GNSO Council vs the volunteer model

Updated - see bottom.

The main policy-making body at ICANN - the GNSO Council - has always been known and mocked for its byzantine and political nature.

Famously there was one session where the resolution being voted on became so convoluted that several council members couldn't figure out whether to vote yes or no and the vote had to be paused until they could unravel the logic.

Possibly the most excruciating GNSO Council sessions however have been about itself - the GNSO 'improvements' process that has gone on so long that they by the time they are finished, it will be time to start the next review (the ICANN equivalent of painting the Forth Bridge).

The improvements process ended up re-creating many of the problems that it had been set up to solve, but one of the positives that *had* come out of the process was the agreement that the GNSO would do its work through working groups, and that the Council would become the manager of working groups, where previously it was the body that did everything.

This was a good idea: it spread the work across the community; it allowed a group of people to work hard on a given problem and get back with their thoughts and recommendations; it freed up the Council to a more managerial role; and it removed (a little bit of) the suffocating politics.

Unfortunately, if a resignation email just sent out by one of the hardest working community volunteers, Mikey O'Connor, is to be believed, the GNSO Council has managed to screw that up.

Writing to the lists of the working groups on which he has worked for several months, Mikey said he was leaving all working groups tomorrow - the day he provides the first report draft of the latest working group he sits on (the DSSA).

He provided the following explanation: "I get to spend hundreds, maybe thousands, of hours working on deliverables that are provided to a Council that can then selectively pick and choose to approve/rewrite portions of our work and forward the stuff they like on to the Board. Oh, and I get to spend thousands of dollars of family lunch-money to get to the meetings to watch this happen. Can you spell 'self-funded volunteer professional staff?'"

The issue is believed to be the IRTP B report that Mikey spent many months on and which looks at the rules for transferring domain names.

The working group provided its final report to the Council which is due to vote on the recommendations contained within it, passing it up to the Board for final approval.

However, the GNSO Council appears to have forgotten its managerial role and started editing the report to fit with its own political goals. In particular, it is thought to have been just the mention of a possible review of the UDRP domain dispute mechanism that scuppered an entire recommendation.

The recommendations have been broken apart and discussed and edited by the Council prior to its vote.

This, Mikey feels, completely undermines all the volunteer work done by him and others. A managing Council would have raised its concerns and sent them back to the working group, rather than started editing the final results at the last possible second.

"Either working groups are the place in the bottom-up process where policy gets formulated... or not," the resignation email continued. "Looks like 'not' from here."

The resignation could be written off as sour grapes were it not for the fact that Mr O'Connor represents a prime example of what ICANN claims to be: an organization made up of hard-working volunteers, and a process that works from the bottom-up instead of the top-down.

The fact that the Council also appears to have forgotten one of the main lessons from its own, extremely painful, self-review process also raises a bit question mark over another ICANN core belief: that it is able to improve itself.

The Council needs to reign in its controlling impulses or face the unpleasant fact that it may be aggressively undermining its own core beliefs and values.

Update: In the end, the GNSO Council did not change any of the wording but instead deferred the recommendations that were causing trouble.

There was some debate on the matter during the Council meeting itself and the agreement that the Council will not adjust working group text was reiterated and agreed to.

Mikey O'Connor also took the opportunity of a discussion on volunteer burn-out in the public forum on Thursday (the day after the Council meeting) to apologize for creating the argument.

"I was little a small furry animal who got scared, ran up a tree and started popping on everyone," he told the room in his inimitable style. "Sorry to anyone who feels I popped on them directly."