Stuart Lynn

How is it that people who’ve shared the same meeting often come out of it with completely different impressions of what happened?

Last week’s meeting between the ICANN Board and the GAC was a case in point. Looking at the statements of Board members and GAC members, it’s like they were in a different meeting to each other. A huge gap between what was said, and what was heard.

Cartoon by Patrick Taylor. Click for larger version

The meeting followed months, if not years, of tense standoff between the two. As the recent Accountability and Transparency Review Team put it “The current Board-GAC relationship is dysfunctional …. The Board should have acted long before now to … build a more productive working relationship.”