Board Committee Reports Mexico City 05 March 09 >>PETER DENGATE THRUSH: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the public forum and I'm glad you appreciated the film clips. We thought it might be nice to try and capture some of the energy and vitality and some of the well-known faces and put them up, and the idea might be we do a different one every day to capture the previous day. Welcome back. Let's begin this next session, which is receiving reports to the community from the committees of the board. And the observant among you will have noted that we ran the reports last time alphabetically and we're going to do exactly the same the same this time. And we began with the Audit Committee. The chairman of the Audit Committee is Rita Rodin Johnston. Rita, can you give the report, please, from the Audit Committee? >>RITA RODIN JOHNSTON: Thank you, Peter. Good afternoon, everyone. Myself, Steve Crocker, and Harald Alvestrand met with some of the staff to have the Audit Committee meeting. And a couple of things that I wanted to highlight for you. If you can go to the second slide. We had a presentation from the external auditors that ICANN uses. It's a company called Moss Adams. So they did a presentation for us, and we decided to use them again for an audit that will end in fiscal year June '09 for ICANN. So again, we have retained the same auditing firm. But we had a discussion that we thought that best practice dictates that you should actually change auditors from time to time, and we thought particularly given the hopeful release of new gTLDs as soon as possible, that it made sense to instruct staff to develop an RFP to seek additional auditing proposals to engage new auditors for our next fiscal year. We also had a discussion at the committee level about the financial operations of ICANN, and you're going to hear from the board finance committee about those, but one thing I wanted to highlight for you all was that we did discuss the formulation of transparent and comprehensive cost accounting principles and reporting methods, so the board Audit Committee is very aware of the preference of the community to have very transparent principles, if we're going to introduce new gTLDs on a cost recovery basis. We're encouraging the organization to develop very transparent standards so that we can actually demonstrate to you this cost recovery process. So I'd be happy now to take any questions from the audience under these blinding lights that we have on the stage here. I can't really see you, so if you have any questions, just shout out. >>PETER DENGATE THRUSH: Well, I can see and I can see that there are no hands raised. People are happy with the report from the Audit Committee. Thank you, Rita. >>RITA RODIN JOHNSTON: Thank you. >>PETER DENGATE THRUSH: And alphabetically following "A" comes "B" and that's the Board Governance Committee. This is the committee set up to look after the practices of the board, and the chairman of that committee is Dennis Jennings. Thank you, Dennis. >>DENNIS JENNINGS: Thank you, Peter. If we could put up the next slide. >>PETER DENGATE THRUSH: Dennis, you should have a clicker on your -- >>DENNIS JENNINGS: I have a clicker. All right. Should I go click. >>PETER DENGATE THRUSH: Take complete control. >>DENNIS JENNINGS: Wow. Hey. You could get addicted to. The members of the committee are up on the screen in front of you. I won't read them out. But you can see who they are. And I have the privilege of -- and honor of chairing. These are the things that we have been working on recently, sort of internal, somewhat mundane things. Introducing the concept of standard operating procedures so that we record what we do and it's available as a procedure for the future; looking at the charters of the various committees and the standard language in our own charter. The charters will come up for approval -- the first draft of the charters will come up for approval at the upcoming board meeting, and there may be revisions to them in due course. We've discussed the board training requirements and we're planning for training sessions for the board members. And the whole question of the self-assessment of the board, the board members, the board as a whole, the chair, the chief executive and president as a board member. We're working on that and we should have some news in Sydney about that. Other things that we're working on, we're working -- reworking the conflicts of interest policies. That needs to be reworked. The law has changed and we need to take that into account and update it. We have discussed the ombudsman framework. We have revised the board committee and chair and vice chair leadership positions, and the whole process for making appointments there. There's a -- there are new board members coming on board, as you know. Two new board members now. And the NomCom appointees of three board members will happen at the AGM and so we have to revise the process to make sure that all the committees are updated and a chair and a vice chair are in place, and we're actually doing something just a little bit radical. We're planning our year's work and we intend to have a forward look for the committee of the work that we intend to achieve, and publish that, and then we hope to promote that idea to all the other committees and ultimately to the board itself. And that's it. Thank you. >>PETER DENGATE THRUSH: Thank you, Dennis. Any questions of the Board Governance Committee? Is that a hand raised at the back? No. Somebody just wanting to bid in the auction, Dennis. >>DENNIS JENNINGS: It's exciting stuff. I know. Thanks, Peter. >>PETER DENGATE THRUSH: Okay. Thank you. The next one is the board finance committee chaired by Rajasekhar Ramaraj. >>RAJASEKHAR RAMARAJ: Thanks, Peter. These are the committee members that we have in the board finance committee. These slides are already up on the homepage of the ICANN Web site. I thought I will highlight a few things that you may find of interest. This is the second year that we have the framework for the operating plan and budget at the same time. This gives the community about four months plus to actually look at what are the key initiatives, what are the base operations, and the costs that go with it. So this gives us an opportunity to look at both the strategic plan, the operating plan that comes out of it, and the costs that go with it. In the past, we used to do these separate, and we couldn't link the initiative and the costs, so this is the second time, last year and now again this year, that the board finance committee and staff are doing this. The second -- something based on the requests that have come many a time from the community, which is functional reporting. The strategic plan has initiatives. From there, we have captured those key initiatives and the reports are coming based on functions, and you can see this on the dashboard and the budget framework is very similarly done. So that you can actually see various functions and the costs associated with each of this. The new gTLD program has not been taken in, in terms of revenues, into this plan. What we are hoping to do is that 90 days before the launch, we would then put out an estimate of what those revenues could be on that cost recovery mode that we have spoken about. What we do have, however, are the costs that would be incurred in the new gTLD program, and that has been captured in the framework. There will be a separate accounting for the new gTLD program, so that there is transparency, as Rita mentioned, so that there's transparency and the community can see what is the cost recovery process and what's happening to that money. Lastly, I wanted to touch upon one item there, and I will -- which is the reserve fund. A couple of years ago, based on the strategic plan, the community decided that we needed to have a reserve fund that would equal one year's of expense, and there was about four years time to build up that reserve fund. So sometime in 2007 the board finance committee engaged external consultants, global consultants, to advise as to what our investment policy should be. A very conservative program. So that principal is protected, and the view was over a five-year plan. Based on that investment plan that was approved here by the board, we appointed somebody else -- again, a global bank -- to manage that investment policy. The investment policy had low to moderate risk, and over -- historically over 20 years, that plan had stood up the test of time. It had, broadly speaking, 65% in bonds and 35% in equity, with the option to go plus/minus 10% on bonds, so that was conservative and that's the basis on which the plan was built and executed. In this -- at Mexico, we had the investment manager come in and talk to us about the state of the fund. We benchmarked it against similar risks and found that we have done significantly better than indices, and similarly, performed to other benchmarked portfolios. However, we've asked staff to appoint an external consultant to review this investment policy and advise the board as to what we need to do before we add any more money to the reserve fund. So that's my presentation. Happy to take questions. >>PETER DENGATE THRUSH: That you, HAM. Are there any questions of the chair of the finance committee? Dr. Goldstein? >>STEVE GOLDSTEIN: Do I need a microphone or -- >>PETER DENGATE THRUSH: Yes, for the scribes. >>STEVE GOLDSTEIN: Oh, I'm sorry. Thank you. There's one more item that was -- of which I was reminded that I had forgotten about the reserve fund and the investment policy surrounding the reserve fund, and that was that we had money sitting in the bank in just a plain old bank account. And it was our auditors who told us that this was not a good practice. So a lot of the impetus for coming up with an investment policy started, I believe, not only with us -- with we ourselves -- or with us ourselves, but with our auditors who brought that to our attention. So I just wanted to make sure that that was understood also. Thank you. >>RAJASEKHAR RAMARAJ: Thank you, Steve. >>PETER DENGATE THRUSH: Any other comments? Questions? Raimundo? >>RAIMUNDO BECA: Okay. Thanks. I confirm what Steve is saying, and I will say more than that. When the investment policy was enacted, we had about $40 million in cash and the policy -- in the policy, doesn't it say only which is the cash which goes to the reserve fund, but also which is the cash that is still kept as a zero-risk at the bank, and at that moment, it was decided to put 20 million something on the reserve fund and 10 on the -- on the bank, and we still have about 10 or 15 or more -- I don't know -- >>RAJASEKHAR RAMARAJ: 20. >>RAIMUNDO BECA: 20 in the bank. >>PETER DENGATE THRUSH: Thank you. Ram, do you want to add anything to any of that or -- >>RAJASEKHAR RAMARAJ: That's it. >>PETER DENGATE THRUSH: Okay. Thank you. It gives me real pleasure to introduce what is the first report of a brand-new committee. Part of my election platform when we were looking at replacing the chair was a promise to revamp the committees. It struck me that we really needed to have some committees that focused on our key activities, and this one is -- relates to the activities we perform under our single most important contract, and that is to perform the services of the IANA function. So it gives me great pleasure to introduce for the first time Harald Alvestrand as the chair of the new IANA committee. Harald. >>HARALD TVEIT ALVESTRAND: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. This is the first report of the IANA committee, so I'll use a few seconds to go over what the IANA committee is supposed to accomplish., before going to what we had recently done. So we're supposed to be reviewing and monitoring IANA operations, advising IANA with respect to implementation of policies, review and monitor and oversee the policies. Important here to note is that "manage" is not a word that the board committee uses. The board committee is in the business of looking at IANA, seeing that it has reasonable policies to follow, and that it, in fact, carries out those policies. If we need to change what IANA does, that's a matter of changing the policies, which is dealt with, as IANA does, in other processes. So in detail, review and provide guidance on enhancing current IANA operations, taking into account security and stability concerns; oversee and annually report to the board on the performance of ICANN's obligations under agreements governing the IANA functions. Currently there are two of those. Review and provide guidance to the board on matters relating to the overall performance and effectiveness of the IANA functions. An appropriate technology planning processes to support growth objectives relating to effectiveness of IANA functions. And review and provide guidance with respect to future trends in technology. So look at IANA, look at the world around IANA, and see that it continues to fit together. The members are me, Harald Alvestrand, Raimundo Beca, Steve Crocker, Demi Getschko, Katim Touray, and we have asked two of our excellent board liaisons to help in the work. That is Thomas Narten, liaison from the IETF, and Suzanne Woolf, who is liaison from RSSAC. So we have had monthly meetings since December, reviewed the content and ranking of the issues list that we keep as guidance to where we -- what we need to look at, which, first of all, has briefings on IANA activities, so that the committee actually knows what IANA is doing, updates on the root zone management software project, ITAR, and the DNSsec signing of the root zone process, and reviewed proposed changes to name server technical checks. The main purpose of reviewing the proposed changes is to make sure that we know what process IANA follows to review this with the community, and that these have, in fact, been followed. We also discussed the IANA functional overview, level of staff and ability to handle current and future operational activities, including new TLDs, and a bullet that has fallen off the slide is we also discussed the nature and processes surrounding IANA's external relationships. That is, with the DOC, with the IETF. Future activities. We should review current practices for developing IANA policies. I mean, IANA is doing a great job within the scope that has been set for it, but sometimes it's not entirely clear that the scope is the best, and we'll see what process we actually have to doing minor changes to the policy -- policies governing IANA so that it can function better for the Internet community. A more particular example is the root zone glue record gal that some registrants have had a bit of trouble with, for various reasons. Assess results of the planned review of the root zone change request process. That is a review that is going to be carried out this year by external bodies. And continue reviewing updates from staff on ongoing activities, DNSsec and IPv6 are two of the major items. And that is the end of my presentation. Questions? Comments? Seeing none, thank you. >>PETER DENGATE THRUSH: Thank you, Harald. Very comprehensive report. Another of our committees, again directing at one of the most crucial elements of ICANN, public participation. We need that from the ground up. Chairman of that committee is Jean-Jacques Subrenat. Jean-Jacques. >>JEAN-JACQUES SUBRENAT: I'm suggesting not to go through the slides with you. If you don't mind, I'll keep that as it is, because we are in the particular situation of being a new board but at the same time we have been exposed to the real world very quickly, actually since we were invited right at the start, and thank you to the organizers, at the at-large summit. So very quickly, we were able to present ourselves in various formats, and also we had -- I think it was yesterday -- a public participation meeting in public. It was a sort of "getting ourselves up to speed," not only presenting ourselves to you, but also beginning to listen carefully to what you have to say about public participation. So I won't go through the usual thing of composition, et cetera, because I think you have all been exposed to that. What I would like to say here is in more general terms. What is participation about? And what is it that we have started doing, actually? And third, are there any ideas which we have already absorbed from you in these first few days of the Mexico meeting? Well, first of all, what is the purpose of public participation? We debated this in the committee. There were various views. One was to craft a special definition of "what is a user," "what is a participant," "what is public participation," et cetera, but for various reasons, we preferred at this stage, at least, to retain a definition of "public participation" which exists already in an association which is the international association for public participation. And that is online and you can find it easily. For my part, I would like to try to adopt -- or adapt these general guidelines to the specific case of the Internet, and more particularly to ICANN. And if I were to use an alphabetical trick -- sorry, I'm not contributing to the alphabetical soup. It's very simple, "ABC." "A," awareness, that's at the level of all participants or all potential participants. It is to gain awareness of what the Internet is about, what are the problems with governance and also what ICANN is about. "B" would be bringing together the expectations, the analyses, the solutions, which various parts of our community can come up with. And "C"? Contribute or contribution to policy development. I cannot overemphasize this last point, which, by the way, our chairman pointed out on the opening day of this ICANN international meeting, when he said that the purpose of all this is to arrive at a stage where a greater number of people from various parts of the world can actually contribute to the policy development process by bringing in ideas and discussions. So that is the purpose of the public participation. Now, in more concrete terms, what does that mean? It means preparing. It means carrying out. It means following up. Preparing? Yes. More timely documents. More timely schedule. Avoid overlap. By the way, you may be interested to know that we fell victim yesterday to cybercrime because our public participation -- or was it the PSC, actually session fell victim to competition, a very tough competition, actually, with another session at the same time, which was actually how to fight against cybercrime. So at least it was not a session on how to fight against public participation. I'm heartened. Now, I won't go through the range of things we've had from you, but I would just like to take a few examples. Travel policy. It is important that we improve our travel policy on ICANN and link it with perhaps a more comprehensive listening to the community as far as visa problems are concerned. For instance, a host country for any meeting like this has to make an undertaking that it will facilitate, actually, the obtaining of visas in a timely fashion. But also there was a suggestion that after such meetings, we shouldn't just let it go down. We have to have a sort of follow-up mechanism in order to be able to take in the valid and the very valuable input which will come after the meeting. Now, amongst the many things which have been voiced by you, either in this meeting or by remote participation, I would just identify a few things. The need for expanded interpretation and translation, because as we go along, ICANN, reflecting the reality of the wide Internet, is becoming more global, more international. Another point which our chair has insisted upon is increased remote participation, and I share his view that ICANN is in the business of facing the challenge of being perhaps -- or becoming a world leader in remote participation. And we have also discussed ways of encouraging public participation through various electronic means. So this, in brief, was the report I wanted to make to you, knowing that I was less onto theory and the PowerPoint presentation but trying to react more to the input we have already had over the past few days. Thank you. Any questions or remarks? Bertrand. and then Raimundo, if I may, Peter. >>PETER DENGATE THRUSH: Sure. >>BERTRAND DE LA CHAPELLE: Just a very, very brief remark. Just to say it was an incredibly interesting and positive discussion yesterday in that committee and I'm looking forward to further interaction. So congratulations for that one. >>JEAN-JACQUES SUBRENAT: Thank you. >> (Speaker is off microphone). >>JEAN-JACQUES SUBRENAT: Raimundo. >>RAIMUNDO BECA: First in French and then in Spanish. Just "B" as in Bachollet, "B" as Beca, and now I'm going to talk in Spanish. Simply so that the -- that you don't say that we do not acknowledge the existence of Spanish. I do have a suggestion which I think -- I had made before, and which to a certain extent was lost or lost sight of. I believe that for those of us who work on the Internet in other languages that aren't our native languages, the most difficult thing is to write in a foreign language. So what I'm asking for is not necessarily that comments on the public list -- participation list be translated, but that one should be able to write in one's own language, and then those who read the comments and answer them, they can answer them in their own language or in another language. We -- most of us read the main languages pretty well but we write them with difficulty. >>JEAN-JACQUES SUBRENAT: Thanks, Raimundo. I cannot speak on behalf of my colleagues but we'll take this up. Thank you very much. >>PAUL TWOMEY: Thank you, Jean-Jacques. Paul Twomey, President. Just to put again on the public record comments that I made yesterday during your hearing that as president, I'm quite comfortable with the committee moving forward with some recommendation on time limits for documents to be presented, with the following understanding: That we presently do not have any formal time limit. We have a practice, but not a formal time limit. But probably the most important of which is to understand that there are a lot of dependencies for work, particularly staff work, that comes before a meeting. A lot of it is dependencies on other parts of the organization, especially the volunteer parts of the organization, and it's quite easy for people to sometimes think it's just staff have not got things done on time. Sometimes that is true, but we -- if we're going to move on any form of setting a limit, we have to understand that that has a compounding impact across all the supporting organizations and constituencies and advisory committees, as well as the staff. >>JEAN-JACQUES SUBRENAT: Thank you, Paul. Message received. We'll discuss that on the committee as well. >>THOMAS ROESSLER: So Thomas Roessler, speaking as somebody who is on the staff of an organization that actually has some relatively strict publication limits before its big meetings, and who, in that staff function, really loves to have a strict policy that we can use to hold our working groups' feet to the fire. It is almost indispensable. If we didn't have a strict policy nothing goes out so many days before the meeting on the Web site, we wouldn't get our working groups to the discipline we have them now. I just wanted to add that aspect into the record here, and I'm wondering, actually, whether ICANN staff might find themselves in a similar situation that stricter guidance from the board might turn out to be the level needed to impose some discipline on part of the community. >>JEAN-JACQUES SUBRENAT: Thank you, Thomas. We've taken note of that. Any other comments or questions? >>PETER DENGATE THRUSH: No? Well, that's excellent. Thank you, Jean-Jacques, and good luck with all the large challenges in front of you and your committee. The next -- another of the new committees is the risk committee and the chairman of the risk committee is Bruce Tonkin. Bruce? >>BRUCE TONKIN: Thank you, Peter. I think the risk committee is a brand-new committee, and what we're working on with the staff is conducting a fairly standard risk management process for large organizations. And the starting point of that process is to identify what are the most critical ICANN objectives and the most critical assets of ICANN, analyze the environment, threats, and vulnerabilities to those objectives. Out of that, we end up with a set of risks that we can prioritize. Once we have that list, we can look at what are the methods we can use to mitigate against those risks, because you can never really get rid of risks altogether, but you can take steps to mitigate them, and, you know, really reduce the chance of them happening. And then you need to put in controls to make sure that the organization is actually following and implementing those mitigation techniques. So just jumping to the next slide, we've identified -- this is fairly early thinking, but -- three, I guess, main ICANN objectives. One is to operate IANA in stable and reliable and have the results it provides to be trusted, so that's in support of the gTLDs and ccTLDs. It also supports the IP address registries. And then another function that's not as visible in these public meetings, but that is in support of the IETF protocol parameter registry. A significant amount of work that IANA does is in support of those, you know, underlying technical protocols that are used on the Internet. Another objective is to ensure that we maintain trust and respect in a single global DNS root zone, and in a way much of the policy development, the global outreach, the advisory committees and all that sort of effort we've been doing over the last few days, much of it is really around ensuring that the global Internet community both trusts a single global root and respects that this is the place to come to operate and make changes to that root, rather than going into alternatives. Because people always have the choice. There are other ways of doing these things and communicating, but we -- our objective is to make this be the method that the global community trusts and wants to use. And then finally, ICANN has a specific function with respect to the generic top-level domain name market, where ICANN has directly licensed registries and directly licensed registrars to provide a service to the community in that marketplace. So we're working through, I guess, some of the risks to those core objectives. Another thing that we're looking for is for each of the major projects ICANN does in its operating plan, that the staff ma manage those projects are actively identifying what the risks are to those projects and how to mitigate against those risks. So examples of that could be the new gTLD project or the IDN ccTLD project or introducing DNSsec into the root. Each of those projects needs to clearly articulate the project managers, what are the potential risks, how do we mitigate those risks, and are we controlling those risks properly. So ultimately, by Sydney we hope to have more clearly identified what the potential risks are, and begin to plan the resources we would need to mitigate against those risks. And that naturally feeds into the operating planning process, and I think over the next year, especially, the following financial year, we see very clearly articulated resources that are in the budget that have been allocated to manage some of the major risks of the organization. So at that point, I'll finish, Peter. >>PETER DENGATE THRUSH: Thank you, Bruce. Any questions about the risk committee? Bruce, I expect a fully costed risk proposal in relation to all those animals that we saw that live in Australia before we're all prepared to go there. There is a question. Bruce, get ready to answer a question from Bertrand. Bertrand. >>BERTRAND DE LA CHAPELLE: Bruce, just one question related to the comment I made this morning in the open forum on new gTLDs. Is the risk committee going to address the portion of the pricing of the new gTLD round that is due to the evaluation of the possible risks of the gTLD round, or is it not in the -- >>BRUCE TONKIN: Yeah. Well that's a very good question, Bertrand, because there are several board committees that have a degree of overlap. So those board committees would be the risk committee, the finance committee, the Audit Committee, and the IANA committee. So for example, some of the -- obviously IANA is a critical function. We'd expect that the IANA committee would, themselves, identify some of the risks and feed that into the risk committee, as an example. Likewise, when the risk committee identifies some mitigating approaches to risk and some controls, that the Audit Committee would then audit to see that that's done. So then in respect to your question on new gTLDs, certainly there is a financial risk to the organization associated with the costs of running the new gTLDs, and the finance committee is directly looking at that risk and would report that into the risk committee. So there's an interplay between the various committees there. >>PETER DENGATE THRUSH: Other questions of the risk committee? If not, we'll move on to the last one on today's list, which is the structural improvements committee. Now, this is a new committee not doing an old or former task. This is a chunk of work that was picked up by the Board Governance Committee, but in our restructuring of the committees, it's such an important task that we've created an entire committee and Roberto Gaetano is in charge of it. Thanks, Roberto. >>ROBERTO GAETANO: Thank you, chair. That was, in fact, my first slide, so I can go directly to the second. The committee members are listed on that page. It is Harald, Rita, Jean-Jacques, Raimundo, and myself. Those are the members of the structural improvement committee. Since we love acronyms, we are normally referred to as the SIC members. I just want to make sure that you spell it without the "K." Thank you. [Laughter] >>ROBERTO GAETANO: We have basically three tasks that we took over from the BGC that are related to the management of the bylaws mandated reviews of this organization. The first one is to coordinate the activities of the reviews. We have eight reviews. One is technically finished but in the implementation phase, which is the GNSO that we nevertheless also coordinate. And then we have six that are in different steps. And then one that we plan to start shortly. So what we do is to create working groups, make sure that the charters are written, then that the contractors are appointed and all these kind of things. Then the second part of these -- of the -- the second task is to kind of learn from the process so far and try to set the stage for the next cycle of reviews that the board will mandate whenever it feels it's the time to have the second cycle, but not to repeat even the mistakes that we had done in the first cycle, and to have a more well-organized process that is -- that is going to be the same for every review, contrary to what we have done so far with these reviews. And the third activity that we have is to make sense of the reviews that -- the recommendations that we get from all the reviews. Sometimes, like for instance from the NomCom review, from the board, a review and from the ALAC review, we had recommendations that they're a little bit conflicting. So we need to bring everything together and try to put everything in a coordinated framework so that then the final set of recommendations that goes to the board is coordinated. To do this we had the meeting, an initial meeting yesterday at, in fact, at 7:00 in the morning. Also with chairs of the different -- of the active working groups in order to bring this together. The last thing that I want to mention is that in this room we are going to have, at 5:00, the review of the board is going to be a public meeting. And I invite everybody to participate. Are there any questions? >>PETER DENGATE THRUSH: There you go. Happy with that. GNSO improvements is on the board agenda again for tomorrow. >>ROBERTO GAETANO: There's a. >>PETER DENGATE THRUSH: Alejandro. ALEJANDRO PISANTY: Thank you, Alejandro Pisanty. Good afternoon, I'm going to speak in English. We are members of group that's working - - bringing together other working groups, it's a pleasure and an honor to be in that meeting, you mentioned, bringing the review processes that we have brought together, I will be very brief but I want to commend the work that you're undertaking. We set, when we wrote this part of the bylaws mandating regular three-year period reviews of all components of ICANN, we -- I think that we did the right thing in principle. But we created too many moving pieces at the same time. I think that this has been a good result up to now, but you now have this coordination of different parts of the reviews that cause a major -- make us a major restructuring or changes in functionality. And I hope that the board expecting all the bottom-up and consultation procedures will be bold and have a strong insight into what needs to be done to revamp ICANN according to the source of the reviews, well functioning organizations can always be made better and I hope that you don't hesitate to -- to do the major changes, if they are needed, with, again, proper consultation. >>ROBERTO GAETANO: Yes, Alejandro, thank you for the comment. I think that although I cannot speak for the board, there's one thing that shows the board's serious intention to proceed in the fact that it has created a specific committee to deal with the reviews. So that is, in my opinion, a sign that the matter is taken very seriously and that there is the intention to go and in this spirit of continuous improvement, to do the changes that are necessary. >>PETER DENGATE THRUSH: Roberto, we have a question behind you from Jean-Jacques and then we'll come to Bertrand. >>JEAN-JACQUES SUBRENAT: As a member of your committee, I would like to say how heartened I am to hear Alejandro, one of the drafters of the bylaws, who says he considers it may be time to feel less constrained by this rhythm that was imposed at a time when it was completely necessary, and in one of our last meetings of this committee, I specifically suggested that we have two things. One is to see, according to the type of work which is useful in this area, to differentiate between the time lines, not have necessarily three years for every type of activity. That's flexibility. And the second one is that we should count the beginning of a new circle not at the end of a study or a review, but during or after implementation, which gives us more time, actually. Thank you. >>PETER DENGATE THRUSH: Bertrand. >>BERTRAND DE LA CHAPELLE: Yeah, the first comment is that I was just sad yesterday to actually understand that I'd missed the meeting of this committee which escaped my attention after Cairo. And it was described as, if I'm not mistaken, organizational reviews on the agenda. And I completely missed it was a meeting of that new committee so just to say that I'm sorry I couldn't see that, but I think it's a very important element, in particular, to articulate the different processes for reform that are under way, either at this stage of re- -- at the stage of reflection or already beginning to be reflected at the GNSO Council reform. We have the PSC report which has, of course, elements that deal with the external world but contain an element of the internal functioning. We have the GNSO reform process concerning the PDP review with the PPSC, two components of the PDP review and the working group methods. There are several review processes that are under way, and I would pick on Alejandro's expression of the "moving parts." One of the biggest challenges that we have in front of all of us is to design what basically ICANN will be for the next 10 years, if we want to get this sort of time line. And I hope that this committee in a certain way together in participation with the committee because it's connected will address those issues and will be the glue that basically puts all of those issues in a holistic approach so that the moving parts are being examined at the same time. I would not like to see that every single review process remains separate as it has been more or less put together at the moment. I think it's great and I hope to be able to follow the activity of this committee as well and to know how it will interact with the community as the participation committee did. >>ROBERTO GAETANO: Yeah, thank you very much for the comment. There is the serious intention to interact with the community because I think that what is the work of a contractor that comes from the outside that might have excellent ideas but then they -- those have to be put into reality and that's the purpose of the working group that is composed by current and past board members, so it's a very high level working group but then definitely it goes -- the recommendation goes to public comment always so there's the input of the community and then what we do as the selection improvement committee is we try to put this together. You have seen in one of the slides the complexity of the interactions, you couldn't probably even read the slides, how we had to have it in fine print in order to have the interaction. I think it's an interesting task. But -- and I think that the participation of the public is essential because otherwise we come up with a structure that - - that the community will see as their structure, that they -- if the community doesn't buy in the changes of the structure, it's not going to work. >>PETER DENGATE THRUSH: Roberto, I wonder if I could add a little sort of explanation, I guess, of why we're in the position we're in now because there is a sense of a lot of moving parts all at once. And that's partly the historical circumstance. By beginning with the GNSO, we didn't realize -- that's been sitting in front and everything sort of backed up against that. That's been a particularly difficult one to complete because it's so large. And not only that, we didn't really have any formal organizational way of dealing with that review, and so it took us a long time to actually commence and get stuck in the GNSO review. I think most other reviews are not going to be as complicated as that one, most other parts of the organization, SSAC and RSSAC, for example, are so much simpler, they don't have all the different constituencies and different chairs and different councils, et cetera, to deal with. So my hope is that now that we've got a specialist committee to deal with this, I don't know whether you particularly mentioned that we also have a director of organizational review on the staff now that's particularly staffing this exercise. When we began we didn't have dedicated staff doing reviews. Any my -- I'm reasonably confident that the second round of reviews will proceed quite differently at least in terms of speed from the first round. >>ROBERTO GAETANO: Yes. And we have one group of reviews which, as I've mentioned, the ALAC, the board and the NomCom that are very tightly interconnected and that we need to see together. And then the others have a less of a correlation so we'll have less of a problem. But as I pointed out, one of the tasks, one of the three major tasks of our committee is to think about how we could standardize the process, so whoever is going to be in charge for the next cycle of reviews, whenever it's going to happen, will have at least -- maybe they will do different mistakes but not the same ones that we have done. >>PETER DENGATE THRUSH: I think that's all we can hope for is not to repeat mistakes. Is that a question? No? Yes? No. Any other questions, then, about the board review? We have a couple of minutes left so I'm prepared to - - that's all? Yes. Has anybody thought of a question they want to put to a previous speaker? Anybody have a question they want to put to me in relation to the board of the committee as a whole? If not thank you for your attendance as Roberto has indicated the next session starts in about nine minutes and it's the report of the working group into the review of the board. Please stay and please contribute to that. Thank you all very much. Session closed.