From: Thomas Schneider
Date: 19 March 2015
To: Mathieu Weill - Thomas Rickert - León Sanchez - CCWG-Accountability
cc: GAC - Adam Peake
Dear all
It seems that there has been some confusion in the CCWG-Accountabilty about the status of my response of 17 March 2015 to the request of the Co-chairs of the CCWG accountability – in their email of 5 march – to get some feedback from the GAC about stress test 18 (amendment of GAC’s operating principles).
For the sake of transparency and in the hope to contribute to a clarification and to avoiding misunderstandings, I would like to share with you the following:
After I had received the request of 5 march from the CCWG Co-Chairs, I sent an email message to the CCWG co-chairs with copy to the GAC the same day, notifying that I did not fully understand what exactly was expected of the GAC and/or myself and I asked, in order to better understand – a number of questions regarding the relevance of this issue with regard to IANA transition and the assumptions that were at the basis of this particular stress test.
The CCWG Co-chairs then proposed to have a phone conversation with me about this. This call was held on Wednesday 11 March. During that call, I explained the Co-Chairs that – in the short time available before the Istanbul meeting of 23-24 March, it was not possible to coordinate a formal GAC response on this issue. I also informed them about a decision of the GAC taken at the ICANN 52 meeting in Singapore that the GAC will undertake a holistic review on its operating principles and that this work will take some time and that there may be no outcome of this process in the coming months.
During that call, the CCWG Co-chairs explained to me that it was important for them to get at least some feedback from the GAC on this issue before the Istanbul meeting. I then told them that the only thing that I could do at this stage was to share my own experience and deliberations on this issue and to convey these to them – while at the same time inviting the other GAC members to join the discussion and share their views and experience before and during the Istanbul meeting. The Co-chairs welcomed this and asked me to do this in the coming days.
Later that Wednesday 11 March, this was discussed by the GAC Leadership team at our biweekly Chair-Vice-Chair call and it was agreed by the GAC leadership team that I should send such a message based on the questions that I had raised in my first reply to the CCWG Co-Chairs of 5 March.
The message that I then sent to the CCWG Co-chairs with copy to the GAC on 17 March clearly indicated that it was not possible to communicate a formal response from the GAC but that I could only give some feedback on my own experience and with some GAC members. (This was emphasized by the CCWG Co-chairs when they forwarded the message to the CCWG – see below.) And I invited other GAC members to join this discussion and give their views as well – an invitation which I would like to repeat here again.
Finally, I would like to clarify that my response to the CCWG Co-chairs of 17 March was not a formal “letter” as it is called on the CCWG-Website, but a simple email message.
Thank you for taking note of this message and for putting it on the CCWG website in addition to the message of 17 March.
Best regards
Thomas
