No Such Weblog

On its conference call earlier tonight, the GNSO Council re-elected Alejandro Pisanty to the board, with the votes of all council members who attended the call.

Besides that, the council discussed various procedural issues, and approved the proposed time lines for the WHOIS Task Forces. These time lines now need to be approved by the board -- a good example for the unhealthy board-and-bylaws micro-management that the new PDP has brought to the GNSO.

Discussion of substantive issues was essentially deferred to Rome. There, the GNSO will hold workshops on all ongoing policy-development processes.

MP3 recording here.

If you look at the Summary of Constituency Statements on Future new Services or Actions by gTLD Registries on the GNSO web site, you'll notice that the gTLD registry constituency -- presumably the constituency most directly impacted by the ongoing PDP -- is the only GNSO constituency that has not submitted a constituency statement in this process. From a statement on this process submitted to the GNSO by Neulevel, we now learn that the reason for the gTLD registry constituency's silence is lack of consensus.

Neulevel's submission includes a detailed description of a possible review process. Although I haven't digested the details of this proposal, yet, I'd recommend a look -- as far as I know, this is the first time that one of the gTLD registries speaks on the record about detailed ideas for a "registry services process."

So we're back to anonymous rumors at ICANNwatch when it comes to learning about board decisions. That's the kind of scenario that preliminary reports from board meetings are supposed to prevent. According to the bylaws, these reports are due five business days after a board meeting; in the past, they were often available on the day of a board phone conference, or -- when late -- on the next day.

Today, we're still waiting for the preliminary report from January 15 -- for instance, was the bylaw change that was up for comment before that meeting actuallly adopted?

And I don't even dare to hope that we see a preliminary report from Wednesday's telephone conference before Rome.

PS: I'd love to be told that the preliminary reports are hidden in some unknown corner of the ICANN web site and that I'm just too stupid to find them. But I don't believe that's the case.