During the latest Names Council call, Bruce Tonkin gave a short overview of the Names Policy Development Process Assistance Group's work. Alexander Svensson, who participated in the call, has transcribed the statement:

In the first call, we were really talking about membership of task forces and how we would try and widen the membership and allow different groups to participate in the task force process. In the second call, there was really a shift which was [inaudible] coming from the top down more or less saying that more of the work of the task forces should be done within the Names Council itself, a bit like what we did with the comments, work we did on the ICANN reform process and that the task forces themselves shouldn't be making direct recommendations as they did for WLS. And then the issue was, well then it doesn't matter that the membership of task forces, you could have a membership of task forces of one member if you like, because the representation issues were dealt with at the Names Council itself, so, I thought that that was quite a big shift between the first and the second call. [...] There's definitely a driver from the top down saying that the processes that we currently use have to change in some way, because the way they're working at the moment isn't acceptable.

(Of course, these are not professional Scribe notes, so errors may still be there.)

Besides the question if it's prudent to actually restrict policy-making to the Names Council (lack of man-power and time comes to mind), a policy-making process like the one described in the note above would require a Names Council quite different from the one we have today. This is, of course, the opposite of the ideas most recently articulated in the resolution adopted by the Council yesterday.

(Note that the GA list today witnessed the rare event that both Vint Cerf and Stuart Lynn publicly state that Danny Younger's criticism of the resolution matches the board's and ERC's thinking.)