At 10:37 AM -0500 3/2/12, Alain Berranger wrote:
>... (upward micro management - never thought about that one... interesting
>new management concept!!!).

:-)  Indeed, and one that staff has apparently been implementing along the
way to significant effect.  The Board are all volunteer, just like all the
rest of us policy advisors, with other jobs to make their livings, so they
do need help "doing their homework" (ever hear of the "one-pager" policy
memo format? -- most policy makers need this sort of resource to manage a
large plate of issues for feasible digestion and usually they employ others
to sift the details for them so they can focus on the resulting big-picture
decisions) and staff is happy to do much of that for them in the case of
ICANN, even though strictly speaking it is the SOs and ACs that are
supposed to be doing that according to the current institutional structure
on paper.

Staff may not present a balanced view of the issues/options, etc., and it
can be useful to fill in the gaps in what staff leaves out, given that
staff is involved at all in practice.

Reminds me of how lobbyists and career legislative staffers importantly
influence term-limited (and thus non-expert) public representatives ...
though presumably this Board is somewhat expert in the principles to start
with.  But as always the devil is in the details.

This is actually the typical way that policy is made in the real world,
whether explicit public sector or the QUANGO before us here.  No one on the
Board should be expected to have the bandwidth to do the full homework from
the ground up -- they need a digested result to do their jobs effectively,
and so control over how the digest is created means a whole lot.

Dan


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