Mary:

Thanks so much for your excellent and detailed minutes of the meeting! It is great to have this kind of a record. I just wanted to add my own simpler notes on the statements of the Board Governance Committee members who visited us

Harald:

BGC tried to balance user/suppier, commercial/noncommercial. The ICANN Board did not give a lot of thought yet to how SGs will organize. Cares only whether procedures of self-org are transparent, and that people claimed to be represented are represented.

Harald said he was responsible for the sentence in the ALAC report that we questioned. His intent was that he does not want entities within ICANN to be competing for the allegiance of the same organizations or confusing people. He did not wish to assert any exclusivity of ALAC over all participation of individual internet users.

Gaetano:

Bring more voices, don't amplify the ones already there.

Need to turn the page on the constituency story. Decouple them from voting power.

Gaetano's 3 takeaway points:

            1. New voices must be able to appear

            2. New voices have a higher priority than voting balance (i.e., multiple voices)

            3. There is autonomy within the “big boxes” (stakeholder groups) to figure out how to do this.

Just to editorialize, we were very pleased with the BGC statements, because they showed a flexibility and a concern with the real, bottom-line issues (encouraging voices and broadened participation in NCSG) and not with bureaucratic details. If this attitude prevails, the “GNSO Improvements” process will live up to its name

--MM (who is no longer chair!!!)