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 -- Any opinions expressed in this message are those of the author alone and do not necessarily reflect any position of the author's employer.