Subject: [Ianaplan] Off topic: public comments

From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 10 Aug 2015 12:44:08 +1200

Hi,

I've just been looking at the public comments already submitted at
https://www.ianacg.org/calls-for-input/iana-stewardship-transition-proposal-public-archive-of-submitted-comments/

I will refrain from commenting on the comments, but
https://comments.ianacg.org/pdf/submission/submission13.pdf is
a fairly painless example.

I strongly suggest that the average quality and value of the public comments
would be greatly enhanced if more people with some understanding of the
issues would submit comments via
https://www.ianacg.org/calls-for-input/combined-proposal-public-comment-period/

Regards
   Brian

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From: Miles Fidelman <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 09 Aug 2015 20:59:36 -0400

> a fairly painless example.

This one is a bit more painful:
https://comments.ianacg.org/pdf/submission/submission5.pdf

Which raises an issue re. the public comment process:  There doesn't 
seem to be any validation of identity.  Worse, the comment form asks for 
"organization" but does not ask for title, or whether a person is 
speaking for the listed organization, or validate the affiliation.

Kind of makes the comments a bit meaningless.

Miles Fidelmn

-- 
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   .... Yogi Berra

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From: Jari Arkko <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 9 Aug 2015 23:27:08 -0300

Sigh. (Then again, this is what you get when _anybody_ can comment. But open processes are still the right way. However, and speaking for myself only, anybody being able to comment does not equate to all comments being equally valuable; the well justified and reasoned opinion is always appreciated. I trust that the ICG will be able to sort the feedback appropriately.)

But I very much agree with Brian’s suggestion.

Jari

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From: "John Levine" <[email-masked]>
Date: 10 Aug 2015 13:58:40 -0000

>Sigh. (Then again, this is what you get when _anybody_ can comment. But open processes are still the right way. However, and
>speaking for myself only, anybody being able to comment does not equate to all comments being equally valuable; the well
>justified and reasoned opinion is always appreciated. I trust that the ICG will be able to sort the feedback appropriately.)

In ICANN comment processes, the people who matter tend to submit their
comments either at the moment the period opens or at the last minute,
so I wouldn't pay too much attention to the ones submitted so far.

But I was impressed that Owen Delong thinks Paris is the wrong place
for arbitration because their Internet connectivity isn't very good.

R's,
John

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From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 10 Aug 2015 10:55:02 -0400

--On Monday, August 10, 2015 13:58 +0000 John Levine
<[email-masked]> wrote:

>...
> In ICANN comment processes, the people who matter tend to
> submit their comments either at the moment the period opens or
> at the last minute, so I wouldn't pay too much attention to
> the ones submitted so far.

While that description is certainly consistent with my
observations, it suggests something interesting and problematic
that is the other side of the "anyone can comment" problem.
That is that there are "people who matter" and people who don't.
It isn't clear who makes that decision and on what basis
although I hope it is ICG.  In the ICANN case, the answer has
traditionally been staff with the criteria apparently closely
related to either "opinions that agree with what they would
like" or "domain name sales interests".   

Unless the community and its comment evaluation processes are
very careful (and transparent), we end up with a plan that
reflects the needs and interests of the "multiple stake wielders
who matter" community, not the "multistakeholder community" and,
yes, that is a possible answer to one of the questions that has
been posed.

    john

---

From: "John R Levine" <[email-masked]>
Date: 10 Aug 2015 11:03:26 -0400

> That is that there are "people who matter" and people who don't. It 
> isn't clear who makes that decision and on what basis although I hope it 
> is ICG.  In the ICANN case, the answer has traditionally been staff with 
> the criteria apparently closely related to either "opinions that agree 
> with what they would like" or "domain name sales interests".

The question of who summarizes and evaluates the comments is an intersting 
one, and I agree with jck's impression of prior practice.

Regards,
John Levine, [email-masked], Taughannock Networks, Trumansburg NY
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail.

---

From: Olivier MJ Crepin-Leblond <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 10 Aug 2015 18:04:29 +0200

> like" or "domain name sales interests".   

This *might* have been the case in the past and has been criticised from
within the ICANN community. One way to remedy any staff bias in the
summarising of public comments has been to publish the summarised
material that was made available to the ICANN Board.

However, on this occasion, we are dealing with a working group that's
doing the consultation. ICANN Working Group Consultations have improved
a lot in recent years. Of the several ICANN working groups issuing
public consultations in the past 2-3 years that I was a member of, I
have noticed a best practice in place for ICANN Staff to limit their
summarising to batching comments (grouping them together) on a per
topic/issue basis into a table. The working group then set itself a duty
to go through each and every comment in turn, taking the comment into
consideration and working out a response. This takes place on conference
calls, is tedious and very time consuming especially for volunteers like
me who do not get paid for doing this, but it also shows respect for the
comment that was made and involves a degree of transparency that shows
the working group is not just dismissing comments lightly.
On many occasions, there have been comments made that I completely
agreed with but others on the conference call disagreed with. It then
comes down to the convincing arguments made in the comment. There are
times when we did not reach consensus in which case the status quo remained.

I really hope the ICG will follow this process, so we can see how they
treat each and every comment made.

Kindest regards,

Olivier

-- 
Olivier MJ Crépin-Leblond, PhD
http://www.gih.com/ocl.html

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From: Alan Greenberg <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 10 Aug 2015 12:24:52 -0400

>treat each and every comment made.

I tend to agree with Olivier. The process in ICANN has changed 
markedly in the last several years. We even saw a Board intent to 
change a Bylaw scuttled by community comment and I have seen WGs 
rethink things that they had consciously discussed and decided upon 
in light of comments which presented a new twist to the issue.

Operating in a fishbowl does not make it easy to reject/ignore the 
comments that (in the view of some) are clearly out of scope or 
completely off-target, but what choice do we have.

Alan

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From: JFC Morfin <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 11 Aug 2015 12:51:22 +0200

Olivier,

Some contribution from the outer world, if it may help. What you 
describe is the kind of experimentation that we are currently 
performing with the discussion over the XLIBRE community itself 
(creation) and projects. We are slowly:

* Starting anew,
* with the target to experiment on what is of interest for this kind 
of approach,
* with a limited number of French speaking, selected contributors 
chosen among those we call the "4th community" (IUsers 
http://xlibre.net/index.php/IUse),
* not involved in the ICANN global community (to avoid the initial 
possibly confusing cross influences)

This currently leads us to consider the "comment seeking" method itself.

I feel that what we want to consider is the general consistency of a 
"meme tree" and, therefore, what we need is a "meme gathering" 
process. Therefore, at this stage we are first considering a 
relational topology with ideas, notions, and concepts, and then the 
possible presentation tools/methods (graphs?).

What seems clear is that the omnistakeholderism that we currently 
wish to consider and technically support is not related to "people 
who would matter" but rather to "memes that seem to matter" and we 
are not concerned by numbers (even to evaluate a rough consensus) but 
rather by pertinence.

However, we are just beginning now with a small group.

The next step could be to use my "cafedu.com" mailing list for some 
group-storming in September. In this case, we would still have 
Francophones but they would be involved in multiple areas, at 
different levels, and participating in the ICANN global community 
process. I only wish to raise a point here: I am not sure that the 
decision and accountability process is similar in communities related 
to different architectures. The IETF is bound to the internet 
technology. We want to be catenet based, and so the internet 
architecture is only an option that is external to the OSI layer six, 
which is our de facto main focus.

jfc

At 18:04 10/08/2015, Olivier MJ Crepin-Leblond wrote:
>_______________________________________________
>Ianaplan mailing list
>[email-masked]
>https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ianaplan

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From: Alissa Cooper <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 11 Aug 2015 14:22:32 -0700

ICG members will be doing the analysis of the public comments, with help from our independent secretariat (who are from ISOC Singapore — they are not ICANN staff). The list of ICG members and their bios is here: https://www.ianacg.org/coordination-group/icg-members/

Alissa

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From: Narelle <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 12 Aug 2015 10:31:55 +0000

Just for clarification - the group aggregating the comments are from the
ISOC chapter in Singapore; a lively capable group and only directed by the
ICG.

So indeed this is scrupulously independent and transparent.

Narelle Clark

On Wed, 12 Aug 2015 07:22 Alissa Cooper <[email-masked]> wrote:

> ICG members will be doing the analysis of the public comments, with help
> from our independent secretariat (who are from ISOC Singapore — they are
> not ICANN staff). The list of ICG members and their bios is here:
> https://www.ianacg.org/coordination-group/icg-members/
>
> Alissa