Hi all,
At an informal Trust conference call[1] earlier today, one of the things we talked about was how the public comment on the IPR agreements could happen. I think it would be good for the Trust to run that public comment itself (and my colleagues seemed to agree). Since the Trust is going to hold the IPR as a service to the Internet community, it seems natural to reach out to the wider community and make sure we're doing it "for the advancement of the science and technology associated with the Internet and related technology."
I know we've all believed we were going to go to public comment, but I don't think we said how we'd do it. I have had the impression that people have just been assuming (as I confess I have) that the Trust was going to do it. I can confirm that the Trust has the necessary infrastructure to make it happen.
Alternatively, of course, we could just leave each community to run its own thing, but I'm a little worried about how we collate the inputs in that case, given that we'll only have about 2 weeks to do it. We've all got a lot of other things to do, so I thought it might just be easier for everyone if the communities could point to the single Trust comment forum.
I don't want to hijack the call tomorrow with this topic, so if people have concerns it'd be great to get them on list in advance (though I understand everyone's busy).
A
[1] Formally, the Trust couldn't have a meeting today because by the time we realised we'd need it the notice period had been missed. So this was not a meeting of the Trust and no actual Trust decisions have been reached.
-- Andrew Sullivan ajs@anvilwalrusden.com