Hi,
On Fri, Aug 05, 2016 at 12:00:08AM -0400, Greg Shatan wrote:
I certainly had assumed that there would be a comment period run through the ICANN website, like most (if not all) of the other implementation contracts and other documentation relating to implementing the transition.
The Trust has a responsibility to run a community comment on this effort no matter what, and we're going to do so. Since the Trust is offering this to the Internet community, we think it only appropriate (and in keeping with the commitments we're making to the other OCs) that we operate this one in a way that is easier and more approachable by the other community participants as well (see below on that), so we're going to need to do something that's public facing, and we will do that no matter what also.
I think we're going to be pressed for time after, so running a single process will probably return better results for the transition, but of course the Trust takes no position on how the operational communities ought to do things for their own decision-making. Certainly, if the names community wants to run a comment period through other infrastructure, it's appropriate that it do so and I cannot imagine anyone objecting. It will make our task of putting things together harder, however, and we won't have a lot of time.
IANA Transition. It would be an odd outlier not to have a transition-related comment in the ICANN public comment system.
I note, however, that the actual transition proposal didn't go through that system, because it involved the joint output of multiple communities. I think it would be an outlier if something that involved all the OCs received comments in a forum aimed at just one of them.
The ICANN public comment system is transparent -- the comments are announced by ICANN, each "comment forum" (to which the comments are submitted) is publicly available and stays publicly available as an archive (you can find comments going back years, if you want). You can see and read submitted comments in real time.
ICANN's system, under the hood, is a mailing list. The IETF has some experience with getting input by mailing lists :-) However,
I went looking for the IETF Trust comment infrastructure. I did find links to three public comment periods on the IETF Trust home page at http://trustee.ietf.org/. Two of these link to pdf pages that request the comment.
historically, the IETF Trust had to serve the IETF only, so the Trust ran any comment efforts it had to run through the usual IETF mailing lists. For this case, we're going to instantiate a new mailing list to receive the comments (on just this topic) instead, roughly the way that ICANN does. Given that the IETF already runs dozens of mailing lists that handle volumes of mail orders of magnitude larger than anything that happens in any public comment I've ever seen, I am confident that there will be no problem with the infrastructure. The IETF also keeps mail archives dating even from before the IETF existed. So, I'm not worried about the durability of the archive.
I suspect it will be less confusing to people if we have one place to submit comments. But if we have to do it in multiple places, then that's what we must do.
Best regards,
A