Hi all,
I thought it might be helpful to provide a little bit of background of the review committee before our first conference call on Wednesday, wearing my hat as (former) vice chair of the CRISP team. Apologies for the length of this mail.
As a reference, it is be useful for everyone on the Review Committee to read the CRISP proposal: https://www.nro.net/wp-content/uploads/ICG-RFP-Number-Resource-Proposal.pdf
(In particular of course: III.A.4. Establishment of a Review Committee)
THE CRISP PROPOSAL When the CRISP team was working on its proposal for the stewardship transition of the IANA numbering functions, there was strong consensus that the number community trusted the RIRs to manage the stewardship of the IANA functions through an SLA with IANA. To be clear, the IANA Numbering Services was, and is still a matter of simple bookkeeping.
This was in fact, the core of the proposal. There was no feedback from the community, suggesting a need for new mechanisms or organisations to be set up post-transition. It was felt that all five RIR communities have strong, inclusive, bottom-up structures and that there were appropriate processes within each RIR region for the community to engage in the bottom-up governance of its RIR.
THE SLA The CRISP proposal did intentionally not prescribe exact SLA text, as it was felt that was something that needed to be defined and negotiated between the RIRs and ICANN. Instead, the CRISP proposal defined a set of guiding principles for the RIRs and IANA to respect as they were finalising the SLA. The RIRs then proposed SLA text that was reviewed by the CRISP team and the community, and then negotiated with ICANN.
THE REVIEW COMMITTEE It was however recognised that the SLA with IANA was a new arrangement. And as a community with a strong tradition of community participation, it was felt that there should be some, very lightweight mechanism for the community to assist the RIRs in its review of the IANA SLA performance. It would also provide the RIRs with a channel to seek input on the SLA performance, should it feel the need for this, without having to create a new mechanism each time.
It is important to point that that it was agreed that we did not want to create an organisation or a committee that would grow into something more important than it had to be, or risk becoming something separate from the existing processes and structures within each regional RIR community.
We therefore intentionally made the Review Committee very lightweight, with a very limited scope. It was further felt that the number community is well experienced in organising itself to carry out such work, so there was little need for the CRISP team to be over-prescriptive in the details of the RC. It was also well understood that the Review Committee would have very little work to do for the first five years, and would therefore have plenty of time to define its relevant framework.
THE FORMATION OF THE REVIEW COMMITTEE It might also be helpful to know that the reason the Review Committee was formed with members appointed to it, before the transition had even taken place, was not because there was a sense that there was a lot of work to take on. The RC was simply put together to give assurance to everyone, before the transition had taken place, that our community was well prepared to handle the transition.
REVIEW COMMITTEE CHARTER We asked the NRO EC to define the charter which it has done here: https://www.nro.net/wp-content/uploads/Review-Committee-Charter_FINALclean.p...
The charter is very clear about the role of the Review Committee being one of advising and assisting the RIRs in their review of the SLA performance. The RIRs have full time staff to carry out this work and it is not the role of the Review Committee to carry out the review itself, nor to redefine the SLA. As such, the Review Committees role is really quite simple and clean.
I hope this background was helpful to people. I am of course happy to further clarify any of this if necessary during our call.
I look forward to our call on Wednesday.
Kind regards,
Nurani Nimpuno