[AfriNIC-rpd] Proposal for Policy Development Process in the AfriNIC service region

[sm+afrinic at elandsys.com]

Hi Douglas,
At 12:52 09-12-2009, Douglas Onyango wrote:
>Then it should be spelt out explicitly in the policy.

That sentence is for exceptional cases.

>As i understand it, the chair is not even in charge of making the 
>meeting agenda, so asking him to post it for me is an overkill, what 
>we should require rather is that he publish the list of Policies to 
>be discussed, because this is within his purview....Meeting agenda 
>cuts across the board and comes off as a guidline, Policy's up for 
>discussion on the other hand, are only limited to the PDP stuff 
>which is reasonable to expect from the chair....don't know if i am 
>getting my point across.

The Working Group Chair publishes the agenda.  An agenda obviously 
includes the list of policies to be discussed.  Now, if you are going 
to hold a Public Policy Meeting without having a list of policies on 
the agenda, I can only wonder why one would call it a Public Policy Meeting.

>house.....We shall have a discussion and then at the end, we have a 
>situation where there
>lingers some objections and the policy should be sent back to be 
>list for further discussion, but i as aurthor stand up and challenge 
>the chair with this clause...."The draft policy may be sent back to 
>the Policy Development Process mailing list for discussion if there 
>are  objections to the proposal" in my understanding, this means 
>50/50 on sending it back and not doing so (sending it up the PDP 
>ladder.)...........eliminate this possibility, but say shall, so 
>that in the event that there is any plausible object on a policy, it 
>cannot by any means go up the PDP ladder...

The last sentence in Section 5.2 could have been written as:

    The draft policy may be sent back to the Policy Development Process
    mailing list for discussion if there is substantial objection to the
    proposal.

The main point in that section is:

   "The Chair(s) determines whether rough consensus has been achieved."

That's not a 50/50 if the process is followed.  The process is much 
more than the steps described.  The keyword here is "rough 
consensus".  That requires consensus building.

There are times when sending the proposal back to the group is not 
worthwhile unless you want to keep it being (not) discussed or for 
this group to have something listed for discussion even if there 
won't be any progress.

If this proposal is adopted, you won't see the results overnight as 
there are also some cultural issues to overcome.

AFPUB-2008-ASN-001 is dated 27 May 2009 and the Status is 
"Ratified".  AFPUB-2009-ASN-001 is dated 27 May 2009 and the Status 
is "Draft".  The process may need a sanity check.

Regards,
S. Moonesamy