[AFRINIC-rpd] Agenda for Policy Development Process at AFRINIC-17

[Alan Barrett]

On Fri, 16 Nov 2012, Douglas Onyango wrote:
> I am not entirely certain SM's revision is inline with our PDP.
>
> According to 5.1 of our current PDP 
> http://www.afrinic.net/en/library/policies/251-afpub-2010-gen-005#5
>> No change can be made to a draft policy within one week of the 
>> meeting.
> SM seems to have followed that very well :-)

Yes, the change was made more than one week before the meeting.
The meeting agenda will be modified to refer to the latest version of
the proposal.

> However, the second paragraph of 5.1 reads
>> "The draft policy shall be available for review for at least 
>> four weeks before the next Public Policy Meeting.  The 
>> author(s) shall make the necessary changes to the draft policy 
>> according to the feedback received"
>
> It's not clear if "draft policy," in this context refers to the 
> policy as a document in whole (including all revisions), or 
> to a version of the document. This is particularly important 
> because the last I checked all revisions of a policy had to have 
> a fresh/unique identifier.
>
> In the absence of this distinction I would argue that any 
> version/revision of the policy could be referred to as a " draft 
> policy," and in which case SM would be late

I personally find the numbering system clumsy and confusing, but that
does not affect the essence of the process.

The PDP seems to draw a distinction between a proposal, and a 
version or revision of a proposal.  My understanding of the PDP is 
that the the proposal must be made at least four weeks before the 
meeting, but the latest version of the proposal may be published 
as little as one week before the meeting.

I trust that the community will object if the changes are so great 
as to effectively make it a different proposal, rather than merely 
a different version of the same proposal.

--apb (Alan Barrett)