GNSO Standing Selection Committee (SSC) meeting Monday 27 Jan 2025

[Johan Helsingius]

Hi again everyone,

It has been a busy period for the SSC, with meetings every week,
but now all the appointments in the queue have been handled so
the frequency of meetings should go down significantly.

Yesterday the topic was the Latin Diacritics PDP Working Group Chair.

Attendance was up, with all but 3 members (Mike Rodenbaugh (IPC),
Frank Anati (NCSG) and Susan Mohr (ISPC) - Susan did submit apologies
in advance) present.

Again, as the SSC procedures prescribe a 48-hour consensus call
period allowing committee members who were not in the meeting to
raise objections I can't yet announce the result, but I can say
that the candidate everyone in the NCSG camp thought best suited
did get chosen.

The way the SSC works is that an initial round is done by a 2-part
poll. The first part asks SSC members to state, for each candidate,
if they think the candidate satisfies the requirements for the
position, and the second part asks the members to rank the candidates.
Nominally this is just an initial poll to inform the discussion,
but there has been little discussion and usually the poll results
determine the choice.

Interestingly the SSC vice chair Segunfunmi Olajide (BC) questioned the
mechanism and its results.

I did raise the issue that staff extended the poll deadline by 2 hours
at last minute after chasing members who hadn't responded. My concern
is that arbitrary decisions to extend the deadline can be used to
influence the result and is unfair towards members who make the
effort to meet the deadline.

In the previous meeting I raised the question about the fact that the
(anonymous) poll replies showed one member stating that the candidate
at the top of the poll was not suitable, and wondered if that was a
showstopper. The member who had given the answer identified themselves
and explained that as a new member, they had answered "no" simply
because that candidate wasn't one of their preferred choices, so it
should not be seen as a showstopper.

Seems that my question was misconstrued as wanting to know who answered
what, and to my surprise, this time the polling results and answers
showed who had voted and answered what. I did raise the issue that
this should not happen without the members being told in advance that
that would be the case, and the Chair, Karen Day (RySG) responded that
"the decision was made under leadership discretion to provide an
additional layer of transparency and provide full context to the
outcome".

In this case, it did give an opportunity to see that poll responses
to a large degree reflected constituency/stakeholder group lines.

There was also some discussion about possibly requesting the
Council to review the SSC charter. The current charter will be
circulated to SSC members for comments.

So far no date has been set for the next meeting as there are
no appointments pending.

	Julf