RULES OF ORDER AND PARTICIPATION FOR THE MAILING LISTS OF THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE GNSO ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Version 0.5 - proposed for consensus vote to the GA 1. INTRODUCTION THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY (a) The General Assembly, hereafter known as the GA, shall be an open forum for participation in the work of the Generic Names Supporting Organization, hereafter known as the GNSO, and open to all who are willing to contribute effort to the work of the GNSO. The participants in the GA should be individuals who have a knowledge of and an interest in issues pertaining to the areas for which the GNSO has primary responsibility, and who are willing to contribute time, effort and expertise to the work of the GNSO, including work item proposal and development, discussion of work items, draft document preparation, and participation in research and drafting committees and working groups. (b) The GNSO Council shall assume responsibility for the GNSO GA e-mail announcement and discussion lists as designated by the following ICANN by-law: ----- ICANN By-laws: Article X Section 3.4 [February 2006] [Quote] ... the GNSO Council is responsible for managing open forums, in the form of mailing lists or otherwise, for the participation of all who are willing to contribute to the work of the GNSO; such forums shall be appropriately moderated to ensure maximum focus on the business of the GNSO and to minimize non- substantive and abusive postings. [EndQuote] ----- The following rules of order and participation for the GA mailing lists have been designed to meet the requirements of Article X.3.4, insofar as is reasonably possible, and have been consensually adopted by GA Participants. 2. MAILING LISTS For purposes of its internal operation, the General Assembly has the following mailing lists. These are as follows: - announce@gnso.org for announcements from the GNSO - ga@gnso.org for discussion among GA members on GA business Both lists are open for public subscription by any E-mail address. Both lists are archived. The archives are made publicly available at the following online locations: [enter archive addresses] The membership of the lists is not made public. The Announce list is available for official pronouncements only. Emanating from the Secretariat of the NC and/or the Chair of the GA The GA list is open for mail from any subscribed members, subject to section 3. of this document. The purpose of the GA list is to allow discussion between GA members on GA matters. It is not itself a decision-making body. The GA members may, however, formulate such collective opinions into consensus documents as designated by its members for submission to other bodies. Note: Neither list claims to be an authoritative listing of the members of the GA, but when a mail is sent to the announce list, it is considered to be published to the GA membership. In addition, the special list "ga-monitor@dnso.org" is provided for those email addresses that are not necessarily persons, but only wish to get a copy of GA messages. See also section 6. Access to Unfiltered Lists 3. POSTING RULES The following natural persons or entities have the right to post to the GA mailing list: - GA members who are members of the GA mailing list, posting using the email address by which they are known to the GA list, who have posting rights in good standing - the staff of the GNSO list management (for technical announcements) The GA Chair will appoint List Monitors whose responsibility it will be to monitor the list posts in accordance with the following rules: 1. The messages must be relevant to the business of the GA 2. Messages that are not strictly relevant to the business of the GA but are directly responding to content within a previous post may be posted, on occasion, by using the prefix [OT](off topic). Constant off topic postings MAY result in the List Monitor imposing sanctions [see section 4. Violation of Posting Rules] 3. The messages must observe a minimum of decorum, including: - not indulging in what may be perceived as personal attacks, insults or slander - not using what may be perceived as offensive language - not indulging in threats of legal action of any kind on list; off list threats may also be forwarded to the Chairman or List Monitor who may decide to take action against the perpetrator of such threats - not exceeding any limitations on the number of posts allowed within a given time period that may be imposed by the GA Chair at the request of members - not exceeding a message size of more than 20KB without exceptional reason List Monitors are appointed by the GA Chair for a given period of time; usually 1 year. List Monitors may be removed by the GA Chair at any time or at their own request. A list monitor may also be removed by a three quarter majority vote of the General Assembly. 4. VIOLATION OF POSTING RULES A List Monitor may impose any of the following sanctions for a violation offence: Monitoring of offenders posts. This will cause delay of postings from the affected individual until a list moderator approves them as being within the content rules, or rejects them. Suspension of offenders posting rights. This will cause mail from that person to be blocked from the GA list. Both sanctions are imposed for a limited period of time (in the first instance 2 weeks), and are announced on the mailing list. Repeat offenders may get correspondingly larger sanctions (for instance 4 weeks for a second offence, 8 weeks for a third). The period is decided by the List Monitor. In the event that sanctions imposed by the List Monitor are challenged the GA Chair will act as Arbitrator. The GA Chairs decision is final. Note that due to technical issues, monitoring one member's postings may cause monitoring to be applied to other members' posts. This is to be avoided as far as possible. List members are asked to be vigilant in these such cases and to not forward private responses from suspended or monitored members. 5. VERIFICATION OF MEMBERSHIP The rules above refer to members posting using the email address (singular) by which they are known. This assumes that an email address belongs to a person, and that it can be verified that two email addresses belong to different persons. Given the properties of the E-mail environment, this is not trivial. Hence, the following method is applied: - In the normal case, any email address capable of subscribing to the list is assumed to belong to an unique person unless the list management is otherwise notified. - If the identity behind some email address set is challenged, the list monitor may ask the challenged party for proof of identity. The list monitor has discretion in deciding whether to take action upon a challenge, and to decide what proof of identity is acceptable in each particular case. A notarized copy of a civil identification (such as a driver's license or passport) is always acceptable. - The claimed identity belonging to the email address is recorded by the list monitor, and the finding is announced to the list. The challenged party may ask the list monitor not to publish his civil identity; this shall be respected. - In the case where it is not possible to prove distinct identities for 2 mail addresses, the posting right of the email address whose distinct identity could not be proven is permanently suspended. 6. ACCESS TO UNFILTERED LIST There exists an open list that can be subscribed to: ga-full@dnso.org. This will get *all* mail sent to ga@dnso.org, no restrictions (except for possibly technical restrictions like message size or size of header). It will be archived by the GNSO. Public access to the archive will be granted as much as possible; there may be legal reasons (e.g. rules against republication of slander) that require closing some parts of the archive. The existence of this list will make it possible to have independent verification of what the filtering function does. 7. TECHNICAL MATTERS Addresses are removed from the mailing list if: - delivery of mail to that address is impossible over a period of at least 7 days - delivery of mail causes disruptive automatic behavior (such as bounce messages sent to the mailing list, causing loops) These matters are handled by the list maintainers, and no notification is given. A list of addresses removed for technical reasons can be viewed at the GNSO website. In the case of illegitimate actions that may harm the function of the list, such as denial of service attacks, the list maintainers are authorized to take appropriate action. Appropriate notification of such action will be given to the list as soon as it is reasonable. 8. ELECTION AND FUNCTIONS OF THE CHAIR The Chair shall act as the titular elected head of the GA. The Chair shall serve as both exterior and interior spokesman for the GA. The Chair shall act as arbiter of any disputes that are not directly governed by the list rules. The Chair can be removed by a three quarter of those voting for the GA. A new Chair may be elected by a three quarter of those voting for the GA. The chair shall post in one of two capacities. The first and foremost, by obligations agreed to and undertaken, is, as chair. Administrative matters shall be thus posted: Centering arguments within threads. Steering a posting individual if there is ambiguity or obvious matter left out in the post. Routinely setting forth areas of concern and formulating and implementing phraseology to assist in reaching consensus. Interacting assertively with other bodies within ICANN. Secondly, as an individual. it shall be assumed the chair is posting as an individual. So the chair will have to make open and clear designations to any posts made as chair. These rules were adopted by the GA Forum on the [day] of [month] 2007