General Assembly

GA is the abbreviation for General Assembly Mailing List, commonly referred to as General Assembly. The GA was established as part of the Domain Name Supporting Organization (DNSO). It is an open forum for participation for the Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO), which superseded the DNSO. It is open to all those people willing to work for the GNSO. The main purpose of the GA list is to allow discussion between GA members on the various GA matters. The GA is not a decision making body but the members may derive any collective opinions into consensus documents as the members might designate for submission to other bodies.

Definition

The GA mailing list defines itself as a forum which works for the GNSO. It serves as a current document where the statements previously made by the GA with respect to the DNSO are now updated.

Participants

The participants in the GA are individuals who have sufficient knowledge of and interest in the issues concerning the areas which form major part of GNSO responsibilities. These participants are such who can dedicate time, effort and provide the necessary expertise to the growth of the GNSO. This work of GNSO includes discussion of work items, proposal and development, preparation of drafts document and participating in drafting and research committees as well as their working groups.

Objectives

The main objectives of the GA are mentioned below:

• To identify the opportunities that would help in increasing the effectiveness and communication of the GA with Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and GNSO.
• Act as a conduit of information between the registrants, users and ICANN.
• To transmit the view of the stakeholders of ICANN as mentioned by the participants in the GA.

Maling Lists

The General Assembly has the following mailing lists for its internal operation:

• ga@gnso.org for discussion among GA members on GA business
• announce@gnso.org for announcements from the GNSO

Both these lists are open for public subscription by any E-mail address and are archived for general public. However, GA doesn’t make the subscribers list publicly available.

The Announce list which emanates from the Secretariat of the NC and Chair of GA is made available only for official pronouncements. The GNSO Council manages the GA mailing lists and it is open and unbiased.

Posting rules

The right to post to the GA mailing list rests only in the hands of the following people:

• Subscribers to the GA mailing list, who post by using the email address by which the GA list recognizes them, these are mostly the ones who have posting rights in good standing
• The staff of the GNSO list management. However, it is restricted only for technical announcements

Violation of Posting Rules

The GA list either sanctions a suspension of offenders posting rights or monitors the offenders post or sometimes even both. However, these sanctions are issued only for short period of time (usually first two weeks). For repeat offenders the GA imposes larger sanctions which might last for a period of 4 weeks if it is a second offense and 8 weeks for 3rd offence. The List Monitor decides the period up to which the sanctions would apply.

Deprecated. Domain Name Supporting Organization. Predecessor of the Generic Names Supporting Organization, which advised the Board with respect to policy issues relating to the Domain Name System (ICANN Bylaws).

Generic Names Supporting Organization. Develops and recommends to the Board substantive policies relating to generic top-level domains and other responsibilities set forth in the Bylaws (ICANN Bylaws).