On June 22 & 23 2010 the .eco Stakeholder Council met in Brussels for two days of deliberation on the fourth draft of a set of proposed .eco policies.

The meeting was a crucial step in a developing consensus around the rules for .eco that the Sustainability Community could submit as part of a Community bid to ICANN when the organisation begins accepting proposals for new domain name endings (like .eco).

Over 2009 the policies were drafted and twice published for public comment. Big Room also gathered feedback on the policies through a series of regional brainstorming sessions.

In Early 2010 Stakeholder Council published an open letter apprising the Sustainability Community of its intention to come to a consensus on the policies in 2010. The Council then broke into sub-groups to make recommendations on key sections of the policies, notably Accountability, Principles, Social Issues, and the Foundation.

This combined feedback was integrated into a fourth draft of the .eco policies, which were again submitted to the Council for feedback prior to Brussels. The resulting discussions were both intense and fruitful.

We encourage any interested groups, particularly those that are members of the Global Sustainability Community, to review the meeting summary and the fifth draft .eco policies (both in PDF).

Since then, we’ve been working to get feedback from Council members who couldn’t make it, and assisting the Council in preparing to debate some of the key outstanding issues.

Here’s some background documents from the meeting, including an agenda, the participant list, and v4 of the policies.

As always, we welcome feedback and encourage comment on the policies. We’d like to thank The Hub Brussels for hosting, Afilias for presenting an overview of their work, the Meridian Institute for mediating, and most of all the Council members for volunteering their time and creativity.

Thank you all!