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I would just like to add a big thanks to Bill for writing this
email, and to all for their enthusiasm. I will admit that I am
already struggling to meet my commitments on the GNSO, the two
working groups I am on , and the privacy and human rights
commitments I have made, so adding another list is a wee bit
suicidal. But I too agree that it is critical that folks
collaborate as much as possible and get help figuring out how to
make a contribution<br>
Thanks again Bill, working my way through the archives and other
information gradually.<br>
Cheers Stephanie<br>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 14-11-16 4:47 AM, William Drake
wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote
cite="mid:4A0E9074-4616-49B3-86E9-F65463FDAB9C@gmail.com"
type="cite">
<meta http-equiv="Context-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
Hi
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">[snipping]<br class="">
<br class="">
<div>
<blockquote type="cite" class="">
<div class="">On Nov 14, 2014, at 10:53 PM, Walid AL-SAQAF
<<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="mailto:wsaqaf@GMAIL.COM" class="">wsaqaf@GMAIL.COM</a>>
wrote:</div>
<div class="">
<p dir="ltr" class="">Thanks for the frank email, which I
found really well-thought and sums up some of what I had
personally gone through when I first joined about couple
of years ago. It also reflects on your sincere desire to
address issues that often go unnoticed yet are
fundamental to the long-term effectiveness of our
constituency. </p>
</div>
</blockquote>
From my standpoint, it’s not so much that they’ve gone
unnoticed—I at least have sent multiple messages about this to
the various lists over the past few years and, as I have
noted, tried to get EC and regular members to work together in
teams to address them. Rather, the problem has been that
enthusiasm for doing something is bursty, and gets expressed
but not sustained; people offer to lead or participate in
collaborative efforts and then…sort of drift off.
Understandable, people get busy, and actually volunteering
time can slip down one's priorities list when other things in
life become pressing. But to get forward movement, we need at
least a couple core people who are willing to do things like
coordinate a team (a couple hours a week at most) and a larger
set that’s interested enough to participate in e-discussions
and pitch in as able. Mancur Olsen’s 1965 book on the logic
of collective action provides a plausible way of understanding
this.<br class="">
<blockquote type="cite" class="">
<p dir="ltr" class="">While I think the situation needs to
be analyzed more thoroughly, I suggest that you host a
virtual Skype chat with some relatively new NCUC members
who are eager to participate but have not yet been able to
crack the ICANN code. </p>
</blockquote>
We already have a monthly NCSG policy meeting on Adobe Connect
that provides an easy way for people to begin cracking the
code on how the policy process works, and I was happy to see
20 people on the call the other day. I’d strongly suggest
making time for these. We could in addition do Adobe meetings
at the constituency level on the in-reach/engagement
challenges if people want. I don’t know ex ante if these
would need to be as frequent, but if the desire emerges and is
sustained that could happen.<br class="">
<blockquote type="cite" class="">
<p dir="ltr" class="">What I suggest is to write and keep
updated a wiki about NCUC with all the necessary
information formulated in a simple and easy to understand
way. It should also include updated sections on specific
working groups including who is working and what and
timelines, etc. and links to discussions that are going on
and even videos and other stuff when possible. </p>
</blockquote>
<div>This is a nice idea, but we need people who are willing
to actually do it, rather than say “someone" should do it.
We are a platform/network for volunteers, not an
organization with a bunch of paid staff, so people have to
step forward and collaborate to make it happen.</div>
<blockquote type="cite" class="">
<p dir="ltr" class="">Secondly, I suggest developing an
electronic form (Google form perhaps) to be filled by
every new NCUC member and those who are still trying to
have a role. The survey should be simple yet comperhensive
enough to know:</p>
<p dir="ltr" class="">1) How well does the member know about
NCUC and ICANN<br class="">
2) What motivated him/her to join NCUC<br class="">
3) Which areas or working groups already active within
NCSG (to be listed and linked to their corresponding
sections in the wiki) are most appealing to him/her <br
class="">
4) What particular new ideas or initiatives could the new
member bring to NCUC<br class="">
5) How much time (in hours per week/month) could he put in
voluntary work to support NCUC within the areas answered
in (3) above<br class="">
6) Whether he/she would need mentorship or could suffice
with the introductory meeting and documentation<br
class="">
7) Any other thoughts about engagement in NCUC </p>
</blockquote>
Ditto<br class="">
<blockquote type="cite" class="">
<p dir="ltr" class=""> I welcome your comments about the
above and I sincerely hope that this could be a turning
point to the better for NCUC's engagement efforts.</p>
</blockquote>
Well, my first comment would be to suggest that you sign up
for the Membership Affairs Team, as I see this morning that
Stephanie Perrin has done. If you were willing to deploy some
the ideas and enthusiasm shown here to coordinating it, that
would be even better :-) [be careful what you wish for] I
think it’s helpful (although not strictly necessary) if EC
members serve as coordinators to ensure three-way info flow
(EC, teams, general membership), and unless another AP
candidate appears today, you should be on the 2015 EC :-) </div>
<div><br class="">
</div>
<div>
<div>
<blockquote type="cite" class="">
<div class="">On Nov 15, 2014, at 2:16 PM, Benjamin
Akinmoyeje <<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="mailto:benakin@gmail.com" class="">benakin@gmail.com</a>>
wrote:</div>
<div class="">
<div dir="ltr" class="">
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">So here is my suggestion - can the
active participants start identifying interested
newbies and start given out simple tasks with
deliverable dates and allow individuals to start
earning reputation for their level of willing
engagement.</div>
</div>
</div>
</blockquote>
<div><br class="">
</div>
I don’t know how easy this model would be to act on, as the
most active participants are really busy with working groups
and other responsibilities, and also may not have any idea
how to identify interested newbies. I would again suggest
that the latter be proactive themselves by joining the
Membership Affairs team and discussing possibilities with
people who have chosen to opt into the work there. I’m a
member.<br class="">
<blockquote type="cite" class="">
<div dir="ltr" class="">
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">Now on a personal note, thank you Bill, I
will join those lists and start trying to read up and
understand some of these issues - I always like to be
constructive in my contributions. I hope by the time
I understand the issues , the present issues wont have
advanced.</div>
</div>
</blockquote>
</div>
<br class="">
<div class="">Your contributions have been very constructive
indeed, thank you.</div>
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">Best</div>
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">Bill</div>
</div>
<div><br class="">
<blockquote type="cite" class="">
<p dir="ltr" class="">Sincerely, </p>
<p dir="ltr" class="">Walid</p>
<div class="gmail_quote">On Nov 14, 2014 4:21 PM, "William
Drake" <<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="mailto:wjdrake@gmail.com" class="">wjdrake@gmail.com</a>>
wrote:<br type="attribution" class="">
<blockquote class="gmail_quote">
<div class="">Hi
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class=""><i class="">Another long message alert</i><br
class="">
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">As I work my way through a backlog of
communications I’d now like to respond to the
thread begun by Benjamin under the NCUC ELECTIONS
2014: NOMINATIONS OPEN 3 - 16 November heading.</div>
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">The entire ICANN community has long
struggled to entice “new blood” into active
*working* participation in its activities (as
opposed to just showing up at meetings when funded
etc). As a first step, we have often focused on
outreach to potential new participants, especially
in developing countries. When I was on the GNSO
Council 2009-2112, Rafik, myself and a few others
pushed a lot on this with business counterparts
and the board, and often got fairly blank stares
in return. A number of people worked on developing
a cross-community Outreach Committee to coordinate
efforts, but the Commercial Stakeholder Group
killed that. Then when Fadi came in he hired all
kinds of Stakeholder Engagement staff including
regional VPs, and they sort of took over a lot of
the outreach work on a fairly top-down basis (they
even have regional strategic plans, <a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://community.icann.org/display/gsergnlstrtgcplns/Regional+Strategic+Plans-Final"
target="_blank" class="">https://community.icann.org/display/gsergnlstrtgcplns/Regional+Strategic+Plans-Final</a>).
But some useful things have begun to happen, such
as targeted “what to expect” webinars before
meetings (NC did one), targeted in situ gatherings
during the meetings (NCUC’s co-organized two with
local civil society, open to all in the SG), etc.
These are in addition to the well known Fellows
Program that will pay for developing country folks
to come to up to three ICANN meetings. <a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/fellowships-2012-02-25-en"
target="_blank" class="">https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/fellowships-2012-02-25-en</a>
While that program has tended to focus on steering
people toward the At Large community, the three NC
chairs do speak to them at each meeting and a
number of people have joined afterwards. In sum,
I think outreach is working much less well than it
should be, but at least it’s a known problem
that’s getting resources now and there are
processes in place to build out. And as our
membership creeps toward the 400 mark, we can’t
really complain that NCUC is not growing.</div>
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">The flip-side of the coin, “in-reach,”
arguably has received less focused attention.
Often ICANN succeeds in getting people to join
some community grouping like a GNSO constituency
where they may take part in mail list discussions
and elections and even attend a meeting or two
when funded, but they don’t easily find their way
through the massive amounts of information and
procedural complexities of the ICANNsphere and
latch onto something that entices them into a
deeper, working engagement. It is especially
tough for newbies, who can face a steep learning
curve (and that’s all of us—I worked on Internet
governance stuff for a decade in UN and other
environments but when I got on the GNSO Council it
took me a half a year to figure out what was
really going on, which is hardly unusual). There
are all kinds of problems here: an information
architecture that makes finding things that’d be
of particular interest unnecessarily difficult;
linguistic and organizational cultural challenges;
information/experience asymmetries; complex
working methods; the constant sense that you’ve
walked into a conversation that’s been going on
for five years and there’s all kinds of embedded
history in the interactions that you can’t
immediately understand; sometimes weak incentives
and difficulties in connecting ICANN issues with
ones’ own priorities; etc. </div>
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">When I first stood for election to
chair two years I suggested that NCUC create
‘teams’ bringing together EC members and regular
members to work on constituency-level
organizational challenges. <a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://lists.ncuc.org/pipermail/ncuc-discuss/2012-November/010875.html"
target="_blank" class="">http://lists.ncuc.org/pipermail/ncuc-discuss/2012-November/010875.html</a>
Among these I suggested an outreach team and an
in-reach team. For various reasons, they never
really attracted the sustained coordination and
engagement needed to take off, and were then
folded together into a ‘Membership Affairs Team,’
which suffered more or less the same fate. But
this team still exists, at least on paper.
There’s even a dormant mail list <a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://lists.ncuc.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/membership-affairs"
target="_blank" class="">http://lists.ncuc.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/membership-affairs</a> with
nine people subscribed to it.</div>
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">If people would like to take another
shot at developing and sustaining a conversation
about ways to improve/facilitate member engagement
in NCUC/NCSG, a simple approach would be to join
that mail list and use it. If we want to talk
about mentee relationships or ways to make things
more transparent to newbie members or how to get
people involved in actual policy discussions
including in GNSO working groups or anything else
of that kind, this is a ready-made place to do
that. Just one thought though: the most helpful
sorts of interventions that are likely to go
somewhere are ones where someone says “I will work
with whomever on xyz”. Comments about how an
unnamed “someone” should do something tend not to
lead anywhere, especially if the most plausible
“someone" is already putting in a lot of volunteer
time doing other things. The only way to make
such things work is to broaden the pool of
engagement, so that all the burden doesn’t fall on
one or two sets of shoulders.</div>
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">On a related note, other things people
can do in NCUC/NCSG, as Tapani and Dan point out
below, is to to look through what already exists.
We have a website that was constructed and is
maintained by the volunteer labor of colleagues;
lots there to look at, and opportunities to help
update and grow it. And we have open archive mail
lists at the website NCUC <a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://lists.ncuc.org/" target="_blank"
class="">http://lists.ncuc.org/</a>. NCSG does
too, although they are a bit more spread around,
some being at Syracuse U and some at IP Justice (I
suppose it would make sense to have links to all
those at some central place, e.g. <a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://community.icann.org/display/gnsononcomstake/NCSG+Email+Discussion+Archive"
target="_blank" class="">https://community.icann.org/display/gnsononcomstake/NCSG+Email+Discussion+Archive</a>)</div>
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">And, one can apply for some travel
support when our new policy goes into action next
month. While ICANN has the best remote
participation facilities in the business, it does
seem that the members who end up getting more
deeply involved are those who’ve been able to
physically attend a meeting or two and get the
bug.</div>
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">A last point: there is currently a
process underway where the chairs of the SOs, ACs,
SGs, and C’s talk on the phone monthly to take the
collective temperature and brainstorm. I’ve
reported on this before, and the transcripts and
recordings are at <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://community.icann.org/display/soaceabout/Event+Calendar"
target="_blank" class="">https://community.icann.org/display/soaceabout/Event+Calendar</a>.
We also have started meeting on the Fridays before
ICANN meetings to talk, and in LA decided to form
some little subgroups to develop agendas on
problems we all think confront the whole community
with respect to participation etc. These will
then be discussed and worked on by the larger
group of chairs and staff, details TBD. Anyway,
I’m working on “in-reach” with a couple other
chairs and the Global Engagement staff, and on our
last call proposed that we use a simple 2 x 2
matrix to crowdsource ideas about the problem.
The four boxes of the matrix will include on one
axis 1) barriers to fuller engagement and 2)
possible solutions, and on the other axis 3)
general considerations applicable across SOACSGCs,
and 4) considerations that are specific to
particular SOACSGCs. So we’re going to start
filling those in with the other chairs to see if
we can move toward some shared definition of
problem and general/localized solutions. </div>
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">If anyone would like to provide some
input from an NCUC perspective that would be
great, shoot me a note and I’ll include it in our
discussion. To be more specific: if you have
ideas about particular barriers to engagement in
NCUC/SG and possible solutions to these, please do
pass them along, either to me, or by joining the
Membership Affairs list mentioned above and
growing it there.</div>
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">Thanks,</div>
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">Bill</div>
<div class="">
<br class="">
<div class="">
<blockquote type="cite" class="">
<div class="">On Nov 8, 2014, at 4:04 PM,
Benjamin Akinmoyeje <<a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="mailto:benakin@gmail.com"
target="_blank" class="">benakin@gmail.com</a>>
wrote:</div>
<br class="">
<div class=""><span class="">Here is a
suggestion I will like to see and I won't
know if I am speaking the mind of the new
members who will like to engage actively
but just feel inadequate - is it possible
to have a position on the EC that is more
like an understudy position. This way
there is an active political will to
bringing on board new members.</span></div>
</blockquote>
</div>
<br class="">
</div>
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">
<blockquote type="cite" class="">
<div class="">On Nov 8, 2014, at 8:40 PM, Seun
Ojedeji <<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="mailto:seun.ojedeji@gmail.com"
target="_blank" class="">seun.ojedeji@gmail.com</a>>
wrote:</div>
<br class="">
<div class=""><span class="">I doubt mentees
list (i presume mailing list) will make any
much difference. The experience will happen
where the action is;</span></div>
</blockquote>
</div>
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class=""><span class="">
<div class=""><span class=""><br class="">
</span></div>
<div class=""><span class="">
<blockquote type="cite" class="">
<blockquote type="cite" class="">
<div class="">On Nov 9, 2014, at 6:05
AM, Tapani Tarvainen <<a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="mailto:ncuc@TAPANI.TARVAINEN.INFO"
target="_blank" class="">ncuc@TAPANI.TARVAINEN.INFO</a>>
wrote:</div>
<br class="">
<div class=""><span class="">Go to </span><a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.ncuc.org/"
target="_blank" class="">http://www.ncuc.org</a><span
class=""> and click "Participate"
and under it</span><br class="">
<span class="">"Mailing Lists", or go
directly to </span><a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://lists.ncuc.org/"
target="_blank" class="">http://lists.ncuc.org/</a><span
class="">.</span><br class="">
<br class="">
<span class="">Almost all lists have
public archives. The exception is
Events,</span><br class="">
<span class="">which sometimes handles
at least semi-confidential stuff.</span></div>
</blockquote>
</blockquote>
<div class="">
<blockquote type="cite" class=""><br
class="">
</blockquote>
</div>
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">
<blockquote type="cite" class="">
<div class="">On Nov 9, 2014, at 9:35
PM, Dan Krimm <<a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="mailto:dan@musicunbound.com"
target="_blank" class="">dan@musicunbound.com</a>>
wrote:</div>
<br class="">
<div class=""><span class="">Great, so
even someone like myself who's been
around for a while (though</span><br
class="">
<span class="">admittedly with little
time to participate substantively
for several years)</span><br
class="">
<span class="">didn't know (or, and I
don't browse the NCUC web site with
any regularity.)</span><br class="">
<span class="">Good to know these
public archives exist! ;-)</span><br
class="">
<br class="">
<span class="">That suggests a hybrid
idea:</span><br class="">
<br class="">
<span class="">(1) We should suggest
that any new member who wants to
understand the</span><br class="">
<span class="">workings of the special
committees make a habit of looking
at these</span><br class="">
<span class="">archives regularly.</span><br
class="">
<br class="">
<span class="">(2) For those new
members who want to discuss
"orientation" matters</span><br
class="">
<span class="">without cluttering up
the main list, perhaps there is
still room for</span><br class="">
<span class="">something similar to
Stephanie's idea.</span></div>
</blockquote>
</div>
<div class=""><span class=""><br class="">
</span></div>
</span></div>
</span></div>
</div>
</div>
<br class="">
_______________________________________________<br
class="">
Ncuc-discuss mailing list<br class="">
<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="mailto:Ncuc-discuss@lists.ncuc.org" class="">Ncuc-discuss@lists.ncuc.org</a><br
class="">
<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://lists.ncuc.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ncuc-discuss"
target="_blank" class="">http://lists.ncuc.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ncuc-discuss</a><br
class="">
<br class="">
</blockquote>
</div>
</blockquote>
</div>
<br class="">
</div>
<br>
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