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Thanks for taking this initiative Bill. I am not going to volunteer
because I am up to my ears in privacy and council work, and do not
have any bandwidth to spare on this. All blessings on the willing
who are prepared to step forward and work on this.<br>
Good luck!<br>
Stephanie Perrin<br>
<br>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 2015-08-08 11:18, William Drake
wrote:<br>
</div>
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type="cite">
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<div class="">Hello</div>
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">Buckle your seat belts, this is a ten minute ride.</div>
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">On the recent free range thread that was supposed to
concern filling the NomCom slot, several people expressed the
view that it is high time to revise the bylaws. If people are
indeed prepared to roll up there sleeves and work on this now,
fine, let’s do it. Please be aware though that this is a
lengthy process because once we work out a text we find more
suitable, it then has to be cleared through the relevant staff
and then the ICANN Board’s Structural Improvements Committee
(SIC). Both will undoubtedly suggest or demand changes, so we
can expect probably a half year delay from when we submit a
revision to when the SIC finally gives its blessing. This means
that we will not be able to have a member vote to approve the
revision until the November-December 2016 NCUC Election. But we
can begin the process now, and it will fall to the EC and Chair
to be elected in a bit over three months to bring it to fruition
in the first quarter and send it off to the power that be.</div>
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">A little background for those who are new to this
item. To refresh my memory, I looked through about 80 saved
messages on the subject going back to 2011 and the ncuc-discuss
archive (which is always a fun way to get a sense of how much
we’ve grown and changed over the years). </div>
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">Our current bylaws were Approved in September 2009.
I tried to find records of the discussion around this but
cannot; we were dealing simultaneously with GNSO restructuring
and the chartering of the NCSG, both of which were big battles
with board/staff/business, and everything in the ncuc-discuss
archive is on these. Back then we tended to do a lot of work
via informal channels so that must have been where the bylaws
were evolved, but alas I can’t find relevant saved messages and
can’t reconstruct what the thinking was. I had just joined NCUC
and the GNSO council, so I don’t think I was involved, but the
people who did the work are still here on this list and can
always fill in the blanks if they like. </div>
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">By 2012 a number of us started to notice gaps
between a) the bylaws and how we were now actually operating,
given the rise of the NCSG, and b) the NCSG charter and the NCUC
bylaws. Re: the former, among the more notable gaps were (and
are) that: we no longer have a policy committee; do not charge
membership dues; don't have a Secretary-Treasurer (just a
Treasurer); and EC members generally don’t “Ensure that members
from their region are made aware of and respond to calls for
comments by members of the Policy Committee on Working Group and
other Council and other ICANN policy.” Re: the latter, for ex:
the NCUC charter reads like one can join without first joining
NCSG (solved by the Join web form), and the NCSG charter and
NCUC bylaws allocate different numbers of election votes to
large and small organizations (solved by simply following the
NCSG model). As should be obvious from the list, none of these
problems actually were significantly disabling in terms of the
basic functioning of the constituency, but they did seem like
things that merited fixing from a good governance standpoint.</div>
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">In April 2012 the then Chair, Konstantinos Komaitis
took a crack at some revisions, but didn’t finish before he had
to step down due to job stuff. So then a few of us—Amr, Avri,
Nobert, Milton and myself——began to play with revisions in a
Google doc version. <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1eMYs3_odaFN01piVcvMAuxAu_nJyqX2oGYK1o10QuIU/edit"
class="">https://docs.google.com/document/d/1eMYs3_odaFN01piVcvMAuxAu_nJyqX2oGYK1o10QuIU/edit</a>
I no longer recall why we abandoned the effort, but probably it
just didn’t seem pressing as the constituency was functioning
and other stuff was going on.</div>
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">In the December 2013 election I became chair and Ed
and Tapani joined the EC. Both really felt we needed to revise.
I was trying to start up this notion of “teams” that would
assemble EC and regular members to perform different
organizational functions, and so we created a Bylaws Team and
set up a mail list <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://lists.ncuc.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/bylaws"
class="">http://lists.ncuc.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/bylaws</a>,
which about 20 members joined. I raised the issue at multiple
Constituency Day meetings but the conversations weren’t terribly
deep and engaged. We did however have a little discussion on the
bylaws list between August-October 2013, but then after we
consulted with staff and realized there was no way we were going
to be able to get a revision through them and the board in time
for members to vote on it in the next election, the effort sort
of wandered off. After the next election, I asked another EC
member to lead the Bylaws Team, but after some months it became
clear nothing was going to be done. After this, as I explained
on the bylaws list,</div>
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">
<blockquote type="cite" class="">
<div class="" style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode:
space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;">
<div class="">On Apr 1, 2015, at 10:48 AM, William Drake
<<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="mailto:wjdrake@gmail.com" class="">wjdrake@gmail.com</a>>
wrote:</div>
<div class="">
<div class="" style="word-wrap: break-word;
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after-white-space;">
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">I then reach out to several veterans
including the folks who did the last version and said
look why don’t we just take a week and do this, and
the view was why bother when what we’d really like to
do is see if we can’t move to the integrated SG model
we advocated at the dawn of NCSG rather than doubling
down on the dysfunctional constituency silo model. So
I started poking around with some board members and
asking do you think it’s conceivable we could ever get
the board to accept that, and got varying responses,
some encouraging us to make a proposal and some saying
that’d probably set off a more divisive holy war do
you think it’s worth it. Then the GNSO Review process
was launched, in which context the structures of
interest aggregation in the GNSO will be debated. The
initial draft from the consultant was full of
agenda-driven nonsense, which we and others have
pushed back on, and we’re now waiting to see what the
revision will look like. The consultant are to
provide this in late April, and then the community
review team will provide input, there’ll be a public
comment period, etc. By the BA meeting I would hope
we will be able to have a more focused discussion,
which together with the pending churn of the Board
Structural Improvements Committee should provide
clarity on the larger picture going forward. If the
upshot is that we are permanently wedded to a system
that basically just wastes peoples’ time and distracts
energies from policy work etc, then I would be happy
to try once again to work with whomever is willing to
spend some cycles to redo the Bylaws and align them
with the current realities of the constituency’s role
in the SG. But we’re not there yet, and expending the
time now while things are up in the air and people
are swamped with other items doesn’t seem so sensible.
I don’t believe the board is thinking about this or
in a position to act anytime soon with all else that’s
going on in parallel.</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</blockquote>
</div>
<div class="">
<div class="" style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode:
space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;">
<div class="" style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode:
space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;">
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">And subsequently, there arose further
uncertainty due to the accountability process and the
various membership models—I was getting contradictory
advise about how things might be organized, whether NCUC
was going to have to become a legal entity, etc. So my
sense was, let’s wait until we see what’s decided in
Dublin (assuming something is) and then decide how to
proceed.</div>
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">But waiting makes some vocal folks unhappy, so
fine, let’s start now anyway. Of course, revising the
bylaws is in effect saying to the board that we are
content to live with the fragmentary C/SG structure they
gave us, so we can forget about having some sort of
integrative civil society formation like in every other
open governance body, but I guess this is the path of lest
resistance.</div>
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">Here’s how I propose we proceed:</div>
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">1. I will ask Maryam to take the Bylaws Team
and its mail list out of mothballs and add them to <a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.ncuc.org/participate/working-teams/"
class="">http://www.ncuc.org/participate/working-teams/</a>
and <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://lists.ncuc.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo"
class="">http://lists.ncuc.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo</a>.
It would make sense to have the conversations there, as
back and forth over whether article II.1.c should say “a”
or “the” will not be of interest to everyone on this main
list. I therefore encourage everyone interested in this
question, and especially those who have complained about
lack of action on it, to join the Team and its list and
take a lead in moving things forward. Conversely, any
members who signed up in 2013 but no longer want to be
there can just unsubscribe.</div>
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">2. People involved may wish to compare <a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.ncuc.org/governance/bylaws/" class="">http://www.ncuc.org/governance/bylaws/</a> with
the changes proposed in 2012 at <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1eMYs3_odaFN01piVcvMAuxAu_nJyqX2oGYK1o10QuIU/edit"
class="">https://docs.google.com/document/d/1eMYs3_odaFN01piVcvMAuxAu_nJyqX2oGYK1o10QuIU/edit</a>.
You could work off of the latter, or simply start over
with a clean slate, whichever. It might make sense to
begin by working in “Comment Mode” so you don’t disturb
the text until some consensus has been reached.</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
3. It might be useful to begin by making a list of things that
should be changed in order to conform with actual practice and the
NCSG charter. And a list of things that might be “nice to add” or
delete. Build consensus in the team around these, develop a
revision with line by line comments.
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">If something can be assembled over the next two
months, we can schedule a hour or more at Constituency Day in
Dublin to go through it and discuss any particularly important
decisions, like whether some sort of Policy Committee would
still be needed for when the constituency wants to express its
own views separate from a SG-wide consensus. I also would argue
for establishing a Vice Chair, and if we’re going down this
route, registering with the US tax authorities as an independent
entity so we can take donations more easily. Inter alia.
Anyway, if we came out of Dublin with some broad consensus,
then it will be easier for the new EC and the Bylaws Team to
move this to conclusion be the end of the Q1 2016 and get it off
to staff.</div>
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">Ok that’ enough for one message…</div>
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">Any thoughts, feedback, etc? <br class="">
<br class="">
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">Bill</div>
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<br class="">
<div apple-content-edited="true" class="">
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-webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class="">*********************************************************<br
class="">
William J. Drake<br class="">
International Fellow & Lecturer<br class="">
Media Change & Innovation Division, IPMZ<br class="">
University of Zurich, Switzerland<br class="">
Chair, Noncommercial Users Constituency, <br class="">
ICANN, <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.ncuc.org" class="">www.ncuc.org</a><br
class="">
<a moz-do-not-send="true" href="mailto:william.drake@uzh.ch"
class="">william.drake@uzh.ch</a> (direct), <a
moz-do-not-send="true" href="mailto:wjdrake@gmail.com"
class="">wjdrake@gmail.com</a> (lists),<br class="">
<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.williamdrake.org" class="">www.williamdrake.org</a><br
class="">
<i class="">Internet Governance: The NETmundial Roadmap </i><a
moz-do-not-send="true" href="http://goo.gl/sRR01q"
class="">http://goo.gl/sRR01q</a><br class="">
*********************************************************</div>
</div>
<br class="">
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