[Membership-affairs] [NCUC-EC] point on the membership survey

[William Drake]

Hi

Thanks for this.  I’ve not had time to focus on this until now so have a couple questions/suggestions.

Two general points:

*Personally, I would allow a more time for people to respond than ten days.  A lot of folks are really busy right now, and more generally many members don’t seem to read all mail frequently, which is part of why every year we allow multiple two week blocs for the stages of the election and send multiple reminders to vote etc.  What’s the rush?

*It seems unusual to me to describe some questions on a survey as ‘mandatory,’ doesn’t it sound a little like an exam for undergrads?   Why not say there’s some we’d really like your feedback on and then others that are optional, Id’ think people would get the distinction…More generally, I’m not sure I understand the decision rule about which is which. For ex, I’d think the replies to Q6-8 would be really important to know and affect how I’d read their other answers, but these are labeled optional.

On the individual questions:

Q4: I strongly suspect the number of members who are paid to do NCUC work is zero, but I guess we could include this for humor.  What does ‘Sonstiges’ mean?  And the bits of German at the end...

Q13: Shouldn’t it be "What DID you hope to achieve by joining NCUC/NCSG?” rather than “do”?

Q15: Regarding the second option: posing use of the NCSG wiki as an alternative to the NCUC mail list seems confusing because the survey is for NCUC members, not NCSG members, and they wouldn’t get any NCUC info from the NCSG wiki.  If you want to frame it as a choice between platforms for updates, wouldn’t it make sense to say ncuc.org <http://ncuc.org/> instead?  Second, "to get for updates” needs a copy edit.

Q16: The list mixes current groups with older ones like JAS but not MAPO, not sure why.  In any event, could you please include the Cross Community Working Group on Internet Governance as an option, a number of us are in there.  Ditto the CCWG on Accountability.  I'd list the informal CC group on human rights as well, a number of us have been putting in time there.  More generally, it might be sensible to separately group the GNSO groups and the CCWGs. 

Q18: Neither the bylaws nor event planning teams nor the lists created for them are operational.  Similarly, there is no NCUC privacy group, and to be honest I didn’t know a mail list had been created.  I’d suggested such a group last year when about twenty people said they were interested in working on privacy, but then others objected that any privacy work had to be done at the SG level (where no privacy group was formed, but whatever).  Listing these will artificially increase the number of “not engaged” responses and present a distorted picture.  I would remove these options, and if we (re)create groups to perform these functions in the future and fire up the lists we can put fresh information on the website.

Q19: "My English is not my mother tongue and think that others may not understand me” might read better as "English is not my mother tongue and I think that others may not understand me.”   

Q20: What about establishing a members’ space on the website where people would have their pix, URLs, bios, links to writings, whatever, would that be useful?  Apparently we can’t do this at http://www.ncuc.org/about/members/ <http://www.ncuc.org/about/members/> directly but we could have another space to create more of a sense of community/identity etc?  BTW two copy edits: It’d be better to say “contribute to” instead of “contribute for” better engagement.  And "A word of welcome and encouragement from veterans could come a long way” probably would be better as “would go a long way.”  FWIW people do get welcome messages when they join.

Anyway, thanks again for all your work on this, it’s really great and should prove very helpful going forward.

Cheers

Bill



> On Feb 19, 2015, at 11:46 AM, Walid AL-SAQAF <wsaqaf at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
> 
> Sure thing Bill. Here it is again: http://goo.gl/XlwyQL <http://goo.gl/XlwyQL>
> In the introduction, I have added Maryam's name and email as the contact person within ICANN as she will be sending out the questionnaire to all NCUC members.
> 
> I've also added a deadline until the end of February so we could close it and start analyzing the results afterwords.
> 
> Let me know any final thoughts/comments before asking Maryam to distribute it. 
> 
> Sincerely,
> 
> Walid
> 

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