[NCUC-DISCUSS] Welcome to the new NCUC-discuss list

Thu Apr 4 10:04:25 CEST 2013

Hello

I mentioned a few months ago on the NCSG-discuss list that we intended to create a new NCUC-discuss list so that members could communicate about matters of interest to the constituency without clogging up the stakeholder group list, which we of course share with our NPOC colleagues.  Well, after a lot of hard work on the part of new EC member Tapani Tarvainen with help from some folks from our e-platform team (most notably Brenden Kuerbis, but also Ed Morris and Wilson Abigaba, and Robin), we've now got an updated and more data rich NCUC membership list, and with that in hand Tapani's gone ahead and launched this new mailing list.  So many thanks to Tapani et al.  Just in time for Beijing, just one of the first batch of concrete deliverables from our new constituency building initiate….

A few opening points.

First, and to repeat, if you're receiving this message you're listed in our data base as a member of NCUC.  I hope you will choose to stay with us and just dump ncuc-discuss at lists.ncuc.org mail into another folder to peruse when you want, I can't imagine the traffic load is going to be heavy and unmanageable.  But of course, if you don't want to be subscribed and keep up with what's happening in the constituency, you can drop out (or make any other settings changes) at http://lists.ncuc.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ncuc-discuss.  If you're an NPOC member and not an NCUC member sorry for the mistake, please let us know and we'll straighten things out with our records. Conversely, we know there are NCUC members who are not subscribed to NCSG-discuss and hence won't be scooped up into this list either.   I hope they will one way or another become aware of the list and join post hoc.  All this stuff will get sorted out with time...

Second, the shared/merged history of the lists created a little dilemma, how to allocate the institutional memory.  Sitting here in a Beijing hotel, I don't recall all the history I wasn't part of (Milton, Kathy Kleinman and others can fill it in if they like), but I guess the Non-Commercial Domain Name Holders Constituency (NCDNHC) was launched in 1999,  soon after ICANN's formation.  I'm not sure when they started using a mailing list, but Tapani had access to a NCDNHC-discuss archive from August 2001 - December 2002.  Then after a gap, the archive picks up in August 2003 and the NCDNHC had become NCUC and the list was now NCUC-discuss.  Amidst the whole convoluted SG chartering transition the list became NCSG-NCUC-discuss in I believe May 2010, and then in July 2011 with the chartering complete the list became NCSG-discuss.  [some day we need to write up our own institutional history!…]  So since that time, we've had one list where everyone in the SG discussed together matters related to GNSO policy and beyond.  But there's been a big caveat, in that while NCUC had given up its mailing list to create the SG space, NPOC has always maintained its own mailing list to talk about organizational and policy matters in parallel.  So we had this odd situation where NCUC people had to communicate via the SG list and NPOC people were wondering why am I reading NCUC mail?  That's what we're remedying here.

So back to the dilemma, what to do with archives.  Rather than artificially chopping and separating the NCDNHC-discuss and NCUC-discuss periods from the NCSG-NCUC-discuss and NCSG-discuss periods, we decided to simply leave the archives intact with mostly shared pasts but different futures.  So:

*The NCSG-discuss list lives on a computer at Syracuse university, and the archive covers the period from August 2003 to present
https://listserv.syr.edu/scripts/wa.exe?A0=NCSG-DISCUSS.  All mail sent to NCSG-discuss will continue to accumulate there (whereas the other NCSG lists, e.g. for the EC and PC, are hosted by Robin).

*The NCUC-discuss list lives on a Virtual Private Server NCUC has just contracted for, where we will be pulling together all the constituency's e-resources (the new function-specific Member Team listservs, the new website now in production, etc.)  The Archive will cover the period from August 2001 (includes the NCDNHC material) through the NCSG-discuss period to today, but henceforth NCUC-discuss and not NCSG-discuss http://lists.ncuc.org/pipermail/ncuc-discuss/2013-April/date.html.  So we fork from today.  I hope I got that right, I'm not a system administrator but it's what I understood from Tapani, who's en route to the airport.

Third and finally is the question of what to use the list for.  This actually has been a subject of little controversy among some of us.  Some folks feel that pretty much any and all discussion of policy issues must happen on an integrated SG-wide basis, and hence on NCSG-discuss.  If we follow this route, then I suppose NCUC-discuss would be used largely for intraorganizational administrative items like constituency building, elections, etc.  (this also goes to the larger question of the role of the constituency in policy, and whether we should have a Policy Committee as our Bylaws say…we do not now)  Alternatively, NCUC could use its list in the way NPOC uses its, which seems to be for both intraorganizational and some policy discussion when needed to build internal consensus before taking things to the SG level to work out between constituencies.  Personally, my feeling is either is fine, the lists will find their natural equilibria through members' decisions and usage, and it'd be a bit much to try to police what members choose to say where and have to issue finger wagging reminders etc.  And either way, in Council we work and vote as a SG.  So I'd rather see how it goes than fret a lot at the front end, but if others feel differently, we can discuss this on Constituency Day, the new listserv is among the items on the agenda, as is the non-extant NCUC Policy Committee and our thus out of synch Bylaws.

I think that's more than enough for now.  So, we have a new listserv, make of it what you will…

Best,

Bill

***************************************************
William J. Drake
International Fellow & Lecturer
  Media Change & Innovation Division, IPMZ
  University of Zurich, Switzerland
  www.williamdrake.org
Chair, Noncommercial Users Constituency, 
  ICANN, www.ncuc.org
william.drake at uzh.ch
****************************************************

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