NCUC Organizational News 13.01.13

[William Drake]

Hello,

One of the things I'd like to happen going forward is regular monthly reporting back to NCUC members by the EC on any noteworthy organizational and policy matters.  We don't have a mechanism in place yet to coordinate a collective effort on this, so I'll get it started with a few notes on recent developments.


1. New Executive Committee

On 3 December the 2012 election results were announced. Our new EC includes

Chair:  Bill Drake  <william.drake at uzh.ch>
Africa:  Wilson Abigaba  <wilson at isoc.ug>
Asia/Australia/Pacific: Norbert Klein <nhklein at gmx.net>
Europe: Tapani Tarvainen  <ncuc at tapani.tarvainen.info>
Latin America/Caribbean: Carlos A. Afonso <ca at cafonso.ca>
North America: Edward Morris <edward.morris at alumni.usc.edu>

Since the 13th (post-WCIT) the EC has begun to get organized and by the end of January we should have more to report on various items.  In the meanwhile, members who want to know what's being discussed, provide input, offer to help with tasks and so on can always visit the EC list archive http://mailman.ctyme.com/pipermail/ec-ncuc/ and be in touch here or via the addresses above, as appropriate.


2.  Appointments to NCSG Committees

Due to the delayed election timing the new EC came in already behind schedule on some housekeeping items.  One of the first things we needed to get done was to fill these slots so NCSG internal and GNSO work could proceed without hiccups.  Accordingly, the EC has made the following appointments until the 2013 annual meeting:

a.  NCSG EC https://community.icann.org/display/gnsononcomstake/NCSG-EC
Rafik Dammak 
Milton Mueller [both continuing]
b.  NCSG PC  https://community.icann.org/display/gnsononcomstake/NCSG-PC
Mary Wong
Avri Doria [replacing Brenden and Konstantinos]
c.  NCSG FC  https://community.icann.org/display/gnsononcomstake/NCSG-FC

Milton Mueller [continuing]


3.  Functional Work Teams

In my candidate statement https://listserv.syr.edu/scripts/wa.exe?A2=ind1211&L=NCSG-DISCUSS&F=&S=&P=38527 I argued that it'd make sense to have
> A more active EC team in which each member has defined responsibilities entailing at least one or two hours of individual work per week beyond reading email.  I’d love it if EC members would each take the lead on coordinating specific functional tasks and assemble work teams of interested members to deal with items like:
> o   In-reach and engagement of existing members, updating of the membership list
> o   outreach to potential new members (it’d also be nice if each regional representative could bring on a few folks from their regions per year)
> o   e-platform improvement and updating
> o   external communications/publicity
> o   finance (dealing with the ICANN budget process, external fundraising for initiatives, etc.)
> 
> Or something like this…to be discussed… This is the kind of functional division of labor I’ve seen work better in other civil society organizations and coalitions, including ones I’ve led, and some evolution in that direction could be helpful.  What plainly has not worked well is for everything to just default to one maxed out volunteer. 


Nobody has argued against this sort of approach and some folks on and off the EC have expressed interest in helping with particular tasks.  So now we'd like to begin to constitute teams/groups/whatever we want to call them on the five tasks above, plus one other I forgot to mention, the very overdue and urgent task of revising our Charter (ideally by the summer for a vote prior to the next EC vote).  Conversations have been underway in the EC and beyond to get some folks on board each to start, and so far there have been expressions of interest/willingness to be involved from the following folks (apologies to anyone I've forgotten, or conversely who's surprised to be listed based on prior conversations). Oh, and I should add that while from a coordination and info flow standpoint it'd usually be easiest if EC members were the coordinators, this doesn't rule out the possibility of experienced, plug n play non-EC people serving is these capacities, as is reflected below.


 In-reach/member engagement
TBD  [Coordinator]
Edward Morris 
Rafik Dammak 
Bill Drake

Outreach/new member recruitment
Edward Morris  [Coordinator]
Bill Drake

E-platforms
Wilson Abigaba   [Coordinator]
Edward Morris
Tapani Tarvainen
David Cake
Brenden Kuerbis
Bill Drake

Communications/PR

Mary Wong  [Coordinator]
Bill Drake


Finance 
Milton Mueller  [Coordinator]
Brenden Kuerbis
Maria Farrell
Bill Drake

Charter Revision

Bill Drake  [Coordinator]
Edward Morris

Obviously, we need more EC and regular members to populate these groups, share the workload, and get things moving.  Pretty much any amount of time and energy beyond zero will make a difference and be much appreciated, so please consider getting involved.  Reply on list or privately, as you like.


4.  Web Spaces/E-Platforms

Once we have teams associated with each of these functions, we should put them on the web and set up communication channels for them to work.  This goes to some of the larger e-platform questions we've been contemplating in the EC.  Clearly, NCUC's public ning site needs some serious rethinking/refreshing and we may even want to consider moving to another platform down the line.  But in the meanwhile, I'd argue it would make sense to refresh the list of groups there http://ncuc.org/groups by a) creating spaces for the new teams and list the people associated with them; b) deciding whether the teams should work there or on listservs etc; and c) if possible, for institutional memory purposes, create a space on the site called Previous Groups and dump all the old ones there, rather than simply deleting them.  

Again, nothing we do now to get started locks us into a final decision about the website.  If all the web wizards decide a Ning is not the best for us and want to migrate to some other platform, we can deal with that then.  But for now let's get some web presence going so people know we're alive and they can join and participate.

Just to repeat again in case any members are unaware, NCUC's web presence is rather spread around and in need of more consistency and maintenance, e.g.

1.  NCUC.org  [the public face…unfortunately most content quite dated, especially member pages etc]

2.  NCUC @ GNSO's public pages http://gnso.icann.org/en/about/stakeholders-constituencies/ncsg/ncuc [in process of revision]

3.  NCUC @ Confluence https://community.icann.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=8945848 [Confluence is the ICANN provided workspace]

A meta-question to consider is whether we want to continue to maintain both NCUC.org and Confluence with some bits of parallel content, redefine the division of labor between them etc…


I think that's enough for one message…

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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