[NCUC-DISCUSS] Membership engagement thread

Stephanie Perrin stephanie.perrin at mail.utoronto.ca
Sun Nov 16 15:25:21 CET 2014


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
Thanks again Bill, working my way through the archives and other 
information gradually.
Cheers Stephanie
On 14-11-16 4:47 AM, William Drake wrote:
> Hi
>
> [snipping]
>
>> On Nov 14, 2014, at 10:53 PM, Walid AL-SAQAF <wsaqaf at GMAIL.COM 
>> <mailto:wsaqaf at GMAIL.COM>> wrote:
>>
>> 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.
>>
> 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.
>>
>> 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.
>>
> 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.
>>
>> 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.
>>
> 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.
>>
>> 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:
>>
>> 1) How well does the member know about NCUC and ICANN
>> 2) What motivated him/her to join NCUC
>> 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
>> 4) What particular new ideas or initiatives could the new member 
>> bring to NCUC
>> 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
>> 6) Whether he/she would need mentorship or could suffice with the 
>> introductory meeting and documentation
>> 7) Any other thoughts about engagement in NCUC
>>
> Ditto
>>
>> 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.
>>
> 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 :-)
>
>> On Nov 15, 2014, at 2:16 PM, Benjamin Akinmoyeje <benakin at gmail.com 
>> <mailto:benakin at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>
>> 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.
>
> 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.
>>
>> 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.
>
> Your contributions have been very constructive indeed, thank you.
>
> Best
>
> Bill
>
>> Sincerely,
>>
>> Walid
>>
>> On Nov 14, 2014 4:21 PM, "William Drake" <wjdrake at gmail.com 
>> <mailto:wjdrake at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>
>>     Hi
>>
>>     /Another long message alert/
>>
>>     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.
>>
>>     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,
>>     https://community.icann.org/display/gsergnlstrtgcplns/Regional+Strategic+Plans-Final).
>>     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.
>>     https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/fellowships-2012-02-25-en
>>     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.
>>
>>     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.
>>
>>     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.
>>     http://lists.ncuc.org/pipermail/ncuc-discuss/2012-November/010875.html
>>     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
>>     http://lists.ncuc.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/membership-affairs with
>>     nine people subscribed to it.
>>
>>     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.
>>
>>     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
>>     http://lists.ncuc.org/.  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.
>>     https://community.icann.org/display/gnsononcomstake/NCSG+Email+Discussion+Archive)
>>
>>     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.
>>
>>     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
>>     https://community.icann.org/display/soaceabout/Event+Calendar. 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.
>>
>>     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.
>>
>>     Thanks,
>>
>>     Bill
>>
>>>     On Nov 8, 2014, at 4:04 PM, Benjamin Akinmoyeje
>>>     <benakin at gmail.com <mailto:benakin at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>>
>>>     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.
>>
>>
>>>     On Nov 8, 2014, at 8:40 PM, Seun Ojedeji <seun.ojedeji at gmail.com
>>>     <mailto:seun.ojedeji at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>>
>>>     I doubt mentees list (i presume mailing list) will make any much
>>>     difference. The experience will happen where the action is;
>>
>>
>>>>     On Nov 9, 2014, at 6:05 AM, Tapani Tarvainen
>>>>     <ncuc at TAPANI.TARVAINEN.INFO
>>>>     <mailto:ncuc at TAPANI.TARVAINEN.INFO>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>     Go to http://www.ncuc.org <http://www.ncuc.org/> and click
>>>>     "Participate" and under it
>>>>     "Mailing Lists", or go directly to http://lists.ncuc.org/.
>>>>
>>>>     Almost all lists have public archives. The exception is Events,
>>>>     which sometimes handles at least semi-confidential stuff.
>>>
>>
>>>     On Nov 9, 2014, at 9:35 PM, Dan Krimm <dan at musicunbound.com
>>>     <mailto:dan at musicunbound.com>> wrote:
>>>
>>>     Great, so even someone like myself who's been around for a while
>>>     (though
>>>     admittedly with little time to participate substantively for
>>>     several years)
>>>     didn't know (or, and I don't browse the NCUC web site with any
>>>     regularity.)
>>>     Good to know these public archives exist!  ;-)
>>>
>>>     That suggests a hybrid idea:
>>>
>>>     (1) We should suggest that any new member who wants to
>>>     understand the
>>>     workings of the special committees make a habit of looking at these
>>>     archives regularly.
>>>
>>>     (2) For those new members who want to discuss "orientation" matters
>>>     without cluttering up the main list, perhaps there is still room for
>>>     something similar to Stephanie's idea.
>>
>>
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