[NCUC-DISCUSS] Membership engagement thread

[William Drake]

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 <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 <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 <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 <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/ <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 <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 <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> 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> 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> 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/ <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> 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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