[NCUC-DISCUSS] Membership engagement thread

[Walid AL-SAQAF]

Hello Bill,

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.

I think the problem emerges when a newbie, who is generally interested in
non-commercial aspects of ICANN, joins NCUC with expectations that he/she
will be acknowledged, guided, and contacted to provide feedback, and get
questions or concerns attended to.

Newbies can indeed get easily overwhelmed by the complexity, jargon, and
discussions about ongoing work. So their reaction could be in remaining
passive observers hoping to grasp what is going on one day. Some hang on
until they dig it while many may give up during the process, particularly
when they discover that the learning curve is too steep, demanding or
complicated.

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.

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.

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

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.

Sincerely,

Walid
On Nov 14, 2014 4:21 PM, "William Drake" <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> 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 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> 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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