[NCUC-DISCUSS] Revising the NCUC Bylaws

Sun Aug 9 08:18:10 CEST 2015

Hello Bill and all great Fellows,

Great discussions so far.

My suggestion is to work towards migrating NCUC to the desired destination
of a stronger  NCUC at all cost. At the end it will be very fruitful.

Warm regards.
On 8 Aug 2015 20:23, "Remmy Nweke" <remmyn at gmail.com> wrote:

> Thanks Bill for all the efforts as usual.
>
> Unfortunately, I suspected this may take a while given your narration
> herein, hence we commenced discussion on this earlier in the week, it was
> nice to roll up our sleeves.
>
> However, as much as I would love to be part of the renew team for the
> review, God helping us with His mercies, I think its ideal to start the
> process.
>
> But my questions now is what should be our resolve on NomCom while we
> prepare for the future and why the EC waited these long without taking
> decisive step on how to handle this given prevailing challenges and status
> of NCUC knowing fully the route abi nitio.
>
> Thirdly, we needed to decide on if we should remain with the statusquo or
> work towards migrating NCUC to the desired destination of a stronger NCUC
> at all cost, instead of waiting indefinitely for ICANN board to decide the
> next role.
>
> Can you also lead us into other likely lull in adequate delegation that
> may affect NCUC through until when likely the review will be resolved,
> outside our forthcoming election?
>
> Regards
> Remmy Nweke
> @ITRealms
>
>
>
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> On Sat, Aug 8, 2015 at 5:57 PM, Stephanie Perrin <
> stephanie.perrin at mail.utoronto.ca> wrote:
>
>> Thanks for taking this initiative Bill.  I am not going to volunteer
>> because I am up to my ears in privacy and council work, and do not have any
>> bandwidth to spare on this.  All blessings on the willing who are prepared
>> to step forward and work on this.
>> Good luck!
>> Stephanie Perrin
>>
>>
>> On 2015-08-08 11:18, William Drake wrote:
>>
>> Hello
>>
>> Buckle your seat belts, this is a ten minute ride.
>>
>> On the recent free range thread that was supposed to concern filling the
>> NomCom slot, several people expressed the view that it is high time to
>> revise the bylaws.  If people are indeed prepared to roll up there sleeves
>> and work on this now, fine, let’s do it.  Please be aware though that this
>> is a lengthy process because once we work out a text we find more suitable,
>> it then has to be cleared through the relevant staff and then the ICANN
>> Board’s Structural Improvements Committee (SIC). Both will undoubtedly
>> suggest or demand changes, so we can expect probably a half year delay from
>> when we submit a revision to when the SIC finally gives its blessing.  This
>> means that we will not be able to have a member vote to approve the
>> revision until the November-December 2016 NCUC Election.  But we can begin
>> the process now, and it will fall to the EC and Chair to be elected in a
>> bit over three months to bring it to fruition in the first quarter and send
>> it off to the power that be.
>>
>> A little background for those who are new to this item.  To refresh my
>> memory, I looked through about 80 saved messages on the subject going back
>> to 2011 and the ncuc-discuss archive (which is always a fun way to get a
>> sense of how much we’ve grown and changed over the years).
>>
>> Our current bylaws were Approved in September 2009.  I tried to find
>> records of the discussion around this but cannot; we were dealing
>> simultaneously with GNSO restructuring and the chartering of the NCSG, both
>> of which were big battles with board/staff/business, and everything in the
>> ncuc-discuss archive is on these.  Back then we tended to do a lot of work
>> via informal channels so that must have been where the bylaws were evolved,
>> but alas I can’t find relevant saved messages and can’t reconstruct what
>> the thinking was.  I had just joined NCUC and the GNSO council, so I don’t
>> think I was involved, but the people who did the work are still here on
>> this list and can always fill in the blanks if they like.
>>
>> By 2012 a number of us started to notice gaps between a) the bylaws and
>> how we were now actually operating, given the rise of the NCSG, and b) the
>> NCSG charter and the NCUC bylaws.  Re: the former, among the more notable
>> gaps were (and are) that: we no longer have a policy committee; do not
>> charge membership dues; don't have a  Secretary-Treasurer (just a
>> Treasurer); and EC members generally don’t “Ensure that members from their
>> region are made aware of and respond to calls for comments by members of
>> the Policy Committee on Working Group and other Council and other ICANN
>> policy.”  Re: the latter, for ex: the NCUC charter reads like one can join
>> without first joining NCSG (solved by the Join web form), and the NCSG
>> charter and NCUC bylaws allocate different numbers of election votes to
>> large and small organizations (solved by simply following the NCSG model).
>> As should be obvious from the list, none of these problems actually were
>> significantly disabling in terms of the basic functioning of the
>> constituency, but they did seem like things that merited fixing from a good
>> governance standpoint.
>>
>> In April 2012 the then Chair, Konstantinos Komaitis took a crack at some
>> revisions, but didn’t finish before he had to step down due to job stuff.
>> So then a few of us—Amr, Avri, Nobert, Milton and myself——began to play
>> with revisions in a Google doc version.
>> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1eMYs3_odaFN01piVcvMAuxAu_nJyqX2oGYK1o10QuIU/edit
>> I no longer recall why we abandoned the effort, but probably it just didn’t
>> seem pressing as the constituency was functioning and other stuff was going
>> on.
>>
>> In the December 2013 election I became chair and Ed and Tapani joined the
>> EC.  Both really felt we needed to revise.  I was trying to start up this
>> notion of “teams” that would assemble EC and regular members to perform
>> different organizational functions, and so we created a Bylaws Team and set
>> up a mail list http://lists.ncuc.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/bylaws,
>> which about 20 members joined.  I raised the issue at multiple Constituency
>> Day meetings but the conversations weren’t terribly deep and engaged. We
>> did however have a little discussion on the bylaws list between
>> August-October 2013, but then after we consulted with staff and realized
>> there was no way we were going to be able to get a revision through them
>> and the board in time for members to vote on it in the next election, the
>> effort sort of wandered off.  After the next election, I asked another EC
>> member to lead the Bylaws Team, but after some months it became clear
>> nothing was going to be done. After this, as I explained on the bylaws list,
>>
>> On Apr 1, 2015, at 10:48 AM, William Drake <wjdrake at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> I then reach out to several veterans including the folks who did the last
>> version and said look why don’t we just take a week and do this, and the
>> view was why bother when what we’d really like to do is see if we can’t
>> move to the integrated SG model we advocated at the dawn of NCSG rather
>> than doubling down on the dysfunctional constituency silo model.  So I
>> started poking around with some board members and asking do you think it’s
>> conceivable we could ever get the board to accept that, and got varying
>> responses, some encouraging us to make a proposal and some saying that’d
>> probably set off a more divisive holy war do you think it’s worth it.  Then
>> the GNSO Review process was launched, in which context the structures of
>> interest aggregation in the GNSO will be debated.  The initial draft from
>> the consultant was full of agenda-driven nonsense, which we and others have
>> pushed back on, and we’re now waiting to see what the revision will look
>> like.  The consultant are to provide this in late April, and then the
>> community review team will provide input, there’ll be a public comment
>> period, etc.  By the BA meeting I would hope we will be able to have a more
>> focused discussion, which together with the pending churn of the Board
>> Structural Improvements Committee should provide clarity on the larger
>> picture going forward.  If the upshot is that we are permanently wedded to
>> a system that basically just wastes peoples’ time and distracts energies
>> from policy work etc, then I would be happy to try once again to work with
>> whomever is willing to spend some cycles to redo the Bylaws and align them
>> with the current realities of the constituency’s role in the SG.  But we’re
>> not there yet, and expending the time now while things are up  in the air
>> and people are swamped with other items doesn’t seem so sensible.  I don’t
>> believe the board is thinking about this or in a position to act anytime
>> soon with all else that’s going on in parallel.
>>
>>
>> And subsequently, there arose further uncertainty due to the
>> accountability process and the various membership models—I was getting
>> contradictory advise about how things might be organized, whether NCUC was
>> going to have to become a legal entity, etc.  So my sense was, let’s wait
>> until we see what’s decided in Dublin (assuming something is) and then
>> decide how to proceed.
>>
>> But waiting makes some vocal folks unhappy, so fine, let’s start now
>> anyway.  Of course, revising the bylaws is in effect saying to the board
>> that we are content to live with the fragmentary C/SG structure they gave
>> us, so we can forget about having some sort of integrative civil society
>> formation like in every other open governance body, but I guess this is the
>> path of lest resistance.
>>
>> Here’s how I propose we proceed:
>>
>> 1.  I will ask Maryam to take the Bylaws Team and its mail list out of
>> mothballs and add them to http://www.ncuc.org/participate/working-teams/
>> and http://lists.ncuc.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo.  It would make sense
>> to have the conversations there, as back and forth over whether article
>> II.1.c should say “a” or “the” will not be of interest to everyone on this
>> main list.  I therefore encourage everyone interested in this question, and
>> especially those who have complained about lack of action on it, to join
>> the Team and its list and take a lead in moving things forward.
>> Conversely, any members who signed up in 2013 but no longer want to be
>> there can just unsubscribe.
>>
>> 2.  People involved may wish to compare
>> http://www.ncuc.org/governance/bylaws/ with the changes proposed in 2012
>> at
>> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1eMYs3_odaFN01piVcvMAuxAu_nJyqX2oGYK1o10QuIU/edit.
>>  You could work off of the latter, or simply start over with a clean slate,
>> whichever.  It might make sense to begin by working in “Comment Mode” so
>> you don’t disturb the text until some consensus has been reached.
>>
>> 3.  It might be useful to begin by making a list of things that should be
>> changed in order to conform with actual practice and the NCSG charter.  And
>> a list of things that might be “nice to add” or delete. Build consensus in
>> the team around these, develop a revision with line by line comments.
>>
>> If something can be assembled over the next two months, we can schedule a
>> hour or more at Constituency Day in Dublin to go through it and discuss any
>> particularly important decisions, like whether some sort of Policy
>> Committee would still be needed for when the constituency wants to express
>> its own views separate from a SG-wide consensus.  I also would argue for
>> establishing a Vice Chair, and if we’re going down this route, registering
>> with the US tax authorities as an independent entity so we can take
>> donations more easily.  Inter alia.  Anyway, if we came out of Dublin with
>> some broad consensus, then it will be easier for the new EC and the Bylaws
>> Team to move this to conclusion be the end of the Q1 2016 and get it off to
>> staff.
>>
>> Ok that’ enough for one message…
>>
>> Any thoughts, feedback, etc?
>>
>>
>> Bill
>>
>>
>> *********************************************************
>> William J. Drake
>> International Fellow & Lecturer
>>   Media Change & Innovation Division, IPMZ
>>   University of Zurich, Switzerland
>> Chair, Noncommercial Users Constituency,
>>   ICANN, www.ncuc.org
>> william.drake at uzh.ch (direct), wjdrake at gmail.com (lists),
>>   www.williamdrake.org
>> *Internet Governance: The NETmundial Roadmap *http://goo.gl/sRR01q
>> *********************************************************
>>
>>
>>
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