[NCUC-DISCUSS] Revising the NCUC Bylaws

Sun Aug 9 10:43:17 CEST 2015

Bill

I am volunteering.

Sal
On 9 Aug 2015 9:03 am, "James Gannon" <james at cyberinvasion.net> wrote:

> I still haven’t seen anyone volunteering to actually do the work of
> migrating NCUC to this new era… I think any may be underestimating the
> effort and hours of work that will need to go into such an undertaking.
> With regards to the NomCom the position will be filled as per the bylaws,
> Peter Green I believe is compiling a shortlist for the EC to consider.
>
> And If I can note, changing the bylaws is not going to get people engaged
> in the work of NCUC, while I understand that not everyone has the
> availability to be on the frostlines its important that people begin to
> step up and contribute, particularly those who are looking to run in
> elections or be nominated for leadership positions. We need more people to
> do the legwork on NCUC business, we need people to draft comments, we need
> people to actively join and participate in working groups, we need people
> to step up and do the unglamorous work that doesn’t come with a title or a
> position but is the work that keeps NCUC alive and running, and most
> importantly relevant and a powerful voice in ICANN.
>
> So my personal suggest is before we run off and start revising the bylaws,
> why don’t we try and get our regional members more engaged in a bottom up
> manner, Remmy and others seem very interested in taking a position on this
> so guys why don’t you start by doing some additional outreach to our
> African members, try to get them to engage on the grassroots of NCUC, seek
> out those with special skills who might be able to contribute to our work
> or even just show how diverse the NCUC membership is by being more active
> in the broader ICANN community for NCUC.
>
> I think that working on regional diversity in a practical way will do much
> more to further the goals than rewriting the bylaws.
>
> -James
>
> On 9 Aug 2015, at 07:18, Sonigitu Ekpe <soekpe at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
>
> 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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