[NCUC-DISCUSS] Regional Outreach Sessions During ICANN Meetings

[William Drake]

Hi

> On Jan 16, 2015, at 8:38 AM, KASWESHA <kaswesha at gmail.com> wrote:

> I participated remotely though with problems of connectivity being on and off. I suggest that Bill and team try to organize feature meeting in African countries like Kenya so most people like myself and other may also fully physically participate.

It would be good to organize outreach events in every region in conjunction with regular ICANN meetings. The problems historically have been 1) finding a slot in the packed meeting schedules;  2) getting resources and a room for meeting with tech support and reception afterwards; and 3) getting help with the organization and mobilization of participants.  I organized meetings at the London and LA meetings that for varying local reasons were frankly not as good as the DC one, but we’ve learned from these on substance. There’s logistical progress as well:  1) experience shows that late Saturday afternoons followed by a reception seems the best option in terms of availability of schedule slots and drawing attendees in advance of Constituency Day, although this may mean our Council members miss the first hour; and 2) I can get resources from the Global Stakeholder Engagement staff if there’s sufficient advanced notice.  Moreover, we have now the new NCUC Travel Policy which can support the travel of two active members up to US $2,000, plus there’s the ICANN Fellows program (more money and a full immersion program) if people apply early.

So the remaining challenge is 3) lining up relevant potential participants from the region and managing the invitation and engagement process.  If we wanted to make this a regular thing, we would need EC members and regular members with regional knowledge to coordinate and lead the way. I pretty much knew who to invite in DC, but would need local knowledge elsewhere. The rebooted Membership Affairs Team would seem the most appropriate vehicle for mobilizing collective efforts in this regard.  While we were thinking the MAT would focus more on “in-reach” to existing members than outreach to potential new members, there’s no reason it couldn’t try every 3-4 months to pull together a list of regional contacts as well, if people have the bandwidth…

It’s probably too late to try to do something for Singapore, as rooms have been allocated, it’s only three weeks away, and I’ll be traveling in between. If there was a upsurge of member commitment to launch and manage it I could try to bug the staff for a room and resources, but it’d hard.  However, the MAT could begin to plan for Buenos Aires in June and beyond.  The next Africa meeting will be in Marrakech 6-11 March 2016. http://meetings.icann.org/calendar <http://meetings.icann.org/calendar>  I'll no longer be chair then, but I’ll certainly be a member of the MAT.

Stuff to think about…

Bill




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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
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