[NCUC-DISCUSS] WBC Global policy support pilot - is NCUC participating in it?

[Mueller, Milton L]

Kathy and all

Third, it is a fact that we leave many comment period "on the table" and do not respond to issues of interest and concern to the NCUC.  Why?  We hear many reasons including volunteer fatigue, the timeconsuming process of preparing comments and the time-consuming process of editing them with the NCUC.
MM: I see a lot of wishful thinking here.

The real problem is that we don’t have enough members who understand the procedures and the issues. That understanding cannot be bought off the shelf. There is no such thing as a neutral public policy consultant. The work has to reflect our members’ views and interests. When you hire a lawyer you have to know what your interests are and you have to instruct the lawyer how to pursue them. Hiring someone to prepare policy analyses, public comments and review other constituencies’ work is even more difficult. The capacity to tell them, “review this,” “write up that,” “scan this proposal and see how it helps or harms our interests as noncommercial users” takes a huge learning curve. This is not about editorial and copy editing stuff.  You have to have policy experts to direct policy consultants. That is what is currently lacking in NCUC: the ability to be completely on top of and to manage our response to so many policy processes. You don’t increase the number and scale of our policy expertise by letting ICANN hire staff people to “help” us.

You CAN increase it by increasing the capacity of NCUC itself to manage and participate in policy processes.

History may serve as a guide in this matter. Several years ago, we (NCUC) objected heartely to ICANN providing us with administrative support.

MM: WHAT? No one ever objected to that. We did object to having ICANN take over the administration and maintenance of our web site and membership list. No one objected to us getting the staff support for Adobe Connect meetings and other neutral administrative functions. We scrutinized the offer of staff support carefully and we got what we asked for, nothing more.

But we now have Maryam Bakoshi working with us and could not imagine a world in which we did not have her support.

MM: I can imagine such a world. In fact we have been living in that world for the past two months due to some personal issues that led to her absence. And as someone else in this dialogue pointed out, we actually underutilize Maryam, because the NCUC leadership lacks the time to define projects and ask her to execute things. This is a good example of how you don’t get something for nothing. We are not even managing Maryam effectively. With policy development, the need to manage increases exponentially over simple administrative tasks.


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