[NCUC-DISCUSS] ICANN Mentor Pilot Programme Application

[Rafik Dammak]

Hi everyone,

thanks for your interests for this program and feedback.

While the mentorship program is good idea in principle, I have some
reservations on how this program is designed and controlled  by ICANN
staff. the requirements put some burden on the mentor-mentee and try to
formalize several aspects of what should be mainly a trusted relationship
between 2 persons.

I do think that mentorship should be flexible and it is up to the
mentor-mentee to agree in the rules and expectations. on other hand, I
agree with with Avri about the expectation of providing report and lesson
learned to share best practices with others in NCUC. For info, we were
informed and got the request to give names quite late. it was even late
 with regard to the timeline setup by DPRD. I asked for some clarification,
more details about the program and that we should get involved to give
feedback. it is a pilot project for Marrakech meeting and we will see how
it will evolves. to be followed closely. My understanding is that the
program is not aimed to replace or to compete with the existing fellowship
and nextgen program but is supposedly aimed toward ICANN constituencies.

I support that we explore the idea suggested by Avri to have our own
independant mentorship program for NCUC and see how we can fund and setup
it. Such internal program is definitely not aimed to replace the pilot
project but complement it. it can be part of a capacity building efforts
for membership to expand our pool of volunteers. As reminder we have also
the NCUC Membership Affairs Team which we are trying to reactivate and
investigate how we can engage our members better.

I would like also to clarify some points:
- Regarding the information about policy work, we are trying to do most of
the work at NCSG level and we can still discuss that at NCUC level. most of
the policy work is done by NCUC members e.g. public comments, participating
in working groups etc. so the challenge is to avoid duplication. for
example, we can make statement to support NCSG comments and put additional
point of views in some cases
- the welcoming message from NCSG includes a lot of information (I drafted
that message when I was NCSG chair ;)) . This mentioned page
<https://links.mixmax.com/b/BOOJTNsRwguFW8xMT?rn=&re=IyZy9mLjV3Yu5yc0NXasB0czV3YzlGZtMWdj5mI>
(which
is included in the welcoming message) was drafted by me and used
extensively existing pages made by Avri. one of the projects we have in
NCUC is to create a NCUC newcomer handbook following the example of IETF Tao
<https://www.ietf.org/tao.html>. please stay tuned for this one. There are
also several scattered GNSO material and links e.g
http://gnso.icann.org/en/issues/pdp-updates that we will try to compile in
single place. anyway point taken about adding more info to the NCUC
welcoming message.
- we got the mentorship skype channel setup. maybe we can to explore other
channels such whatsapp etc while being mindful about the level of efforts
and adoption by members. I acknowledge that the learning curve can take
some time but I think that we learn by practicing and asking questions.  We
will try to facilitate and be a broker for matching mentor-mentee pair and
see how it will works.
For those interested, I am reiterating my offer of informal chat or skype
discussion to give more information and respond to your questions, also
happy to do mentorship too.

hope that helps.

Best Regards,

Rafik
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