[NCUC-DISCUSS] ICANN Mentor Pilot Programme Application

[Amr Elsadr]

Hi Glenn,

About a year ago, ICANN’s Development and Public Responsibility Department (DPRD) conducted a survey among the Fellowship Program alumni, asking many questions including what barriers to participation in ICANN may be.

You may find the results interesting, but like I said, this isn’t a proper study. Just a voluntary survey. It does however give some insights to reasons behind the lack of active participation of alumni members in ICANN’s SOs and ACs. Here’s a link to the report: https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/fellowship-alumni-survey-results-28may15-en.pdf.

I hope you find this helpful.

Thanks.

Amr

> On Feb 1, 2016, at 4:55 PM, Glenn McKnight <mcknight.glenn at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Observations
> ICANN has been operating a  Fellowship, NEXT GEN and now a pilot Mentorship program and the numbers are reaching close to 1,000 and I have created a spreadsheet of all of the participants in the fellowship
> The fellowship has incorporated  a sort of  mentorship in the  evidence of  various repeat participants.  These participants are functionaries in the process I assume similar to Mentors. In addition  ALAC  at  ATLAS ll event a pilot program had a mentor/mentee program as well  
> 
> All of these efforts although  noble in intent have not been able to generate community volunteers except for the occasional ambitious individuals   
> 
> This new  mentorship iniatiative is similar to the model created for  ARIN and other RIR which match an existing active advisor with an incoming  mentee and they shadow this person 
> 
> Also we have  IETF and the ISOC Ambassors program. 
> 
> Benefits
> For all this  effort do we really know the benefits to the various ICANN communities and the individuals?
> Have we done any pre and post surveys?
> Do we have motivational stories of inspiration?
> 
> Not sure
> Glenn
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Glenn McKnight
> mcknight.glenn at gmail.com
> skype  gmcknight
> twitter gmcknight
> .
> 
> On Mon, Feb 1, 2016 at 9:40 AM, Stephanie Perrin <stephanie.perrin at mail.utoronto.ca> wrote:
> I agree with your concerns and suggestions.  I have attended several meetings of the ICANN academy but almost never hear anything between sessions...possibly my fault, but I thought I had signed up on all relevant lists.  Anyway I would like to know how this program meshes with the academy efforts, as well.
> cheers Stephanie
> 
> 
> On 2016-02-01 9:53, Rafik Dammak wrote:
>> 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 (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. 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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