[NCUC-DISCUSS] Community budget request 2017

[William Drake]

Hi

I share Ed’s concern that we are underrepresented in many of work areas of GNSO policy, and agree that rectifying that should be a priority.  At the same time, it is not completely evident that there’s a zero sum trade-off here.  We may have members who’d be disinclined to fill the GNSO gaps anyway, for various reasons, but who would be more prepared to put some time into a conference.  And it could be that getting engaged in something like this would subsequently lead to dipping toes into the GNSO work…as Stefania noted, she followed this path from conference to the Council.

The amount of work involved varies depending on the ambitions and the extent to which we seek to engage other parts of the community and bridge build.  The 2014 Singapore conference had that as an explicit design goal and so involved a significant amount of coordinating and schmoozing.  It paid off to the extent that we had a packed room of 130+ audience members who stayed for eight hours and it helped NCUC’s standing, but it took time.  So I wouldn’t dismiss the potential benefits, or the costs.

So I’d try to determine a) what unique and compelling substantive topic(s) might such a meeting explore, most likely at M 1 of 2017; b) would the conference be optimized for NCUC doing its own thing, or with cross-community relations in mind; and c) is there a core group of folks who would have the bandwidth to see it through, without detracting from GNSO work.  If there are good answers on all these fronts, I suspect staff would be happy to allocate the necessary resources, budget permitting.

Bill 

> On Feb 11, 2016, at 16:08, Edward Morris <egmorris1 at toast.net> wrote:
> 
> I'm going to be the contrarian here.
> 
> We are starting several highly time intensive PDP's on core issues to our community such as WHO2 and RPM reviews. We are in the middle of a GNSO restructuring. Accountability continues with work stream 2, a work stream where many of our core issues such as transparency and human rights are at issue. Tens of public comments come and go with nary a contribution from the noncommercial community. Two close next week and I don't believe we have anyone working on them.
> 
> Policy conferences are nice but I'd suggest they are not a core function of the NCUC. They take time and resources to organise, two commodities we don't have a lot of right now. 
> 
> If folks want to go down this road I'd suggest we need to partner with a NGO that has the bandwidth and money to organise such an event. We certainly can provide the policy expertise and panelists, for example, if they could provide the organisational man/woman power. I also question whether these should be held at ICANN meetings. First, the new meeting strategy virtually precludes having these at the 4 day B meeting. Second, with all that is going on who has the time at the meetings to attend or participate in a policy conference? Events are already scheduled on the days preceding the meetings themselves that many of us need to attend.
> 
> Now a seminar on how to write public comments, perhaps one on how to be effective in working groups...IMHO these types of seminars should be our priority. Our colleagues in other groups are fighting for policy wins, not conducting policy seminars. I'd suggest we should focus on doing the same.
> 
> Ed
> 
> Sent from my iPhone
> 
>> On 11 Feb 2016, at 13:16, Matthew Shears <mshears at cdt.org> wrote:
>> 
>> I would like to support - if it is not to late - an idea that I believe Farzi/Rafik floated some time ago - that of a Policy Conference.
>> 
>> Apparently we have done these in the past - San Francisco, Toronto and Singapore
>> 
>> I would proprose a one or two-day Policy Conference with three specific components/goals:  1) deep dives with invited experts into priority and/or new policy areas; 2) working sessions to coordinate on/progress PDPs and other policy priorities; 3) assessment of progress and planning on policy priorities generally.
>> 
>> I see this as a great opportunity to come together and drive policy work forward (there is no substitute for F2F), build capacity among those interested in policy work and getting more involved, outreach to experts from other parts of the community, etc.
>> 
>> Matthew
>>