[NCUC-DISCUSS] candidate statement David Cake

[David Cake]

This is my statement as a candidate for NCUC Chair. 

As most of you know, I have held many roles within NCSG and NCUC already. 

I won’t try to list my entire experience, but I have been an NCSG GNSO Councillor for four years, two of those as Vice-Chair of the Council, I have served on the NCUC EC, and served briefly as acting chair in 2013 when Konstantinos Komaitos stepped down. And I have held other roles within ICANN, including part of the first Security Stability and Resiliency Review Team (a useful role to interact with parts of ICANN that NCUC often has limited interaction with) and I have been part of multiple policy development processes, currently one of the Vice-Chair of the Next Generation RDS Working Group that aims to replace the WHOIS system. I’ve also been involved outside ICANN, including several years as Chair of Electronic Frontiers Australia, and involvement in several other digital rights campaigns and groups. 
I believe my experience within ICANN and the digital rights movement speaks for itself. 

I was asked to run for NCUC chair by some colleagues, and on reflection I agreed with their reasoning. 

NCUC needs a chair with strong experience, not just within NCUC, but within the broader range of activities that ICANN performs. 

NCUC Exec Committee is an excellent position for someone relatively inexperienced in NCUC and ICANN, but Chair is different. NCUC Chair interacts regularly with ICANN staff, particularly over funding and travel and staff support. NCUC Chair regularly is involved in discussions regarding the entire community, discussions that involve the other ACs and SOs and senior staff and benefit from a strong understanding of how the entire organisation works, and as we move into the Empowered Community era this need is becoming stronger. And as ICANN policy work is the primary reason for NCUC to exit, the Chair needs to be someone with a strong understanding of policy work, who understands the various processes we go through well. 

I believe that I am the only candidate in this election that has the experience to move into those parts of the chair role quickly and with full understanding of how NCUC operates within the complex system that is ICANN. 

However, I do not believe that you should vote for me for that reason alone, and I certainly have policies that I am keen on implementing. 

I would like to see an outreach strategy that does not depend on simply adding events to ICANN meetings, and is not dependent on the work of individual EC representative, no matter how talented. I would work towards documented strategies for each region including major events that we will plan to have representative at, and planning documents that EC members can hand on to their successors. 

I do think that the current EC policies are working well for a transparent, reasonable, yet fair and pragmatic approach to travel funding, and will strongly agree that we need to keep working to build on that work.We began the move towards a more transparent process for travel funding when I was interim chair in 2013, and I am glad to see that process continuing. 

I believe that NCUC needs to keep considering its own policy independence, and while we should try to work through the NCSG Policy Committee wherever possible, there are times when NCUC may want to take action on its own, such as presenting policy proposals.  

I will continue the great work done this year on on boarding, in reach, and policy training. We need to bring more of our great volunteers into becoming effective participants in policy working groups. We may need to have strategy sessions where we talk to policy veterans, staff and outside policy experts to build programs to help people make the transition to active policy workers. Our policy veterans are overworked and spread thin, yet our new volunteers are often finding that working groups are dense and intimidating and difficult to contribute to as a newcomer, and we need to work to fix that. This is a huge issue for NCUC, and a lot of work has gone into addressing it but there is still more to do. 

I want to see a process of planning our outreach activities that strives to find where NCSG and NPOC efforts are complementary to NCUC, and do what we can to build on those issues by default. We too often duplicate efforts that do not make effective use of our scarce resources. 

I want to see a more open, flexible process for NCUC budget requests  that actively involves not just the NCUC but other experienced volunteers. 

I want to see NCUC supplement the ICANN Harassment policy and code of conduct with our own processes that will allow us to pick up behaviour issues within our group before they become a crisis and need to be referred to formal processes like the ombudsman. Not a new set of codes of conduct or other rules, but practical systems to ensure that new people coming in to ICANN are aware of the mechanisms to protect them, and know of some names of people who can be trusted to give them practical advice and assistance if issues occur. I am aware of some issues with relatively new volunteers in the last few years experiencing problems with interpersonal behaviour from other participants and not knowing how to deal with them. And I have become aware of gaps in the existing mechanisms. I want to raise our standards.