[Ec-ncuc] NCUC Executive Committee

[William Drake]

Hi

Hopefully starting another thread?I hope folks will keep these in a folder somewhere so we can return to them periodically and ultimately make decisions, do follow up, etc?When we have had some dialogue on these and have something to report or propose, we'll also need to take them to the membership list...

As I'd argued previously on the members list,

>  One of the key ideas that's come up in the revision drafting exercise is to enhance the responsibilities and expectations of the Executive Committee.  We desperately need for the EC to play a stronger, more active role if NCUC is going to step up and meet the demands of the rapidly evolving ICANN environment.  Right now, too few volunteers are carrying too much of the workload for us to be as effective as we could be; we've got to broaden the circle and share it more.

> ...the priority should be electing a new Executive Committee whose members will significantly increase their levels of individual and collective commitment to performing the basic tasks we need done to make it a vibrant and growing group.  EC slots cannot be nominal titles for business cards, they have be for people really willing to work on defined, languishing functions like member inreach, outreach, finance, communications, web resources and so on?the nuts and bolts of any effective civil society body.


Accordingly, I began playing with the possible revisions to the charter (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1eMYs3_odaFN01piVcvMAuxAu_nJyqX2oGYK1o10QuIU/edit) that could be proposed to the membership.  But since we couldn't elect people to regional-based slots in the same election as we voted on possibly redefining the slots, we put aside the charter redraft until afterwards.  By next summer we will need to significantly revise the charter and put it up for a member vote in advance of the next election cycle.  In the meanwhile, we should start to sort out some issues here.

Personally, I don't believe it makes sense to stick with a region-based EC configuration.   It's not obvious that any of us can individually "represent" our home regions, or that or there's a history of EC members being particularly focused on region-based activities, e.g. inreach with extant or outreach to potential members.  All we need to do is specify in the charter that the EC should have a given regional distribution to avoid excessive concentration.

I argue it'd make more sense to redefine EC slots around real functions that need to be performed.  This is common in other civil society or academic organizations I've been affiliated with.  A possible topography per above would be that people run for five 'coordinator' positions:
(extant) member inreach
(new) member outreach
communications and PR 
web resources 
finance
Of course, if people see a different functional topography as preferable, please suggest.  Either way, candidates would run for positions that are responsible for defined functional contributions.  Once elected, they could be supported by opt in volunteers from the EC and general membership.  They might want to make use of the Groups option on our site http://ncuc.org/groups to organize teams.  None of these functions would require enormous commitments of time; indeed, ANYTHING, even one hour a week, would be an improvement.

Now, irrespective of whether you and/or the membership agree with my suggested charter revision, I would argue that we still need to perform the above functions in order for the EC to be useful.  If we're not managing the organizational affairs of the constituency, what are we here for?   So even if you and future ECs have been elected regionally, members could still volunteer to take the lead as coordinator of one of these functions.  Or in some cases, maybe people would prefer to partner with someone rather than do it solo.  For example, Wilson and Ed have both indicated an interest in helping to get our web resources in order.  One could be the coordinator and the other a team member, or they could be co-coordinators, whatever?.who cares.  The point is, we need to do the above stuff, no?

Thoughts needed on

*Whether these 5 functions define what we most need to be doing as a EC
*Who would be willing to be involved in which
*Whether this model might not be better to fix in the charter than region-based (perhaps a judgement best made later after some experience)

Thanks,

Bill



***************************************************
William J. Drake
International Fellow & Lecturer
Media Change & Innovation Division, IPMZ
University of Zurich, Switzerland
william.drake at uzh.ch
www.williamdrake.org
****************************************************

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