[Ec-ncuc] NCUC Policy Committee

[William Drake]

Hi

Another thread to lay on your tables for whenever you have time to respond...

The current, wildly out of date NCUC charter http://ncuc.org/page/charter-1 says that we have a PC that, inter alia,

shall be responsible for determining and liaising with the NCSG Councilors on the positions of the Constituency on matters of domain name and ICANN policy and procedure to the Generic Names Supporting Organization of ICANN (the GNSO), the GNSO Council, and other ICANN policy committees, working groups, advisory committees, and policy forums.

The Policy Committee shall consist of 2 (minimum) to 5 (maximum) NCUC representatives. Each representative should ideally be an ?expert? in each of ICANN?s policy mandated areas. The Chair of NCUC will also be included in the PC but will not act as its Chair.

Shall be elected for two-year terms by the NCUC Executive Committee. Any member can nominate and be nominated in the PC. Members can serve on the PC for no more than two consecutive terms.

In my four years as a Councilor, This was never a real thing.  I recall conversations about how we were supposed to have a PC, and there was a brief period in late 2011 in which we started using a listserv and determined that the committee consisted of the 3 elected NCUC GNSO Councilors at the time (Bill, Mary, Wendy) and Konstantinos, Milton, and Robin.  But we never used it much, and certainly did not attempt to determine the positions of the NCUC for Councilors, who normally vote their conscience unless there's a particularly strong group view.  The main rationale for having it seemed to be transparency, talking policy on a publicly archived list http://mailman.ctyme.com/listinfo/pc-ncuc.  In any event, while the people nominally on the PC talked all the time and collaborated on policy anyway, we didn't really make use of the structure per se.

When I started thinking about charter revisions, my initial instinct was to kill it.  After all, if we can't populate and operate it, then we shouldn't nominally have it and be operating out of synch with our charter.  I still lean in this direction a little.

BUT, another option would be to make it a thing.  I've proposed that Avri and Mary represent us on the NCSG-PC.  They could also be on the NCUC-PC, and the bridge between the two.  And we could add a few other folks who'd like to be engaged in real, substantive issues work? helping stimulate and coordinate dialogue and consensus formation with our Councilors, members on GNSO working groups, etc.; ensuring that the constituency gets out responses to Public Comment periods and other position statements; and so on.

I guess a main argument for this might be that it'd promote group identity and collaboration without us having to wait and see all the time if NPOC has an opinion and then negotiate a common stance etc.  When they're able to come to a view and we can do things at the SG level great, that's more useful in the GNSO structure, but as a constituency we should also be prepared to react quickly and freely whenever we want/need.

So another thing to consider?we'll talk about all these a bit in LA as well.

Best,

Bill 



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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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