[NCUC-EC] Welcome to the NCUC EC

Fri Dec 20 18:42:13 CET 2013

Hi

So congratulations again to our newly elected EC members.  The election produced a great result, and I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to take some good strides forward in building NCUC’s capacity to serve as a platform for civil society participation in the GNSO and ICANN.  

I have many loose ends to catch up on after a month of heavy travel, one of which is helping to get us booted up.  In the next few days you’ll probably be barraged with messages from on various points—apologies in advance, including for the length of this message, which you might want to save for reference.

There are a few basics I want to put on your radar at the outset, particularly regarding tech stuff.

Working Methods:  There’s little on WM in our outdated bylaws, so it’s up to us how we proceed.  We can discuss this online and F2F in Singapore, but for now:  historically, the EC’s have tended to work in an informal manner, with chairs circulating proposals or action items to the list and if nobody objects within a certain time frame they move forward with assumed consensus, or at least rough c, often without clearly documenting that xyz was decided on this date by these people etc.  Whether and how much to stick to or depart from this tradition was a subject of debate in the last EC.  There was agreement that we could  improve the documentation of decisions, and some folks wanted to do this by having more meetings and even voting on some items.  But it also proved difficult to organize meetings sometimes, and many decisions were time pressured and needed action...Bottom line: I don’t like “silence is consensus” much, it doesn’t make for good governance or transparent decisions, so when one of us makes a proposal or a decision has to be taken, PLEASE try to respond either way within whatever time frame is suggested.  If it turns out this isn’t working and we have to get more formal about it and start scheduling regular meetings and even voting we can, but as everyone’s busy let’s try to make asynchronous, informal, but "all hands on deck” work, and let’s document better, whether we do it at each step along the way or accumulate decisions and do a monthly listing, etc.  TBD

Appointments:  This is our first task, as these really should get done in the next two weeks, holidays notwithstanding.  I’ll write separately about this to the members list and copy the EC, but please a) think about whether there are people you’d suggest for the open slots and b) be prepared to help agree a list when we’re ready (appointments are the kind of thing we should do with all EC members involved).

Listservs: You are obviously subscribed to the EC listserv.   The EC list’s archive is http://lists.ncuc.org/pipermail/ncuc-ec/  There are other lists in addition to this and the members list, e.g. for the teams we set up last year.  You can of course join any, and indeed hopefully volunteer to serve as team coordinators (will send another message about all this).   NCUC lists are all at http://lists.ncuc.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo. 

NCUC Website: If you’ve not, please do look through www.ncuc.org.  The website was rebuilt last Spring by volunteers and is incomplete in terms of content.  One of the things we really should do this year is bring this up to code, in collaboration with members of the e-team http://lists.ncuc.org/cgi-bin/mailman/roster/e-team.   With Roy’s archive initiative we’ll have additional incentive to focus on this.

GNSO Website:  If you are newish to planet ICANN and you’ve not had a chance, it’d be good to poke around the GNSO site, http://gnso.icann.org/en/index.htm.  NCUC exists for the GNSO, so over time it’d be good to get familiar with this complex institutional environment and the procedural/substantive issues.  

Confluence Website: There’s an ICANN community website that’s used for meeting planning etc.   Since we have our own website we’ve not been using the space staff set up for us, https://community.icann.org/display/gnsononcomuserconst/NCUC-Home, but we do use the Council spaces for meetings etc. (there’s some helpful stuff on https://community.icann.org/display/gnsocounres/General), and for NCUC Constituency Day agendas, e.g. https://community.icann.org/display/gnsocouncilmeetings/NCUC+Buenos+Aires+Meeting+2013-11-19.  In addition, Robin’s put stuff in the NCSG space.  Probably At Large makes the most use of it, as they have staff to do stuff; other sorts of initiatives also go to Confluence, like the preparation for the Sao Paulo IG meeting next April (we have a Cross Community WG) https://community.icann.org/pages/viewpage.action?spaceKey=CPMMB&title=ICANN+Community+Preparation+for+the+Multistakeholder+Meeting+in+Brazil+Home  Anyway, it’s worth knowing the Confluence space, and setting up an account if you don’t have one.  One reason to do so is you can have a personal page where others in the community can find you, which we no longer have on our website since we gave up the Ning. 

Adobe Connect:  NCUC has a web room we can use for meetings, both EC and with the broader membership, https://icann.adobeconnect.com/ncuc/  No software installation needed.  One can log into meetings as Guest but then the moderator has to approve you, or you can get your own account.  

Relevant Staff:  Glen de Saint Géry is the wonderful ICANN staffer who helps us and other GNSOers with admin stuff.  If you want accounts on ICANN platforms or similar stuff, she’s the person you ask, <Glen at icann.org>.  Nathalie Peregrine helps her <nathalie.peregrine at icann.org>.  Rob Hoggarth is the professional staff person who’s our wrangler.  I’ll be referring to these folks and others in mail so worth getting to know the cast of characters, including the policy staff for GNSO.  http://www.icann.org/en/about/staff

Your Pictures: Tapani posted pix of you all at  http://www.ncuc.org/governance/executive-committee/   On the assumption that these are ok with you all (please advise if not) I gave that link to Glen.   She will ask ICANN’s webmaster to swap them into the outdated GNSO page about us at http://gnso.icann.org/en/about/stakeholders-constituencies/ncsg/ncuc 

Ok, enough for one message :-(

Bill

**********************************************************
William J. Drake
International Fellow & Lecturer
  Media Change & Innovation Division, IPMZ
  University of Zurich, Switzerland
Chair, Noncommercial Users Constituency, 
  ICANN, www.ncuc.org
william.drake at uzh.ch (w), wjdrake at gmail.com (h),
  www.williamdrake.org
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