[NCUC-EC] Staff Proposed Administrative Support

[William Drake]

Hi

Further to my conversation with Rob: staff is contemplating a pilot program to help constituencies and SGs manage their operations by performing some administrative functions.  We talked about this a little at the NCPH meeting in LA in January.  Lots of constituencies, especially IPC and BC, and calling on ICANN to help them with secretariat support.  What's currently being discussed is a configuration like ICANN hires a dedicated staffer to support a SG and its component parts, so for ex NCSG, NPOC, and NCUC each get say 13 hours a month of help.  

Of course, I said that we'd prefer to select and manage the person ourselves; I mentioned the OECD CSISAC example.  He said sorry but the people will have to be ICANN staffers on the payroll, they can't provide funds for independents, but certainly the person would have to have our approval, ongoing trust and task management to be effective.

Additional scenario: As we've been allocated funds for printing but it's unclear whether volunteer members will have the bandwidth to ensure the on time publication of professional looking issue briefs etc. per meeting, he said it's conceivable we could select a staffer with some substantive expertise (could even be a current NCSG member) who'd play the coordinating role to make sure the outputs are actually output.   We'd still have to write the content, but formatting it, dealing with the publications office, etc. could be given to such a person.

Time line on this is unclear, somewhere after BA it becomes more of an issue.  In the meanwhile, we are asked to consider and specify precisely what sorts of tasks we might like a staffer to perform for us.  So please let's keep that item on our agendas as well and exchange ideas going forward.

And yes of course, with regard to this and the regional outreach support, there's the issue of does this make community members dependent on and subservient to staff, are we all reduced to pigs fighting for the troth etc.   We can revisit this issue as we go...

Best,

Bill


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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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