[NCUC-EC] EC Decision Making

[Tapani Tarvainen]

On Sep 24 11:05, William Drake (wjdrake at gmail.com) wrote:

> The length of time it took Ed to get responses on the SCI
> appointment and all the unanswered questions and proposals I've
> posed here about CD, ICANN Academy, etc etc. should by now make it
> clear to all, after nine months of experience, that it just doesn't
> make sense to hold up every little EC decision pending a majority
> vote. It simply doesn't work

No offense intended, but that's not true.

We haven't had nine months of experience of that, rather we've hardly
had *any*: you have not made any real effort to make people respond
that way. (It's not the same as trying to engage them in a conversation.)

It does take an effort and perhaps some skill and experience. It will
not happen in "fuzzy" style list conversation, sprinkling questions
within long rambling messages &c. You need a more disciplined, more
formal style, including making it explicit when a formal decision is
being made. But it can be done. The initial effort to create a list
culture where it works takes some doing, but once you get things
rolling, it becomes surprisingly easy. Been there, done that.

Of course, not all little things need to be formally decided by the
full EC:

> So at least for smallish and routine items we need to return to the
> way NCUC worked for a decade before we got here and accept that it
> is ok to declare there to be sufficient consensus if after several
> messages and days a couple folks have replied and nobody has
> objected.

You can do that, yes, if simply because such (smallish and routine)
decisions can of course be made by Chair alone, treating objection or
agreement from the EC as guidance only. Or the EC can agree to use
such or some other simplified decision procedure for some issues.
That's not really critical.

But either way, I would very much appreciate making decisions explicit
and documenting properly who decides what and when.

For example regular (monthly, bimonthly, whatever) email meetings
or even just memos simply noting decisions that have been made.
I positively hate the undocumented way EC has worked in the past -
it's all but impossible to dig up what's been decided and when from
the voluminous email discussions they've been buried in.

We could simplify things by various technical measures, e.g.,
use etherpad or some wiki-like thing or whatever to put
decisions in as they take place and every now and then
collect them as monthly summaries or something like that.
Shouldn't be too hard, and it'd be very helpful to newcomers
and outsider (in this context including NCUC members) to see
what the EC has been up to.

Decision-summarizing could even be made almost completely automatic,
if you as the Chair could use some specific format for announcing
decisions. E.g., use Subject: that begins with "EC Decision:" or
"Chair Decision:" and no other content than the decision made;
then it would be easy to collect such messages automatically.
But you'd have to be consistent about it.

> As we are late, I am therefore going to tell the ICANN Academy
> people that Tapani will be our person for Leadership Academy in BA.

Good.

-- 
Tapani Tarvainen