[NCUC-EC] Welcome to the NCUC EC (long)

[William Drake]

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 leave Friday for a week in Chicago and another in London so need to dump a bunch of items on your plates for contemplation and action now. I will send separate messages about Travel Funding and Appointments.  This message will concern internal operational basics.


1st EC Meeting in DC Monday 12 January, 7:30am

While nobody has been contacted yet by Constituency Travel, staff assures me that the indicated travelers are indeed going to Washington DC in just over three weeks (tickets will be expensive, but that their problem).  Hopefully all visa and letter of invite issues will be solved in advance.  Unlike Singapore, we will have everyone there but Roy, so we should have a first official meeting.  Looking at the evolving schedule, I propose that we do this for at breakfast on Monday 12 January, 7:30am in the hotel.  Yes, I hate breakfast meetings too, but it makes double sense in that the internal dynamics of the NCPH will not be familiar to all of you, so this will be a chance to strategically prepare for what we are about experience.  Trust me, the CSG side will be VERY prepared and our NCSG Councilors should be similarly attuned to the games and state management we’ll encounter, so it’s important that we all be acclimated too.  In addition we can use the meeting to just get to know each other and conduct a little business, like approving appointees and starting a conversation about our agenda for the year.  Hopefully the wifi works in the breakfast room and we can bring Roy in that way, otherwise he can vote on our decisions electronically.


Outreach Meeting in DC on Wednesday 14 January

Relatedly, one or two of you sent suggestions or promises of suggestions of possible invitees.  Please get any thoughts to me ASAP so I can send a list to staff.  http://lists.ncuc.org/pipermail/ncuc-ec/2014-December/001524.html <http://lists.ncuc.org/pipermail/ncuc-ec/2014-December/001524.html> 


Working Methods:  There’s little on WM in our outdated bylaws, so it’s up to us how we proceed.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 2013 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.  


Listservs: You are obviously subscribed to the EC listserv.   The EC list’s archive is http://lists.ncuc.org/pipermail/ncuc-ec/ <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 <http://lists.ncuc.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo>. 


NCUC Website: If you’ve not, please do look through www.ncuc.org <http://www.ncuc.org/>.  The website was rebuilt in 2013 by volunteers and is incomplete in terms of content.  One of the things we really should do this year is bring and keep this up to code, in collaboration with members of the e-team http://lists.ncuc.org/cgi-bin/mailman/roster/e-team <http://lists.ncuc.org/cgi-bin/mailman/roster/e-team>.    


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 <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 <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 <https://community.icann.org/display/gnsocounres/General>), and for NCUC Constituency Day agendas, e.g. https://community.icann.org/display/gnsocouncilmeetings/NCUC+Los+Angeles+Meeting+2014-10-14 <https://community.icann.org/display/gnsocouncilmeetings/NCUC+Los+Angeles+Meeting+2014-10-14>.  In addition, Rafik'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 <https://community.icann.org/pages/viewpage.action?spaceKey=CPMMB&title=ICANN+Community+Preparation+for+the+Multistakeholder+Meeting+in+Brazil+Home>  Anyway, you’ll need to work with the Confluence space, and 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. So please contact our staff supporter Glen de Saint Géry <Glen at icann.org> and get an account if you don’t have one.


Adobe Connect:  NCUC has a web room we can use for meetings, both EC and with the broader membership, https://icann.adobeconnect.com/ncuc/ <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 ask staff 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 <mailto:Glen at icann.org>>.  Nathalie Peregrine helps her <nathalie.peregrine at icann.org <mailto: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 <http://www.icann.org/en/about/staff>


Your Pictures: Maryam has posted pix of you all at  http://www.ncuc.org/governance/executive-committee/ <http://www.ncuc.org/governance/executive-committee/>   I will ask Glen to swap them into the outdated GNSO page about us at http://gnso.icann.org/en/about/stakeholders-constituencies/ncsg/ncuc <http://gnso.icann.org/en/about/stakeholders-constituencies/ncsg/ncuc> 

Ok, enough for one message :-(

Bill

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