[NCUC-EC] NCUC EC Internal appointments/roles

[William Drake]

Hi

Hope everyone had a good holiday season.  Time to get moving now.  I’m trying to get caught up on a bunch of ICANN stuff, including clarifying if the funds for the EC retreat can be repurposed to cover more peoples’ travel, dealing with the conference, appointments, etc. and will be peppering you with more info in the weeks ahead.  Some replies to my prior messages would be a good start, where relevant….e.g. I never got the Skype details on some of you, so have been unable to set up an EC channel or tie you into the ongoing discussions among some of our more active members.  If people could provide, that’d be a good start.

When we have enough responses to my call for nominations to the various open slots, I’ll organize a first official online meeting (will Doodle, of course) so that we can do the formal appointments and take other pressing decisions.  Stay tuned.

In the meanwhile, we need to begin figuring out how we will organize ourselves internally, who’s willing to cover which functions, have a division of labor.  Here’s where we could really use some folks to step up and volunteer to take ownership of some pieces, with support of course—not suggesting anyone has to be overburdened with solo responsibilities.

Some particular options:

On Dec 21, 2013, at 3:57 PM, William Drake <william.drake at uzh.ch> wrote:
> 
> 1 NCUC Rep. to the Public Interest Registry
>  http://pir.org/about-us/get-to-know-us/advisory-council/
> 
> PIR manages .org etc. and is a long time financial and political supporter of NCUC.  We appoint a rep to its .org Advisory Council; Robin is currently in this position as well.    I understand this has not involved a lot of coordination of late, and indeed PIR’s website still calls us by our old name, the Non-Commercial Domain Name Holders Constituency (NCDNHC), but as with some other slots/functions we might want to reboot a bit.  Our bylaws specify that the EC is to appoint the rep by majority vote, with at least four members voting.

The only offer I’ve had here is from a GNSO Councilor who’s already in addition playing an important role in the e-platform team, handing email administration and stuff.  I would think it better not to burden him with this as well, and that serving as an interface with one of our historically primary financial supporters might be a low impact but useful activity for an EC member.  Such a person could also help when it comes time to hit them up for funding, which I’m thinking might be best done after the Singapore conf. this time, depending on what I hear from Fadi.


> Finally and parenthetically, the EC will also need to make some internal appointments. For ex, our bylaws say we are to have a Secretary Treasurer who must be approved by a majority vote of the EC with at least three members voting.  Milton’s always been the Treasurer because he has NCUC’s bank account, but he’s not been doing the ‘Secretary’ piece and it could be helpful to separate and fill it.  We also need coordinators for the four EC/member functional Teams http://www.ncuc.org/participate/working-teams and the Bylaws Revision Committee http://www.ncuc.org/bylaws-revision-committee/


I think splitting off the Secretary function from the Treasurer function is the only way it’s going to be performed.  We need someone who writes happily who can generate concise minutes (basically a page) of EC  and Constituency Day meetings and send these to members, help with any other outward oriented doc writing like press releases, missing web pages, etc.  So maybe sort of a secretary +, or communications coordinator position.  BTW we have budget allocated by ICANN to do print publications, like Issue Briefs that could be released at physical meeting.  

Teams   http://www.ncuc.org/participate/working-teams/

You may know that one of the innovations I tried to establish last year was working teams linking the EC with regular members that would focus on functional issues we really need performed.  A way to get people engaged in collective ownership, etc.   The idea was that each could normally be lead coordinated by an EC member, so that the work of the teams fed into the EC when decisions at a ‘official’ level are needed, and conversely the views of the EC on relevant points were conveyed back to the team members.

At the outset of last year, we tried to set up six teams: inreach, outreach, communications, finance, e-platforms, and events.  Some just fell flat on their faces: the member who offered to coordinate inreach and outreach didn’t.  So then we combined them into a single Membership Affairs team that would presumably handle both, and alas the same thing happened, we ended up with no EC member to facilitate conversation and it drifted.  Communication never took off, even though we really needed external comms to be upgraded, because the person who I’d hoped would lead that one lost the election by one vote and nobody else wanted to pick it up.  Finance being kind of dull (but crucial), it was hard to get anyone pumped on this, so I ended up asking a non-EC member to serve as the coordinator, got agreement but then illness happened and this too wandered with no leadership and sort of dwindled out.  I ended up doing all the money stuff like applying for budget support solo.  The two teams that did work were Events (everyone like to plan meetings, especially the academics), and the E-platform team, primarily because Tapani stepped up to do an enormous amount of work.  Wilson and Sarah also helped by redesigning the web page, Brenden helped from time to time, etc.  Now Tapani’s retired, and we have three people—Brenden Kuerbis, Joly McPhee, and David Cake—trying to ad hoc keep our e-stuff running but there’s no coordinator to keep track of what needs doing and so on.  So for example we just did manage to add some new members to the listserv, but not apparently to the data base and website yet.  

So in short, right now we have four listservs and groups of people, one reasonably active but leaderless, the others pretty much just sitting there waiting for someone to juice them up.  

E-platforms.  I don’t know if any of you have technical skills do system administration or web site management yourselves, or would be willing at least to simply coordinate the efforts of the folks who do that so their time can be well managed and focused.  But absent staff support to handle such things, (which we need to apply for, and probably could get) in the near-term we have to make sure our tech is working and people who join NCUC get fully plugged in and listed.  This is our most important team, and it desperately needs a coordinator.

Membership Affairs. I still think could serve a really useful function by doing some targeted outreach (BTW, all regional EC reps are supposed to do outreach to potential new members in their regions….) and more importantly by engaging existing members, bringing opportunities to their attention, getting them plugged into GNSO working groups, generally facilitating anything they’re willing to put time into.  You may have noted some recent discussion on the list about the idea of rebooting Interest Groups in which a few members said they’d happily join an IG focused on development aspects.  Well, we don’t have a ning site anymore where people can just build social nets around topics (sort of a big loss in our web transition), but if we had someone willing to work with members and provide a platform, we could still do stuff like set up listservs for folks who want to discuss and hopefully work on special topics and get these listed on the website.  This is a wide open opportunity for someone proactive to make of it what they will; I’m betting more than half the nine people still subscribed to the MA listserv would be happy to re-engage if someone were to lead.  I know I would.

Finance.  I’m inclined to just retire this and say that any money related stuff gets discussed in the EC.  Probably not needed.

Events.  I’ll coordinate this for now, since I secured the funds for the conference in Singapore and will need to interact with staff and the community extensively anyway on the agenda and logistics.  But interested people are welcome to join.

Any of these lists can be joined by following the links from the URL above, and you can also look through the archives to see what was and wasn’t done last year.

Bylaws Revision.  Here’s another big important thing that’s just laying there without a leader.  The person who was most adamant that we do this and offered to lead a group effort is no longer on the EC or wants to do it.  It was set up as a ‘committee’ for some fluky reason at http://www.ncuc.org/bylaws-revision-committee/ but should probably be folded into the Teams page.  Anyway, the lack of movement may have dampened the interest of the folks who signed up, most of whom were newbies, so this group may need to be reconstituted a bit.  It certainly would need engagement from veteran members who have institutional memory and were involved in writing the current bylaws (which date back to pre-Stakeholder Group days and are almost entirely unrelated to how we actually operate) or prior efforts to revise them.  While some folks have felt like what’s the difference, life goes on even if the bylaws don’t map with how we operate, I think that as long as we do have constituencies it’d be much better to have bylaws that fit who we are and how we operate.  Good for transparency, accountability, and in dealing correctly with any problems that may arise.  It would be really good to get them revised in the second quarter, after the busy Singapore meeting, so that they could go to the board and staff, get cleared, and be put up for a vote in next December’s election.  This might seems like a really daunting task, but it need not be if there’s an active group; the extant text is not that long and complicated.  I would encourage folks to consider stepping up to coordinate.  I would help, others will too.  Would be really good to have someone with legal expertise, I suppose…

Ok, that’s more than enough for you to chew on in one message.  Bottom line, there’s a lot to do, but none of it is unmanageable, and should involve more than a couple hours per week of work.  Most of the time consuming, heavy lifting stuff defaults into the chair’s lap, but if I could get some help with some these bits it’d be really really great.

Thanks,

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 (direct), wjdrake at gmail.com (lists),
  www.williamdrake.org
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