[NCUC-EC] Dublin Travel Support Decisions

[William Drake]

Hi

The Executive Committee will review the proposals and strive to make decisions within one week of the close of the application period. http://www.ncuc.org/participate/ncuc-travel-support/ <http://www.ncuc.org/participate/ncuc-travel-support/>

Applications closed Friday. We have two, Arun and Remmy.

Arun: Normally I would be reluctant to offer support twice in a row to someone. But as he notes in the application I forwarded here this is sort of a special circumstance, as he jumped into both NCUC and the transition and accountability discussions with both feet and has been a heavy and noteworthy participant for us. If the idea of the policy is to get people to meetings who we really need to be there in order to advance noncommercial interests, then offering him up to $2,000 (which probably won’t cover all his costs) would seem logical as we do need as much presence in these processes as possible.  The only counter-argument I can see is that a precedent shouldn’t be set of back to back support.  Whether that outweighs substantive policy contributions in peoples’ minds I don’t know; for me it does not, as we can note the exceptional circumstance of the processes reaching a turning point at this meeting.

Remmy: As he wasn’t really too present until recently I looked in my mailer for messages he’s sent to the list in the five years since he said he’d joined. I found a couple dozen back to 2012, almost all of them basically one sentence +1s, seasons’ greetings, etc. I think we can say he has not otherwise been an active member.  In the application letter I forwarded he says that he "serves as a consistent member of At-Large Advisory Committee of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) under AFRALO,” so maybe that’s where his energies have gone.  Which makes me wonder why he’s not asking ALAC for support, since they have lots of ICANN travel support to allocate based on passports, which is what he’s advocating NCUC needs to do otherwise it’s not committed to diversity  (a claim that is empirically inconsistent with e.g. our EC composition, past NomCom appointees, outreach and inreach efforts, etc...we just don’t have goodies to hand out).  Leaving this aside, the neutral question here is, do we make an investment in the hope that this will lead to a deeper engagement going forward?  We supported Benjamin (also from Nigeria) for Singapore on this basis, although he was a new member without a track record.  Shall we make the same bet here?

Please share your thoughts.  Ex officio nonvoting members of the EC are also free to weigh in on this and other matters...

Thanks

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 (direct), wjdrake at gmail.com (lists),
  www.williamdrake.org
Internet Governance: The NETmundial Roadmap http://goo.gl/sRR01q
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