Hi,

Missed the candidate meeting yesterday because of a conflict and have
not had a chance to listen to the recording yet.

But from what I have heard since, these seem like good ideas.  Common
sense ideas even.

One point on electing a PC chair. It does not need to be a council
member.  Just needs to be a PC member.  Given that we only have 2
constituencies, that means there are a pool of 4 other people for the PC
members to chose from. I do think it has been tried in the past, but
with the same results. PC has occasionally been adequately led by a vice
chair or such, but that only happened after a dearth of leadership from
a chair.

And I continue to believe that the reason the monthly policy meetings
have not worked is because the PC members, especially the council
members, do not make participating a priority - no knock against the
current members, over the years, the members never have. I think this
may also be part of the problem with the PC.  While most of them make
attending the council meetings a prority, and many of them make
participating in Council groups and WGs a priority, few make the PC a
priority.

avri


On 19-Aug-16 06:03, William Drake wrote:
> Hi
>
> Yesterday’s call provided a useful opportunity for dialogue on the
> candidates’ views and priorities and also turned out to offer some
> folks a chance to start clearing the air, however uncomfortably,
> regarding issues that arose within our Council contingent the last
> cycle.  I’d like to suggest a couple take-aways in hopes that we can
> re-set that which needs to be and move forward on a firmer footing.
>  Purely my own views, which I guess some folks will disagree with, in
> which case fine, let’s talk it out.
>
> 1.  Differences of perspective among Councilors are fine but these
> should be openly shared in order to preserve trust. It might make
> sense for the interested parties to find some congenial space in which
> to privately work through past bits of friction that arose re: e.g.
> Marrakech, the GNSO chair selection, and whatever else.  It doesn’t
> make sense to leave misunderstandings unresolved and entrenched as it
> can impact on the effectiveness of the team effort going forward.
> Hyderabad obviously offers F2F options, which are likely to be the
> most productive in coming to resolutions, but it might make sense not
> to wait entirely on this.
>
> 2. It would be helpful if Councilors could be sure to attend the
> monthly NCSG calls and proactively share their thinking about upcoming
> Council meetings and votes with each other and the wider membership.
>  In ancient times when I was on Council we regarded these as fairly
> mandatory and tried to miss only exceptionally and with notification,
> but more recently participation seems to have be spottier at times (I
> believe the NCSG chair has attendance records?).  Yes we’re all
> volunteers with day jobs and travels so things can happen, but it
> shouldn’t be the case that people miss more than a couple per annual
> cycle.
>
> 3. In parallel, it’d be good to have greater open discussion of
> pending votes and positions on the NCSG PC mail list.  I’ve been on
> that list since we set it up in 2011 (first as a Councilor, then as an
> observer) and think it’s under-utilized resource that should work in
> synch with our monthly calls and those of the Council.  Of course,
> issues should not always be sorted purely on an internal PC basis;
> important policy choices at least should also be vetted on
> ncsg-discuss so the PC is well informed by a feel for general member
> sentiment, even if it’s divided.  
>
> Either way, between the monthly calls and the PC, we shouldn’t have
> cases where members of the team don’t know until they arrive at a
> Council meeting how their colleagues will vote, or what contacts and
> representations of the group’s shared positions are being made to
> other stakeholder groups, etc.  You can’t have a team effort if people
> are unaware of each others’ doings.
>
> 4.  Part of the PC’s challenge has always been to ensure effective
> chairing, including tracking of progress on open projects, herding
> cats, etc.  We’ve always appointed Councilors to chair but the results
> have been variable as people are already maxed out.  On yesterday’s
> call Ed made a suggestion that merits consideration: having a
> non-Council member as chair, and allocating one of the NCSG travel
> slots to this person so as to promote their continuous coordination of
> the process.  It’d be interesting to hear views on this.
>
> 5.  After-meeting reporting to the membership of the issues and votes
> should be routinized.  This doesn’t have involve demanding magnum opus
> treatments, a couple paragraphs one a month should be sufficient and
> doable.  I’d suggested (below) that the six Councilors could rotate
> the responsibility, as was briefly attempted in 2009-2010.  Stephanie
> counter-proposed on the call that reporting be done by non-Councilors,
> in part as a way of on-boarding ‘new blood’ and helping to prepare
> folks to stand for Council in a future election.  This could work too,
> although it may involve some extra coordination to ensure every
> Councilors’ votes and views are reflected to taste.  Worth a try…
>
> If we could do at least some of this, I think it’d increase our team’s
> solidarity and our general members’ understanding of what their
> representative are up to, what’s in play in the GNSO, and what the
> opportunities for engaging in working groups and such are.  It’d also
> make our votes in elections more well informed.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> Bill
>
>
>> On Aug 17, 2016, at 10:39, William Drake <[log in to unmask]
>> <mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:
>>
>> Hi
>>
>>> On Aug 16, 2016, at 23:38, Robin Gross <[log in to unmask]
>>> <mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:
>>>
>>> Agreed.  It is important for members to become more acquainted with
>>> our representatives and resumes are extremely helpful for that.
>>
>> Sharing candidates’ resumes is not a bad idea.  But I’d like to
>> suggest we go beyond this.  Two issue we might want to consider on
>> tomorrow’s call:
>>
>> When I joined Council in 2009, we discussed the need for better
>> reporting to members as to what their reps were actually doing in
>> Council.  We launched an attempt to deal with this by having
>> Councilors take turns doing brief reports about Council meetings.
>> Alas it didn’t get far, after a couple times the sense of urgency
>> faded, people told themselves “well, members can always look at the
>> Council archive to see what’s happening," and the effort drifted off.
>>  But of course it’s actually not easy for a member to dive through
>> the Council archive and try to reconstruct what’s happening, and it’s
>> not so hard to compose a one or two paragraph summary of a monthly
>> Council meeting indicating how our reps voted on which issues,
>> especially if the workload is rotated among six Councilors, making it
>> just a few times per year each.  So while it’s a bit uncomfortable
>> suggesting work to be done by others, I’d like to put this idea back
>> on the table ahead of our Meet the Candidates call tomorrow.  It need
>> not be an one onerous thing, and after all we exist to participate in
>> the GNSO, so surely we should be able to know how our reps are
>> representing us in the GNSO.  Especially when we’re being asked to
>> vote them into ‘office’ (for incumbents) on the basis of past
>> performance.
>>
>> More generally, we have long debated the matter of coordination among
>> Council reps.  Unlike most if not all other parts of the GNSO, NCSG
>> by charter doesn’t normally do ‘directed voting,’ where the members
>> are bound to vote in conformity with a rough consensus position.  We
>> have a charter provision to do this in exceptional cases, but I don’t
>> recall it ever being invoked.  We’ve always been content to operate
>> on the notion that the Councilor does what s/he thinks is in the best
>> interest of civil society @ GNSO, and if members don’t approve of
>> anyone’s action they can vote them out in the next cycle.  But as
>> that has not really happened, it’s sort of a meaningless check and
>> balance.  And this is not without consequence, as we’ve sometimes had
>> internal differences within our contingent that have arguably
>> undermined our effectiveness and credibility in the eyes of the
>> community and staff, and can even allow our various business
>> stakeholder group counterparts to exploit the differences in order to
>> push through what they want in opposition to our common baseline
>> views.  So at a minimum, we need to do better somehow at team
>> coordination and make sure all our Councilors know what each other is
>> doing and why and so there’s no real time surprises, especially
>> during meetings with high stakes votes.
>>
>> Thoughts?
>>
>> Best
>>
>> Bill
>



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