+ 1 on both counts, particularly the second point - thanks Bill.


On 17/08/2016 09:39, William Drake 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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Matthew Shears
Global Internet Policy and Human Rights
Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT)
+ 44 771 2472987