Hi Bill, James and all,
Absolutely agree with both points, especially with regard to voting. I
think we don't have enough transparency and accountability in the work of
our councillors. While it is an issue of "bona fide" and the councillors
are elected by us, I think it is necessary to change out attitude to and
ask for more openness and communication.  While I am very much for a
freedom of opinions, I think for the crucial issues directed voting shall
be considered as an option - of course, carefully and with checks and
balances and with participation of the policy committee.
Warm regards
Tatiana

On 17 August 2016 at 10:46, James Gannon <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Hey Bill
>
> As I think some people here know I have asked for greater accountability
> of our councillors in the past, specially on coordination and ensuring that
> they are reflecting the views of the NCSG and not just their personal
> positions, as when we get into situations of personal attempts to become
> political players (And usually fail) we do our whole community a disservice.
>
> I would like to build on your below and ask, how are the candidates
> planning on upholding the integrity of the NCSG, will they make a pledge
> not to attempt to go rogue and to perform a coordinated vote when asked to?
> Will they pledge to work with the NCSG and not against it and not to engage
> in actions that may put us all at risk of losing our credibility. We need
> our councillors to be out in public telling us what they are doing and why
> they are doing it and I think that’s something that we are really bad at at
> the moment. Looking back over this list we have extremely few messages from
> our councillors as a whole, and I think that that is not good enough. For
> our elected representatives one message every few weeks or months doesn’t
> really cut it in my opinion. We need more accountability, more
> communication and more openness in what our representatives are doing on
> our behalf I think.
>
>
> -James
>
>
> From: NCSG-Discuss <[log in to unmask]> on behalf of William
> Drake <[log in to unmask]>
> Reply-To: William Drake <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Wednesday 17 August 2016 at 09:39
> To: "[log in to unmask]" <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: Proposed Items for the Meet the Candidates call tomorrow:
> Transparency and coordination in Council
>
> Hi
>
> On Aug 16, 2016, at 23:38, Robin Gross <[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
>