Hi all,

I would like to support Bill’s comments that there be better reporting from our elected representatives. As far as I can tell – and please do correct me if I am mistaken – the only accountability instrument we have at our disposal is the periodic election or re-election of our representatives to decision-making councils. Such a mechanism, while obviously important, tells us little about how our elected representatives are representing us.

In reading some submitted candidate statements I see that some have said that it on the basis of their past performance in office that we should assess their promises of future performance. This is certainly one measure, and an important one at that, but I am not convinced that voters are actually able to ‘sanction’ candidates for their past votes because it is not easy to determine what positions they have previously taken. Our bylaws speak about procedures of representation (i.e. geographic regions, gender balance, periodic elections) but little about the substance of how accountable these representatives are to those who are eligible to cast a vote for them in the first place.

So what is it that we expect of our elected representatives? Are they delegates, acting on our explicit commands (in which case I understand the discussions around directed voting) or are they our trustees, tasked with understanding the interests of our constituency ‘better’ than the rest of us have time to do? I'll confess I always saw them as the latter.

I fully support James when he says, “We need our councillors to be out in public telling us what they are doing and why they are doing it.” More communication and more openness around how positions are being reached is, in my view, absolutely essential. However, for this to happen, I think we need to have a discussion around what the role of our representatives is. Should they be acting in accordance with, say, the majority opinion of views expressed on this listserv? Or do the ends justify the means – what if they take a contrary position to how we have directed them on the list, but we find, in time, that was the better course of action to have been taken? And before we can try out tools like Adhocracy.de (as Rafik suggested) I think we need to figure out whether we want our representatives to be doing independent research to understand the issues, or whether we simply want them to be relying on what knowledge we, the voters, impose on them.

Accountability is complicated; how do we strike the right balance between a representative voting in accordance with the NCSG’s wishes, and what they have drawn from their own independent sources of knowledge? How much loss of agency will our representatives accept? I appreciate that Tatiana suggested that maybe directed voting only be essential for the most important issues, but I’m thinking it’s precisely those issues where some of our elected representatives may be least interested in sacrificing their vote?

I don’t have the answers here, but, at a minimum, I agree with Bill and others who have said there has to be more oversight mechanisms for the actions our representatives are taking once they are in office.

Best wishes,

Ayden Férdeline
linkedin.com/in/ferdeline

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: Proposed Items for the Meet the Candidates call tomorrow: Transparency and coordination in Council
Local Time: August 17, 2016 10:36 AM
UTC Time: August 17, 2016 9:36 AM
From: [log in to unmask]
To: [log in to unmask]

Hi,

I am fine with reporting, informing about votes etc since I included that already  in my candidate statement :) I see a lot of value to doing it for members  engagement.

For polling and policy engagement,  I think we can try some "liquid democracy" tool, and in fact we tried once at ncsg as experiment   https://adhocracy.de . I won't assert that tool would help but I am happy to start with some practices.

I will send my resume later .

Best,

Rafik


On Aug 17, 2016 6:22 PM, "Tapani Tarvainen" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Hi Bill, all,

First I'll have to confess I haven't written or maintained a proper
resume since 1998... but those who want to know more about my
background can get some idea by reading my last year's candidate statement:
https://community.icann.org/display/gnsononcomstake/Candidate+Statements#candidatestaments--1976617577

But I would wholeheartedly support better reporting of council
activities, possibly as a task rotated amongst councillors,
and maybe reviewed in our monthly policy calls, limited though
the time there is.

As for coordinating councillors actions, it would be very useful to
have more discussion about major issues before they come to a vote.

We could even poll the entire membership in advance of voting on
contentious major issues.

In any case I support more openness and transparency
in everything we do.

Tapani

On Aug 17 10:39, William Drake ([log in to unmask]) wrote:

> 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