From: NCSG-Discuss [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of William Drake
Sent: Friday, August 19, 2016 6:04 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: A Few Take-Aways from Meet the Candidates Call re: Council Transparency and Coordination
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.
Hi
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.