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.