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<p>+ 1 on both counts, particularly the second point - thanks Bill.<br>
</p>
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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 17/08/2016 09:39, William Drake
wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote
cite="mid:B3AD43AE-2EEB-431E-95CE-44FE3FFAD21D@gmail.com"
type="cite">
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Hi
<div class=""><br class="">
<div>
<blockquote type="cite" class="">
<div class="">On Aug 16, 2016, at 23:38, Robin Gross <<a
moz-do-not-send="true" href="mailto:robin@ipjustice.org"
class="">robin@ipjustice.org</a>> wrote:</div>
<br class="Apple-interchange-newline">
<div class=""><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size:
18px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal;
font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans:
auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px;
text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto;
word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;
float: none; display: inline !important;" class="">Agreed.
It is important for members to become more acquainted
with our representatives and resumes are extremely
helpful for that.</span></div>
</blockquote>
<br class="">
</div>
<div>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:</div>
<div><br class="">
</div>
<div>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.</div>
<div><br class="">
</div>
<div>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.</div>
<br class="">
</div>
<div class="">Thoughts?</div>
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">Best</div>
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">Bill</div>
</blockquote>
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<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
--------------
Matthew Shears
Global Internet Policy and Human Rights
Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT)
+ 44 771 2472987</pre>
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