<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=utf-8"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class="">Hi<div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Thanks Stephanie. Yes I know Rachel kindly volunteered to take the first bit of reporting. Doing two separate reports might prove to be a bit ambitious but let’s see how it goes, if it works the first time maybe we can mobilize folks to sustain it.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Cheers</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Bill<br class=""><div class=""><br class=""><div><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class="">On Aug 19, 2016, at 18:23, Stephanie Perrin <<a href="mailto:stephanie.perrin@mail.utoronto.ca" class="">stephanie.perrin@mail.utoronto.ca</a>> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><div class="">
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<div bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000" class=""><p class=""><font size="+1" class=""><font face="Lucida Grande" class="">Thanks Bill, this is
very useful. We already have a volunteer to be our outside
reporter on the Council meeting, Rachel Pollack, and Robin
(who listens to every council call anyway) had offered to help
translate councilese for her. So we are off to a good start
for September 1. My thought had been that we should actually
do both.....have councilors hold the pen alternately on a
report, and have the outside reporter ask questions, bring up
issues that may not be clear, etc. There is a lot going on
usually at council meetings, and as we have seen, councilors
have different priorities so the council report from them is
likely to go into depth on a critical issue. For instance,
for me, one of the big issues at the last face to face in
Helsinki was the prospect of GAC intervention at the Board
level on the acceptance of the report on privacy proxy
services. I could easily fill a page explaining that one, and
frankly I think if we are trying to engage more people in
participating, we need to describe an issue thoroughly enough
that they understand what we are excited about. <br class="">
</font></font></p><p class=""><font size="+1" class=""><font face="Lucida Grande" class="">I am thinking that a
template for the meeting reports on both sides would
help....for the councilor report, showing attendance and votes
etc, no point in repeating between the two reports. Purpose
of councilor report is more directly their accountability to
the group to report back and explain behaviour and key results
from a meeting. This is certainly not going to solve the
larger problems you describe below (for which many thanks,
this is useful in my opinion), but it is a good start towards
greater accountability.</font></font></p><p class=""><font size="+1" class=""><font face="Lucida Grande" class="">Stephanie Perrin</font></font><br class="">
</p>
<br class="">
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 2016-08-19 6:03, William Drake
wrote:<br class="">
</div>
<blockquote cite="mid:6105DEE6-F66F-417D-8600-1780012BE8D6@gmail.com" type="cite" class="">
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Hi
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">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.</div>
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">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.</div>
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">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.</div>
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">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. </div>
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">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.</div>
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">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.</div>
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">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…</div>
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">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.</div>
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">Thoughts?</div>
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">Bill</div>
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class=""><br class="">
<div class="">
<blockquote type="cite" class="">
<div class="">On Aug 17, 2016, at 10:39, William Drake <<a moz-do-not-send="true" href="mailto:wjdrake@gmail.com" class="">wjdrake@gmail.com</a>> wrote:</div>
<br class="Apple-interchange-newline">
<div class="">
<div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode:
space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class="">Hi
<div class=""><br class="">
<div class="">
<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 class="">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 class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">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 class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">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>
</div>
</div>
</blockquote>
</div>
<br class="">
</div>
</blockquote>
<br class="">
</div>
</div></blockquote></div><br class=""><div class="">
<div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); 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; word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); 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; word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); 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; word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); 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; word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><br class="">*************************************************************<br class="">William J. Drake<br class="">International Fellow & Lecturer<br class=""> Media Change & Innovation Division, IPMZ<br class=""> University of Zurich, Switzerland<br class=""><a href="mailto:william.drake@uzh.ch" class="">william.drake@uzh.ch</a> (direct), <a href="mailto:wjdrake@gmail.com" class="">wjdrake@gmail.com</a> (lists),<br class=""> <a href="http://www.williamdrake.org" class="">www.williamdrake.org</a><br class=""><i class="">The Working Group on Internet Governance - 10th Anniversary Reflections</i><br class="">New book at <a href="http://amzn.to/22hWZxC" class="">http://amzn.to/22hWZxC</a><br class="">*************************************************************</div></div></div></div>
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