Questions to the GNSO Council Candidates

[Tatiana Tropina]

Dear Bill, dear NCSG members,

why my candidate statement is still on its way, I am happy to answer Bill's
questions - but firstly to thank him for asking them! Please find my reply
in line.

1.  Can you commit to missing no more than two NCSG and Council calls, and
> in the latter case to ensuring you give apologies and get a proxy at least
> a day prior to the meetings?  (if there are technical issues with
> attendance those would need to be planned for)  And since silent attendance
> is really not enough, can you indicate what you would do to be a visibly
> active and effective participant?
>

I have quite a good record of attendance in the groups I have been active
at, such as CCWG Accountability WS2 Human Rights, NCSG EC calls (be it just
a EC call or budget discussions or bylaws drafting meetings), and others.
As the GNSO calls are known well in advance, it's easy to plan the time and
secure attendance. Even with my travel schedule, I was able to attend the
most important calls on the regular basis. One of the weirdest cases was
attending the CCWG WS2 HR call in the evening from the main square in
Tallinn on a public WiFi network, because even though I sent my apologies I
felt like the call was too important to miss and I connected anyway :-).

So, yes, I can commit to do my best to attend the calls and my track record
proves that once I am committed. I can commit to appointing a proxy well in
advance if I have to miss something due to any scheduling conflicts. But I
will do my best to avoid any scheduling conflicts.

Furthermore, I fully understand that just attendance is *not* enough.

I decided to accept the nomination because I think we need vocal and
participating councillors -- and that's what I want to be. I think many of
you who kow me from IG and ICANN spaces can believe that I am vocal,
committed, and passionate about work.

This commitment has two dimensions for me: first of all, it's taking part
in the Council's work and be vocal there -- not only at the ICANN meetings
or on the calls, but also in between the calls, on the mailing lists, etc.
Well, I think we all are going to make such a promise. My promise can be
supported by the evidence of my work on the policy committee (before I
became NCUC EC member because I had to resign due to NCUC EC position), my
work in CCWG accountability WS1 and WS2, CCWG-IG, my commitment to NCUC
outreach, to NCUC procedures and bylaws drafting teams, and other tracks of
record. I am fully committed to do be present and to be active at the
Council.

The second dimension is link between the Council and NCSG membership and
NCSG policy committee (PC). I was a policy committee member already as NCUC
representative, and I was active there. Right now since a few days am back
on the PC and I am taking part in PC deliberations again -- feels great to
be back :-). If elected, I will continue and can commit to having a good
track of this activity. Furthermore, I understand that it is also about
informing the membership about policy development processes, public
comments, help in drafting the comments, help to observe the deadlines etc.
I can commit to this too. I will do my best to contribute to the
communications between councillors and NCSG membership -- I have already
seen the good practices established, for example, by Rafik. He informs
members about GNSO processes and decisions and I am going to take an active
part in this activity.

This goes well with your second question, because it's the part of
communication between the councillors and the NCSG membership:

>
> 2. While interested members can read the Minutes of Council meetings at
> https://gnso.icann.org/en/group-activities/calendar to see which of their
> Councilors attended and what was discussed, a) people often don’t have the
> time, and b) the minutes don’t provide an assessment of how things are
> going from an NCSG standpoint.  After-meeting reporting to the membership
> on the issues and votes would be helpful, and should be routinized. We
> tried doing this with volunteers but only got a couple reports (much
> appreciated).  So, would you be willing to rotate the responsibility among
> our six Councilors and ensure every meeting gets at least a two paragraph
> report, ideally with some indication as to whether the contingent is
> coordinating and in agreement or not on particularly hot topics?
>

I am absolutely ready to commit to writing a report based on rotation and
also -- if necessary -- contribute to any report even if it's not my turn
to write it. I think this shouldn't be a problem for active councillors and
it's time to commit to the promises we make before elections. And here you
all can have my full commitment (and hold me responsible for this promise).


Warm regards,
Tatiana




>
> Thanks much
>
> Bill
>
> On Aug 19, 2016, at 12:03, William Drake <wjdrake at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> Bill
>
>
> On Aug 17, 2016, at 10:39, William Drake <wjdrake at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi
>
> On Aug 16, 2016, at 23:38, Robin Gross <robin at ipjustice.org> 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
>
>
>
>
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