Private Calls for NCSG Leadership Committees

[Amr Elsadr]

Hi Stephanie,

Thanks for this response. I believe it to be very helpful. Some thoughts on your own in-line below:

> On Jul 31, 2020, at 3:09 PM, Stephanie E Perrin <stephanie.perrin at MAIL.UTORONTO.CA> wrote:
>
> Good Morning.
>
> It is great to see people care about policy and meeting discussions. Allow me to attempt to clear up what I see as unfortunate misperceptions as to what is going on.
>
> First, the discussion with the Board. For as long as I have been going to ICANN and sitting on a leadership position (that would be since the fall of 2014 when I was first elected to council), there have been informal breakfast meetings with the Board at face to face meetings, They were not recorded, and they were also invitation only....they were not on the agenda, and different leaders handled invitations differently. I have vivid memories of being chastised for bringing along other folks who were at the meeting who were not elected officers, and even for bringing elected officers who had not been invited by the chair. So I do challenge Amr's memory of how these things have evolved.

Your memory of how these were done in the past and mine are indeed very different, but tbh…, I don’t recall ever attending any of these meetings with you, personally. You and I might have attended different ones. The ones I did attend did indeed have Next-Generation and Fellowship participants present, and the meetings took place without any incident I am at least aware of. The meetings I did attend had far fewer than a dozen participants. Usually no more than 7 or 8, if memory serves. They were quite small, but the option to attend had been available. On other occasions when I did not believe it was necessary for me to be present, I didn’t attend those breakfast meetings at all. I skipped quite a few, but that was by choice, and not because no invitation was sent.

Attending these meetings should not be some kind of privilege, where one has to earn the right to be there. They are working meetings, during which matters of importance to the NCSG need to be discussed with the Board members appointed by the GNSO, and who have an influential role in the process by which these matters are resolved.

If you were ever chastised for bringing members to these meetings, I’d think that you’d be within your rights to challenge whomever did the chastising. That isn’t to say that these meetings don’t need to be managed in an organized manner, like planning ahead on what the (informal) agenda will be, and the time allocated to each topic needing to be covered during the course of the breakfast/meeting/webinar (whichever).

> However, the important thing to focus on is how well they have been running in recent years, the fact that more Board members actually come, and that we have a useful and informal discussion of challenges and priorities. Now the question that arose, when we realized we were going to be looking at virtual meetings for the foreseeable future, is how do we continue this fruitful discussion? I have tried very hard to be more open than we have been in the past, with efforts such as the dinner at ICANN 66 to which we invited everyone in NCSG who was present at the meeting, not just a selected few. So I am deeply in sympathy with the concept of all NCSG participating, not just the leadership team, but it is not accurate to characterize those breakfast meetings as having been open in the past, there were never more than a dozen or so of us there.

Like I said, I remember things very differently, both in terms of invitation and actual attendance, but yes…, the whole point of me bringing this up was to look forward, not to allocate blame or seek explanation. …, and this is not solely about your remaining time as Chair, but something I hope all current and future NCSG EC members will pay attention to. Blaming someone/anyone for whatever already took place is meaningless. I’d just like to see things done more constructively moving forward.

> Given the frank and open nature of the discussion, and the fact that we are all suffering from zoom webinar fatigue, I discussed it with the Chairs and we invited the NCSG EC and the NCSG policy committee. Now, at no time did anyone on the policy committee or EC push for wider participation. As an elected official I know the buck stops with me, I am responsible and accountable for this decision. However, all the other leaders had plenty of opportunity to suggest we open this up to the list. The policy committee has broader representation than just the councillors, and the chairs also have a duty to speak up. Frankly, I do not think we will have a good discussion with Board members if all of our members who are not necessarily following our work closely dial in and ask questions, but I am open to debating the issue if you wish. More fruitful, in my opinion, would be discussion with your elected representatives. Send your questions in. Listen to the recordings. We are planning to have another call with Matthew Shears at the end of August, and I am trying to settle the date right now so that everyone can plan to attend.

No…, please don’t assign representatives to speak on behalf of members actually engaged in the trenches. No matter how well briefed or prepared, they will never be able to represent the issues at stake as well as those most intimately familiar with them. It’s perfectly reasonable to broaden participation, agree on topics in advance (even send them to the Boardies as a heads-up), and assign individual speaker(s) for each topic to keep things focused, and still manage time effectively. We do this during the NCSG open meetings with the Board at every ICANN meeting anyway. No reason why it can’t also be done in a less formal setting with fewer Board members.

I look forward to hearing about how arrangements for the August meeting with Matthew evolves.

> There is a broader issue that surfaces in the context of this debate. Folks are not happy with the webinar mode for virtual meetings. They want to participate, There are many reasons why virtual meetings have not taken off over the past 20 years as predicted, replacing all travel to conferences , and we have COVID 19 to thank for forcing us to try to make this mechanism actually work better than it is working right now. It seems to me that we will have to find a way for everyone to chat and participate during a session, without holding up the discussion that leaders or working group members are having. This is, I believe, why chat is disabled for viewers. but it certainly makes webinar mode unattractive to non participants. We are all being subjected to webinar contacts in every sphere of life, we want ICANN to remain a leader in multistakeholder engagement, and that means everybody gets to speak. I would like to propose that we experiment with this by trying a parallel discussion, with a leader managing a parallel channel with observers to a call, and if volume permits, allowing interaction with the main channel. Of course if nobody shows up, this is not a problem, but if 100 show up it can be challenging to have a productive discussion in an hour.
>
> This is just a modest proposal.

We don’t need to use the webinar formats for meetings we (the NCSG) organize. That’s totally up to us. With adequate planning and management of the Zoom meeting (as opposed to a Zoom webinar), it shouldn’t be an issue. For years, we’ve been holding similar meetings over Adobe Connect, and it was never an issue because of the format of the meeting. It doesn’t matter what kind of tech we use. It matters more how we organize ourselves and use that tech.

> On to the second meeting, with the Commercial Party House presumptive nominee for GNSO Council Chair.
>
> We have been putting this meeting off since the election, because folks were focused on other issues, including the KL virtual meeting. I am remiss, we ought to have had this meeting a while ago. The determination of Council Chair is a matter where Councillors will vote. Phillippe Fouquart is very open to having another meeting, in August (we have a September 1 deadline on this matter). I made a special effort to make sure we found a date that suited Rafik, who as Vice Chair of the GNSO Council has a broad perspective on what the Council's needs and priorities are, and as part of the leadership team has a thorough grasp of the requirements of the job. Rafik has had a gruelling schedule lately involving nighttime daily meetings for Council and the Chairmanship of the EPDP. We picked Thursday 12:00 UTC to suit his schedule and Tatiana's. Unfortunately, the meeting invitation did not reach us in a timely manner, my fault for not doing followup on that as soon as we landed on the correct time. My family came to see me this week for the first time in 5 months, so I must admit that I was offline and preoccupied with my new grandchildren, not the manner in which this meeting was rolling out. Mea culpa. However, I am following up with Philippe to schedule another meeting in a couple of weeks in August, and we will agree that date and invite the entire NCSG to participate with a minimum of two weeks notice, you have my word.

Thanks for making arrangements for a second meeting, and I’m very happy to hear that you’ve finally met your new grandchild. Congratulations!! I know making this happen has been challenging for you over the past few months. I’d think that whenever any of us have personal or professional engagements that conflict with our volunteer duties at NCSG, we can lean on colleagues to plug any holes that need plugging. This is true for EC members, PC members, EPDP Team members, etc...

> In closing, may I say that I have 83 days left in my term as NCSG Chair. I am doing my best to manage this heavily administrative role, but I would be the first to say that results are not up to my standards. I am always eager to talk to people, if they have concerns. i am not sure that posting criticism to the list is the most effective way to solve a problem, particularly when something is a mere oversight (as is the case in the GNSO Council Chair meeting) or is debatable point that I am happy to discuss (as is the case with the breakfast meeting with the Board members). I am trying to foster a productive discussion here, but if nobody talks to me, it is quite difficult. I hope that when Bruna takes over on October 22, you give her your full, whole hearted support. There is no reason for drama or distrust here folks, we have enough with COVID, we need to all pull together and help one another.

There is no drama or distrust. I’ve tried to make that clear, and stressed that there is no reason at all to assume any ill intent at all. I was only raising an issue I believe to be important to the NCSG’s work, and affects many of its members. It seems to me like we may be beginning to converge on an agreed path forward. If we’re not quite there yet, we are at least having a productive conversation about it.

If I may also be a little frank, Stephanie, I’ve tried the whole speaking in private thing before, and in my experience, it doesn’t work well at all. Having conversations like this seem to me to be far more effective, and keep our members in the loop of how things are managed. IMO, it’s a good thing for us to have some kind of expectation or level of predictability on how things are being run by our elected/selected leaders. This kind of dialogue helps in that regard, so don’t think of any of this as criticism. It’s just part of the job you (and Bruna) signed up for.

Open, honest and polite discourse is one of the things that I appreciated most about the NCSG when I first joined back in 2010. On occasion, it hasn’t been quite so polite, and that’s a different issue that we’ll always need to wrestle with. However, I see no reason to discourage open dialogue, particularly when it is core to our work.

Thanks again, Stephanie. I appreciate your response, and will look to you and the rest of the EC to follow up on all this.

Amr
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.ncsg.is/pipermail/ncsg-discuss/attachments/20200801/826c5e62/attachment.htm>