NPOC Constituency Day Notes – Tuesday, November 5, 2019
PRESENT: Joan Kerr, Oreoluwa Lesi, Juan Manuel Rojas, David Cake, Maryam Bakoshi (ICANN Staff), Other Community Members
ONLINE: Caleb Ogundele
20 people present in the room
NPOC ACCOMPLISHMENT & FUTURE PLANS – JOAN:
- Joan gave an intro to the items to be discussed by individual EC members.
REPORTS & UPDATE – ORE:
- Ore gave an update on NPOC’s project management processes and tools, outstanding activities and a few of NPOC’s accomplishments over the last year.
CHARTER UPDATE – RAOUL:
- Raoul shared that the NPOC Charter had been shared and approved by community members and sent to ICANN staff. Hopes the process is completed by next March.
- We are looking for more efficient and usable project tracking tool since Trello doesn’t seem to have worked for most EC members.
- We are exploring Next Cloud as a web storage but has had difficulties installing it
- Explained why we are looking to register a nonprofit in Estonia, but this is still under review and no charter has been created.
POLICY COMMITTEE UPDATES & POLICY STRATEGY – DAVE & CARLOS:
Dave:
- We should contribute more effectively to NCSG policy comments, instead of just focusing on NPOC issues except where our policy positions differs radically
- Potential policy topics of interest include IGOs, ICANN’s definition of and treatment of natural persons versus legal entities (because registered nonprofits – many of which may have great privacy concerns should not get the same treatment as legal person (laxer privacy standards than for natural persons).
- Also Sam was involved in Auction Proceeds WG
- Carlos will set the future policy directions
- Encourages anyone interested in getting involved in policy to contact him or Carlos
- Remmy asked about specific challenges for NPOC in doing policy work
- Dave: Identifying what is an appropriate topic for us; we have capacity-building challenges which we have started to address by collaborating with other groups (e.g. joint sessions with ALAC)
- Suggests we think about how we can collaborate with other groups as we move along
Carlos:
- Briefed on Red Cross and Crescent work, and IGO
- Has been discussing with Joan, Martin and Raoul on how to get more young people involved in policy development (especially Next Gens and Fellows)
- He and Dave have been welcomed to the NCSG PC and he hopes this good start can continue.
- Need to look for volunteers for PDP
- Looks to have at least 6-7 new/NPOC people in ICANN 67
COMMUNICATIONS:
- Joan: We have a new website and are exploring tools for online storage and project tracking
FINANCE:
- Sam: He is part of the NCSG FC, but there is no Chair for the FC yet because the FC only has 2 members (he and Stephanie). Stephanie is Chair of NCSG and cannot vote, however at least 2 out of 3 votes are needed to elect a Chair. So for now, unless there are more members appointed to the FC, there cannot be a Chair yet. This is not a problem yet, as there are not much funds to manage.
ICANN LEGITIMACY STUDY – Jan Aart (University of Gothenburg):
- An independent academic research project funded by Swedish Research Council
- ICANN’s legitimacy is highly rated by ICANN insiders (staff)
- Legitimacy is fairly stable across stakeholder groups
- Definition of legitimacy was left to the interview subjects
- One motivation for this study was interest in studying ICANN’s legitimacy 3 years post-IANA transition. Also, multi-stakeholderism has been on the rise and so there was an interest in seeing how ICANN was doing.
- Spoke to Insiders (30 board members, 305 community members and 132 staff) and Outsiders i.e. 62 people who are involved in IG but not ICANN , 860 “general elite”
- ICANN ranked fairly high (5th) among global governance insititutions (WHO, UN, UNFCC?, IFC ranked higher)
- However it only ranked 1.7 out of 3.0, which is just over 50%
- So, it’s IG and general elites who tend to know about ICANN
- Overall, ICANN staff had the most confidence in ICANN, closely followed by the Board (next was the ICANN community)
- South-East Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa showed the highest confidence in ICANN
EDUCATION AND RESOURCES PROGRAM – PATRICK JONES:
- Patrick: Mentioned that a presentation of what GSE has to offer was done in Marrakech
- Listed potential topics for webinars/trainings of interest to NPOC. This includes Registrant Rights and Responsibilities, What is a Domain Name, About ICANN, About DNS Ecosystem, Domain Name Management (Registration, Transfers, Renewals, Expiration), ICANN Policies Impacting Registrants, Protecting Your Domain Name, Others?
- Joan: Our strategy for engagement is Outreach, In-reach and Youth (engaging Next Gens and Fellows)
- Sam: We need to think about how we will engage newer NGOs, as many of them don’t own domain names but rather use social media for their publicity and engagement.
- Action Item:
- Joan: NPOC will get back to GSE about what we need.
GNSO UPDATE – Martin Silva Valent:
- Was going to present on what the GNSO and PDPs are, but the meeting audience is not beginner level, so won’t do it.
- Upcoming topics: Rights Protection Mechanisms for IGOs (the discussion has gone on for years) but NPOC has the opportunity to take leadership in this policy area