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

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