[alac] Chairing models
Dear all, this is to start the long due discussion on Chairing models that was envisioned in Luxembourg, to find an effective model to manage the Committee after I resign from Chairmanship in Vancouver.
There is one Chair that coordinates the activity and represents the Committee. One or more vice-Chairs can substitute the Chair in case of need. Possibly, the vice-Chairs get to coordinate parts of the work, for example one coordinates policy activities and the other one At-Large organization. 2) CO-CHAIRING MODEL There are two Co-Chairs at the same level. They coordinate among themselves to share the work. 3) ROTATING CHAIR MODEL Each Region gets to chair the Committee in the months that precede the ICANN meeting in that Region. Members from that Region pick the person, and substitute him/her in case of need. 4) 1 ROTATING + 1 FIXED There is one rotating Chair as in 3, that coordinates the internal work of the Committee, and one fixed Chair, that represents the Committee to other constituencies and the public. Now my comments. The problems I see in the current model are two: one is that it might create competition for the Chairmanship inside the Committee, and given the scarcity of resources we can't afford to have too many disillusioned or harshly dissenting members. The other one is that it totally depends on the performance of the Chair: I think that the Committee presently suffers a lot when I happen to have busy periods, and this is undesirable. This last point could be solved if we managed to make vice-Chairs effective; however, our discussion (over one year ago) on whether to assign responsibilities to them never ended anywhere, and I don't remember any situation where the existence of vice Chairs was useful to the Committee. So the rotating model could be interesting, as it shares the burden and encourages all members to stay involved. However, I see one major problem, in that we have a visibility towards the rest of the world, which needs to be associated with one clearly identified individual. It would become very difficult for other constituencies and organizations to interact with us, if every couple of months they wrote to their contact and received a reply such as "No, sorry, now you need to talk with this other person", who in turn might not be totally up to date about past discussions or might even have different ideas. This is why I came up with model 4, which could be an interesting middle ground. We could even come up with different names, such as "coordinator" and "spokesperson", or "rotating chairperson" and "permanent chairperson", to make the different roles clear. In the end, as usual, much depends on the commitment by each individual who occupies a position. In any case, I think that in a few days we will have the results of our self-review work, which is related to this discussion. I look forward to your opinions. -- vb. [Vittorio Bertola - v.bertola [a] bertola.eu.org]<----- http://bertola.eu.org/ <- Prima o poi... |