[Community-Discuss] Fwd: [AfrICANN-discuss] Report of the AFRINIC Open Mic Session on June 20

[Owen DeLong]

> On Jul 24, 2019, at 00:41 , Sami Salih <sami.salih at outlook.com> wrote:

> 

> Thank you Internet Society’s Africa, and Thank you Dawit and Michuki,

> This is what we expected from ISOC and from you as real Africans who really cares about the stability of this continent.

> 

> Few points I would like to highlight as follows:

> 

> 1) The Board can never viewed as part of any problem (I prefer use issues instead) if and only if we (I will always use WE as we are one community) increase the level of transparency. However, increasing transparency DID NOT mean to disclose everything. While I personally support disclosing the methodologies use to take decisions, I believe this is to be evaluated by the board its self to decide on the information to be share with members, community, etc. Overall, the board needed to build a trusted relationship with the community.


It is absurd to claim the board can never be viewed as “part of any issue” or “part of any problem”.

It is entirely possible for them to be part of the problem and several past actions show that they have, in fact, been part of the problem.

If the board was not considered to be part of the problem, there would not have been a landslide victory for “none of the above” across the board in the 2018 board elections.


> 4) The  legal interpretations and other bylaw issues can't be discussed in such details during open mic, only specialists in a small dedicated group can provide useful contributions and suggested the way-forward. As you can notice different views and different wishes are expressed at the end only specialist can enlightening and guide the community to respect the local laws and maintain the spirit of the bottom-up system for RIRs.


While there is value to having these issues worked by small working groups to bring proposals back to the wider community and collect feedback, this should be an iterative process and there is absolutely good value in having wide community input into the process at various stages.

IMHO, only when a proposal achieves relatively wide support in community consultations should it be formalized into motions put before an xGMM.


> 5) In page (3) please remove/rephrase this sentence "....  vote on policy proposals. ..." cos its not accurate.


That whole paragraph is questionable, actually.

There are specific requirements to participate in the PDP…
	1.	You must have an email address.
	2.	You must subscribe to the PDWG mailing list.
	3.	You must begin participating.

I do not see how this particular set of requirements either enfranchises or disenfranchises one of any particular right to “vote”.


> 6) I would also propose that the Nomination and Election processes to be conducted by the governance committee, or at least they need to set a clear rule and procedure for those sensitive activities.


I think that the board, possibly in consultation with the GC should propose the necessary bylaw amendments to correct the identified deficiencies in the election process and specifications and also produce a set of procedural documents which cover the identified gaps that are not necessarily bylaw material, but more operational and procedural in nature.
I do not think that the election process itself should be managed by the GC. I believe that the current situation where the board supervises the nomcom is correct, but needs some fine-tuning in terms of how the nom-com is managed and what its responsibilities are.

Owen


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