[Gnso-sc-budget] Fellows and ROI

[Martin Pablo Silva Valent]

I think is a useful blog post to start a deeper debate. A quick reply I sent to Kevin Murphy, the author of the blogpost, the actual debate should be more structured, methodic and hold data we are yet to gather.

Cheers,
Martín


"I liked your blog spot! Remeber, that ALL fellows come from developing countries, not just most of them, that the first rule of the program. They are also elected by a community/staff committee and is region, gender, and profession and stakeholder balanced.

You are also missing a whole lot of people in your count that should be included as fully engaged. There are leaders and pen holder in almost every structure, and those leaders are a key diversity feature in the MS model that validates and improves what ICANN does. Also, you are only seeing a photograph, while the product of the fellowship is a movie that has produced result though years, like people that got engaged for a few years and left or leader today that held several positions before. Even some of this successful cases only got engaged after years after their fellowship experience, since it took time to find the right way to make sense to be involved.

The fellowship is not only needed because of the lack of resources in developing countries for a specific fellow, is the same structural asymmetry between regions that affect the level of diversity inside ICANN, and as well, the presence and legitimacy of ICANN around the world. So is a street that goes both ways, people from X countries begin in ICANN and X countries IG ecosystem being aware and knowledgeable about ICANN. So fellows might not become penholder in a PDP, but they are still successful if, as leaders in their own profession IG related in their region, they bring awareness and new networks that bring more people that do gets directly engaged. 

There are many ways in which ICANN improves its diversity and legitimacy with the Fellowship, and selecting people that will directly be involved is absolutely imposible, since ICANN is a very cryptic and expensive place to be, most people need to first get to know it, sometimes even build a regional network or ecosystem in their country so they later find a useful way for them to get directly engaged. For instance, a lawyer doing privacy issues in it's NGO may not found the funds to be right now a penholder in a PDP, but will teach and use the fellowship acquired knowledge to use DNS in its activities regarding privacy back home. Creating in that way a lot of value to ICANN and very good potential for more people, and more meaningful, to join (since a more developed ecosystem will foster better candidates).

We even have ccNSO people which NICs don't send them because they lack resources or is not a priority or governments!, imagine how far are business or civil society to find reasons and resources to directly and fully engaged someone in leading an ICANN process. The work the fellowship does is hard and very crafty, people are not being remotely fair in their analysis and I blame, the fellowship for not giving more tools and data to properly set the cost-benefit debate.
If ICANN is serious about diversity and a true global MS model, then a program like the fellowship is essential, even if we agree a lot of things could be this way or that way."

> On 20 Feb 2018, at 21:28, Michele Neylon - Blacknight <michele at blacknight.com> wrote:
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