[Comments-fellowship-proposal-11jun18] Comment from Raphael Beauregard-Lacroix

[Raphaël Beauregard-Lacroix]

Dear Public Responsibility Support team,

I do understand that the purpose of the fellowship programme is to ensure
durable participation and engagement from "new" (relatively speaking)
individuals.

In that sense, an evaluation of the fellowship programme and of the
possibilities for improvement cannot happen in a vacuum, detached from a
reflection on how to engage with persons not entirely familiar with the
ICANN environment, generally speaking.

If fellows disengage after their first meeting, it is either because they
were not actually interested in ICANN's activities (and so were most likely
not selected properly) or because they were put off by obstacles to further
participation.

In that sense, while I recognise the value of gaining some quantitative
data on fellows' engagement, I do not favour an approach which would seek
to coerce them into further participation. It is extremely important to
know why fellows choose to not engage further, but I consider it is wasted
resources to "force" fellows to attend a certain number of calls of a given
working group or to write every so often on a mailing list or blogs.

My personal experience tells me that there certainly exists several
obstacles to further engagement which have to do with the highly complex
internal structure of ICANN and the concept of "constituencies" and
"affiliation." While the fellowship programme will seemingly seek to select
individuals who are already somewhat active (hence there is an assumption
of familiarity with the aforementioned structure) I still consider it too
easy to lose track of what is going on in the community generally speaking
and *where *in the whole flowchart of SO/ACs it is happening, as well as
how each of those constituencies internally organise "engagement" and
"participation"

This is something that needs to be addressed and it deserves a thorough
reflection. I consider it a form of discrimination, less visible than that
of geographical origin, cultures or gender, but no less present and
pernicious. In addition, my intuition tells me that such a discrimination
does affect certain geographical groups, cultures and genders more than
others, but I do not have data to back that up...

In addition, I do support other comments posted up to now which seek to
underline the necessity to rethink what "diversity" entails.

Thank you for your consideration,

Raphael Beauregard-Lacroix
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