[council] Fellowship Selection Process - Council questions answered

Rafik Dammak rafik.dammak at gmail.com
Wed Apr 10 23:36:06 UTC 2019


Hi all,

Please find below the responses from Heather to some questions in the
thread related to fellowship selection process.

Best Regards,

Rafik

---------- Forwarded message ---------
De : Heather Forrest
Date: mer. 10 avr. 2019 à 21:32
Subject: Fellowship Selection Process- Council questions answered
To: Rafik Dammak


Dear Rafik,

 I would be very grateful for your help with posting these responses to
questions about the Fellowship selection process to the Council list.

1. Arsene raised the following: "The ability to speak English SHOULD NOT,
in my opinion, be a criterion when selecting a member of the fellowship
program." To clarify, the strawman that I prepared and which is now being
discussed and modified by Councillors should set out *additional *criteria
of a GNSO-specific nature. These criteria will be considered in respect of
applicants who express an interest in, or an existing involvement with, the
GNSO. There are universal criteria that apply to all applications; a basic
ability to communicate in English is indeed inherent in the process, as
applications must be submitted in English and understandable to the
Selection Committee members. It seems to me that it is not necessary to
specify English language ability as a GNSO-specific criterion.

2. Ayden has raised concerns about "confusion around why the fellowship
exists." Ayden is absolutely correct that the Fellowship program is now
being seen as a tool to relieve volunteer burnout and introduce active new
policy development members. I pushed very hard in the Marrakech selection
round to implement a minimum threshold score for 'likelihood of meaningful
future engagement'. This reduced the overall number of Fellowships awarded
for Marrakech, but I strongly believe that we should not follow the
previous mentality of awarding as many Fellowships as are budgeted simply
because the budget exists.

3. Elsa asked: "I wonder what will make anyone be sure of the criteria
being met?" It will be the job of the Fellowship Selection Committee to
evaluate, based on the information provided in each application, an
applicant's satisfaction of the criteria. In addition to the SO/AC-specific
post-Fellowship follow-up that Elsa suggests, staff are, on request of the
Fellowship Selection Committee, investigating ways of objectively tracking
what a Fellow does post-Fellowship. For example, we can ask: Has the Fellow
joined at least one WG as an active member, or joined and made active
contributions to the work of an SG/C. Has the prior Fellow participated in
any ICANN meetings (whether f2f or remote) since their Fellowship? In other
words, there is much more that we can do to follow up. This hasn't been
done in the past, but I will continue to push hard for this going forward.
Where an applicant is relatively new to ICANN, we have other ways when
reviewing the application to assess whether they have potential to become
active participants based on what they have done outside of ICANN. I
believe this addresses Elsa's second question as well.

4. Elsa also asked: "Will this be reviewed at some point after the
requirements of all SO/ACs are submitted?" Yes! What I suggest is that when
the GNSO-specific criteria are applied in the Montreal round, I will report
back to Council on any issues or questions that the Committee had when
applying the GNSO criteria. We will have a continuous opportunity to
reflect and modify. These are definitely NOT cast in stone! Let's get to a
set of criteria that the Fellowship Selection Committee can apply for
Montreal, re-evaluate, and revise as appropriate.

Best wishes to you all,

Heather
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/council/attachments/20190411/5a19e2cb/attachment.html>


More information about the council mailing list