[NPOC-EC] Plan for capacity building

[David Cake]

	I’ve been working on a plan for capacity building for the NPOC policy committee. 

	I would like to propose a plan that rather than focus on specific skills, such as submitting comments, we focus on a specific policy issue for a few months, and revisiting it a few times over several meetings, including discussion at the start of the Kobe meeting, and then discussing what has happened around the issue again towards the end of the meeting. We can then look at the process of general analysis and advocacy, rather than specific sub-skills. At each of several successive meetings we can review how the policy process has gone, and then discuss how effective advocacy and policy work has taken. 

	The issue that I think would be appropriate is the Rights Protection Mechanism Review Working Group. This group is at an interesting point, it is working in sub-teams, and one of the sub-teams, the Trademark Data Review Sub-team, is co-chaired by Martin Silva Valent, who is of course both an active NPOC member and an NCSG Councillor. This gives us a valuable opportunity to have working group leadership explain the process to us, and Martin has indicated he would be enthusiastic. Unfortunately he will not be at the Kobe meeting, but we may also take advantage of that meeting to have NCSG (or other) colleagues explain some of the historical background and active issues. 

	I would like to hear PC feedback on this idea. 

	David