Thx Maureen.  I know that there’s good experience in mediation.  But I would go deeper: What if at the start of a WG or WT we kind of knew would be contentious ICANN professionally kicked it off with a 1 or 2 day in person stakeholders workshop, parsing out issues, sides, sensitivities and looking for potential solutions since day one?  Lots of time and money and distress would be saved!

Thx again Maureen & Marita earlier for these replies today!

On Thu, Jul 30, 2020 at 2:52 PM Maureen Hilyard <maureen.hilyard@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Javier

I dont think your idea is off-the-wall at all. ICANN has already introduced a mediator to work with conflict resolution in all sorts of situations. And she is excellent to work with.

I think that for something like the EPDP and MSM which has got a multitude of high level decision makers who believe that their views should take priority over the views of other groups, then it probably does need a different set of experts of the ilk you have mentioned who are skilled at facilitating discussions at this level. Nothing wrong with adding that as a recommendation into the mix. 

M



On Thu, 30 Jul 2020, 5:38 am Javier Rua, <javrua@gmail.com> wrote:

Hello to all. IMHO, an aspect that seems absent from this discussion is the possibility of professional facilitation in thorny issues, to the extent compatible with MSM.

This idea might go a bit against the grain in terms of community self-governance which cannot be underestimated, but there are profesional entities out there that are experts in getting diverse and even enemy groups to sit down and negotiate (from peace / reconciliation agreements among guerrillas and states, to more run of the mill, less bellicose disagreements).  I’ve seen these entities in action (I remember one called REOS Partners 
https://reospartners.com/) and I believe these professional approaches could help a contentious working group be more purposeful, efficient and effective-Maybe pack months of work into a few days.  

If this notion  is seen completely out of the ICANN  MSM self-governance comfort zone, perhaps one of these professional organizations could help train ICANN community volunteer/leaders and perhaps also ICANN staff, on these communication and consensus building techniques. ICANN org would get great ‘bang for the buck’ in investments such as these, which would both enhance participation and speed-up processes in WGs & PDPs.

Javier Rúa-Jovet

+1-787-396-6511
twitter: @javrua
skype: javier.rua1


On Jul 30, 2020, at 11:04 AM, Evin Erdogdu <evin.erdogdu@icann.org> wrote:



Dear ALAC Members,


Please see the ALAC Statement on Enhancing the Effectiveness of ICANN’s Multistakeholder Model – Next Steps and provide comments, if any, by this Friday, 31 July at 17:00 UTC:


https://docs.google.com/document/d/1l8hAOyuL4XiTS-yzGbpgOk7pl4hSpH4yeMNxxiZEVwA/edit?usp=sharing


Thank you,


Evin Ashley Erdoğdu

Policy Development Senior Coordinator

Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)