Hi Evan and All

On the Newsletter front. NARALO has been doing it with Constant Contact for four years and we have about 42% capture rate out of over 300 emails. Its much higher than the industry average. The newsletter was to be taken over by a NARALO volunteer but it has fallen to me to meet the deadlines each and every month. Originally Eduardo's approach was to try to get the NARALO ALS community to use the newsletter as a means to push information about ALS activities. This was a challenge and very difficult to achieve

Since November I have been moving the newsletter to more policy issues and Internet Governance trends by sharing resources from IEEE, IFF, IGF, Diplo and others to increase awareness and knowledge. Also i have been asking for ALAC members from our region to provide precises and context to current and pending policy issues so the NARALO membership can appreciate and get involved. This is also mimicked with the monthly short info-webinars during the monthly meetings. A recent NARALO educational committee has projected each month topic which draws upon the community talent and get more of the Unaffiliated member to be involved ie. Jonathan Zuck and Kristin Doan. This format of a 20 minute mini webinar is tied to the HOT TOPICs created by NARALO and cross referenced with Silvia the other RALO HOT TOPICS so we have each month set for discussion and with work we will links from the newsletter to the discussion with ebooks and resources.

Glenn McKnight

NARALO Secretariat
mcknight.glenn@gmail.com
skype gmcknight
twitter gmcknight

289-830 6259
.

On Sun, Feb 18, 2018 at 11:43 AM, Evan Leibovitch <evan@telly.org> wrote:

[ Note: I seem to be blocked from the ALAC list but am receiving this thread through personal CCs. Thank you for that.]

The beginning of this thread talked about the Board asking for executive summaries of its commentaries. Somehow this has morphed into doing an ALAC newsletter along the lines of what is now done by NARALO and ICANN's Latin American community.

I suggest caution.

First, be sure there is an audience. It should be possible to collect statistics to see how many hits have been on the NARALO and other existing newsletters. We're already doing such policy debriefs in webinar form (such as this week's Ottawa readout -- how well was that attended by the intended audience?) What's the point of spending all this volunteer effort to write something that nobody will read (and arguably is already being done)?

Second, what is the newsletter's purpose?
To introduce ALAC to an outside audience?

To create in-depth summaries of issues to enable ALSs and individual participants to give informed policy feedback to ALAC?

To provide a summary of ALAC positions taken (which is what the Board has asked for)?
Each of these choices requires very different choices of content and maybe even different writers. It also requires someone to be already deeply involved within ALAC policy to be able to describe the "what is ALAC thinking right now" subject matter that Maureen suggested. Is there a good supply of such specialized writers eager to help?

Lastly, ICANN At-Large is full of really good ideas that simply die when their champions leave, or when advocates for such good ideas presume that "someone else" will do it, and in a volunteer body such assumptions can be dangerous. This is especially so if there is a commitment to a schedule of future activity.

While ICANN is going into austerity mode when it comes to finances, At-Large seems to be in the midst of a lengthy austerity mode regarding volunteer talent. The number of person-hours available for ALAC projects, especially those that require good awareness of ICANN's issues and ALAC's stances on them, is very small. Is it reasonable to channel such resources into a newsletter that nobody outside ALAC has asked for, rather than into the original research and analysis that ALAC so badly needs?

- Evan

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