After joining NCSG as member, you are wondering how to get involved and to participate. ICANN can be intimidating with flood of acronyms (you can find glossary here), what sounds as complicated policies and complex procedures.
A first step will be to go through NCSG wiki space and discover what was done previously in policy: participation in working groups, public comments, statements. Following the discussion within the NCSG mailing list is important to get up to dated about all informations e.g. monthly NCSG meetings, NCSG sessions in ICANN meetings, public announcements. There is also the ICANN pre-meetings policy update to give a brief overview on policies being discussed.
When there is a public comment, any member can volunteer to draft a statement and share it with the rest of membership to be endorsed after going through cycle of edits and comments then reaching consensus
You can also contact the NCSG chair and GNSO councillors if you want to ask a question or clarification. "Old timers" will be glad to help and support you anytime.
You will find here some documentation to understand better how to participate within NCSG and GNSO:
GNSO provide several pages regarding the policy development process and how working groups function. Understanding the processes makes your participation effective:
- Ongoing Policies/ Current Working Groups
- Procedures
- Working Groups guidelines
- GNSO basics
- Consensus Policy
- The ICANN website landing page for all policy : https://www.icann.org/policy and it laos include a simple infographic about policy development
On other hand you can grasp quickly about ongoing policies processes here via easy to read briefings here and here. There is also a monthly policy update that you can follow and receive a kind of newsletter.
There is a one-stop page to find all information about GNSO and also about GNSO activities during ICANN meeting.
There is also a monthly newcomers confcall that you can join to understand how to involved in GNSO working Groups, the material is here and you can find the recordings of the previous sessions in GNSO master calendar by looking for session titled "GNSO WG Newcomer Open House Session"
There is also the online training for newcomers in ICANN Learn learn.icann.org/courses/gnso
