FY20 NCUC Outreach Strategic Plan

* The NonCommercial Users Constituency (NCUC) plans to continue its ongoing efforts for outreach and diversification of its membership. Currently we reached over 560 members from 130 countries. More details and statistics can be found here http://www.ncuc.org/about/members/. While we got more members from developing countries in particular Asia, Africa and Latin America and the Caribbean, we are aiming to increase our efforts to inform noncommercial Internet users globally about NCUC involvement with policy making at ICANN.

* We aim to coordinate efforts with GSE for participation in ICANN events bringing local audiences to the DNS policy debates currently in focus in the organization as well as with regards to the importance of non-commercial views on the Domain Name System policy making processes.

* To include CROP program in our current projects with members more to make them part of capacity building initiatives and relevant events and conferences, which could run previously, during or after an ICANN meeting. For FY20, we could use the 3 approved slots in quite short time in order to guarantee our members attendance, participation and outreach activities at one ICANN meeting (the next Community Forum), one regional forum of  Internet Governance to be determined based on Members interest and RightsCon, one of the most important meetings around advancing human rights and non-commercial discussions.

The CROP is complementary to our regular outreach efforts during ICANN meetings and other two meetings identified as important places in order to strengthen the NCUC dialogue with other communities.. Our strategy is to combine the different resources and also try to coordinate with the help of our existing members. We will experiment for FY20 to let more members doing outreach with support from the executive committee and chair. We have also organized some outreach events previously to ICANN meetings. For FY20, we would like to continue the ongoing work, improve with the feedback and inputs got from previous events , and coordinate more with GSE staff, in particular for some regions.

The strategy is built around the following core objectives, which will guide us in targeting opportunities for NCUC members to attend regional events with CROP assistance.

Increasing knowledge of ICANN and making civil society more visible

Recent events have raised some interest from several civil society organizations in DNS Policy and we got some of them to be involved with us. However, we are aiming on being more involved at the discussions around the Evolution of ICANN the Multistakeholder Model. NCUC/NCSG have always been very representative voices for Civil Society while at the ICANN community and we wish to continue engaging in discussions such as the enhancement of cooperation between stakeholders and so on. Other than that, it is important to mention other areas of focus such as strengthening the Non-Commercial views within GNSO PDPS and the following the implementation of ICANN accountability and the positions advocated by NCUC that may appeal to civil society organizations, such as the Human Rights discussions.

Building national/regional engagement

For FY20, we gave more priorities for CROP proposals bringing regional members to ICANN meetings in order to see the outcomes of the Constituency efforts on capacity building directed to enhancing our participation in policy work. Previously, we attended the African Internet Summit proposed by AFRINIC and one of the LACNIC meetings. We hope to connect more with regional community to strengthen our presence, using the experience and knowledge of our members.

We will keep this approach and explore with members and GSE staff about possible partnerships in ICANN events. We are planning to submit session proposals, requests for session/meeting rooms and more for those events to optimize our presence there.

Building internal capacity

To continue our inreach efforts, we are empowering our members more by encouraging them to attend capacity building sessions and using ICANN Learn, applying for CROP, guiding them to other sources of funding. The executive committee is playing its role for supporting the members and helping them when they volunteer.

NCUC events in ICANN meetings are playing the double role of inreach/outreach since mostly our active members and not officers make the presentations about main topics and positions advocated by NCUC in ongoing policies processes.

Therefore, the events to be covered by this Strategic Outreach Plan are the following: 

• ICANN66 (Montreal);

• One meeting of a Regional Forum on Internet Governance (tbd); and
• RightsCon 2020.