[Chapter-delegates] IGF Ambassadorship Open

[Olga Cavalli]

Dear Raul,

many thanks for your comments.

You mention that the IGF Ambassador´s program has been successful. In a way
I totally agree with you, but perhaps the rules established some years ago
(I remember it started in 2009?) may be revised in the ligth of other
results of an constantly evolving Internet ecosystem.

I agree with comments made by James Gannon, which I quote here:

*"I think we need to take a serious look at our ability to engage and
manage people who want to get into the nitty gritty details, because we are
so incredibly understaffed in that area that its a serious concern of mine.
And that means opening our support systems to anyone who can demonstrate
knowledge, ability and willingness to perform as a volunteer. Wether these
end up as two separate streams of engagement across the various I*
organisations is for others to determine, but I do think that we need to
realise and accept that we have a capacity problem that we are not fixing
despite our efforts, and we should take a hard hard look at excluding
potential applicants who can be converted into the people on the front
lines, building policy, ensuring our agenda is heard and doing the work. If
we exclude these people based on arbitrary criteria then we are doing
ourselves a disservice I think. If someone is willing to get involved and
do the work I don’t think we should care if they are 18 or 80, from the US
or from Uzbekistan, I feel that we almost don’t have that luxury yet, or if
we feel we do, then we need a parallel program for those willing to do the
heavy lifting."*

Those of us that dedicate our time to actively participate as volunteers in
different I* activities, usually see how difficult it is to find
participants who engage in a more relevant and deeper level, than just go
to the meetings, one or several times.

Best regards

Olga





2016-07-09 1:22 GMT-03:00 Raul Echeberria <echeberria at isoc.org>:

>
>
> Hi everybody
>
> I would like to thank all the comments and feedbacks you have provided in
> the last few days on this topic.
>
> We have many different programs and different fellows programs that target
> different audiences. Some are oriented to new leaders, others to policy
> makers, to technical people or to chapters leaders.
> Those are programatic decisions based on the objectives of each of the
> programs which are different among them.
> For example, the regional Chapters workshops are managed with different
> criteria. We held the European regional workshop, attended by 23 chapters
> if I remember well and we will have the LAC one this month in Costa Rica.
> This is a chapter oriented program, like also Beyond he Net.
>
> The IGF Ambassadors is one of our very successful programs and it is
> oriented to a given target. We have even received sometimes criticism in
> the opposite direction of the discussion in this list. Some people think
> that we should low the age of the participants. I think that the current
> program is good and it is complementary to other initiatives we have, like
> the Youth program in which we participated last year together with the CGI
> Brasil and that we are trying to replicate this year.
>
> I have the opportunity to participate as a Mentor of the IGF Ambassador
> program the last 2 years and it has been a very good experience. It has
> been exciting to work with the participants, who represent a good balance
> between youth and experience and that brings every year new energy to the
> IGF.
>
> As I said, these are programatic decisions, so they can be always arguable
> in one direction or another.
> Can we have other programs? of course! And we do it.
> Programs and projects evolve all the time looking always for the most
> effective ways to accomplish our goals and objectives.
>
> I really hope that we have this year once again a good list of candidates
> for participating in this programa and I encourage you to promote people
> from your communities to participate.
>
> We appreciate very much your support for the continue success of this
> program. (and all the other programs, or course)
>
>
> Best,
>
> Raúl
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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>
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