Focus of Self-Assessment
My current thinking is that the most important dimension to understand is how EFFECTIVE the WG was in its operations, behaviors, and protocols leading (or not) to the achievement of its mission. In particular, the WG Guidelines and Charter are simply tools that were developed to help WGs become more effective - they are not ends in themselves. As a result, I do not think we should ask questions about how well organized or even useful these documents are to WG members. One reason is that a team of intelligent and committed ICANN volunteers (WG-WT) spent the better part of a year going over every paragraph to ensure that the end products were appropriately organized, thorough, clear, and useful. Apart from the larger set of tools/support that the team receives, we do not need to ask WG members if they think those documents are especially helpful. A person who has participated in many WGs may never need to consult the guidelines having learned through experience how to be a valued and useful participant. In my view, it is more important to know if the WG itself was effective in its forming, storming, norming, and producing stages. If any critical element of the WG process is perceived to be ineffective and the survey explanations/reasons are insufficient for proper diagnosis, the Chartering Organization can and probably should investigate further arranging follow-up interviews with WG members.
Should Self-Assessment be completed by each WG member individually or by the entire team?
Individual Member (separately)
- Possible to obtain opinions and viewpoints (anonymously) that might never be acknowledged by the entire group.
- More efficient to ask each individual for impressions and perspectives than to ask a group to coalesce around a single representation. A team might consider the self-assessment task to be more challenging and difficult (obtaining consensus) than its original mission.
- It may be difficult to gain an overall impression of the WG's process by examining individual perspectives.
Entire Team (collectively)
- A group characterization, if achieved through consensus, may be the most balanced and informative because it will have been discussed openly by all members.
- If a WG was dominated by one or two individuals or labored under weak leadership, that type of information would likely be suppressed in a collective assessment. Similarly, if something negative occurred that could represent a learning opportunity or process improvement, a team may be reluctant to admit shortcomings, failures, or "air its laundry" in public.