As part of my commitment to training and professional excellence in the ICANN ombudsman role, I have just completed a course run by the International Ombudsman Institute, and taught by the faculty of Queen Margaret University of Edinburgh. This has been a three-day course covering a wide variety of topics relevant to good practice for an ombudsman. One of the features about this Institute is that the members are almost entirely classical ombudsmen who operate within the government structures of the various countries. The ICANN ombudsman is of course different because of the role within a multi-stakeholder organisation. Nonetheless many of the issues are very similar including the cross cultural issues, diversity issues and good governance issues.
The course ran from Sunday, September 16, 2012 through to Wednesday, September 19, 2012 and was supported by staff from the Institute. Our host was the Austrian Ombudsman Doctor Peter Kostelka, who is the Institute Secretary-General. The Institute is supported by the Austrian government as part of a commitment to international practice of ombudsmanship. They provide the offices for the Institute, in a 17th century palace in central Vienna. The Secretariat staff participated and supported the training and made us all feel most welcome and the range of participants was from all around the world. There were many from Europe, and we also had participants from South Africa, Botswana and Sierra Leone. Others came from as far as Hong Kong, Thailand and Papua New Guinea. I had the pleasure of meeting again two participants from Pakistan, who I met at the Hong Kong training earlier this year. From Europe we had representatives from Northern Ireland, the Ukraine, Belgium, Gibraltar, Spain, Portugal, Slovakia, Lithuania, Italy, Slovenia and Estonia. From South America we had participants from Argentina, and Peru. We also had a participant from Canada. The course was conducted in English, which was something of a challenge for some of the participants but they rose to the challenge and often provided most thoughtful insights. It is always useful to share in different cultural perspectives on our work as ombudsman.
The course itself was diverse and consisted of presentations with participation and group sessions. We covered such ground as operating within legal frameworks, complaint diagnosis and assessment, managing conflict and challenging behaviour, preventing things from going wrong. We also covered areas such as investigation planning and reasoning, gathering and managing evidence, effective interviewing critical thinking and decision-making, making proportionate recommendations and decision writing. We had a number of useful panel discussions about an ombudsman office, its management and functions. On the 2nd day of the course we also had a formal dinner in the palace ballroom of the Institute office. It was a most pleasant dinner and a wonderful 18th-century setting.
The course such as this is essential to maintain knowledge of current thinking about the practice of an ombudsman. The academic staff at Queen Margaret University specialise in the academic study of the office of an ombudsman and have extensively trained many in the United Kingdom, and now are extending this training particularly to Malawi. So we had access to some of the leading thinkers and academic researchers, a real privilege.
For me, meeting so many of the international colleagues was a real privilege and I hope I have forged some good international relationships. I also have the opportunity to explain the ICANN multi-stakeholder model. There was very real interest in this as a governance structure, and they could immediately see why an ombudsman was necessary within such a complex model. So in conclusion, this was a most worthwhile course and I have learned a great deal.