[Ec-ncuc] Travel funding

[David Cake]

On 19/12/2012, at 8:31 AM, Milton L Mueller wrote:

> Speaking as Treasurer:
> 
>> Yes, as Bill says this idea of actually having guaranteed  travel
>> slots is such a recent luxury (first applied in Toronto) that  we
>> haven't actually worked out how to deal with it yet.
> 
> [Milton L Mueller] See below for my suggestion as to how to deal with it.

	I was referring more to us not really having a process for allocation of the ICANN constituency travel slots (other than 'EC decides'), but of course we do need to think about the process for NCUC funded travel as well. 
> 
>>> And NCUC has some money of its own, which the EC may decide to use
>>> for travel funding (previously, this was most of what NCUC funds were
>>> used for).
> 
> [Milton L Mueller] In  my view, ICANN's decision to handle travel for a given number of NCUC and NCSG members should be taken as a first-order budget constraint regarding travel support. In other words, as a rule the Constituency and the SG should send to meetings only those people supported by ICANN; anything over and above that should be considered a highly exceptional circumstance. The reason is that NCUC funds should support capacity building of the constituency itself and its projects. Routine support of travel will dissipate our bank account quite rapidly; sending 2 or 3 people per meeting per year could cost $10-20,000, for example. Until our Treasury is about 2-3 times what it has been, I don't think we can consider that. And adding 2 or 3 to the 5 or 6 already supported by ICANN, Nomcom, etc. is not that great an incremental improvement. Unless, as I said before, there are exceptional circumstances. 

	While I think that the general strategy of relying on ICANN funding where we can, and reserving NCUCs own funds for other purposes, I'd suggest that rather than apply that strategy absolutely, we keep open the possibility of using NCUC funds to fund travel if we can get a good value for the money. If we have an NCUC person who lives geographically quite close to where the meeting is held, and where we can find cheap accommodation, it might be worth using NCUC funds to get them there. Sometimes sponsoring organisations might be able to contribute. 
	I'm thinking, for example, of my second ICANN meeting, in Nairobi - I was able to convince my organisation (EFA) to provide half the money needed, and I shared a room with Rafik to keep costs down. 
	Given we generally can manage to get a pretty decent core delegation that covers most of the more active members to meetings with the current travel arrangements, travel certainly shouldn't be a priority - but our strategy should also be to increase the number of active members, and getting people to meetings certainly helps with that, and if we can manage it cheaply now and then, it might still be worth it. 

	And more importantly, I think there will continue to be some times when we want to get people in a day or two earlier or later than ICANN travel allowance provides, and we should continue to use NCUC to top up accommodation funds if we need to do so. 

	But I agree with the general gist of Miltons view - ICANN has seen fit to give us sufficient travel funding to get all the essential members of our group there, and this frees us up to think of other uses for NCUCs own funds, and the marginal utility of having a fourth (apart from councillor, NomCom, etc) NCUC person there is a lot less than the first or second, so for the most part there will probably be a lot more productive uses for our money than travel now. What those might be is a different discussion. 
	
	Cheers

		David