[NCUC-EC] NCUC Finances and Budget Requests to ICANN

Fri Dec 27 11:46:59 CET 2013

Hello

Another thing to put on your horizons, related also to Singapore.

Financial Management

NCUC has some funds that have been raised over the years from PIR, ISOC, Afilias and and others, primarily to support ICANN meeting attendance and NCUC conferences.  Last I heard, about a half year ago, we had about $80,000 in the account; it’d be good if Treasurer Milton could send an update.  

Re: meeting attendance, the practice has been to occasionally help someone doing key administrative or policy work that’ll be necessary at a given meeting.  This was especially important prior to last year, when ICANN began offering three travel slots per SG or constituency per meeting.  Now with both NCUC and NCSG receiving 3 per, we can usually get 4 members to a meeting: NCSG’s go to the chair and one NCUC rep and one NPOC rep (typically EC or PC members), while NCUC’s go to the chair (who has to be there to run Constituency Day) and two others, typically but not necessarily EC members.   (BTW, for completeness, all NCSG Councilors also get travel support, so at present there’s six more NCUCers’ covered that way.  Ditto NCUC reps to Nomcom and AoC-based teams like ATRT, when they are operating).

Anyway, it is up to the EC to decide who gets the NCUC’s slots.  Again, while groups tend to vote for themselves, in principle the funding should be available to anyone in NCUC who’s really making a difference and has a distinct need to be at a particular meeting, e.g. for a GNSO WG or the NCSG PC, etc.  Accordingly, last year’s EC discussed the criteria we should use for selection, with “needs to be there” being the most important, but decided not to formalize a policy and put it on the website.  We might want to revisit.  This is especially so if we go forward with another idea floated last year, the possibility of regularizing an amount we make available per meeting, perhaps at $5,000.  Circumstances didn’t require a final decision, but with @ $80k on hand and hopefully more to come (we’ll do funding appeal letters in the spring) one would think we could manage a $15,000 annual outlay to get people to meetings who are really engaged and committed.

Re: conferences, in the past funds were raised specifically for these and leftovers went into the account.  This year I’m hoping to get ICANN to carry more of the logistical/budgetary load of our Singapore conference so we can focus on content and building a community process around it.  If that works, funding letters could be focused more on look at the improvements we’ve made, the work we’ve done (e.g. the conf) and what more we could do if we could support more members to get to meetings and be engaged.  

It would be nice if the sole responsibility for this activity did not also devolve to the chair, which brings us to the next point.

Our (Secretary-)Treasurer has always been Milton since he has the bank account and cuts the checks when payment is needed.   There’s no logical reason to consider changing the latter role.  However, we do need more help with financial stuff besides cutting checks, and these are not things Milton’s had the bandwidth to focus on.

One option I’d strongly suggest we consider is to split the Secretary and Treasurer functions and appoint whichever of you is willing to serve as Secretary.  Such a person could help ensure meetings and decisions are documented and reported in a transparency-enhancing manner.

As for the Treasurer, whether the title need to be tied to the bank account is worth considering.  Whatever label we use, and a priori Treasurer seems the most appropriate—we need someone who will commit to help me oversee financial stuff, including keeping track of funds, doing funding appeals and budget requests, reporting to members, and (if we decide to reboot it) coordinating the EC/members Finance Team.

ICANN Budget Requests 

 These are done in two stages for the fiscal year beginning July 1, namely a preliminary or fast track app for funds to be allocated soon and then a regular request.  Last year I filed a half dozen, all successfully, although it seems we may not get our acts together to expend them all, e.g. print materials, which might not help in future requests.  My appeals for help last year yielded no volunteers to help write stuff; maybe this can change in the coming months, we’ll see. 

For an overview of FY 14 allocations, see https://community.icann.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=38045777.  For what we got, see the old message below.

One thing that would probably help is if we had more consistent participation in the budgetary processes the accounting dept. has set up.  I can’t make all the calls held by Xavier Calvez and his team, and as Woody Allen says, 80% of life is just showing up.  They want people to be participating or at least showing interest, and those who do may be in a better position to make requests.  Again, if we had an engaged Treasurer or watchamacallit, that person could help maintain the channel to the finance folks.  

If anyone might be willing to help with financial stuff do let me know. 

The deadline for preliminary requests for FY 15 is 7 March 2014.  

Best,

Bill

On Sep 8, 2013, at 11:10 AM, William Drake <wjdrake at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi
> 
> A few comments on budget allocations further to the conversation I mentioned with Rob Hoggarth.
> 
> As a general matter, we should consider that the amounts I asked for in the proposals or that the staff inserted are not precise.  That is, what will actually be provided for any given activity is whatever is needed to pull it off, rather than the precise figure listed in the approval.  So for example, we're told that $11,100 is allocated for a policy conference in Singapore, but it may be that ICANN's actual costs—the room, equipment, staffing, etc—will come in under or over $11,000.  Similarly, NCUC may get it together to produce written materials that ICANN would publish in a nicely formatted manner, i.e. the proposed issue briefs or 'newsletter' per meeting, and in the process run up a $8,000 tab per the allocation.  Or centrifugal forces and bandwidth exhaustion could result in us not getting it together to make full use of the allocation, in which case we spend less (or, gulp, nothing) and it's not like there'll be a pot of leftover cash sitting there with our name on it that can be repurposed.  Bottom line, don't focus on the numbers, but assume the approved activities will be supported.
> 
> A few specifics:
> 
> On Aug 28, 2013, at 6:33 PM, William Drake <wjdrake at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> Hello
>> 
>> So this year past we decided to depart from our past asceticism and submit no less than six requests to ICANN for budgetary support.  This included two "fast track" applications for this fiscal year and four regular cycle requests for the next fiscal year.  I'm very happy to report that the board has approved the budget along with the staff's recommended support for our applications.  (Have a look at budget-requests-fy14-22aug13-en.pdf  …we did better than some other, more demanding constituencies, no names…)  These included:
>> 
>> I.  Fast Track 
>> 
>> FY14-A04-01
>> 5-NCUC - Print Materials Fast Track
>> Deferred to Regular Track Review 
>> 
>> => funds were made available from extant money pools to print our brochures, and more funds will be available for other print materials going forward, below.
>> 
>> 
>> FY14-A04-02
>> 6-NCUC - Workshops & Related Outreach at IGF 2013 Fast Track
>> $12,000 Approved
>> 
>> => These funds provide travel support to the chairs of NCSG, NCUC, and NPOC to participate in the IGF Bali workshop, http://www.intgovforum.org/cms/wks2013/workshop_2013_accomplish_list_view.php?xpsltipq_je=249
>> 
>> 
>> II.  Regular Requests
>> 
>> 
>> FY14-B05-01 
>> 39-NCUC FY14 Regular Budget Request (Policy Conference) Regular Track
>> $11,100  Approved, but staff comment is, "Staff needs to confirm schedule/space availability for Friday meeting pre-London."  
>> 
>> => That is a mistake; I revised the request to move the policy conference to Singapore, so as not to conflict with ALAC's ATLAS II summit.  Have followed up, will again.  Count on Singapore 21 March.  When we are over the hump of the bylaws revision we should start planning the Singpore meeting and the Jan/Feb. civil society roundtable with Fadi.
> 
> So we are on for a big one day event, and will need to solicit member ideas and reconstitute the events team, probably after Buenos Aires.  Should be fun.
>> 
>> 
>> FY14-B05-03 
>> 41-NCUC FY14 Regular Budget Request (New EC Retreat) Regular Track
>> $6,950  Approved, staff comment is, "Combining community leadership strategy sessions with an ICANN meeting can be a cost-effective way to leverage the gathering of ICANN community members. Granted for a pre-meeting prior to the ICANN Public Meeting in Singapore."
>> 
>> => So the new EC we elect in the coming cycle will need to get to Singapore several days early to do this retreat, which will probably be Thursday 30th, followed by the policy conference.
> 
> This will happen in Singapore on 20 March.  The 2014 EC will have to decide what can be done about travel support beyond the 3 ICANN provided slots.  NB, of relevance here is something I'll mention in a separate message in a few minutes, the staff's proposed new regional outreach funding, which could allow us to bring the Asian EC member to Singapore on that ICANN budget line.
>> 
>> 
>> FY14-B05-02 
>> 40-NCUC FY14 Regular Budget Request (Print Materials) Regular Track
>> $8,000  Approved, staff comment is, "Based on positive experiences and feedback in FY13, ICANN staff has made accommodations to continue to provide GNSO non-contract community members with publication support in the form of production and printing resources. The Communications Team has established a process for this resource and will coordinate with the NCUC and other interested non-contract communities. To manage costs, the staff will work with ICANN vendors and suppliers on behalf of the community."
>> 
>> => So if we wanted to get serious about disseminating noncommercial views we could for example produce prior to each ICANN meeting a shiny doc with nice formatting summarizing our positions on the issues that will be taken up at the meeting, etc.
>> 
>> 
>> FY14-B05-04 
>> 42-NCUC FY14 Regular Budget Request (IGF Bali supplemental) Regular Track
>> $8,000  Approved, staff comment is "This request was granted as part of the Fast Track process and has been revised to reflect a two additional NCUC travel slots for the IGF meeting."
>> 
>> => We have inquired whether the funds could also be used more flexibly if need be, e.g split up differently and allocated in a manner to bring more people with partial support, TBD.
> 
> Please see separate message sent today.
> 
> Any questions or comments, let me know.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Bill
>> 
>> 
>> Anyway who wants to read the proposals that were submitted is free to do so on https://community.icann.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=38045777
>> 
>> Best
>> 
>> Bill
>> 
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>> **********************************************************
>> William J. Drake
>> International Fellow & Lecturer
>>   Media Change & Innovation Division, IPMZ
>>   University of Zurich, Switzerland
>> Chair, Noncommercial Users Constituency, 
>>   ICANN, www.ncuc.org
>> william.drake at uzh.ch (w), wjdrake at gmail.com (h),
>>   www.williamdrake.org
>> ***********************************************************
>> 
> 
> **********************************************************
> William J. Drake
> International Fellow & Lecturer
>   Media Change & Innovation Division, IPMZ
>   University of Zurich, Switzerland
> Chair, Noncommercial Users Constituency, 
>   ICANN, www.ncuc.org
> william.drake at uzh.ch (w), wjdrake at gmail.com (h),
>   www.williamdrake.org
> ***********************************************************
> 

**********************************************************
William J. Drake
International Fellow & Lecturer
  Media Change & Innovation Division, IPMZ
  University of Zurich, Switzerland
Chair, Noncommercial Users Constituency, 
  ICANN, www.ncuc.org
william.drake at uzh.ch (w), wjdrake at gmail.com (h),
  www.williamdrake.org
***********************************************************

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