[NCUC-EC] Staff Proposed Regional Outreach Support

[William Drake]

Hi

Last message for today concerning my conversation with Rob.

As you know, after years of seeming indifference, there's much staff activity in the Fadi era on the notion of outreach.  It's easy to be of two minds about this.  On the one hand, some of us raised outreach with board, staff, GNSO et al over and over for years, arguing that ICANN really needed for both operational and political reasons to broaden and deepen the engagement of developing country governments and stakeholders and others, and felt like we were getting nowhere.  So it's nice to see movement at last.  But on the other hand, the way outreach is being done is arguably much more centralized and staff-driven than community-oriented than one might like.  Many folks have raised this concern in the outreach group, but it's been a bit difficult.

Staff is now contemplating a related pilot program that will probably please a number of community people and could begin after the BA meeting.  Under the  "Regional Community Outreach Travel Pilot Program," the FY14 budget would allocate travel funding for each of the 5 At Large RALOS and the 5 GNSO Non-Contracted community constituencies.  Funding would be available to each for 5 "regional" outreach trips per year.  So if there's a big Internet governance meeting being held in say Latin America where we could get PR bang for the buck by having an EC or regular member attend and fly the flag, ICANN would cover the cost.  We would be obliged to coordinate this with ICANN's VP for LA.

Staff are still thinking about the details and will down the line solicit community input.  One point I pressed him on was whether such funds could be used to support attendance at ICANN meetings.  He said that if people went to that well too much then opponents of the idea would probably manage to kill it on the grounds that it's not being used for the intended purpose.  But he also said that if we could make the case that there was an especially pressing need and this is really the best way for us to use the money, we might be able to, for example, ask for funds for the Asian EC member to attend Singapore, the Euro EC member to attend London, etc.  Again, all still fluid, but of relevance to our advanced planning for Singapore etc…

Best,

Bill