[Ccwg-auctionproceeds] Notes and action items

Tue Apr 10 02:22:34 UTC 2018

Thanks Daniel. 

I totally agree with you about the need to keep working on the preamble to give guidance on the scope to the mechanism. This is why this CCWG was organized on the first place. 

I was thinking about grant cycles. In my experience, what many agencies do is that they set up a "program" that will fund X activities during a determined period of time. Then, that "program" is reviewed and adjusted and a new one gets approved before the other one ends for continuation. I do not know what those tranches might be in terms of length, but I really don’t think that it will be a good idea for ICANN -who has not done anything like this before- to rush and allocated 230M in one go. That will be quite risky, as there will be no time to implement and corrective measures if things don't work out. 

Just as an example, let's say the mechanism (an ICANN-hosted grant management program) gets a first budget of 50M for its first tranche, and that the tranche is 3 years. They will open a first call to allocate 15M and that will be open for a few months, projects are selected and start working. 18 months later a second call opens, and the review of the period is done, if everything goes well, this unit at ICANN will get another 50M and so one until the 230M are exhausted. That will be around 12 years of operations. Or 3 tranches of 3 years, each for 76M+ will be 9 years, or 2 of 5 years and 50M... whatever is decided. That should also help manage budget/overhead, set up monitoring mechanisms, let things mature enough to actually be able to observe impact... but it will still be a finite exercise, not an ongoing new department that ICANN will maintain forever. Working like that you could really calculate the salaries and operational expenses to run the program for that X number of years and manage the proposed 5-10% in a reasonable way. One of the main issues we had during all of these conversations is to try to figure out how much will it actually cost to manage the program. This might actually provide some clarity to begin with.

I also agree with you about the need to work on grant sizes as it is a very important aspect to know how many people ICANN will need to manage the grants, and the type of software to use for application, selection and monitoring, among many other details. However, I think it is possible to support small grants as well as large grants. Small grants could be an exception (rather than the norm). My take on that one, will be to allow for people to submit proposals based on what they need with guidelines around budget request size (small less than 250K, medium less than 1M and large up to 3M -I think 10M is too big for the first allocation as ICANN has no experience doing this-). 

Looking forward to continuing the conversation and to close/solve some elements of the discussion so that we can feel that we are making progress. The way I see this is that we keep going on circles instead of eating this elephant, one biiig chunk at the time ( 

Regards,

Sylvia

---------

Sylvia Cadena | APNIC Foundation - Head of Programs | sylvia at apnic.net | http://www.apnic.foundation
ISIF Asia, WSIS Champion on International Cooperation 2018 | http://www.isif.asia | FB ISIF.asia | @ISIF_Asia | G+ ISIFAsia | 
6 Cordelia Street, South Brisbane, QLD,  4101 Australia | PO Box 3646 | +10 GMT | skypeID: sylviacadena | Tel: +61 7 3858 3100 |  Fax: +61 7  3858 3199
* Love trees. Print only if necessary.

On 7/4/18, 12:22 am, "Daniel Dardailler" <danield at w3.org> wrote:

    Hello Sylvia, all

    thanks for your thoughts.

    > 1. I think we finally found the right wording. "In service of ICANN's
    > mission" gives real meaning to what the auction proceeds funds can
    > support. Great!

    I agree that it is a good wording (in particular because it matches the 
    by-laws wording, as I mentioned a year or so agao) but without more 
    guidance on scope, like we attempted to deliver with the preamble on 
    open and interoperable internet, we're leaving the scoping part of our 
    work pretty much empty IMO.

    I agree with the board that our preamble is a bit unclear on its 
    semantics, but at least it gives future evaluators useful directions we 
    all agreed on.

    > 
    > 2. I think the suggestion from the board about programming
    > disbursement based in tranches (3-4 years period) is common practice
    > among many donors and agencies and supports the overall need of
    > fine-tunning processes and procedures as the mechanism kicks off.
    > Having ways to identify when things might not be working and ways to
    > tackle them and incorporate corrective measurements is key. Another
    > benefit of this is that those tranches could be aligned with ICANN's
    > strategic planning/focus. It will be a good idea to try to align those
    > tranches with whatever cycles ICANN normally goes through, so that it
    > is easier to be "in service of ICANN"s mission".

    I'm not sure what 3-4years refers to, one tranche ? or the entire 
    duration of the full auctions benefits granting ?
    If one tranche, does this mean that the board is OK with a grant agency 
    setup that would last for several of these tranches, so potentially more 
    than 10 years ? (five 4-year tranches is 20 years).

    > 
    > 3. The evaluation of the mechanism itself and the projects it will
    > support should also be sync and aligned with those programming cycles.
    > Assessing impact on a 3 to 4 years framework makes a lot more sense
    > than assessing projects only during their implementation period and
    > final reporting requirements. Revisiting projects/organizations
    > supported after a while and track how funds allocated supported their
    > growth and development is a key part of assessing the real impact, and
    > it is also a very good mechanism to build community, strengthen
    > collaboration and have an understanding of the issues on the field. I
    > just have a cautionary word of advice when defining those mechanisms,
    > so that there is balance between the quantitative and the qualitative
    > information collected. Anecdotal information about how "god" or "bad"
    > something is will certainly not be enough, but focusing only on
    > quantitative indicators is also an incomplete view of the work done. A
    > key element on that evaluation/monitoring strategy is to identify the
    > individuals that are behind projects /organizations supported. Most
    > organization/projects that are successful are so because of the team
    > behind them. Putting a face to the dollars invested, also helps to
    > support leadership development, build capacity and a support network
    > of peers.
    > 
    > 4. Regarding the question about what is better... if funding few large
    > projects or more smaller projects, I think that it will really depend
    > on the areas of focus and the activities provided. There may be
    > projects that will not be successful if they do not have the necessary
    > budget commitment, so they might be at a disadvantage from the
    > beginning. My suggestion will be that out of the first tranches to be
    > explored, the mechanism allocates funding across both options, so that
    > their effectiveness can also be compared -to a certain extent-.

    I agree that we should be flexible to start with, but still, are we 
    talking about granting 20K or 20M ? I've been in this group for more 
    than a year and I still have no idea of what the group has in mind. I 
    think we should set up some ranges of acceptable grants (e.g. 500K up to 
    10M). It costs of a lot of grant agency resources to merely reject 
    projects in all fairness, and I'm not sure we want to let this thing go 
    live with the potential of folks asking 10K for their schools or 200M at 
    once for rewiring Antartica, and having to read all their literature for 
    nothing.

    I think that if we take the goal of minimizing the overhead costs 
    seriously, and knowing that managing a 10M$ project is not 20 times more 
    expensive than managing a 500K$ project, we'll have to come up with some 
    rules on average amounts to be funded (like all granters do usually, to 
    manage their project officer staff).

    When are we planning to discuss these topics ? Or are these sort of 
    issues moved ahead for when the grant agency/dept/partnership gets 
    created ? (and become their issues ?)

    > 
    > Kind regards,
    > 
    > Sylvia
    > 
    > 
    > ---------
    > 
    > Sylvia Cadena | APNIC Foundation - Head of Programs | sylvia at apnic.net
    > | http://www.apnic.foundation
    > ISIF Asia, WSIS Champion on International Cooperation 2018 |
    > http://www.isif.asia | FB ISIF.asia | @ISIF_Asia | G+ ISIFAsia |
    > 6 Cordelia Street, South Brisbane, QLD,  4101 Australia | PO Box 3646
    > | +10 GMT | skypeID: sylviacadena | Tel: +61 7 3858 3100 |  Fax: +61 7
    >  3858 3199
    > * Love trees. Print only if necessary.
    > 
    > 
    > 
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