[Gnso-sc-budget] [EXTERNAL] [v.0.9.2] Please review urgently - draft Council comment on the Budget

Wed Mar 7 00:00:11 UTC 2018

(personal capacity)

I agree that we should be looking at our relatively small piece of the ICANN budget for effectiveness and efficiency, and prima facie the example of halting ineffective PDPs seems to me a sensible idea. However, our success depends on many factors, including the availability or lack thereof of resources, and these hamper our progress.

To give an example from outside of the Council; if CROP funding is cut, some Stakeholder Groups will be unable to inform their members of the status of various ICANN policy issues, and will be unable to recruit subject matter experts who can positively contribute effectively to the multistakeholder model. This could harm a PDP, for instance - but should that result in a PDP being labelled a failure, or could the variable actually be that CROP (for example) is too small / not available and so the right participant mix is not in the working group? My point is, we need to assess process as well as progress, and where process changes are positively or negatively impacting progress, we need to have a way to detect this.

However, there are a lot of challenges involved in actually measuring these metrics, and I fear we would need even greater budget granularity than we are currently calling for in our comment in order to do this. I was thinking through how I would assess whether a PDP was making sufficient progress or not given the investment, and it's hard to answer that absent a lot more information. That said, the fear in requesting higher levels of specificity (and I guess more frequent reporting if we were to use this information to track our activities) is that any well-intentioned attempts to improve our performance could instead result in diminishing returns and escalating costs in generating this information.

To Donna's point that "it might be helpful to request assistance from ICANN in identifying possible metrics that we might use," I am uncomfortable asking ICANN to help us develop the metrics which will be used to measure our effectiveness and efficiency. I already have concerns around the high level of staff involvement in implementing 'community' decisions, which themselves are frequently drafted by staff. There is no implied criticism here; staff help us a lot and that is appreciated, but there are some things which I think we should be doing, and this is one of them. The successful implementation of any metrics which assess our own performance are going to require the interest of all of the Council. I am hopeful that if we develop them on our own - and obviously this will not happen before the deadline for submitting our comment on the FY19 Budget - we can better achieve buy-in.

I appreciate that it might sound disingenuous to say we are going to hold ourselves more accountable and to then not explain how - but I think this is a true statement. I think we did open that conversation in January, however we have not yet as a Council defined the metrics which we will use to promote successful outcomes. Or at least this is my perception. New Councillor here ;-)

I think we can get there, and this is certainly a conversation I'd like to be involved in. Thanks.

Best wishes,

Ayden Férdeline

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
On 7 March 2018 12:12 AM, Michele Neylon - Blacknight <michele at blacknight.com> wrote:

> Donna
>
> I’d be supportive of us, as GNSO / GNSO Council, eating our own dog food and being conscious of expenditure / resource usage in our work. So I don’t think it’s unreasonable for us to state as much while also asking for the greater visibility on budget etc., in order to make this happen.
>
> As you noted, this is something that we discussed during the meeting in January. Some of us noted that if PDPs were being run like business projects that resourcing them and suspending or stopping them would be quite normal.
>
> Regards
>
> Michele
>
> --
>
> Mr Michele Neylon
>
> Blacknight Solutions
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> From: Gnso-sc-budget <gnso-sc-budget-bounces at icann.org> on behalf of "Austin, Donna via Gnso-sc-budget" <gnso-sc-budget at icann.org>
> Reply-To: "Austin, Donna" <Donna.Austin at team.neustar>
> Date: Tuesday 6 March 2018 at 17:24
> To: Ayden Férdeline <icann at ferdeline.com>, "gnso-sc-budget at icann.org" <gnso-sc-budget at icann.org>
> Subject: Re: [Gnso-sc-budget] [EXTERNAL] [v.0.9.2] Please review urgently - draft Council comment on the Budget
>
> [Thanks to Ayden and Berry for bringing these comments to this point.]
>
> I do have one overarching comment that I would like others to consider.
>
> Our comments state that ‘we’ will be more efficient and effective in the use of our resources but we don’t indicate how we would do this.
>
> Our comments call for others to be held accountable by way of metrics that speak to return on investment.
>
> If we are serious in our claim that we will be more accountable then it might be helpful to request assistance from ICANN in identifying possible metrics that we might use. We did discuss in January the possibility of allocating budgets to PDPs and holding the WG Chairs accountable to the spend. ICANN has developed a dashboard that they use of the Review Teams (CCT, SSR, ATRT) that we may be able to adopt some form of regarding PDP management.  I’m concerned that our comments could be read as disingenuous if we don’t provide some indication of how we intend to hold ourselves accountable.
>
> Donna
>
> From: Gnso-sc-budget [mailto:gnso-sc-budget-bounces at icann.org] On Behalf Of Ayden Férdeline
> Sent: Tuesday, March 06, 2018 7:47 AM
> To: gnso-sc-budget at icann.org
> Subject: [EXTERNAL] [Gnso-sc-budget] [v.0.9.2] Please review urgently - draft Council comment on the Budget
>
> Dear all,
>
> Just a friendly reminder that we need to send our comment on the FY19 Budget through to the Council mailing list today for evaluation and review.
>
> Unless I hear any objections, I plan to send through the attached file (with track changes marked to 'accepted') in 3 hours time at 17:30 UTC.
>
> I did a quick fact check and couldn't find where the $8.1 million figure originated from re: increase in personnel costs. Document #2, page 9 says $7.3 million, so I've adjusted this now - but I would appreciate it if someone could please double check this.
>
> The other changes I made were largely grammatical, replacing "implantation" on page 3 with "implementation", and reverting one sentence regarding GSE to a previous draft of our comment ([please see my email here](https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__mm.icann.org_pipermail_gnso-2Dsc-2Dbudget_2018-2DMarch_000261.html&d=DwMGaQ&c=MOptNlVtIETeDALC_lULrw&r=CwipU91YB6EkpFXK9ynnT_QUef4yC5p7jpsDm8cU97g&m=GV0WjEg-2RTavQHjaHrmSnmRu3iua5ndTihysdoxyTQ&s=spDS3t_C-PQ2ymBEfJGvsVI8eJCnz3e2c3KOubMV7jw&e=)).
>
> I have also flagged one edit on page 2, second bullet point of our specific comments. "SAs/Cs" was changed to "SGs/Cs". However "SGs/Cs" was the original language, and I believe the change to "SOs/Cs" originated from Marilyn. Marilyn could you please review this and kindly advise if this change to "SOs/Cs" was intentional? Thank you.
>
> All - as a matter of priority could you please review the attached comment one last time and indicate if you have any concerns? Thank you very much.
>
> Best wishes,
>
> Ayden Férdeline
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