[Comments-fy18-budget-08mar17] Additional ALAC Comment on FY18 Budget

[Alan Greenberg]

This request is being submitted by the ALAC Chair on behalf of the ALAC.


The ALAC has met with the GAC for many years, and have always talked 
about more substantive collaboration and the possibility of 
exchanging Liaisons. However until recently, such collaboration has 
not actually occurred. The ALAC and GAC are now more effective in 
addressing issues of joint concern (such as potential harms from 
specific sensitive gTLDs). Current GAC leadership was very supportive 
of establishing an ALAC Liaison to the GAC, ensuring a regular 
bi-directional flow of information and ensuring that both groups are 
aware of each other's "hot issues". As of June 2016, this liaison has 
now been put in place (roughly equivalent to a similar GNSO Liaison 
to the GAC). To ensure that the Liaison can fulfill his/her mandate, 
it is essential that the Liaison can attend all ICANN meetings and 
participate in GAC activities.

Currently the ALAC has travel support for its Liaisons to the GNSO 
and ccNSO. Fortunately at the moment, the Liaison to the ccNSO also 
has travel funding as an ALAC member, so we have been able to 
"reallocate" the ccNSO Liaison travel slot to the GAC Liaison. 
However such a fortuitous "spare" travel slot cannot be guaranteed 
and is not expected to be available for much longer.

The ALAC requests one additional ICANN meeting travel slot (airfare, 
hotel and per diem) to for its Liaison to the GAC.



The ongoing At-Large Review has identified the need to those At-Large 
workers who are active participants in At-Large and other ICANN 
policy activities to attend ICANN meetings. Having such active 
workers attend ICANN meetings will not only enhance At-Large 
discussions at its meetings, but will benefit the other ICANN 
activities they are involved in as well. The ALAC strongly supports 
such an initiative. The Review Final Report has not yet been 
delivered (it is due within several days), but it is expected that 
the proposed method to fund such travel will not be implementable 
(based on extensive ALAC and At-Large review of the proposed methodology).

The ALAC requests that additional travel support slots to ICANN 
meetings be allocated to At-Large active contributors. The ALAC would 
establish criteria to be met and ALAC Leadership would ensure that 
such support is only provided if other sources of funding are not 
available. This request is very comparable to the FY18 GNSO request 
(FY18-22) for four Working Group Chairs which has just been approved.

Unlike participants in many other parts of ICANN, At-Large 
participants are volunteers in the true sense of the word. Virtually 
none of these contributors are employed in activities related to 
ICANN or the domain name industry. None are paid to attend ICANN 
meetings. Many have to take unpaid time off from work or use 
vacations to attend meetings.

The ALAC further notes that its travel funding has been close to 
uniform since mid-2009 (the last meeting of FY09). At that point 
At-Large was funded for its 15 ALAC members plus two regional leaders 
per Regional At-Large Organization (RALO) for a total of 25 travel 
slots. In FY14, it was increased to 27 to cover the liaisons to the 
GNSO and ccNSO if they were not otherwise funded. During this same 
FY10-FY16 period, the number of funded GNSO travel slots has gone 
from 23 to 49 (for ICANN56). Since the GNSO did not tend to use all 
of its travel slots in the early years, the average funded number of 
GNSO travellers per meeting has increased from 17 in FY10 to slightly 
under 48 in FY16.

The ALAC requests as a pilot program for FY18, five additional travel 
slots per ICANN meeting, to be allocated to demonstrably active contributors.
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