EMM 2

ALAC should define a set of metrics for assessing the level of active engagement of “policy advice” or “outreach and engagement” ALMs. Active ALMs should be provided with funding to attend regional meetings including AGMs, Internet Governance Schools, and the rotating regional ATLAS meeting when it occurs in their region.

Although based on experience, such metrics are neither easy nor foolproof, but the ALAC agrees that being able to measure such performance is desirable.

Many of the restructuring recommendations seem to be driven largely by a desire to free up travel slots so that they could be used by Rapporteurs. 

There is no doubt that a number of extra travel slots could be useful to allow those who make significant contributions to attend ICANN meetings. To date, that has only been possible when regular travellers cannot attend a meeting. 

The ALAC believes that merging RALO leadership with ALAC Membership and Liaisons with NomCom appointments would both have extremely detrimental effects and are not a reasonable or rational exchange for the questionable benefit of having 10-12 rapporteurs attend meetings. 

The ALAC does agree that having the ability to bring a limited number (perhaps 5) of non-RALO/ALAC leaders and Liaisons to ICANN meetings could be extremely beneficial, but believes that other methods must be found for doing so. For FY18, the ALAC has received permission to being two such people, active in ICANN policy activities, to each ICANN meeting.

Given that some other AC/SO travel allocations have rapidly increased over the last seven years (the period for which statistics are available), while the At-Large allocation has remained nearly unchanged, perhaps there are alternatives to the Review Team proposal.

The EMM model presumes that we (an undefined we) will be able to recognize when people have been “active” for N (3, 6 or 12, the number has varied throughout the report and subsequent interactions with the Review Team) months, and also presumes that we will monitor them to ensure that their activity levels are maintained. It was pointed out to the Review Team that this was not a minor “implementation detail”. 

Recognizing that people are truly active (and not just dialing into meetings and never saying anything, or using mailing lists but never sending out anything other than “+1” indicating support or birthday wishes) is a really difficult problem that At-Large has been grappling with for years. If the EMM were to actually be successful, the number of such people to monitor could be significant. Who would do this monitoring, and on what basis is completely unclear. The issue unfortunately does not go away with rejecting the EMM and we must come up with better methodology recognizing significant contributors.

The ALAC is not in a position to guarantee travel funding to all active At-Large contributors, although we will continue to have this as a target. Moreover, the ALAC is aware of the limitations that ICANN has in massively funding activities outside of its core mission.