Recommendation 3

At-Large Support Staff should be more actively involved in supporting the policy work of the ALAC, drafting position papers and other policy related work based on ALAC input. Staff competencies should be adjusted accordingly.

Staff resources are disproportionately concentrated on administrative support. Staff should have greater capacity to support preparation of policy advice.

In other parts of ICANN, particularly those which generate large and substantive documents, staff plays a key role in such drafting, but explicitly at the bidding of the volunteer community. Much of ALAC's outputs are far less massive and the need for such support is lessened. Currently, an ICANN At-Large Staff member edits and “cleans up” documents drafted by volunteers and in several cases has created the initial draft based on instructions from community members. This activity is expected to grow, although slowly. At-Large does require additional support for communications with its members within ALSes and RALOs. Staff will be the main content creators of the planned regular messages outlining policy activity that will be sent to individual and ALS members. Although administrative in nature, At-Large also requires additional support for creating records of its meetings and discussions are under way to address this. Such staff work is the norm for other ACs and SOs.