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Strategic Working Session for ALAC and RALO Leaders at ICANN Public Meetings 57 and 58 (from the ALAC)

To help the ALAC and RALO leadership carry out their work, including the current At-Large Review focusing on the nearly 200 At-Large Structures, the ALAC is again requesting Strategic Working Sessions for the ALAC and RALO Leaders to take place on the Saturday at the start of ICANN 57 and 58.

In particular, this request is for the necessary elements of these ALAC Strategy Sessions, including an external facilitator to lead the ALAC in the prioritizing their workload, facilitation skills and a working lunch.

ALAC Development Session at ICANN 57 Second Pilot Activity (from the ALAC)

Based on the success of the ALAC Development Session at ICANN 54, the ALAC is again requesting an ALAC Development Session for the 15 members of the ALAC, both continuing and incoming members, as well as ALAC liaisons to the ccNSO, GNSO and SSAC on the last day of the ICANN 57 Meeting to be held in Puerto Rico.

This ALAC Development Session, will foster co-operation within the ALAC as well as allow planning for ongoing and upcoming projects and activities within the ALAC. The Development Session will serve as a team-building exercise to increase collaboration and to work more effectively as a virtual global team inter-sessionally.

The activity will also include sessions on professional skills development and teambuilding. This latter activity will increase the ability of all ALAC members to develop critical skills needed to more effectively participate in meetings and work in a multi-cultural environment.

The requested day for the ALAC Development Session is Friday, 4 November between 12:00 and 18:00.

Submit. 

Date moved to Friday, 4 November.

At-Large FY17 Special Community Request for a Real-time Captioning of Adobe Connect Meetings In English, Spanish, and French (from Judith Hellerstein for the ALAC)

This is a continuation of our current pilot program of captioning for 3 RALO and/or ALAC monthly meetings, and/or 3 Working Group meetings or webinars over a 4 month period in FY16.

Our goal in this continuation of the pilot is to provide real-time captioning for either 3 RALO meetings a month or 2 RALO and 1 ALAC meeting, and/or 3 working group meetings or webinars a month to enable full participation of all At-Large Users within ICANN. We also want to raise awareness of the importance of including captioning whenever language support is offered. We are targeting RALO meetings since our goal is to increase engagement in ICANN within each of the respective regions. We are also targeting the working groups and webinars for the same reason as well as to promote more engagement from RALOs in these working groups. We think this will lead to more effective participation and engagement within ICANN. This is especially the case for people who are coming from bandwidth challenged countries where lack of bandwidth has limited their participation within ICANN. Adobe Connect is a large user of bandwidth and as such makes it difficult for those with limited bandwidth to fully participate. Adigo calls are helpful in that regard, but often in many places cell coverage is sparse and calls often drop or use up too much of a person’s quota.

The goal of the pilot is to gather the necessary metrics to illustrate the need for captioning not only for accessibility reasons but also for those with limited bandwidth. The data gained from this second phase of the pilot should help us meet these goals and show the need for captioning ICANN wide.

In the original phase of the pilot we restricted ourselves to only providing English Language captions, but in this second phase we want to add support for Spanish and/or French as we have gotten requests for captioning in this language.

The ALAC has been allocated travel slots specifically for GNSO and ccNSO liaisons to attend ICANN meetings. Currently these positions have been filled by persons who are already entitled to travel to ICANN Meetings.

The ALAC notes that since this request involves no additional budget allocation, it might be considered one which should be resolved purely within the Constituency Travel processes, and the ALAC agrees. However, since that process has not provided the needed flexibility, the ALAC is following this unusual process.

Opportunities exist for At-Large members to do local outreach and engagement about ICANN and ICANN policy related issues. The local activities can include  local presentations, brown bag lunch topics, local  business persons presentations i.e., Kiwanais, Rotary, Professional Women’s  University Groups, Chamber of Commerce and more. These local groups at the grassroots are looking for professional speakers on a weekly basis and rely on local experts on various topics. They open up opportunities for speaking engagements at minimum cost.

The ALAC requests that each of the five At-large Regional At-Large Organizations (RALO’s) are given access up to $2,000 each for targeted local discretionary funds to permit the local travel, luncheons, displays, graphic and promotional Facebook/Twitter graphics.

For complete transparency and proper oversight, all RALO budget requests will be reviewed through a process defined once funding is approved.

Fixing the bugs in ICANN’s machine translation tool used for the LACRALO mailing lists (from the Technology Taskforce)

LACRALO has two mailing lists:

The key issue is that ICANN has not allocated a dedicated person to fix this software tool. Senior staff have not given this critical communication tool the priority it deserves. The continuing lack of an effective tool to allow EN and ES speakers within LACRALO to communicate with each other has contributed to challenging situation within LACRALO.

It is clear that a dedicated IT staff resource is critically needed at ICANN with a mandate to fixing this software.

Hence this budget request is for funding to be made available for the staff resources to work on ICANN’s new machine translation tool and fix the remaining bugs by October 2016 so that the new software tool can be installed and ease the communication difficulties faced by LACRALO, the At­Large Community and ICANN Staff over the past 9 years.