AT-LARGE GATEWAY
At-Large Regional Policy Engagement Program (ARPEP)
At-Large Review Implementation Plan Development
Page History
...
Independent Examiner’s Final Recommendation | 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. |
Issue Identified | |
Does ALAC Support Recommendation? | |
If Not, Please Provide Reasoning. | |
If ALAC Does Not Support Recommendation, Does It Suggest an Alternative Recommendation? If so, please provide a suggested alternative Recommendation. | |
Prioritization | |
Additional Working Party Comments | |
ALAC Comments | Status: Accept Comment: Although based on experience, such metrics are neither easy nor foolproof, but the ALAC agrees that being able to measure such performance is desirable. 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. == ALM “activity” certification 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 ALAC does not support this Implementation Guideline. Specific issues will be more fully addressed in section 7 of this document. To implement such a radical and untested change, against the judgement of those who have been working in this arena for years, is at best risky, and at worst exceedingly dangerous. During discussions in Copenhagen, a Review Team member mentioned that the CCWG-Accountability Empowered Community measures were also untested. The difference is that these were developed by the entire ICANN community over an extended period of time and approved by all of the chartering ACs and SOs. ** Travel Issues 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. 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 following table shows the number of Full Support Equivalent (FSE) travellers (ICANN funds a specific number of travellers per AC/SO per meeting. The support for a traveller may be divided between multiple people (for instance one receiving just airfare and one receiving hotel and per diem) that have been funded by ICANN for the AC/SOs over the last eight fiscal years (the ASO is fully funded by the Regional Internet Registries). In most years, the numbers are slightly inflated from the actual approved traveller because incoming members often attend the Annual General Meeting but are separately funded. The number of incoming members varies from year to year. These were omitted from the FY16 counts, but are present in other years. Note that the table excludes extraordinary travel including At-Large General Assemblies and Summits, and Intersessional meetings that have become common in the GNSO. For At-Large the average over seven years for these additional travellers has been 32 FSE per year, and for the GNSO over the last two years has been 37 FSE per year. |
Possible Dependencies | |
Who Will Implement? | |
Resource Requirements | |
Budget Effects impact? | |
Implementation Timeline | |
Proposed Implementation Steps |
...