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Given the significant success of the RALO Discretionary Funding granted in FY18, FY19 and FY20, for FY21 the ALAC requests that each of the five RALO’s be given access up to $6,000 each for a total of $30k for targeted discretionary funds to permit the support of policy-related engagement activities as catering, meeting room rental for such activities as At-Large Structure read out sessions, registration fees, displays, graphics and travel within their region – as well as one cross-regional activity.

As shown by the number of useful activities requested and approved to date in the implementation of the similar FY20, FY19  and the FY18 approved Additional Budget Request for RALO Discretionary Funding, it is clear that an increase from $20k to $30k in FY21 will allow increased opportunities for At-Large members to participate in local, regional and even international policy-related engagement and outreach activities as they work to implement their At-Large Review and post-ATLAS III activities.

This is particularly the case given the At-Large Post-ATLAS III set of activities in outreach and engagement, capacity building, and communication as well as the At-Large Review Implementation, in particular Issue 2 on reducing barriers to ALS/individual participation and Issue 13 on the need for more systematic engagement in regional activities.

Giving the RALOs the ability to identify policy-related engagement and outreach activities which they can self-organize provides ICANN and the At-Large Structures with an efficient local team that is knowledgeable on ICANN policies. This results in grass-roots awareness-raising of ICANN in communities that are key for At-Large and ICANN.

All RALO Discretionary Funding requests are developed and reviewed according to criteria agreed to by the RALO leadership.

Funding has allowed for catering, printing costs and other activities associated with holding policy-related activities such as ALS readouts. The funding allows for regional travel which has been used for such activities as participation in regional Internet policy-related conferences and strengthening relations with regional Internet/DNS associations. The request for one international travel is meant to include recognized global events at which the requestor is presenting on an ICANN-related policy event on a topic that can’t be covered by an At-Large member in the region.  

These funds have seen year on year significant increase in the number of requests and successfully implemented local events. An additional year of ABR funding would allow this program to build on its success in allowing RALOs and At-Large Structures to reach out to and engage with local, regional and even international communities.

Request: 

$30k in funds allocated to the At-Large RALOs for outreach and engagement activities. The funds will be managed by At-Large staff in collaboration with GSE and At-Large Regional Leadership based on agreed upon criteria.

Seeking 12 hours of RTT services in English and 6 hours of RTT services in Spanish. The Spanish RTT will be off the Spanish interpretation that is already provided

At-Large Content Management System

Google doc

The support request is for the setup and maintenance of a content management system (CMS) for ICANN At-Large Community to share up to date news and updates about ICANN At-Large Community and its activities in a manner that

• reduces duplicative efforts in sharing At-Large Community news and updates
• makes At-Large Community news and updates more accessible to people on mobile devices
• allows for easier, automatic sharing of At-Large Content news and updates on At-Large social media channels and At-Large Community members’ websites and their social media channels.
• allows for better outreach to persons interested/involved in Internet Governance by making At-Large Community news and updates more discoverable via search engines and via social media so that such persons can decide to join and participate in the At-Large Community.

Currently a great deal of At-Large updates are done

• via emails manually copied to multiple At-Large Community mailing lists which are mostly invisible to search engines and not conducive to sharing over Instant Messaging or social media.
• via the At-Large wiki which is not easily accessible over mobile devices which makes for poor sharing via social media. The At-Large wiki also suffers by being a labyrinth to navigate making it confusing to even regular At-Large Community members as to where information on activities are located.
• a separate update is done on the At-Large Calendar about meetings.
• separate postings are done on At-Large social media mostly pointing to links on the At-Large wiki which is not easily accessible on mobile devices and confusing to non-At-Large Community persons who may stumble on the links
• possible further updates to the At-Large website when an activity has passed.
• This wastes a lot of effort manually copying and pasting information for emails, social media, updating wiki pages, calendars costing time, money and effort in just getting the information out. 

The proposed content management system would reduce such manual duplication by writing one post about At-Large news and updates and having that content automatically shared via email to At-Large mailing lists, to social media, be discoverable via search engines, accessible on mobile devices. At-Large members can have headlines from the At-Large Content Management System embedded on their websites. Write once, distribute everywhere.

At-Large Staff can be editors and At-Large Community members can submit posts about their ICANN activities in their language.

The proposed At-Large Community CMS is Wordpress, a popular CMS with relatively minimal hosting requirements and with a variety of plugins and themes. The funding request is to host this CMS outside of ICANN’s hosting so that ICANN’s security is maintained by not having cross-sharing of resources within ICANN.org.

The anticipated direct costs are

• $5 US /mth for a virtual server on Amazon Services or $60 US / year
• cost of a domain name to point to the website. $25 US / year

In addition, Amazon Services offers additional services such as :

• Amazon Translate (https://aws.amazon.com/translate/) which would allow for machine translation of articles in other languages, (such as from English to French and Spanish as well as content written in French and Spanish able to be translated to English), increasing the availability of content to the global, diverse At-Large Community and to potential At-Large members
• Amazon Polly (https://aws.amazon.com/polly/) which turns text into lifelike speech, allowing for At-Large updates to be read to persons (in combination with Amazon Translate) in their language. Apart from making At-Large updates more accessible, this offers possibilities of select At-Large updates being syndicated as a audio podcast.

As an experiment, some members of the O&E developed a prototype website https://icannatlarge.blog/ showing some of these concepts in action. 

IGF Global (2020 in Poland) specific budget - At-Large delegation proposal for IGF Global in Poland (Katowice 2020) - Final

IGF global were organized in 2017 in Geneva (Switzerland – Europe), in 2018 in Paris (France – Europe), in 2019 in Berlin (Germany – Europe) and will be organized in 2020 in Katowice (Poland – Europe).

IGF Global is organized for the 4th years in a row in Europe but for the 1st time in Eastern Europe.

To allow the participation of At-Large and organize its presence during Global IGF each of the last 3 years EURALO used one on its crop slot.

This proposal is to leave a crop slot to Euralo and to allow a new opportunity for At-Large to be more involved in Eastern part of Europe (covering both EU and AP).

As ICANN is now very much organized around 3 pillars: ICANN Board, ICANN Org. & ICANN Community.
The global ICANN budget for IGF global must be split equally between the 3 groups: ICANN Board, ICANN Org. & ICANN Community.

Part of the ICANN Community budget will be used by At-Large in the following way.

At-Large delegation proposal for IGF Global in Poland (Katowice 2020):

• Chair of ALAC
• Chair of Euralo
• Chair of O&E

If more budget is available, the At-Large delegation will add the 5 Co-Chairs of E&O (one per ICANN regions).

Travel Support: 

Request Number

3 or 8 people