The following letter was sent on 21 September 2013 as an email with attachment. It has been reformatted and edited so that references to attachments are actual pages contained in this Wiki space.
Please note that, for those who speak English, all of the Overview document contents are presented within the Program Operations section.
Dear At Large RALO and GNSO Constituency Leaders:
The recently approved ICANN FY14 Operating Plan and Budget (FY14 OPP) includes some expanded resources for outreach and capacity-building efforts by your communities. The purpose of this note is to alert you to the availability of one of those resources, to invite you to learn more, and to ask you to partner with Staff to effectively deliver that resource to your communities over the remainder of FY14.
The ICANN Board and Senior Staff recognized in the FY14 OPP that, while organization-wide efforts are still underway to develop a comprehensive ICANN outreach strategy, it is important to give individual communities some immediate flexible support to start or continue targeted outreach efforts that support specific community outreach or recruitment strategies.
In an effort to provide that support as soon as possible and to test whether such a resource can be effectively and consistently managed on an organization-wide basis, staff was directed to develop – as a pilot program - a community regional outreach trip program to be made available to regional At-Large organizations and non-contract GNSO constituencies.
Recognizing that the formal FY14 OPP was approved almost two months into the fiscal year, staff has worked hard over the last several weeks to develop a pilot program framework that is “implementable” in the short term and “assessable” over the long term. A detailed overview of this new Community Regional Outreach Pilot Program (CROPP) is available for your review and we have created a new wiki workspace to administer the program.
In according with the FY14 OPP directive to Staff, the CROPP provides a framework in which each of the 5 At Large RALOS and each of the 5 GNSO non-contract Constituencies will have available 5 "regional" (three-day) outreach trips in FY14. The specific processes for how these resources are to be made available are set forth in the overview document and in the wiki workspace (see Program Operations). Three critical components of the program include (1) specific pre-trip approval standards (flexibly administered by your community leadership and ICANN Stakeholder Engagement Vice Presidents), (2) post-trip reviews and assessments and (3) an overall spirit of transparency by which all ICANN community members can observe the implementation of the program.
We invite you to read through the overview document, review the “developing” wiki space and email us (at Robert.hoggarth@icann.org and Janice.lange@icann.org) with any of your thoughts, comments or questions on specific aspects of the program.
Staff will be hosting two group calls for anyone interested in talking through the program in real-time on Tuesday October 1 at 1300 UTC and 1900 UTC (specific call details to follow) and we welcome participation from you or other community representatives. We are also happy to have separate calls with each of you to discuss the program. Recordings and transcripts of the two group calls will be posted on the wiki space for all to review and the wiki will have commenting capabilities to capture your Feedback.
We are producing the overview document in all 6 UN languages (targeted availability next week and posted on the wiki) and we also hope to have full plug-in translation capabilities on the wiki space available as well. We expect to produce a “Frequently Asked Questions” page on the wiki so that all will benefit from individual questions that are asked, and we are planning to schedule training for program users in early October as well.
If all goes as planned, we hope to launch the CROPP on Wednesday, 9 October. Your feedback now and throughout the course of the next eight months will help us identify areas of improvement, flag issues we have not anticipated and demonstrate whether this type of program can meet its objectives, be administered and implemented effectively and perhaps merit a longer-term budget commitment.
We are looking forward to collaborating with you all on this effort!
Best regards.
Rob Hoggarth
Janice Douma-Lange
