At-Large FY17 Budget Development Workspace

At-Large FY16 Special Community Request for a Strategic Working Session for ALAC and RALO Leaders at ICANN Public Meetings 57 and 58.

Given the increased workload of the ALAC and RALO leadership, 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.

At ICANN 57, both current and incoming ALAC Members, RALO Leaders and Liaisons would be included. .

Based on the success of the ALAC Development Session at ICANN 54, the ALAC is again requesting a one day ALAC Development Session for the 15 members of the ALAC, both continuing and incoming members, as well as ccNSO, GNSO and SSAC Liaisons 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 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 Session will also include a session on professional skills development. 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.

An external facilitator will lead the session.

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

At-Large FY17 Special Community Request for a Real-time Captioning of Adobe Connect Meetings In English, Spanish, and French

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.

Visit to China by # of members of the APRALO Leadership Team (plus regional partners if available) (from APRALO Leadership Team)

China has recently proposed the registration of a national At-Large Structure – the Internet Society of China. APRALO has discussed and supported this application while at the same time recognising the many challenges posed to our regional organisation by this unique application. We have been very fortunate to have Kaili Kan, as the APRALO NomCom representative who has been able to respond to the many queries that arose out of the debate about inclusion of this organisation into the APRALO community. ISC is significantly unique, yet it is made so by an extremely complicated political system which does not normally allow individual groups to apply as members to international organisations. We have identified some anomalies with two current ALSes which may not have government endorsement. We believe that enabling ISC to be registered with ICANN is a major and positive directional move for the Chinese government and we would welcome their inclusion into APRALO (SO1.3).

After our comprehensive discussions the APRALO Leadership Team would like to send a delegation to Beijing to talk with the Beijing ICANN office and members of the ISC leadership team, about ways in which APRALO can assist to create effective mechanisms which will facilitate effective participation and involvement within the ICANN ecosystem (SO4.3, 4.4, 5.3). ISC covers nearly all local government, profit, not-for-profit and civil society organisations related to the Internet (SO3.3). For this reason we would like to include representatives from our regional partners to provide their support to this delegation. Our regional partners include APTLD, APNIC and DotAsia (SO2.3). Being accompanied by these organisations would make the discussions, both as a whole and as individual sectors, more meaningful and productive.

The Eleventh Meeting of the annual Internet Governance Forum (IGF), under the revised mandate, is tentatively scheduled to take place in Mexico City, Mexico in September 2016. The final announcement relating to the venue and dates is expected shortly at the time of preparing this proposal. The slight delay in the announcement is on account of the requirement for the formal renewal of the IGF Mandate, which has since been obtained at the WSIS+10 meeting in December 2015.

IGF is an open and public forum that brings interested participants from various stakeholder groups as equals, under a multistakeholder process. IGF focuses on public policy issues relating to the Internet. Starting out in 2006, original 5-year IGF mandate was renewed once. The current renewal at the WSIS+10 meeting in December 2015, is for a period of ten years. The extension of the duration of the mandate indicates the growing importance of IGF.

IGF's open format allows anyone interested in Internet policy to participate. Consequently, it presents a unique opportunity for outreach as well as for networking and interacting with several global communities that are otherwise difficult to contact independently.

Several members of APRALO—including some of the members of the APRALO Leadership Team—have been actively participating in IGF over the years, and have been organizing workshops on different IG-related topics.

In 2015, for the first time, APRALO was able to send an official delegation to IGF 2015 held at João Pessoa, Brazil, with ICANN budget support. The initiative was very successful, and the APRALO team was able to extensively interact with members of APRALO, members of the Asia-Pacific Internet Governance community, members of other RALOs, ICANN community members, and the larger IGF Community. The APRALO team also supported the APRALO members in organizing their workshops.

Continuing further with the successful 2015 IGF initiative, the APRALO Leadership Team proposes participation of 5 members of its Leadership Team at the 2016 IGF. 

Showcase local APRALO activities at APNIC42 to be held in Dhaka, Bangladesh (from ISOC Bangladesh)

APNIC will be holding one of their meetings in Dhaka, and we would like to take advantage of having many people coming from all over Bangladesh and beyond to showcase what our ALS, ISOC Bangladesh Dhaka is doing as an APRALO organisation, and also to use the event to highlight ICANN’s activities not only in the Bangladesh community but also in other regional and global areas as well. The event will be held at the end of the workshop week, but it will serve as an introduction to the conference week which we will encourage our participants to join, to learn more about APNIC and the internet ecosystem.

ICANN workshops in support to the 1^st  Palestinian National IGF (from ISOC Palestine)

As an initiative from the Internet Society Palestine Chapter (ISOC Palestine), we are planning to organize the first Palestinian National Internet Governance Forum (Pal IGF) for two days to be held in Ramallah in August 2016.

In spite the many geopolitical challenges, absence of the parliament and national regulatory authorities in Palestine, the Internet and its governance is working well under the regulations of the split government and private sector.  However the role of well-informed civic engagement proved to be very important in advocating the alignment of Internet policies.

ISOC Palestine is aiming through Pal IGF to bring all stakeholders together for the first time, to encourage and facilitate the cooperation among the concerning parties. 

Our request is to provide partial financial support to Pal IGF and full support to the two ICANN workshops.

The first workshop will be an information and capacity building session about ICANN and its role into the Internet governance ecosystem.

Support to the First Indian School on Internet Governance (ISIG 2016) (from ISOC TRV, ISOC Delhi)

India has a population of 1.28 billion (Jan 2016), and an Internet user base that is fast approaching 500 million. Despite the very large end-user base, participation of the country's community members in Internet Governance has been relatively low. At the same time, there has been widespread participation in India in the recent debate on Net Neutrality and Zero Rating, where more than 10 million users responded to the regulator's call for opinions.

One of the most significant reasons for the low participation in Internet Governance, particularly through institutions including ICANN, is the low awareness about how and why users can participate in IG.

In order to enhance capacity of the Internet End-User Community in particular and Civil Society in general, and to stimulate their participation in Internet Governance activities, ISOC Delhi and ISOC-TRV, both member ALSes of APRALO, are jointly planning to organize the first India School on Internet Governance (ISIG 2016) in July 2016 (tentatively). ISIG 2016 aims to bring together about 25 participants in the first batch and is expected to be an annual programme. Resource persons drawn from the International IG Community will handle sessions. The syllabus has been loosely based on the APSIG syllabus (used with permission).

Most of the funding for the program will be generated from internal sources (particularly from NIXI, Delhi), but the organizers are also applying to ICANN (through this proposal) and ISOC (if they have funding available).

EURALO requests funding for 5 EURALO members to attend the ICANN-Studienkreis to take place on 6-7 October 2016 in Dubrovnik, Croatia. The ICANN Studienkreis ("ICANN Study group") is an open network composed of experts in the Internet industry who are dedicated to organizing high-level expert seminars on issues regarding ICANN development and internet governance. Individuals and constituencies from the private sector, government, academic institutions, the civil society and the media participate in yearly conferences organized by ICANN Studienkreis.

It is important to note that ICANN’s President and CEO Fadi Chehadé has attended the last 2 ICANN Studienkreis, as the conference is directly related to ICANN activities.

This request includes travel support, hotel, per diem and a contingency fund. The total amount we are requesting is $6 000.

FY17 Community Special Budget Request Timeline

Kick off and Submission Period

staff@atlarge.icann.org