At-Large Staff wrote:
Below please find a note prepared by the staff in order to help inform discussion in At-Large on how to allocate the travel funds available in this fiscal year. I have a few comments.
First, I am somewhat distressed by the two options presented, because both come at the expense of some or all RALO participation at ICANN meetings. This puts me, as a RALO chair, in the position of trading off my own participation for those of the ALSs and that is not a very fair choice for me to make.
When the ALAC Executive Committee met at the end of the Sydney meeting, Steve and Kevin joined them and a discussion about travel was held; one of the take-aways was that the staff would look at the available pool of funds and see what options could be envisaged that stretched those funds as far as possible to (in particular) ensure that each RALO could hold a General Assembly each year.
Again, we have the executive committee participating in activities for which it was never intended -- doubly so in this instance because the discussions were MAINLY concerned with internal RALO allocations that indeed did not affect ALAC travel subsidy at all. Has RALO leadership known about such a meeting with those consequences, maybe we would have been asked to attend -- especially since it is within the RALOs themselves that all the tradeoffs are being asked to take place. One more reason to disband the executive committee -- it continues to be oblivious regarding the bounds of its mandate, in this case even more outrageously so than usual. I'm eqully annoyed that staff allowed and encouraged this to happen without the ability of RALO leadership to be involved in tradeoffs that pit them against their own ALSs. In any event, I would like to suggest a third-category option -- one in which GAs are held every two years, staggered so that half the At-Large GA expense occurs each year. Since there are five RALOs, stagger them (for instance) so that the two most-expensive regions have GAs on odd-numbered years and the other three take place in even numbered years. Or use some other formula that tries to balance the expense -- I hope you get the idea. Perhaps this can still allow RALO leaders to fully participate in ICANN meetings while still allowing GAs to happen. - Evan