Evan, you seem to have a rather large misunderstanding about what transpired at this meeting. What was presented in the note from staff was not the result of some clandestine negotiations between ICANN executives and the Executive Committee. What is being presented here is a fait accomplis. It was stated earlier in the ICANN week by Kevin Wilson. At our meeting on Friday afternoon, one of my purposes (I can't speak for Vanda and Cheryl) was to make sure that I had not mis-understood what they had said in the public meeting, since I was so incredulous. We (the ALAC) had, I thought, VERY clearly stated that we wanted and needed RALO leadership at the ICANN meetings *AND* we felt that for many reasons, we needed regional gatherings as well. And we reiterated this previously stated position. Period. The meeting was not held to decide on the fate of RALOs or their budgets. I was a wrap-up to make sure that the results of the weeks's meetings were followed up on and that there were no omissions in the various "to be done" lists. We asked Kevin and Steve to join us to make sure we understood the current travel situation and tried to cover things to improve the Seoul meeting. When it became obvious that I and others had not misunderstood, Cheryl asked that staff document the options open to us at this time and the result of that is the document that you are commenting on. I have said in public (probably to you as well as others) that if this is indeed the situation for this budget year, perhaps it is too late to change it, but we still need to try to fix it in future years. I spend quite a while on Saturday morning talking to Kevin about the budget analysis I did last fall, to try to make sure that he understood that this year's At-Large budget is not a continuation of the status-quo, but a cut. (For the record, I did this as the person who had spent the most time on travel budget issues over the last two years, and not as a ExCom member - my discussions predated my taking on that role.) He said he would go home and root around to understand what happened. I plan to talk to him this week to find out if I was successful. Alan At 30/07/2009 03:10 PM, Evan Leibovitch wrote:
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.