Dear all, as discussed repeatedly over the last months and at our monthly call tonight, our concept and practice for the annual CROPP over the past years needs to be reviewed for 2017. As repeatedly stated before and according to our concept so far, we always dedicated our 5 travel slots per year to EuroDIG which was considered to be one of the most important annual events on the European level dealing with IG issues. And this concept and practice was not contested until recently (2016). Key elements and criteria for our annual CROPP selections were: Concentrate on candidates / members from the SEE region to allow them to participate at EuroDIGs (while being funded by ICANN/CROPP; ISOC Europe had a complementary funding scheme for this since 2014, EuroDIG offered an own funding program lately for 2016). Other criteria for EURALO’s CROPP selection were: * avoiding "duplications" (not the same candidates than last year), * focusing on candidates from the SEE region (who usually do not have the means to attend by their own), * preferably selecting candidates not from existing ALSes but potentially new ones in the region. * like previous years when we created a sort of precedence, to give one slot to Armenia (by avoiding duplication from last year). It was in 2016 only when we slightly modified the above criteria by considering incoming new ALS candidates from Western countries as well (Austria and Serbia) and a candidate from Romania. Meanwhile there was some discussion why we always focus our 5 CROPP slots on EuroDIG only (what was not contested before) while not considering other events in the region (as other RALOs do)? And there were several good to pragmatic reasons for this so far like language diversity in Europe what makes it difficult to attend a meeting in a national language. On the other hand, there are only very few cross-European IG events like EuroDIG, ICANN-Studienkreis, RIPE meetings or the annual re:publica faire in Berlin/Germany where English is a working language as well – besides the inaugural SEEDIG meeting in 2016. These are the simple reasons why we focused on EuroDIG so far. As announced at our last Helsinki GA end of June, the EURALO Board and leadership will review this concept and discuss modifications for 2017. At tonight’s call we didn’t have enough time to discuss this in detail. Therefore we decided to prepare the CROPP 2017 debate as a next key issue for the agenda of our August monthly call. Your comments and ideas are welcome. Thanks and best regards, Wolf EuroDIG Secretariat http://www.eurodig.org/ mobile +41 79 204 83 87 Skype: Wolf-Ludwig Swiss IGF http://swiss-igf.ch EURALO - ICANN's Regional At-Large Organisation http://euralo.org Profile on LinkedIn http://ch.linkedin.com/in/wolfludwig