There was much said in yesterday's NARALO "listening session" regarding how At-Large's travel slots should be allocated. Hard workers, subject matter experts and frequent contributors, it has been argued, ought to deserve priority over those who may be "entitled" due to their position. My comments, based on early RALO history -- that the hard-fought availability of travel for elected and appointed positions was achieved *precisely because* they were elected and appointed -- were widely derided as archaic and demanding update. May be. But be careful what you wish for. At-Large currently has 29 travel slots *because* there are exactly 29 RALO-elected, NomCom-appointed and ALAC liaison positions formally identified. The day that ALAC de-couples these slots from leadership roles is precisely the day when ICANN senior management starts to reduce the number of slots. After all, if ALAC is going to say that it should just be the most-needed people at a meeting (by whatever criteria, it doesn't matter), then there's nothing special about the number 29. "We have a budget crunch and can only afford to pay for the top 25," we will hear. Or 20. Or whatever arbitrary number ICANN decides it can afford. Without linkage to elected and appointed roles, there is no longer a solid rationale for 29. Indeed there are many flaws in the status quo. Little accountability exists for elected and appointed ALAC leaders who choose to under-participate in meetings for which their travel was subsidized. Meanwhile, many over-participating people are denied the utility of learning ICANN culture and doing ALAC advocacy while people seen to be mere tourists and entitlled are paid to go. But however awful that status quo is, all of the proposed solutions are worse. Like it or not, those "tourists" were legitimately selected by their RALOs or the NomCom through their own very regimented processes of determining, well, worthiness. Any benefit of ranking "more-worthy" people at the outset is outweighed by the anti-democratic and top-down nature of whatever process is used to determine "worthy". Furthermore, the number of travel-worthy people that ought to be subsidized also then becomes wholly arbitrary. Tread carefully. Hundreds of person-hours spent thrashing over any criteria of "worthy" will be mostly wasted, if far fewer of these newly-deemed-deserving folks are actually able to travel. -- Evan Leibovitch, Toronto Canada @evanleibovitch / @el56