Hi all, I was just on the Finance and Budget Committee conference call. Rob Hoggarth, Senior Director, Policy Development Support, ICANN and Janice Douma Lange, Outreach/Engagement Manager were leading the call. The call mainly addressed the requests made by the regions for the Fast Track for this fiscal. Basically, the request from Garth Bruen for funding for outreach efforts (https://community.icann.org/download/attachments/38045783/18-NARALO+FY14+Bud...) was denied. However, they used two overarching themes when looking at all requests, which are: - Outreach should be handled by ICANN staff with consultation with the region - Grants – to be coordinated and managed by staff and not by the community There was also an announcement of a new Regional Outreach Pilot Project. There will be regional funding for resources for outreach however there still needs to be a conversation about implementation. The actual announcement with details about this program be made in the next couple of weeks. There is also a reluctance from ICANN to start supporting "new" travel - which would be travel to other events in order to promote the region. There also needs to be more guidelines for requests and more work with staff to hone them better. Staff will be working on this. The idea is to build programs that all groups can benefit from while also doing regional strategies to address specific needs. They’ll never have the budget to accept every request but if all work together, most can be covered. One problem that affected us this fiscal was that the strategic plan did not come out in time so it was very difficult to put in requests that were in line with it. Requests had to be based on the previous strategic plan. Sylvia raised the point that better communication needs to happen between staff and the regions so that this doesn’t happen in the future and they will be working on this. So, although our request was denied (which is disappointing to say the least) ICANN is attempting to address our requests by improving the system over-all. D Darlene A. Thompson CAP Administrator N-CAP/Department of Education P.O. Box 1000, Station 910 Iqaluit, NU X0A 0H0 Phone: (867) 975-5631 Fax: (867) 975-5610 dthompson@gov.nu.ca