Great feedback from all. I think part of the budget question is making funds available for paid media, to spread the UA word in a positive fashion to raise awareness that domain names are here, growing, and important, so that businesses and services recognize they need to address acceptance issues because the consumers are coming. Raising consumer awareness puts pressure on for Universal Acceptance because if demand for domain names of all shapes and sizes is there, it behooves all the stakeholders to make sure their #*#* works. :-) I also think this group could develop a strategy to reach out to high profile acceptance challenges, where a single fix can have a widespread impact. For example, if new gTLDs don't resolve in the default Samsung mobile browser, getting Samsung to correct it will impact literally millions of devices. That's a big win for UA. Perhaps we should try to categorize such "big" opportunities and target them sooner rather than later. Thanks again to everyone. Jeffrey Sass, CMO .CLUB Domains, LLC Direct: (+1) 954-256-9334 Mobile: (+1) 970-367-7277 E-Mail: jeff@nic.club Website: www.nic.club Twitter: @sass @getDotClub Skype, Hangouts: jwsass PLEASE NOTE: I am only checking email 2-3 times per day. If something is time sensitive (really time sensitive) please message me or text me at the mobile number above. Thanks! From: Don Hollander (don@i2.org.nz) Sent: Thursday, February 26, 2015 11:39 PM To: Kurt Pritz (kpritz@thedna.org) Cc: UA-discuss@icann.org Subject: Re: [UA-discuss] Preparing a Budget request Kurt, et al… I wouldn’t worry so much about the budget process but instead focus on the tasks that the community thinks need to be done (including those that will require cash) and some indication of the amount that might required. We’ve already heard from Akram and Cyrus about how important this is within ICANN, so let’s let them handle the internal process. A few examples that I have heard over the past month or so: 1) Host a Hackathon so that validation and transformation code can be developed in many different programming languages. 2) Provide travel support for UA Ambassadors to get the message out. 3) Support a trouble ticket logging system, possibly with resources devoted to educating remedies 4) Developing documentation aimed at: Software Engineers; Systems Architects; CIOs, CEOs, Sales & Marketing Executives, Government Officials, Government Ministers 5) Seeding open sources solutions for a mail client. (CNNIC funded an open source mail transport agent last year). 6) Developing some metrics and regularly measuring them. These are just some ideas that I’ve heard. I hope that this group will spend some time thinking of where they would want effort made rather than worry about ICANN’s internal budget process. (and not everything may happen in the first year, but let’s see what we, as a community, think needs to happen and then how we schedule things. And, of course, I hope that people are thinking about which area they want to spend some of their time and effort to move this forward. As I noted yesterday, the draft Charter is still open for comments. Don On 26/02/2015, at 12:08 pm, Kurt Pritz < kpritz@thedna.org> wrote: Hi Everyone: I am writing to request your input on an approach to making a budget / funding request to ICANN. I make some recommendations below but am open to others. During the Singapore meeting many identified the formulation of a budget or funding request to ICANN as a high-priority item: high priority because funding of a communication effort is required to promote Universal Awareness of the issue and and also because ICANN's budgeting season is in full swing and the ICANN timetable calls for "community" budget requests very shortly. I recommend that our immediate action is to write to Akram & Cyrus, who kicked off the UA session in Singapore with a commitment of ICANN support to let them know we are formulating a request and ask them how we should submit it. I'd be happy to draft that. I also recommend that we form a team to formulate a proposal. There are a number of marketing and communications professionals on our UA team and, believing the most significant portion of the proposal will have to do with communication, we should recruit them into this effort. We can utilize the existing UA-Comms email list to conduct the discussion and add those that want to participate. I can work with Don Hollander to coordinate the launch of that discussion. Besides a communications effort, there might be other efforts: building and staffing a UA issues desk of the handling "complaints" about UA issues building software or other tools Please reply with funding efforts you think could be funded. I hope this is helpful and in line with the thinking of others. Best regards, Kurt Kurt Pritz +1-310-400-4184 Skype: kjpritz