Additional Budget Requests: What activities do we want ICANN to fund

[Ayden Férdeline]

Farzaneh, thanks-

I have two suggestions.

1) As the NCSG and its constituencies scale and mature, we may want to become more independent than we are today from ICANN. Is it possible to request a budget for professional services so that we can receive advice on whether becoming our own legal entity is a possibility - and desirable?

2) Another suggestion - and one which I appreciate will not have support from all our members - is to explore the possibility of hiring external consultants to aid us in our policy work. Other ICANN communities receive support from WBC Global in writing first drafts of their public comments. I am aware that the Business Constituency, Intellectual Property Constituency, Internet Service Providers and Connectivity Providers Constituency, and the Registries Stakeholder Group accept this assistance. They receive support from WBC advisers for up to 20 public comments per year. We refuse this assistance and I continue to maintain that this is a mistake. [According to a document](http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/comments-fy18-budget-08mar17/attachments/20170330/8e8238e7/RySGcommentonDocumentDevelopmentandDraftingProgram-0001.pdf) that I found on the ICANN website from the RySG:

"Our Document Development and Drafting Research Assistant, Wim Degezelle, made a significant contribution in his role of drafting comments to complex public comments. His ability to research a topic, communicate with those in the RySG who may have some more in-depth knowledge of the issues/topics at hand, and then prepare and present salient observations and suggested comments has been of incredible benefit to the RySG. Wim’s role facilitated participation by RySG members who don’t use English as their first language, and better enabled engagement by smaller (or new) registry operators who have limited bandwidth, resources and/or knowledge that restrict their participation in issues that may have a direct impact on their operations. In fact, we saw a notable increase in participation by volunteers to partner (or even take a lead role) in developing and/or contributing to critical issues requiring formal comments by the RySG."

When communities with more resources than us are accepting assistance in drafting their comments, and we do not (for a number of very valid reasons), I worry that we exacerbate our disadvantages.

I understand that one of the concerns regarding WBC Global was that they describe themselves as a "Leading international trade government relations consulting firm serving multinational clients ... offer[ing] public policy, political and strategic business advice to Fortune 500 and other companies". There are concerns, rightfully so, that they may not be best positioned to write comments through a civil society lens. But can we instead request our own budget, and work with ICANN [I am not entirely familiar with their procurement processes] to choose our own consulting firm? We're swamped. We need help.

Best wishes,

Ayden Férdeline
[linkedin.com/in/ferdeline](http://www.linkedin.com/in/ferdeline)

> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject: Additional Budget Requests: What activities do we want ICANN to fund
> Local Time: 7 December 2017 3:52 PM
> UTC Time: 7 December 2017 15:52
> From: farzaneh.badii at GMAIL.COM
> To: NCSG-DISCUSS at LISTSERV.SYR.EDU
>
> We can submit additional budget requests to ICANN to fund certain activities. This year we got our NCSG policy course approved. What do you think the need of our stakeholder group is for next year? What should ICANN fund for us?
>
> Please send your ideas my way, and remember that there are many restrictions to the sort of funding we get. For example, we probably won't be able to get funding to support travelers for ICANN meetings we could try but it might be turned down.  Here is the link to additional budget request announcement: https://www.icann.org/news/announcement-2017-12-05-en
>
> Note that we will discuss the ideas with NCSG Executive Committee, select some, develop them and submit the requests on behalf of NCSG. I advise against submitting additional funding request on your own.
>
> Best
>
> Farzaneh
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