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

Tue Dec 12 10:05:05 EET 2017

I kind of agree that we may need to explore that idea of hiring a
consultancy firm.

A quick question would be: for how long are we gonna use the services of
such a firm? I believe a good reasoning (in our application for additional
budget) would be to request it for a certain period of time (to be
determined) and then as part of the package, ask the same firm to provide
targetted/specialized capacity building program for those of our members
who are already involved in public comment drafting so that they can take
the lead afterwards. But i believe we have this aspect already coverd by
the policy course?

Unless we want to totaly rely on such a firm to forever provide this kind
of support, which i am worried might not be approved by ICANN and probably
would not be valuable for us in terms of sustainability and on long term
run. I see the NCSG as a sort of school, giving its members the unique
opportunity that we are not receiving anywhere else to be involved in
public comments, which is real policy work that we do here at ICANN.

I also used to believe that one of the things that make the NCSG different
from other groups within ICANN is our ability (so far) to produce our own
policy materials and not rely on staff support or such an independent firm
to do the work for us. But, I now do agree that we need help in order to be
effective and timely in comments drafting.

We might need to find the right balance here. Just been thinking outloud :)

------------------------
**Arsène Tungali* <http://about.me/ArseneTungali>*
Co-Founder & Executive Director, *Rudi international
<http://www.rudiinternational.org>*,
CEO,* Smart Services Sarl <http://www.smart-serv.info>*, *Mabingwa Forum
<http://www.mabingwa-forum.com>*
Tel: +243 993810967
GPG: 523644A0
*Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo*

2015 Mandela Washington Felllow
<http://tungali.blogspot.com/2015/06/selected-for-2015-mandela-washington.html>
(YALI) - ISOC Ambassador (IGF Brazil
<http://www.internetsociety.org/what-we-do/education-and-leadership-programmes/next-generation-leaders/igf-ambassadors-programme/Past-Ambassadors>
& Mexico
<http://www.internetsociety.org/what-we-do/education-and-leadership-programmes/next-generation-leaders/Current-Ambassadors>)
- AFRISIG 2016 <http://afrisig.org/afrisig-2016/class-of-2016/> - Blogger
<http://tungali.blogspot.com> - ICANN's GNSO Council
<https://gnso.icann.org/en/about/gnso-council.htm> Member. AFRINIC Fellow (
Mauritius
<http://www.afrinic.net/en/library/news/1907-afrinic-25-fellowship-winners>)*
- *IGFSA Member <http://www.igfsa.org/> - Internet Governance - Internet
Freedom.

Check the *2016 State of Internet Freedom in DRC* report (English
<http://cipesa.org/?wpfb_dl=234>) and (French
<http://cipesa.org/?wpfb_dl=242>)

2017-12-09 3:44 GMT+02:00 Stephanie Perrin <
stephanie.perrin at mail.utoronto.ca>:

> I agree with Ayden, and in particular I would identify research and
> preparing briefing papers in order to bring our new people up to speed, as
> key activities we could use help on.  Some of us are happy to mentor, but
> the folks who want mentoring need materials to read, questions and answers,
> prior to discussing issues with potential mentors.  We can't just throw
> them at the ICANN PDP websites and wikis, it is overwhelming to scan
> through the amount of material and resource documents one has to read.
> That kind of help from a research firm would be useful, and I agree with
> Ayden that we may want to hire a different kind of resource than the one
> the RySG is using, which should be permissible.  Although, there are
> certainly firms like that who work with NGOS of all kinds.
>
> Stephanie Perrin
>
> On 2017-12-08 20:14, Ayden Férdeline wrote:
>
> 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
>
>
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.ncsg.is/pipermail/ncsg-discuss/attachments/20171212/e859eb5d/attachment.htm>