I mentioned to some of you that the BC submitted a proposal last year that was not funded, but that we thought it useful to share with you, and seek your support for a version of a standard support project that can be self administered at the Constituency level [in the case of the Ry and RR, that would be SG level]. We proposed $20,000 in 2012, and you will see that we have increased it to $25,000 in 2013.
We have specific activities in mind, and listed those. They may not be inclusive of what your entity would want to seek funding for. In our case, we primarily want to do recruitment, and we would be able to support our part time secretariat/travel, and our ongoing interest in developing some materials.
You may have other items that you would like to see in the list, and we did not mean to make it exclusive.
We would welcome your views, including if you do not want to join in any further discussion. Each constituency would still have to submit their own budget request and each will be approved individually, without any dependencies. What we are proposing is a jointly developed endorsement of such an approach. This certainly isn't required by the budget process, however.
As you all know, when the GNSO improvements plan was approved by the Board, certain unfunded mandates including maintaining a website, archiving records, and certain other activities were mandated for constituencies/SGs but without any consideration of how we developed resources. I gathered that the staff and Board may have had some irrational enthusiam that the ToolKit would magically solve all such needs. It is useful, but not encompassing. And, ICANN's timeline for completing it has been extremely slow. The GNSO website improvements themselves are still pending, which has made us reluctant to move our website itself to ICANN. However, this proposal is about different services than the ToolKit provides, as you will see.
I hope you find this useful to consider, and welcome any suggestions, or thoughts.
As noted, I have shared the draft with the CFO, but only as a concept paper. I have not indicated whether others will join in endorsing or improving it, so don't feel that you are at this point committed to supporting the concept. You are not, but we would welcome collaborating, if that makes sense to you.
If any of you would like to have a phone discussion, we can arrange that as well.
I copied Benedetta Rossi, the BC's Secretariat, who would arrange any such call.
Regards
Marilyn Cade
Chris Chaplow