Hi Tapani,

I may respond to the some points below.
NCSG doesn't have funds per se, neither even a bank account (nor did fund
seeking).

What NCSG is getting can be described as in-kind support from ICANN  which
fall under the so-called community support , in particular for GNSO:
-there is part provided to all stakeholder groups and constituencies i.e.
gnso toolkit covering confcall services, adobe connect, admin/secretariat
support and travel support for executive committee members (3 slots) and
gnso councillors (6 slots). That is fixed and applied every year by GNSO
staff within the budgeting process.
-there is the special financial budget requests as what you shared few
days ago. Those proposals have to  be approved by ICANN financial team.
Such proposals can cover some outreach event, capacity building etc.  All
submitted  financial requests are public and online, same for the results
and responses from finance team.

ICANN usually don't give any funding directly and instead manage it by
itself  e.g.  travel arragement via travel constituency and so on.

NCSG financial committee should get involved on the ICANN annual budget and
operating planning to comment the kind of support get by community but also
what projects is funding.

Best,

Rafik
On Feb 27, 2016 8:44 PM, "Tapani Tarvainen" <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:

> Dear Sam,
>
> Thank you for the explanation. I must admit, however,
> that I'm a bit confused by it.
>
> On Fri, Feb 26, 2016 at 08:06:25PM -0500, Sam Lanfranco ([log in to unmask])
> wrote:
>
> >    I have a lot of trouble with the ICANN documents.
> [...]
> >    The numbers are quite aggregated, and hence give no detail.
>
> That is a good point and worth raising. However:
>
> >    In particular, I would like to know how much SO/AC funding  was spent
> >    on NCSG and its constituency groups, and what it was spent on.
>
> You want to ask the board to tell us how much money they gave us
> and how we spent it? That we can't track it so we need their help?
>
> I should think we know that, and if we don't, it'd be up to us
> to try to clean our own act, or at least attempt to before calling
> the Board to help.
>
> Now I do agree that we haven't been tracking and reporting our
> funding as well as we might have. Indeed, that is the main reason
> I've been trying to reboot NCSG's Finance Committee - I'm hoping to
> get it moving in or immediately after Marrakech meeting, if our
> constituencies name their new FC representatives in time for that.
> Perhaps you could ask NPOC to appoint yourself there?
>
> To be clear, I have no objection to the Board or anybody else digging
> into our funding, on the contrary. As far as I know there's nothing
> there that anybody would want to hide, but if there is, I certainly
> would want to know about it.
>
> But it'll be a bit strange if you bring this to the Board and
> I'll have to say nobody's even asked me or NCSG EC to do anything
> about it before.
>
> Perhaps I've misunderstood your intent. If the idea is that we
> should have detailed funding data from ICANN to check our own
> bookkeeping against, good. That's something I was actually
> going to ask our FC to look into as soon as it gets going.
>
> Or if it's something else altogether, please explain.
>
> >    In a normal organization we, as a unit of the organization, would have
> >    those numbers and we would be expected to worry about efficiency and
> >    effectiveness. Here we (only I?) have nothing.
>
> OK. Regardless of what happens in our meeting with the Board, I take
> this chastisement seriously. One of the main tasks of our Finance
> Committee will be to come up with better and more detailed reports
> of our funding. And I will put this on the agenda for next NCSG EC
> meeting.
>
> >    Beyond that question, when things like
> >    [4]
> http://domainincite.com/19630-icann-reveals-1m-of-not-lobbying-lobby
> >    ing-expenses boil up, I find it almost impossible to cross reference
> >    numbers, to confirm facts, and to defend NCSG against the argument
> that
> >    it helps legitimate an ICANN that is less transparent than one would
> >    expect from an accountable not-for-profit multistakeholder
> >    organization.
>
> That is a very good point. Our funding should be transparent not
> only to ourselves but to the world.
>
> >    Those are the thoughts that leave me uneasy about the apparent level
> of
> >    transparency here. If the data is under an accessible rock that I
> >    somehow just missed, I would appreciate help locating that rock(file).
>
> I will join you in the quest of finding the rock under which the data
> is hidden and to blow it up if need be, whatever explosives it takes.
>
> And if you think asking the Board to help at this point would be
> useful, I'm fine with that, too. I would, however, appreciate a bit
> more clarity in what kind of help we'd hope to get from them at
> this point. Otherwise I rather fear they'll ask what have we done
> about this so far and where we got stuck, and I'd have to say
> we haven't even gotten our FC convened yet.
>
> For example, it would be much easier to say we want the data for all
> SOs and ACs, so that we could compare NCSG vs CSG vs... &c, rather
> than talking only about NCSG.
>
> --
> Tapani Tarvainen
>