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