[soac-newgtldapsup-wg] Criteria Proposal

[Avri Doria <avri@xxxxxxx>]

hi,

I have become concerned about our ability to come to any sort of recommendation 
on criteria for a fee waver program for applicants.  We have a requirement to 
give the Board a draft on Friday, and the work currently being done is not 
close to being ready on this issue.  While various members have worked on 
general proposals for aid approval we do not have something to present the 
board that focuses on a possible fee waver program.  

I know there are those who hope that the application process will be delayed 
until we are ready, I for one do not believe this is going to be the case.  If 
we have not established criteria by the time the Board needs criteria from us, 
then we risk losing the chance for a fee waver program.  I think most of the 
discussion we are having in the group lend themselves more to the design of 
financial systems for future rounds and not for the round that starts after the 
June decisions.

Karla and I had an extended discussion on the minimal elements that would need 
to be included in any fee waver program for the 2011-2012 round.  Any 
recommendations made in this note, while based on ideas that came out in our 
discussion have not been approved or even reviewed by staff at this point.  
Karla provided the first draft of the proposal, but as stated above this is to 
help us in our discussions and is based on a large extent on discussions that 
have been ongoing.  It does not represent an ICANN staff proposal, but is 
hopefully an aid in our discussions.

Some of the considerations that went into this proposal:

- It does not go beyond the criteria for a fee waver program as discussed in 
the Milestone report.  T

- Fundamentally we need to give criteria to indicate:

-- Which applicants get any of the fee reductions that we recommended to the 
Board in the Milestone report.  It is also possible that these criteria would 
be sufficient for recommending applicants to donors that we may partner with.

- In order to come up with a plan, we need to take in account the skills ICANN 
has and those which it does not have yet.  For example ICANN has no skill in 
doing needs analysis especially on a cross cultural basis.  The idea, therefore 
becomes, what skills, or whose skills, could we leverage to enable a program in 
a very short time. To this end we thought that leveraging off of the approval 
the applicant may have received from recognized donor organizations might be a 
way to jumpstart the considerations.

- How do we enable a program based on the recommendations in the milestone 
report for fee wavers

- How do we avoid gaming.  Requiring that a group be a reestablished group as 
of 2009 predates any discussion of there being a fee waiver program for new 
gTLDs.

I hope the group is willing to discuss this proposal.

thanks

a.

Attachment: JAS WG Criteria Considerations-1.doc
Description: MS-Word document