[soac-newgtldapsup-wg] Discussion of Financial criteria and how to set them

[Alan Greenberg <alan.greenberg@xxxxxxxxx>]

Sorry for not getting this out earlier, but it was a stretch to get 
it done now.
I have added these comments to 
https://community.icann.org/display/jaswg/Subgroup+1+Qualifications+%28was+A+B%29. 
That page already has a lot of the specific things that we want 
incorporated into the criteria and I have not had the time to try to 
merge all of them into the new test. But that can be done once there 
is general agreements.
Alan

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Discussion of the criteria by which an applicant will be judged 
worthy of support.
Members of the JAS WG did not have the skills or experience to 
specifically define criteria. ICANN does not likely have the skills 
in-house either, but presumably there are organizations that do. The 
skills do reside in a number of international donors, and in 
development cooperation groups of many of the governments that 
participate in the GAC.
 It was agreed that there are a number of goals to be met by the criteria.

 - Financial need is a key. Other missing resources can be 
outsourced if money is not a limitation.
 - Criteria should be as objective as possible, but it is clear that 
ultimately judgment calls will need to be made, and the criteria 
should reflect that.
 -  The WG explored a variety of specific criteria such as net worth 
of the applicant, net annual profit and annual revenues [add any more 
here that we have looked at], but found all lacking in that they 
could be relatively easily gamed or would eliminate certain 
applicants who should otherwise be supportable.
 - The intent of this support is to provide initial support for an 
otherwise viable application. [Note: this does not mean that we 
should ignore lowering the operational costs, but that should be in a 
separate section.]
 - Support should not exceed XX% of the fees due from ineligible applicants.

 - The actual judging of financial need and deciding whether an 
applicant meets the established criteria to be supported should be 
outsourced to those who make similar judgment calls with respect to 
developing economy requests (is "developing economy" the term we are 
using??) on a regular basis. This will also serve to distance ICANN 
from the actual decision and the politically dangerous ground.
 For discussion:

 - We do not want gaming, but we also do not want to miss really 
deserving applicants. We need to decide which of these is the more 
important goal, since any set of criteria will likely tend to allow 
either false positives or false negatives.
 - Similarly, there will be many profiles of prospective applicants. 
If we want the overall criteria to fit all of them, it may become far 
too unwieldy and impractical. Are we willing to sacrifice some 
classes of applicant to allow a more manageable process.