Comment on travel support
I have several comments to make, all on my own behalf, but which I believe are widely held. 1. I support Eduardo Diaz' comment on wire transfer fees. ICANN uses wire transfers as a cost-effective method of distributing money to volunteers. It is simple to ask a volunteer to specify what fee they pay (and if necessary, back it up with a previous bank statement) and add this to the per diem being distributed. It is petty for ICANN to expect the volunteer to fund this fee themselves with such a trivial savings for ICANN. 2. The document has a number of trivial errors that undermine its being treated seriously. The ALAC is a Committee and not a Council. Funding is provided for 15 members as well as for the Bylaw mandated Liaisons to the GNSO and ccNSO. Section 3 describes the GNSO as having 23 funded travel positions in FY12, 21 for Council members and 2 for Liaisons. 21 is the correct number of GNSO members, but I know for a fact that my funding as Liaison from the ALAC has always been counted as ALAC support, not GNSO and the GAC long-ago stopped sending Liaisons to the GNSO. Section 5 says that in FY13, the GNSO will have funding for 20 people and while still counting the Liaisons which I suspect are not funded, has lowered the number of Councillors from 21 to 18. 3. I will once more suggest that the policy formally state that ICANN appreciates all efforts of travelers to keep costs down and will accommodate such efforts. There are still reported cases where a traveler has two choices: a) book a much higher air fare; or b) book a lower air fare which expands the number of hotel days, and then pay for these days themselves even though the hotel costs is less than the air savings. If a person is willing to give up days to save ICANN money, ICANN should not begrudge them the extra days on site. |