[council] Re: Some reality (was Re: [ga] DNSO Expenses)

["Bret A. Fausett" <baf@fausett.com>]

Elizabeth --

Thank you for your kind message. I certainly appreciate your volunteer
efforts to date, and I hope that in the future we can find help for
volunteers like you who are spending great amounts of time doing this
work.

You're right that we should avoid inflaming the members of the GA list,
and that was certainly not my intention. Let me share with you why I sent
my message.

> Your estimate about $US 750 is simply a fiction.

I did not make this up; I took this number from the CIGREF proposal to the
Business and Commercial Constituency to operate the B&C secretariat.
CIGREF's estimate *was* US $750 per member per year. (See,
http://www.bcdnso.org/cigrefproposal.html) And the CIGREF budget did not
include any amounts to be paid to the NC for webcasting support, etc.
CIGREF was elected overwhelmingly by the members of the B&C constituency
to operate the secretariat. Based on this proposal and the results of the
election, I thought it reasonable to conclude that we were moving toward a
very high membership fee.

I understand that the Intellectual Property constituency also has proposed
high membership fees. While I don't know where their estimated budget is
now, early estimates on the IPC budget included line items for the travel
and hotel costs of NC members. I recall that the IPC proposal also called
for the creation of its own staff.

If we are moving to a model where each constituency builds their own
infrastructure, we will, in my opinion, be creating inefficiencies and
unnecessarily increasing our costs.

We've also recently had a call for constituencies to support the NC
webcasts. Someone recently remarked to me privately that their company had
very cutting edge streaming multimedia technology and that it likely would
be willing to lend that to ICANN bodies but no one had ever asked and
there was no obvious way to volunteer! That's something that I was hoping
to correct. We should list what we need and see if the community can help
us.

My message was in no way meant to be a criticism of current secretariats.
It was simply a caution to keep costs in mind and to seek volunteer
efforts before seeking a high membership fee.

I don't know if I have the ability to post this reply to the "council"
list, so please forward this reply if my message does not make it through.

Thank you again for all of your work.

        -- Bret