Community Travel Questions & Answers

Dear Supporting Organisation participants:

The following information is provided to help you take advantage of the travel funding recently made available for the ICANN Cairo meeting through the new Community Travel Support Procedure (CTSP). Since travel arrangements for the Cairo meeting need to be completed shortly, your organisation may want to use a “temporary” process for providing a list of ICANN-funded travelers for this meeting. By 4 September, staff needs a list of supported travelers - 13 names from the GNSO and 12 names from the ccNSO including the chair and NomCom appointees. (Please note the additional important deadlines for Cairo travel included below.) If needed, please take more time to provide staff with the final, proposed travel allocation procedure for your SO.

1) Deadlines for ICANN-funded travel to the Cairo meeting.

 To ensure all available travel funds can be used for the ICANN Cairo meeting, which starts 2 November, the following schedule will apply:  

• 4 September (14:00 PDT) – deadline for each Supporting Organisation Chair to provide ICANN Staff – travel-support@icann.org – with the list of travelers who are to receive travel support under the CTSP. If your SO has named you as a recipient of support for Cairo, you will be contacted by ICANN Travel Coordination Staff with complete information on how your arrangements will be made.  

• 17 September (14:00 PDT) – deadline for room bookings. All travelers’ arrival and departure dates need to be finalized by this date because this is the date by which all hotel room reservations must be contracted for or released. After this date, any additional cost for changes to travelers’ arrival and departure details will be paid by the traveler, unless otherwise agreed to in advance, in writing, by ICANN Travel Staff. 

• 1 October (14:00 PDT) – deadline for flight bookings. Any approved traveler who has not completed their flight on or before this time will no longer be eligible for sponsored air travel. 

2) Requirements for ICANN-funded travelers for the Cairo meeting include the following:

• The names of all ICANN-supported travelers will be publicly posted on the ICANN community travel webpage (URL forthcoming), along with the class of travel supported, and the amount of travel funding received.
• For newly supported travelers (excluding Chair and NomCom-appointees) people who receive travel support will be asked to provide a short report on his/her trip, which will be publicly posted, and also will be required to attend all relevant, scheduled SO-related meetings in Cairo (as identified by your SO). Each SO is encouraged to provide guidance on the general content requirements for travelers’ reports. If time does not permit this to be done in time for Cairo, travelers will be asked to basically use the report template that is used for ICANN fellowship program participants (URL to be posted in FAQ).
• Per diem payments to funded travelers will be issued after their reports are received and attendance records verified. This is in response to the community requests to ensure transparency, accountability and efficacy for ICANN travel funding, and also is consistent with the approach used for ICANN’s fellowship program participants.  

3) ICANN can only accommodate full funding of designated travelers at this time. (For example, ICANN will not provide one person with only airfare support, and another person with only hotel support, etc.) To keep the time and cost of administering the travel procedure to a reasonable level, total available travel support will be made available on an individual basis for the number of people allowed under the CTSP. As noted in the CTSP announcement, at the end of this fiscal year staff will facilitate a public review of this and all other elements of the CTSP and consult with the community on changes that may be needed.

4) Individuals who are not members of an SO Council CAN be selected to receive travel support. As stated, the goal of the CTSP is "to lower the barrier to participation, broaden the group of participants and, advance the work" of ICANN. SO’s are asked to provide a list of individuals to receive travel funding “based on best meeting the policy-making needs of the entity.” Any SO member is eligible to receive travel funding.  

The GNSO has been asked to provide ICANN Staff with the names of 13 individuals (including chair and NomCom appointees) to receive travel funding, and the ccNSO has been asked to provide ICANN Staff with the names of 12 individuals (including chair and NomCom appointees) to receive travel funding. Although these numbers were based on the total number of Council members from each SO, travel funding is not restricted to Council members.

5) SO’s should consider factoring “need” into selection of travelers. This is one element which SOs may wish to consider when determining who should receive travel support. This supports ICANN’s goal of lowering the barrier to participation.

6) Council’s liaisons should be considered for supported travel by the entities that send them. The entity that sends the liaison needs to decide whether or not to include the liaison on their funded travelers list for each ICANN meeting. The exceptions to this are liaisons who also are NomCom appointees.

7) If an SO does not use all of its available travel slots for a given meeting, they can be ‘rolled over’ to a subsequent meeting. This applies until the end of each ICANN fiscal year, after which point the unused support is ‘lost’ and the new fiscal year – and a potentially revised CTSP applies.