[council] Costs of Santiago DNSO meetings

["Andrew McLaughlin" <mclaughlin@pobox.com>]

To the Names Council:

In anticipation of your meeting tomorrow, it occurs to me that I owe you an
estimate of the DNSO's Santiago meeting costs.  Because I am in Washington
at the moment (rather than Boston), I don't have the invoices and exact
numbers (I will forward those to the NC when I get back home), but can
provide basic estimates to inform your discussions.

Though ICANN again paid these expenses up front, it is our expectation that
the DNSO will attempt to reimburse them, as we discussed at the last NC
teleconference.  I am not including (and ICANN is not requesting
reimbursement of) general meeting and overhead expenses.  Rather, we ask the
DNSO to cover at least a portion of its direct costs in three areas:
meeting rooms;  webcasting and remote participation;  and translation.

MEETING ROOMS:  ~$500

Thanks to the good efforts of Florencio Utreras, we were able to find
university rooms for all but 2 of the DNSO constituency groups.  The total
cost of those meeting rooms and related expenses will amount to no more than
US $500.

WEBCASTING AND REMOTE PARTICIPATION:  ~$6,000

The total bill for all the webcasting (English, Spanish, and Portuguese) and
remote participation services provided by the Berkman Center for Santiago is
likely to be approximately US$30,000.  The DNSO General Assembly and Names
Council each required approximately 5 hours of webcasting services.  The 10
hour total constitutes approximately 40% of all the webcasting and remote
participation time.  In addition, the Berkman Center provided a special
two-way audio feed to enable remote participation by two Names Council
members, which entailed non-trivial long distance charges of US$300-400.

The DNSO's direct proportional share of the webcasting and remote
participation expenses thus comes to approximately US$12,000.  As we
discussed on the last NC teleconference, ICANN asks that the DNSO attempt to
fund at least half of its proportional share of the webcasting expenses, or
US$6,000.

TRANSLATION INTO SPANISH AND PORTUGUESE:  ~$4,000

Using the same formula above, the DNSO's share of the translation expenses
(interpreters, radio receivers and equipment, special translation booth,
etc.) for its General Assembly and Names Council meetings amounts to
approximately $4,000.


In addition to considering how to reimburse ICANN for these direct incurred
meeting costs for Santiago, the Names Council should to take account of such
anticipated expenses as it makes plans for the ICANN annual meeting in Los
Angeles, November 2-4.  [ICANN is not currently planning to provide realtime
translation into non-English languages for the L.A. meeting, but is open to
any offers of voluntary assistance in that regard.]


--Andrew