[Chapter-delegates] Raul's question about chapter resources

[Dave Burstein]

Raul

There are better ways to spend the money we have.

It cost between $1,000 and $4,000 per active U.S. member to support the
cost of the last NA Regional Director. (I don't know the Canadians.) The
U.S. chapters have amazing few truly active people.

Diverting say half that money to *chapter-led* uses would be the smart
thing to do. We could do that if we didn't try to pay the (very high)
salary of a DC based policy advocate and instead hired someone whose
primary experience is building a membership, mostly volunteer group. That's
what we really need and people like that don't expect the pay of a good PC
policy person. With people like Kathy & Sally, we don't need yet another
policy advocate.
----------------
While it might not be practical to support paid staff, certainly basic
chapter expenses can be covered. Leah's comment that they had to dip into
their own pockets for basic expenses says the system is broken.

As Joyce notes below, there's also a lot of money being spent *at the
discretion of the staff*. That's missing the point and is woefully
inefficient. The staff time just at the meetings to review things like
Beyond the Net probably costs a substantial fraction of the funds provided.
Centralization isn't always best.

In addition, it's very discouraging to have to beg staff every time you
need even small sums for ordinary functions. It's demeaning, demoralizing
and discourages local initiative. Kathy says we're a bottom up,
multi-stakeholder group; we should try to live up to that.

It also wastes a lot of time both of staff and in the chapter.

With the $30M we get from PIR, ISOC can certainly afford *small* sums for
the chapters, whether or not you follow the suggestions above. The
arithmetic says $2,000 to perhaps $10,000 per chapter can be offered with
modest and sensible changes.

For example, a chapter might decide to only fund travel done inexpensively
to make the money go further. I went to the ITU Plenipot in Busan with my
own money. I stayed in a hostel for ten days and did most of my own
cooking. (I'm not rich.) That may or may not be the right decision but it's
certainly one the chapter could evaluate.

Raul, I have many reasons to believe you are working in good faith. But
it's very hard to change an organization that currently makes decisions top
down.

Ultimately, we want to be more democratic.

Dave Burstein

I wanted to take this opportunity to take a step back and look at the
current situation.
Currently ISOC supports it’s Chapters' activities in many different ways :

   - Beyond the Net, which has been completely launched to support our
   Chapters’ projects.
   - Financial support for web presence
   - A range of tools to support the day to day operations (survey monkey,
   zoom, webex, Connect, marketing toolkits, etc)
   - Fellowships to regional Chapter meetings
   - Fellowships to Internet related meetings (like IETF that is happening
   right now, EuroDIG, IGF, etc)
   - A regional Chapter Manager to support the Chapters
   - Speaker support at Chapter events


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