[Chapter-delegates] Accounting Accountability

[Alan Levin]

Hi,

On 08 Apr 2016, at 12:52 PM, Eric Burger <eburger at standardstrack.com> wrote:
> One of the major issues with disbursing funds is accounting and accountability.

I've always said that it's not about 'giving the Chapters money', but rather about providing the Chapters with the support that they need. 

This said I am always concerned that even ISOC does not know what it needs. The example of how Microsoft (and maybe even Google) seemed to be 'listening' at all the IETF meetings, it's horrible implementation of indentation on emails has resulted in most people, even the Internet Society "connected community" forces to top posting and has almost lost the idea of inline and threaded responses :(

I've been begging ISOC to hire a global policy analyst in order to provide (and obtain) policy inputs at the country level. ISOC has almost only been about global level policy making. For example to be able to get analysis on local loop unbundling or spectrum allocations or cctld administration, case studies and various good and failed practices would be amazingly helpful. 

More recently we've found that the local training initiatives has dried up because of global processes, ISOC could certainly be funding special training (ipv6 and DNS specifically) projects at the local (rather than regional) level. I note that regional training is often more expensive than international training (e.g. for a Senegalese to travel to Kenya costs more than double going to Paris)

I've never been fully in favour of paying for a secretariat, mainly because it's not directly within the ISOC mandate and can fail terribly. There is no benefit in paying people to run the chapter if the Chapter isn't doing good things. 

oh, btw, I think we're the first Chapter to have our website ipv6 validated, do you know of any others?

Sincerely


Alan  Levin
ISOC-ZA