[Chapter-delegates] Services, staff considerations, and so forth (was Re: ISOC LIVE - the reports of its death are exaggerated, but..)

[Andrew Sullivan]

Dear colleagues,

I note that the conversation on the list has moved into a debate about staff levels, services offered, how services are negotiated with chapters, and so on.  These are actually staff matters rather than board ones, so I am in a position to try to respond to them.

I am not, however, in a position to respond to specifics, because that involves matters touching on individuals, their employment or contracted work with the Internet Society, and so forth.  I hope it is self-evident why discussing such individual cases with a group of people who do not have a contractual or employment relationship with the people involved would be not only contrary to legal obligations the Internet Society has, but also incredibly rude.

To begin with, let me be clear that, if I ran the universe, the Internet Society would be in a position to do everything it wants to do all the time with no friction.  In this actual universe, however, we are limited by the basic fact that our budget is not infinite.  The reality is that costs around the world continue to rise and that, so far, despite our best efforts, our income has not.  We have undertaken some work to distribute our income and expenditures efficiently in order to be able to do more with the flat income we have, but the world continues to get more expensive.  And so, we have to make choices about what things we spend that money on.

Especially in the first half of 2023, we had some acute failures in our fundraising efforts at the Internet Society.  It became clear by the middle of the year that this important function was not working as well as it needed to and that our budgets for future years would be affected by this.  It required an immediate response that involved examining all our expenses and deciding which ones had to be reduced.  This was true even though we had economized rather carefully over time: travel budgets have been cut to the minimum, we had been unable to provide cost of living increases to employees in some years, and so forth.

The live streaming webcasting service received the same analysis as everything else.  Since he weighed in on this thread, I want to note that Joly has been, for a long time, both a treasured member of our community and a big help to the Internet Society staff in producing a resource that was valuable to the community.  He produces high production quality video.  When we looked at the empirical evidence, however, for the use of the _service_, we could not make the case that the service had a lot of demand.  In the end, we had to make the unhappy decision that the retainer-based arrangement for that service could not continue.  At the same time, we were aware that chapters have more funding available to them than ever.  The Beyond the Net program is the most generously funded it's ever been, and chapters are also in a position to apply for other kinds of grants offered by the Foundation if they have projects in those areas.  (Some chapters have successfully taken those opportunities.)  So, for those chapters that find they continue to want or need the service, we wanted to encourage people to use it.

It should be emphasized that it is not possible for us to negotiate what facilities the Internet Society can provide with all the chapters.  First, the chapters are independent entities legally, and I believe they guard that independence jealously (as they should).  That independence means, however, that the chapters do not have legal responsibilities to the Internet Society corporate body that are not defined in the chapter engagement letter, which means that contractual terms and so forth cannot be shared with the chapters.  Second, that independence of the chapters means that not every chapter will agree with every other one, and we would end up trapped in a bilateral negotiation with each chapter for various services, which we cannot realistically undertake.  That is why the services that the Internet Society is able to offer need to be determined by Internet Society staff.  We of course wish to provide both high quality and desirable services to our chapters, because that is how we get a dynamic and engaged community.  Unfortunately, we can't do everything.

The same financial considerations had effects on the size of the Internet Society staff.  We had already undertaken a number of reforms to try to increase efficiency.  For instance, when I started, each regional bureau attempted to duplicate the functions if the global organization.  This meant enormous inefficiency in the use of staff, as well as a highly "siloed" organization in which a great deal of bureaucratic activity was devoted to allowing different parts of the organization to talk to each other.  This might be a worthwhile compromise in a very large organization.  In an organization of our size and budget, it was unacceptable, and we eliminated regional bureaux (and, indeed, a bunch of other internal divisions) as part of the large staff reorganization of 2019.  By organizing ourselves around our work, we were able to achieve a number of gains in effectiveness.  Where this has worked really well, it has improved collaboration with chapters on our work.  I will not pretend it has always been perfect, but I believe our recent impact reports indicate the way the current organizational structure has yielded results.

But again, as a result of our financial situation in the middle of last year, we simply had to reduce the staff complement of the Internet Society.  We spend most of our money on program work; but like virtually every charity, even there the largest part of expediture is in the cost of staff.  "Reduction in force", as the HR term has it, is not a layoff or a temporary condition: it is an acknowledgement that the overall size of the organization will need to be permanently reduced until such time as conditions change.  I want to be perfectly clear: every single one of those reductions was painful.  These are things we used to be able to do that we cannot do any more.  Nevertheless, we had to do it, and we did it through a careful and exhaustive internal evaluation of the effectiveness of various things we were doing.  The unhappy reality at the end of that evaluation was that 10 jobs disappeared at the Internet Society, and the people who were doing them lost their employment too.

The long term answer to this problem is that we must be the best builders and defenders of the Internet that we can be, so that those with financial resources to support our mission will contribute them to the work we are doing.  We need to make those stories appealing so that our fundraisers can do more of the excellent work they are already doing.  The good news is that the fundraising team is making progress.  The collaboration of fundraising and communications in 2023, as well as some changes to our web site driven by the communications team, resulted in the largest number and dollar amount of individual donations to the Internet Society ever. We're in the happy position that the ongoing support from PIR means that any dollar we raise can go to support important work the Internet Society does, including its support of chapters.  We will continue to work on raising funds to ensure we have the financial resources we need in the future, so that we can keep on striving to ensure the Internet is for everyone.

I hope this overview gives the chapters information they need.

Best regards,

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan, President & CEO, Internet Society
e:sullivan at isoc.org m:+1 416 731 1261
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