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A deluge of ICANN documents and reports
Monday, June 1. 2009
To ensure participants are able to engage in even more effective discussions, ICANN is making sure major documents are published well in advance of its meetings.
Several major documents have been published by ICANN in the last few days.
There's an analysis of the second Draft Applicant Guidebook comment period and corresponding changes made by ICANN staff to the DAG v2.
There's the final IRT report which is bound to be a major topic of discussion in Sydney.
There's also the third revision to the ccTLD IDN fast-track process (of special interest to me, as I'm on the GNSO's gTLD IDN fast track working group).
Why the deluge you may ask. Check out the minutes of the ICANN board's May 21 meeting, section 8.a, for your answer.
After Mexico, there were complaints from the community that too many documents were published in an haphazard way just before, or during, ICANN meetings, and that it was therefore impossible to take them all in and discuss them properly during those meetings.
So the board asked its Public Participation Committee to look at this issue. The result: a board resolution asking that all documents that need to be considered by the GAC should be published 15 working days before June 21 (the official start of the Sydney meeting, although my colleagues and I on the GNSO Council start our work a day earlier with a full schedule of meetings). Other documents should be available 10 working days before.
This is a good resolution which should help us all by not forcing us to wade through pages and pages of important documents at the last minute when we go to ICANN meetings.
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Yes indeed re: document deadlines.
In fact, for Sydney, there are two deadlines because the meeting was so close when the issue was put to the Board. A 15-working-day deadline for GAC documents (as requested by the GAC) and a 10-working-day deadline for everything else.
The intention is to have a single 15-day deadline for Seoul onwards but the reality is that it will increasingly rely more on the community to hit those deadlines.
One of the big issues that this approach - which I think is great and long overdue from the participation perspective - is that it leaves less time in between meetings to actually get work done.
If you then include the longer public comment period times that people are asking for. And if you include the issue of translation - where we should be publishing all documents in all languages at the same time. Well, then leaves very little time between meetings to do the work to be discussed at meetings.
This is something the community is going to have to think about sooner rather than later.
The Board Public Participation Committee is having a meeting on Wednesday where the issue of document deadlines will be discussed (as it was in Mexico City). I encourage you - and everyone else - to come along and help us all figure this out together.
Cheers
Kieren McCarthy
General manager of public participation, ICANN
In fact, for Sydney, there are two deadlines because the meeting was so close when the issue was put to the Board. A 15-working-day deadline for GAC documents (as requested by the GAC) and a 10-working-day deadline for everything else.
The intention is to have a single 15-day deadline for Seoul onwards but the reality is that it will increasingly rely more on the community to hit those deadlines.
One of the big issues that this approach - which I think is great and long overdue from the participation perspective - is that it leaves less time in between meetings to actually get work done.
If you then include the longer public comment period times that people are asking for. And if you include the issue of translation - where we should be publishing all documents in all languages at the same time. Well, then leaves very little time between meetings to do the work to be discussed at meetings.
This is something the community is going to have to think about sooner rather than later.
The Board Public Participation Committee is having a meeting on Wednesday where the issue of document deadlines will be discussed (as it was in Mexico City). I encourage you - and everyone else - to come along and help us all figure this out together.
Cheers
Kieren McCarthy
General manager of public participation, ICANN
Thanks Kieren for that explanation and for the info about the PPC meeting on the Wednesday during Sydney week, which sounds like it will be well worth going to.
