[At-Large] Documents and Draft Agenda for ALAC Monthly Teleconference, 8th April 2008

[Wendy Seltzer]

At-Large Staff wrote:
> Dear All:
> 
> As many of you may be aware, the Staff made a commitment to post all
> documents related to teleconferences not less than 7 days in advance of
> meetings (where this is possible), which is by way of assisting the Chair in
> conforming with Rule 13.2 of the ALAC Rules of Procedure, as well as for the
> advance preparation of Members for meetings.
> 
> We are therefore pleased to provide details, including all documents
> presently available, for the upcoming April 8th teleconference of the
> At-Large Advisory Committee. These details may be reviewed at:
> https://st.icann.org/alac/index.cgi?8_april_2008.

I appreciate document creation, but the dissemination and use for
communication leaves a lot to be desired.

Now it seems that we're using the worst of all technology worlds --
documents aren't being circulated, nor are they being posted in formats
that lend themselves to discussion by editing.  Since I'd presume the
goal of posting documents is to encourage At-Large community discussion
and revision to make those documents conform to the wishes of the
at-large community, I strongly urge that they be circulated IN TEXT
and/or posted IN TEXT to the wiki as pages that the Committee and
community can edit and comment upon.

I've wikified the draft "Draft Statement on the FY 2008/2009 Budget and
Operating Plan Framework" here, and edited it.  I hope others will use
<https://st.icann.org/alac/index.cgi?draft_statement_on_the_fy_2008_2009_budget_and_operating_plan_framework>

to update or comment on these edits.    I include the full text of that
page below.  The original is there as "Revision 2," and a comparison
showing my first round of suggested edits is
<https://st.icann.org/alac/index.cgi?action=revision_compare&page_name=draft_statement_on_the_fy_2008_2009_budget_and_operating_plan_framework&mode=source&new_revision_id=20080331192032&old_revision_id=20080331191405&Button=Compare+Revisions>


At-Large Advisory Committee Statement to the ICANN Board on the Draft
Operating Plan for FY 2008/2009

We welcome the opportunity to make our comments on the Draft Operating
Plan and Budget Framerwork for FY 2008/2009.

Firstly, we endorse the change to the budgeting and operational planning
process introduced this year. It seems to us that the combination of the
consultation on these obviously closely-related issues is eminently
sensible. We also welcome the longer public consultation timelines that
this allows.
Since this is the first stage of this process, our comments are
introductory. We provide them at this early stage so that they may be
taken into account as the Staff prepare the Budget and Operating Plan
for its first iteration consultation.
Our comments, therefore, are primarily related to the various
“Activites/Outcomes by Initiative”. We do not propose to comment on each
of these, but on those most important to the At-Large Community.

IDN Activities
This is a very important area of work for At-Large – and also for all of
ICANN. The extra funding and greatly increased ICANN activity in this
area is therefore welcomed. We would like to emphasise the element of
communications related to IDNs.
Fundamental choices that will affect the many communities that do not
rely upon the latin character set will be made in the next few years.
For that reason, we believe ICANN, in partnership with other
stakeholders of course, needs to make a substantial, sustained, greatly
increased effort to communicate with these communities –to ensure that
the message about the choices to be made related to IDNs in the
forthcoming period reaches a far larger pool of potential contributors
to the process than is currently aware and participating. This should
not simply take the form of translated press releases but really a
well-thought-out media campaign which ‘reaches out’ to the public. We
know that efforts to do this work exist – we wish to emphasise that this
is extremely important.

Implement Policy for New gTLDs
We urge the board to act quickly to approve a simple, straightforward
procedure for addition of new gTLDs in IDNs and ASCII character sets.

Compliance Activities
We note the increase in staffing and staff work related to compliance.
We are pleased to see that the budget framerwork proposes further
considerable investment in this area. However we wish to note what we
see as gaps:

The public relies on ICANN to enforce its contracts with registries and
registrars, since ICANN has apparently preempted the public's ability to
sue on those contracts to enforce its rights. ICANN should both return
some of these rights to the public beneficiaries of its contracts /and/
ensure that contractual promises to ICANN are being honored.

Complaints Processing. We note that there is now some information on how
registrants can complain on the website, which is a welcome improvement.
We also note that there is a provision as a headline activity in the
Operational Plan Framework to “Implement Compaints Process System to
address complaints and forward them to correct parties as approved”.
This is a start but is not nearly enough – such a system needs to also
verify whether or not the forwarded complaints were addressed, and
provide options so that the complainant can easily report whether or not
they are satisfied with the result. The underlying philosophy should be
that, as the contractor, ICANN should ensure that the contractees are
living up to their side of the ‘deal’ and completely offloading
complaints to the contractee – or anyone else – is the wrong approach.

Global Outreach
This is a particularly important area to us. The various communities in
ICANN are not nearly representative enough of the worldwide
Internet-using community. We note the initial provision of a substantial
increase in funds allocated to Global Outreach – we will look forward to
seeing more detail about precisely what this consists of when the draft
budget is posted. However, we note that on page 23 of the Draft
Framework, under Global Outreach, there is a major area of work listed
as ‘Implement business engagement outreach’. If this is intended to be
outreach only to business communities, this is far too narrow – outreach
efforts and recruitment efforts need to be even-handed, global – and to
all communities and potential participant communities, not just
business. We draw the attention of the board to the many comments about
the importance of dramatically increasing the outreach and recruitment
of stakeholders that was such a common theme of the respondents to the
JPA review recently held; clearly, there is broad support for greatly
increased work by ICANN in these respects.
Of course we welcome the continued support for participation by our
community from ICANN. Without it the Internet end-user’s voice will
simply not be adequately represented. We draw your attention to our
statement to you in relation to the development of a volunteer travel
and expense support policy, in document AL.ALAC/BUD.SC/0308/2 accessible
at <insert url here> for elaboration on our views on this subject.

Policy Development Support
We welcome the major theme associated with this area of work on page 25,
that ICANN will “provide additional secretariat support to SOs,
constituencies and ACs to make volunteer efforts more effective.” We are
beneficiaries of this, in the addition of two members of staff on the
At-Large team. The filling of these long-open positions is already
beginning to increase our capacity for working effectively. We hope that
the kind of support our community receives of this kind will become
generally available across the constituencies and communities and look
forward to seeing the detailed plans for how the objective listed in
this area is to be achieved.

Registrant Protections
Whilst we welcome the increased activity in this area, we wish the board
to be seized of the fact that the RAA review process appears to have
ceased operation. We hear anecdotally that there is current work in this
area inside ICANN, but it is not visible to us (or anyone else from what
we can tell). This is a very important area of work for ICANN and to our
community. We believe that there should be deadlines set for concluding
work on the RAA.

Transcription and Translation
Our community has been calling for ICANN to become a truly multilingual
organisation for years now. We are glad to see the increased budget
commitment, draft translation framework, and other moves in this
direction but we wish to remind you that ICANN has a very, very long way
to go to reach the mission that the translation programme proposes.
In our opinion, this area of work is of absolutely central importance to
the organisation’s credibility, as we do not believe that any
consultation or policy development process conducted entirely in English
is globally legitimate. This is especially true with subjects like IDNs
that – incredibly –continue to be largely english-only, with multiligual
documents provided only in some cases, often far later than the original
English versions, and only as an afterthought.
Ensuring that the work of ICANN becomes truly multilingual is a core,
critical objective. It must not be sidelined, or de-emphasised by other
objectives like new gTLDs.

Broaden Participation

This area is of great importance – not just to our community but to all
communities. In particular, whilst the provisions for teleconferences
for our community have improved marginally by changing vendors, we do
not believe that it makes sense to continue to outsource this core
communications function and so we welcome the news that ICANN proposes
to purchase a truly fit-for-purpose system to facilitate telephonic
interactions. We hope that in doing so choices will be made which truly
facilitate equal access and quality for all participants, regardless of
where they might be.
In particular, the new system must provide for the technical operation
of simultaneous interpretation on teleconferences. This is an absolutely
essential function, not something that is “nice to have”.
We would also like to emphasise to broadening participation of effective
remote participation in meetings, of which telephonic two-way
participation is only one element. We believe that the current remote
participation modalities for ICANN meetings are not fit for purpose. We
draw your attention to our statement to you in relation to the
development of a volunteer travel and expense support policy, in
document AL.ALAC/BUD.SC/0308/2 accessible at <insert url here> for
elaboration on our views on the subject of remote participation, and
meetings.
In closing, we thank the board in advance for its consideration of our
views. We look forward to a response to our concerns and recommendations
in due course.


-- 
Wendy Seltzer -- wendy at seltzer.org
Visiting Professor, Northeastern University School of Law
Fellow, Berkman Center for Internet & Society
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/seltzer.html
http://www.chillingeffects.org/
https://www.torproject.org/