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Recurring activity. Seeking 8 hours of RTT services in Spanish and 8 hours in French each month. The Spanish RTT will be off the Spanish language interpretation that is already provided and the French Translation will be off the French language interpretation in the calls.

Currently, RTT in English has made it to the core budget, but if for some reason it drops out of the core budget of ICANN than we would like this ABR to cover that RTT in English as well.

JH--Strongly Support

MH-- strongly support

JC – Strongly support

MM – Supportive but would want to see some stats re: use at the end of the year

RH - Support, but agree with MM

Procurement of, Approval of, Training on a threaded discussion and consensus tool. The two recommended by the Technology Task Force (TTF) are Loomio (https://www.loomio.org/) or Slack with an addon called Cloverpop (https://www.cloverpop.com).

Diversity Leads to Better Decisions

Research shows that decision made with a diverse (gender, age and geography) set of participants tend to be better in terms of objective realization, buy-in and longevity. The good news is that ICANN, generally, and the At-Large community, in particular, are well positioned to enable consensus building and durable decisions with a very diverse population. Unfortunately, the tools at our disposal to do so (email, Skype and Confluence) are not fit for purpose. The barriers are technical, cultural and lack of focus.

Good Discussions Require Focus

While the high volume of Zoom calls play their part, a great deal of consensus building and decision making needs to take place asynchronously.  To date, the primary asynchronous tool at our disposal is email which is fraught with pitfalls because conversation threads are informal, usually broken into multiple threads by various email clients and often diverted to other topics. So a random +1 rarely has its intended effect. This is where threaded discussion tools come into play. These tools demand structure and persistent threads of conversation that are easy to follow. For those less interested in being in a separate application, threaded tools allow for the primary interaction to, in fact, take place over email but threads are maintained.

Consensus Building is Incremental

With very few exceptions, most topics for discussion do not have a single decision to be addressed but a series of smaller decisions about priorities, costs and benefits, success measures and metrics. Here an important role is played by different kinds of ad hoc polling and “temperature taking.” Instead of endless prose, very specific questions are asked of participants along the way to ensure momentum towards consensus is maintained or at least the lack of consensus is recognized. There are certainly polling tools out there including Survey Monkey and Google Forms, etc. but unless those polls are integrated into the discussions and documented, they often fail at their objective.

Decision Recording is Crucial

Critical to the process of incremental consensus building, is the recording of decisions along the way.  If a point is settled and documented, it is far less likely to be revisited haphazardly. Instead, if a participant wishes to bring a new perspective or data to a previous decision, it is with intention that a conversation is reopened. Dedicated decision support tools facilitate decision trees and documentation of “settled” questions so that forward momentum is retained.

Asynchronous Threaded Decision Support Encourages Diversity of Participation

There are a number of challenges to diverse participation in international consensus building including cultural differences with regards to speaking up on a call, time zone differences, languages and differences in information. processing. Dedicated decision support tools help to address these barriers in a number of ways. First, asynchronous participation allows for more contemplation at a time, convenient to the participant. Words can be considered carefully before being shared. Second, the extensive use of polling allows for silent participation in decision making. Most participants on Zoom calls are silent but participation in polls is much higher.

Slack vs Loomio

The Technology Task Force has evaluated a number of decision support tools and finds that Loomio is the best fit for the At-Large community. The decision support is integrated into the product, built from the ground up to support consensus building. Loomio is also open source so, if ICANN chose at some future date, it can be hosted on ICANN servers without requiring a relationship with an outside host. Even with hosting, the cost to non-profits is minimal, however.

Slack, on the other hand, is a more mature commercial product, with which ICANN staff are already familiar. The learning curve would onlv involve the decisions support addon, Cloverpop. The decision such support is integrated enough to serve the purpose and there might be some benefit to continuity with existing supported technologies inside ICANN.

Timeline:

1^st Quarter FY22, ongoing

Deliverables: 

100 User, non-profit license, two trained At-Large staff members

Requesting:

Staff Training

At-Large Training

JH-Support. Jz mentioned Loomio or slack with the clover pop addition. We really do need this especially if it works with mobile

 MH--Heidi - there was additional info on JZ's application form for this. This would be a great tool for CPWG to trial for their conversations rather than using the wiki

JC – Agree with MH; JZ has mentioned use of Loomio with Cloverpop, and Slack, in particular, which I strongly support.

MM - Supportive although not really familiar with these; General feeling in the community that we need to improve our tools in this area. 

RH - Not sure if this must be a At-Large ABR or a decision from ICANN IT

Translation and Publication of Materials for Individual User Education on DNS Abuse

MH--Similarly for this application

I strongly support this application to get information out about DNS abuse to the wider community. It would require more money to go into the comms budget to cater for the work which would come out of a small At-Large publication production team similar to our current ICANN Learn teams  

JC – Support.

MM – Supportive; any end-user targeted info we can release to the wider community in formats they can easily absorb would be very helpful 

JH-Support

RH - Support

Background

The ALAC is charged with representing the interests of “individual internet users,” within the ICANN community and the context of ICANN Policy Development. Because “individual internet users” are not truly a type of individual but rather a class of activities, it is often sufficient to surmise the interests on individual end users with logic. However, there are certainly aspects of internet usage that those with more experience take for granted and it behooves the ICANN community generally and the At-Large community specifically, to “take the pulse,” as it were, of the broader individual user community.

Issues such as universal acceptance, string confusion and semantic expectation are areas where more knowledge would be helpful to the ICANN community. For example, the research, conducted by the CCT Review Team, revealed an individual user preference for a more semantic web, where the gTLD is more closely related to the purpose of the corresponding websites. This is especially true in otherwise “highly regulated” areas such as finance and healthcare. One could expect these preferences to vary by region, culture, gender and other factors and knowing them would allow the At-Large to even better represent these interests.

Another area of interest is individual internet user experience with the web. Is DNS Abuse as pervasive as it appears to some? As we balance the economics and interests of contracted parties and registrants with the interests of non-registrant users, knowing how pervasive the challenges truly are will help tip the balance.

Finally, what impact have Apps, Search Engines and social media impacted how people browse the web?

Many within the At-Large community have fielded ad-hoc surveys using tools such Google Forms and Survey Monkey and received valuable feedback. However, so-call “self-selection” polls are known to be flawed when attempting to survey a larger, less known, population. Similarly to ICANN public comments, self-selection polls are subject to selection bias as well as influence by those with an interest in a specific outcome.

An At-Large Individual Internet User Poll

The issues outlined above are merely examples of topics that could be covered by a poll. A polling effort would necessarily include:

1. Identification of key issues
2. Professional question construction
   1. To facilitate demographic distinction
   2. To minimize bias
3. Fielding a professional survey

As the CCTRT discovered, fielding an international poll is not cheap, so great care would be taken with the question formation and it might make sense to begin with a single language and region to see how useful the information turns out to be.

Deliverables: 

The key deliverable would be the results of a professional poll on individual internet user proclivities, concerns and interests.

Technology Support: 

There would need to be a series of Zoom calls to establish the priorities and questions of the survey.

Language Services Support: 

Ideally, discussions of the survey would take place in multiple languages, as would the survey itself.

JH--Support but needs more clarity on whether they are looking for funding for the survey tool or just the analysis and discussions?

Also no mention of captioning which I think is needed here

MH--This is a project that a team from At-Large working with ICANN Org staff could develop for a specific purpose. Not sure if we need to make the request for an ABR or whether we could put forward a proposal for a particular poll and ICANN Org could administer it.

Its all in the purpose of the poll and the questions you ask, but Survey Monkey or one of those tools could do this. Hasn't ICANN already got an account we could use?

JC – Strongly support. JZ has clearly mentioned,

"A polling effort would necessarily include:

1. Identification of key issues
2. Professional question construction
   (a) To facilitate demographic distinction
   (b) To minimize bias
3. Fielding a professional survey."

So, the focus is less about the tool itself but the designing of the poll to address his points 1-3 to best capture the data we need to formulate positions/direction. It is the designing that we require professional support for.

MM – agreeing with JC that this might need breaking down. Just getting experts to design a poll around various topics is no mean feat. 

RH - I think more clarity is needed, also some kind of budget