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ALAC Leadership Team Strategy Sessions

(Final)

This request is for a post-ICANN meeting ICANN Meeting Review and Planning Session. It will occur at the end of each ICANN meeting and will include the ALAC Leadership Team (1 person per Region), the Liaisons to other AC/SOs, other advisors to the ALT (typically the recent past ALAC Chairs of not there in some other capacity) and critical At-Large support staff.

This strategy meeting will include a number of components:

1. Debriefing on the meeting just completed.
2.  Address issues that have arisen during the meeting
3.  Plan for ALAC actions over the coming months.
4.  If available and practical, meet with senior ICANN staff (Chair of the Board, CEO, Senior Vice President, Policy Development Support – such interactions have proven very constructive in the past),

Our experience is that in the absence of such a meeting, people disappear immediately for 1-2 weeks to either relax (rare!) or to catch up on their real lives and jobs after being at the ICANN meeting (often taken as vacation time from their real jobs). We then spend considerable time scrambling to get organized again and we inevitable do not quite make it, decreasing the ALAC and leader effectiveness and significantly increasing stress (on both volunteers and staff).

Optimally this would be a breakfast meeting allowing for an early start and early completion.

Real-time Captioning of Adobe Connect Meetings In English, Spanish, and French

(Final)

This is a continuation of our current pilot program of captioning for 5 RALO and/or ALAC monthly meetings, and/or 5 Working Group meetings or webinars over a 6 month period in FY18.

Our goal in this continuation of the pilot is to provide real-time captioning for either 5 RALO meetings a month or 4 RALO and 1 ALAC meeting, and/or 5 working group meetings or webinars a month to enable full participation of all At-Large Users within ICANN. An additional objective of this third phase of the pilot is to test the concept for the implementation of a permanent captioning program to replace the transcription program currently available. The metrics obtained from the second phase of the captioning pilot clearly indicates strong support for captioning. 

• More than 91% described captioning as either extremely helpful or helpful.
• More than 75% indicated the ability to understand the session more effectively
• More than 54% had a greater understanding of the topics

The standard of captioning is now at such a high level that it is effectively a transcript. Captioning has the benefit of people being able to check facts and terminology during a call and thus being able to participate in a more informed manner. This is especially valuable for people whose primary language is not English, French or Spanish. On the WS2 Diversity call #9, 61% of participants stated that English was not their primary language. Most of the AFRALO call participants either did not have English as their primary language and/or had low bandwidth and 75% were able to understand the session more effectively and the topic better with captioning. This was even higher in the WS Diversity call at 84%. There were many comments about the advantage of being able to catch up especially if a speaker spoke quickly or the audio was not so clear.

We also want to raise awareness of the importance of including captioning whenever language support is offered. We are targeting RALO meetings since our goal is to increase engagement in ICANN within each of the respective regions. We are also targeting the working groups and webinars for the same reason as well as to promote more engagement from RALOs in these working groups. We think this will lead to more effective participation and engagement within ICANN. This is especially the case for people who are coming from bandwidth challenged countries where lack of bandwidth has limited their participation within ICANN. Adobe Connect is a large user of bandwidth and as such makes it difficult for those with limited bandwidth to fully participate. Adigo calls are helpful in that regard, but often in many places cell coverage is sparse and calls often drop or use up too much of a person’s quota.

Participants were enthusiastic and wanted captioning on working group and CCWG calls while 50% of WS Diversity participants wanted captioning on all calls.

The goal of the pilot is to continue to gather the necessary metrics to illustrate the need for captioning not only for accessibility reasons but also for those with limited bandwidth and novice without a clear understanding about the terminology used in key ICANN meetings. The data gained from this third phase of the pilot should help us meet these goals and show the need for captioning ICANN wide. This next phase of the project intends therefore to extend the reach of captioning even further so that it meets the intended goals.  This means offering more sessions with captioning including in French and Spanish and reaching out to any persons who have a hearing impairment. It would assist ICANN staff to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of captioning compared to the provision of transcripts after the call.

Requesting: 5 meetings per month for a semester. 60 meetings per year.Administration of 5 surveys per month and tabulation of results.

GSE Funding for RALO Activities

(Final)

For FY18, the ALAC again requests that each of the five At-large Regional At-Large Organizations (RALO’s) are given access up to $2,000 each for targeted local discretionary funds to permit the local travel, luncheons, displays, graphic and promotional Facebook/Twitter graphics.

Opportunities exist for At-Large members to do local outreach and engagement about ICANN and ICANN policy related issues. The local activities can include local presentations, brown bag lunch topics, local business persons presentations i.e., Kiwana’s, Rotary, Professional Women’s  University Groups, Chamber of Commerce and more. These local groups at the grassroots are looking for professional speakers on a weekly basis and rely on local experts on various topics. They open up opportunities for speaking engagements at minimum cost.

While the FY17 Additional Budget Request on this issue was not approved, there was $10,000 in GSE funding made available. The ALAC is appreciative of this.

Well into FY17, a template was prepared and requests from the RALOs are now being submitted.

Approved for Submission with revision.

Request for revision sent to Dev Anand Teelucksingh.

A revised and final version was sent to staff by Dev Anand Teelucksingh

IGF Funding for At-Large

(Final)

The proposal is to organize and implement an effective, coordinated and sustained At-Large strategy to raise awareness of the end-user perspective and engage in targeted outreach and engagement program during the 2017 IGF to be held in Geneva 18-21 December 2017 which is a premier global event  targeting global stakeholders in the Internet Ecosystem.  The program will include awareness raising on end-user policy issues through 5 workshops, training activities and better utilize the ICANN information booth, thus heighten overall branding of At-Large and ICANN. 

Note that this request is being submitted in addition to several RALO-based requests for IGF support. This is necessary because there is no Assurance that a global At-Large IGF request will be accepted, and the individual requests, even if accepted by ICANN, will be contingent on IGF acceptance. However, on the assumption that this request is dealt with favorably, and one or more RALO requests are accepted, it is understood that they will be reconciled and implemented synergistically.

Moreover, it is understood that a global presence of At-Large representing ICANN at an IGF, without a particular ICANN funded workshop, is a new concept, and it is expected that this will need to be phased in over a period of several years.

Improve the tracking of ALAC’s Advice to the ICANN Board and ALAC Responses to ICANN Public Comments

(Final)

The ICANN At-Large website has a summary page https://atlarge.icann.org/policy-summary listing all of the correspondence issued by the ALAC including advice to the ICANN Board and responses to ICANN public comments. This summary page allows for searches by Topic Keywords (eg. IDN, WHOIS) of all of the At-Large Policy Advice issued by ALAC since 2003.

There are two key limitations with this search function on this summary page on the At-Large website :

1)     The ICANN Board responses to the advice submitted by the ALAC cannot be found as they are not linked to the database. The information on how the ICANN Board treated the advice from ACs is maintained on a separate page at https://features.icann.org/board-advice in several PDFs. It appears to be generated manually and any linkage needs further manual intervention by staff - which makes for a very inefficient use of staff resources plus a cumbersome end user experience

2)     The text of the PDFs of our Policy Advice is not indexed, limiting the ability to search for persons who acted as penholders for the advice statements and looking for specific wording in the policy statements. The keyword search method is very limited and hard to use for users that are not well versed in the topics - this being the majority of our At-Large Community.

This proposal seeks to have ICANN allocate resources to design and build a system that will remove or significantly reduce these limitations.

As a start (phase 1):

1)     Adding the ICANN Board responses to the ALAC statements database on the At-Large website. This would be of benefit to At-Large to show the impact of our work both within and outside of At-Large.

2)     Having the text inside the PDFs of our ALAC documents fully searchable. Additional data fields for each ALAC statement such as penholders can be added.

This would pave the way for a wider ranging phase 2 - a Policy Management Process System, by aligning databases to a common standard based on Open Data standards, interoperability and interactivity.

At present, all coordination of databases, from the Board’s response to ALAC advice to RALO involvement and At-Large Structure input to policy is done manually, resulting in a high workload on At-Large Staff and in inaccurate and sporadic updating of policy according to overall workload and key personnel. The resulting set of information to be used by At-Large members is disseminated amongst several sources, from the At-Large Web site to a WIKI and is thus completely customer unfriendly. The ALAC has been repeatedly falsely accused of purposely not making information easy to find. Some commenters have seen a deeper, somehow more sombre goal of At-Large leadership to keep information hard to find (information hoarding) so as to remain in their elected seats. This accusation is of course completely unfounded and the ALAC has been trying for years, through its Technology Task Force, to find tools that would ease the difficulty to provide a welcoming environment for volunteers to access key information that would help in drafting statements, thus increasing organisational effectiveness.

It is clear that the current system of Web and WIKIs only goes so far and falls short of our members’ needs for easy access to information. Furthermore, it is clear that a significant part of a volunteer’s motivation comes from seeing that their action has had an impact on the organisation - thus ongoing feedback on the effectiveness of At-Large policy advice is essential and has to be optimised through automated processes for it to be durable and sustainable.

Whilst this proposed is a short term measure (phase 1 of a wider “Policy Management Process System”), ICANN needs to treat this in a holistic fashion.

Approved for Submission with revision.

Request for revision sent to Glenn McKnight and Dev Anand Teelucksingh

Final version sent.

Travel Support for GAC Liaison

(Final)

This request is to provide travel support (flight, accommodation and per diem) for the new position of ALAC Liaison to the GAC. The ALAC currently receives travel support for the ALAC liaisons to the ccNSO, GNSO and SSAC (if they are not funding by other means such as receiving ALAC Member support or SSAC support). This request would like to ask that the new position of the ALAC Liaison to the GAC receive similar support on an ongoing basis in order to be able to carry out their duties and participate f2f in the GAC and ALAC meetings at ICANN Public Meetings.

The ALAC requests that this travel slot be placed in ICANN’s core budget starting in FY18.  If this does not occur, the ALAC requests that this travel slot be considered as a FY18 Additional Budget Request.

The ALAC has met with the GAC for many years, and have always talked about more substantive collaboration and the possibility of exchanging Liaisons. However until recently, such collaboration has not actually occurred. The ALAC and GAC are now more effective in addressing issues of joint concern (such as potential harms from specific sensitive gTLDs), Current GAC leadership was very supportive of establishing an ALAC Liaison to the GAC, ensuring a regular bi-directional flow of information and ensuring that both groups are aware of each other’s “hot issues”. This liaison has now been put in place (roughly equivalent to a similar GNSO Liaison to the GAC). To ensure that the Liaison can fulfill his/her mandate, it is essential that the Liaison can attend all ICANN meetings and participate in GAC activities.

Approved for submission

Submitted to the ICANN Controller

This proposal envisages organizing the Asia-Pacific Regional At-Large Organization  (APRALO) General Assembly (GA) – that is, bringing together one representative from each of the APRALO ALSes, as well as a selected representative for individual members, at a single location for a combination of strategic development, policy development, capacity building and outreach and engagement. The last APRALO GA was held in London in 2014.

The proposed date and location is specifically requested to be at ICANN 60 (Meeting C) scheduled to take place 28 October - 3 November 2017 in Abu Dhabi, UAE.

This request for a APRALO General Assembly is in line with the timeline for RALO General Assemblies and the next At-Large Summit as developed by the ALAC. APRALO meetings at the requested General Assembly will focus on three specific components:

1. How to better engage our ALSs – also known within ICANN as “inreach” – in a candid examination of expectations, member engagement, program execution and community adhesion, we intend to deliver a one-day workshop intended to discover what needs to be done, both by ICANN and the APRALO community, to maximize volunteer participation, increase the ability to represent the best interests of end-users, as well as increase ICANN's “on the street” relevance.

2. Policy briefings on critical ICANN issues intended to ensure that APRALO ALS

representatives are adequately informed to educate their ALS memberships, and that they

are better able to channel bottom-up end-user perspectives and ideas into the At-Large

community’s policy debates.

3. Leadership training, intended to educate APRALO ALSes about the details of ICANN processes, and develop a clear understanding of its role in the broader Internet Governance Ecosystem. As an example, the current deluge of activity surrounding the Post transition of the IANA stewardship is mainly the realm of those who can follow it practically full-time, with multiple working groups and dozens (if not hundreds) of proposals in the air. It is our experience that many in the At-Large community do not understand much of what's going on or even the relevance. Awareness of both the processes and the path from idea to policy is a critical part of advancing the public interest within ICANN.

Public Media Initiative

(Final)

(PDF)

SUMMARY:

Production of independent, factual, end-user-targeted information regarding the worldwide use and administration of domain names, as well as other components of the ICANN functions. This program will identify and and deploy creative approaches to explaining difficult Internet concepts through the use of clear, colloquial language, using non-traditional media and presented in a light – humorous, if possible – tone.

RATIONALE:

As part of an attempt to block the IANA transition in late 2016, US Senator Ted Cruz, along with political collaborators and proxies, launched a global campaign of false information, conspiracy theories, and even personal attacks on the then-CEO of ICANN. With a communications strategy aimed at policy-makers, the domain industry and technically-savvy users, ICANN was ill-equipped to counter this. While Senator Cruz’s campaign to derail the transition within Congress did not succeed, the results were far closer than expected and trust for ICANN as an organization was diminished within the end-user population. Moreover. the polarization, inaccuracies and hostility created by the campaign have subsided but not been eliminated; they could be revived at any time, and their tone can easily be repeated by actors in other countries hostile to the ICANN multi-stakeholder model.

In a society that honors free speech, ICANN cannot simply wish away or ban that which is hostile or false. The answer to malicious and false information is to confront it with utility and fact. While such confrontation will not change the minds of those attacking ICANN and multi-stakeholderism for political ends, it may succeed in reaching the billions of neutral observers who, in the absence of truth and clarity, have only heard from the fear-mongers and conspiracy theorists.

Moreover, a number of examples exist that demonstrate the ability to present complex Internet issues in clear lay language, often using humor to help convey the message. Two examples:

• “John Oliver: Net Neutrality” (June 1 2014, HBO)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpbOEoRrHyU
• “Adam Conover: The Terrifying Cost of ‘Free’ Websites” (Dec 7 2016, TruTV and collegehumor.com)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pFX2P7JLwA

THE PROJECT:

Using a contest aimed at communications and visual arts students, we hope to find sources of independent, creative approaches to providing publicly-focused factual information through a variety of media (web, video podcasts, etc). An advisory committee will determine the priority topics and judge the winning proposals, a secretariat will create and publicize the contest, conduct supporting research/fact-checking, and oversee the execution and distribution of the final material.

The advisory committee is tentatively to be composed of:

• ICANN communications staff

• Expertise in video production
• Expertise in journalism
• Members of the ICANN At-Large Community
• Other expertise in Internet Governance

While the project (obviously) is counting on the support of ICANN and others, it is intentional that the media content produced as a result of the contest be independent and not official ICANN communications. Indeed, it is possible that some analysis and humor may not be totally in-line with ICANN messaging, but that is acceptable. What is most important is accuracy, relevance and understandability (and thus trustworthiness) by a maximum audience.

The ALAC has been allocated travel slots to attend ICANN meetings for 15 ALAC Members, 10 RALO Leaders as well as for the Liaisons to the GNSO and ccNSO.

The interpretation by ICANN staff has been that the ALAC could freely re-allocate any of the 15+10 slots if the original designated traveler cannot attend a meeting, but that the Liaison slots could be used only for the designated Liaison.

If the Liaison is already funded through some other means (such as being an ALAC Member), the Liaison slot could not be use at all.

Notably, the other AC/SOs receiving travel support have no such restrictions for the use of their travel support slots (other than the requirement to fund NomCom Appointees). We specifically note that the GNSO has 22 unrestricted travel slots, whereas there are only 21 GNSO Council Members – the 22nd slot was originally designated for the Liaison sent from the ALAC to the GNSO, but the GNSO has never used it in that way. We also note that according to recent travel reports, the GNSO currently receives more than 55 travel slots despite the guidelines setting their limit at 22.

We believe that the ALAC should be given full discretion about how they can use all of its travel slots.

The ALAC and RALOs currently reallocate travel slots when an ALAC Member or a regional leader cannot attend a meeting. The replacement traveler is selected based on a combination of who will be able to contribute most to the At-Large meetings and sessions, and who would benefit most from this participation. A similar process would be used for filling the “Liaison” slots. 

The ALAC notes that since this request involves no additional budget allocation, it might be considered one which should be resolved purely within the Constituency Travel processes, and the ALAC agrees. However, since that process has not provided the needed flexibility, the ALAC is following this unusual process.

This same request was made last year. The Formal response was “YES”, but the text that followed was a repeat of the current interpretation saying that we could not reallocate slots. That notwithstanding, we were allowed to reallocate these slots for recent meetings. The ALAC was also told that it could “trick” the system by having the Liaison use the Liaison slot and then re-use the ALAC slot (in the above example). This is problematic because the RALO has control over the RALO/ALAC slots from their region, but the ALAC reallocates the Liaison slots.

The ALAC requests that ICANN eliminate the disputed interpretation and allow travel slots to be used most effectively. There is NO budget implication, but gives the community control over resources that have been allocated to it.