2024-08-26 RDRS Standing Committee - Meeting #15

Notes/ Action Items

AI: ICANN Staff to check the feasibility of proposed solutions. 

AI: ICANN to provide details to SC on the amount of time it takes to get a Metrics Usage report published.

AI: ICANN Staff to update Impressions Document accordingly with the agreed enhancements and access limitations. 

AI: ICANN Staff to update Impressions Document with an LOE for the enhancement request.

1.Welcome

• The chair confirmed the agenda and allowed time for additional agenda items. Sarah Wyld indicated she would bring up a new idea during the Any Other Business (AOB) segment.

2.RDRS Usage Metrics Report

1. Continue discussion on Metric 10/Lookups

i.The SC discussed the high number of lookups unrelated to domains sponsored by participating registrars. It was discussed that malformed domain names or non-domain names could generate lookup errors due to the search interface. The user interface triggers it’s first query  after typing three characters.  If there is a 750 millisecond delay between each additional input for the same domain search, then the system will treat that as a separate search query. The SC discussed how this affects the data and agreed that it should not generate bad data.  ICANN confirmed that less than 5% of data shows multiple searches on one word entry which is negligible and also indicated the “Registrar Not Supported” is the best indicator of demand in Metric 10.

ii.The difference between successful lookups and actual requests submitted was also discussed. The group offered  the potential reasons for users abandoning their requests after identifying a valid domain but not submitting a request (this included comments from SC members that they often search to see if a registrar is participating to inform their teams before actually submitting a request at a later time. Various solutions, such as conducting surveys or focus groups, were proposed to understand user behavior better. However, ICANN indicated that users cannot be contacted for input without their consent as it requires use of PII.

AI: ICANN Staff to check the feasibility of proposed solutions. 

     a.Cadence of publishing metrics reports going forward

i.ICANN staff suggested changing the frequency of publishing metrics reports from monthly to quarterly due to create more efficiency and indicated. that  CSV data could still be provided to the Standing Committee monthly, but reports could be published to icann.org quarterly. The SC Chair recommended to continue with the monthly reports until completing a full year, after which the cadence could be reconsidered.

AI:  ICANN to provide details to SC on the amount of time it takes to get a Metrics Usage report published.

3.Next Round of RDRS Enhancements Ready for ICANN (Impressions Document [docs.google.com])

• • Registrar Item 2 & 18

1. Item2: Registrars requested the ability to re-categorize requests, for example, changing a request categorized as law enforcement to a more appropriate category. The SC agreed to proceed with this enhancement, understanding that this would override the original categorization made by the requestor.
2. Item 18: A quick efficiency improvement was suggested where, upon completing a case, the system should automatically return the user to the “Pending” request list rather than staying on the completed case screen. The group agreed to prioritize this improvement.
3. SC discussed the access of the document and agreed to limit the access to SC members only, so no third party can make amendments and SC members will have better ability to navigate the document. 

AI: ICANN Staff to update Impressions Document accordingly with the agreed enhancements and access limitations. 

4.Collecting Standing Committee thoughts for RDRS Final Report (based on charter questions)

• • The chair mentioned that a new tab had been added to the impressions document to start collecting thoughts for the RDRS final report. 

• • The chair also mentioned that a new tab in the impressions document for tracking outreach activities

4.AOB

• Sarah Wyld proposed an enhancement where the public Registration Data Directory Service (RDDS) response could be displayed within the Naming service portal RDRS persona for Registrars alongside the request. This would help registrars and see if the disclosed data is already publicly available. This suggestion was positively received.

AI: ICANN Staff to update Impressions Document with an LOE for the enhancement request.