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No.	Recommendation	Recipient	Thematic Group Source	Assignees	Status
30	For each Public Comment process, SOs and ACs should be adequately resourced to produce impact statements.	ICANN SO & AC Chairs	TG5	ALAC

Implementation Details

The At-Large Community has championed the ICANN staff-led efforts of improving the public understanding of and engagement in public comment proceedings.

The Document Production Pilot Program was approved in FY16 and extended to the first several months of FY17. In this Pilot Program, external contractors will collaborate with ICANN Staff and community members to produce policy premiers that provide background information of public comment proceedings and explain the impact of those issues to business, government, civil society groups, and end users. Regional At-Large Organizations will play an active role in participating in and shaping this Pilot Program.

Should this Program prove to be successful, the policy premier production services may be extended to benefit more SOs and ACs in the long run.

Next Step

Regional At-Large Organizations will closely collaborate with ICANN staff in the Policy Development Support department and the external contractors to fully explore the potential of the Document Production Pilot Program.

Notes:

For near future ALAC discussion
Could be one of the hot topics in LA?

20 Oct 2015 (Post ATLAS II Implementation Taskforce meeting - ICANN54)

There are many forms of impact statements including legal, environmental and all sorts. An impact statement is usually defined as an analysis or study, which describes the expected effects of a policy, project, or action being contemplated by a business or government organization. Impact statement has a specific, technical meaning and can be a relatively in-depth study.
In the case of GNSO policy, a specific decision may have significant financial impact on organizations or restrict usages. They can be non-trivial to create and will be required for GNSO PDPs.
In the At-Large context, impact statements may speak about the impact on end users with regard to any issue that is being dealt with at ICANN or any action of ICANN. Specifically, this may imply that the ALAC needs to provide a study that will demonstrate and prove its advice's impact on end users that as opposed to an opinion. This might be a guiding principle for drafting future ALAC statements, and it is something that needs to be institutionalized as we go forward. As a penholder that drafts an ALAC policy advice statement, he/she needs to explain how the ALAC is making a comment in a way that is relevant to/important for end users and what impact it will have if it’s implemented or not implemented.
If the ALAC includes such impact statements in its policy advice, some groups within ICANN may call it an opinion unless the ALAC can demonstrate that it has actually done a study to show fact as opposed to an opinion. If the ALAC tries to conduct a study and demonstrate fact via an impact statement, there wouldn’t be enough time within the public comment response period, or enough penholders to draft such impact analysis. Furthermore, if the inclusion of an impact statement becomes a norm, it may insinuate that if an ALAC recommendation does not include impact study on users, then the recipients of the recommendations may categorically reject it until they see the impact study.
Impact statements should show how ICANN issues are affecting end users/registrants. Oftentimes public comments do not indicate what's in it for end users; as a result, there is no interest from the At-Large community to respond to the public comment because they don't know how this impacts the end users. This recommendation suggests that when public comment comes out, there is some assessment of the proposed policy impacts on end users, registrants, registries, and other stakeholders.
As the recommendation's recipient is ICANN SO and AC chairs, the ALAC Chair could bring forward the use of impact statement across ICANN for discussion among SO and AC chairs.
In order to be able to produce an impact statement, either the At-Large community would have to draft this or there should be a staff resource to do so. There are very limited resources from volunteers to draft impact statements. The phrase 'adequately resourced' means there should be some staff time allocation given.
This recommendation is not actionable in its current form, but it is something that the ALAC must put on its “to-do” list.

14 Jun 2016:

RALO leaders will discuss the document production pilot project with Dan O'Neil during the RALO Leadership meeting in ICANN56.