Post ATLAS II Implementation - ALAC

Notes: 

20 Oct 2015

• The Post ATLAS II Implementation Taskforce has been working on this very task of keeping track of actions on recommendations 

Actions:

• Staff to provide the Strategy document before LA.
• ALAC to expand on this recommendation
• 02 Sep 2015: 
  
  • Ariel Liang to follow up the GSE team and Heidi Ullrich with regard to the Strategy document 

Notes: 

18 Oct 2015 (ALAC-GSE Part 1) 

• Note on Slide: This should be referred to ICANN’s Operations Team
• Olivier Crepin-Leblond: 
  • It's pretty much done and dusted. ICANN has opened offices to cover all of the five regions, so that works well. 

Actions: 

• 02 Sep 2015: Olivier Crepin-Leblond to ask the Board Chairman re the implementation of Rec 27; Olivier Crepin-Leblond will ask ALAC Chair's permission first. 
• 14 Jun 2016: 
  • Olivier Crepin-Leblond to check whether the ATRT rec 9.1 is incorporated in the new ICANN bylaws
    YES it is:
    
    
    Section 12.3.
     
    PROCEDURES
     
    Each Advisory Committee shall determine its own rules of procedure and quorum requirements; provided that each Advisory Committee shall ensure that the advice provided to the Board by such Advisory Committee is communicated in a clear and unambiguous written statement, including the rationale for such advice.
     
    The Board will respond in a timely manner to formal advice from all Advisory Committees explaining what action it took and the rationale for doing so.
    
    
  • Heidi Ullrich to forward the question to Board Support, Rinalia Abdul Rahim and possibly Steve Crocker to address this during ICANN56
    

Notes: 

Action: 

• 24 Nov 2015: 

• • Heidi Ullrich to contact ICANN staff with regard to professional survey creation and report back to the RALO secretariats with regard to the progress

• 09 Mar 2016 (secretariat meeting - ICANN55): 
  
  • Humberto Carrasco and Siranush Vardanyan to collaborate with Staff and lead the effort developing professional survey for RALOs. A working group, with one representative from each RALO, may need to be formed.  
    

Notes: 

All RALOs completed a Professional Expertise Survey (APRALO Survey  was a bit different with more questions and analytical results included ). This work was consider a very good start to map the current professional expertise.

AFRALO Result

APRALO Result

EURALO Result

LACRALO Result

NARALO Result

Below is the result analysis from LACRALO Chair and Secretariat

24 Nov 2015: 

• It is important to prepare a new survey to obtain more detailed information from At-Large members, professional help may be needed. 
• The survey should not only include ALS representatives but also other members in the ALSes. There is issue of openness of the survey. Some ALSes are tremendously large with lots of members. The survey needs to be more widely distributed with certain cap. 
• If we open the poll of survey respondents, the results may be complicated, as certain large ALS respondents may skew the results. 
• Ask ALSes themselves to provide the range of their members' knowledge, skills, and competencies that they can offer ICANN. 
• Professional survey creation is needed; ICANN may have in-house expertise to create professional surveys. Heidi Ullrich is following up on this action item. 

21 Jan 2016 (secretariat meeting)

• EURALO is working to form a taskforce to review the past survey and to add further questions for new survey; this taskforce will build the database of EURALO ALS expertise 
• LACRALO is waiting for the professional help re building the survey, also to learn about the number of members in the ALSes is important (e.g. some ALSes may have tens or hundreds of members) 
• NARALO had very little participation in the first survey with little impact. Similarly, an IEEE event held an extensive survey but only a handful of people responded. Survey may not yield the desired result as response rate could be low. Alternatively, RALO Chairs and Secretariats probably should contact ALSes directly instead of waiting for responses to surveys. 
• All RALOs should use the same survey, so it may be better to wait for professional help 
• APRALO: the idea of calling ALSes does not work in APAC region. The response rate in the previous APAC survey was high, and the result was clear with regard to professional expertise. Since new ALSes have joined, it would be valuable to do a new survey. 
• The last survey was only asking the ALS representatives, although the target is ALSes (e.g. members). Target audience needs to be defined clearly this time. 
• Survey that is short and sweet may get better response rate. 
• To find ways to promote the survey and encourage people to participate (e.g. amazon gift card for filling out the survey) may be needed. 
• Several ways need to be used to reach out to ALSes, and survey itself can be administered in different ways (e.g. emails, polls, calls) to be effective. The list of questions used in the survey need to be consistent across RALOs. Professional help may be useful in defining the survey questions. Each RALO can decide how to promote and inform the ALSes to take part in the survey

18 Feb 2016 (secretariat meeting) 

• The EURALO At-Large Structure Engagement Taskforce has been established. It will be looking at ways to engage EURALO At‐Large structures better.  

09 Mar 2016 (secretariat meeting - ICANN55)

• Heidi Ullrich: There does not appear to be any particular expertise on survey development within staff. There have been some staff resources allocated to a personal survey in terms of staff being able to reach out and call the ALSs and the identified representative of each ALS. And we are hoping to use this Staff resource in the context of the ALS Criteria and Expectations Task Force. It would be great if there is collaboration between the efforts in the Cross RALO Secretariat Group as well as the ALS Criteria Task Force. 
• Alberto Soto: ALSes should have the flexibility to provide the number of contacts for completing the survey, but we should demand at least a minimum of three contacts from each ALS.
• Humberto Carrasco, Siranush Vardanyan, and Heidi Ullrich need to first discuss and agree on the content of the survey. A small working group should be formed for this effort, with at least one representative from each RALO. 
• The purpose of the survey needs to be clarified and whether all RALOs need to do the survey needs to be discussed, as RALOs differ from each other. 
• Such survey can be an opportunity to update RALOs' database on ALS primary and secondary contacts. Such survey can also ask questions how RALO leadership can help further engage ALSes and make them more active.  
• 2010 ALS survey can be a good reference. It asks about ALSes' areas of interest, questions related to the At-Large improvements, and a subset of questions that Rudi Vansnick made on some ccTLD issues. After the survey, RALO Secretariats and Chairs did an analysis of each of their RALO’s results and then that was reported back. 
• To have a database of the actual knowledge that we have within our community – and not only just the ALS representative, but also within the At-Large Structure – would be useful, especially in soliciting specific penholders to draft ALAC Statements in response to public comments. This approach would be much better than sending a flood emails, among which public comment related ones often get lost. 
• The survey result can potentially feed into ATLAS II Recommendation 26 about the policy management process system improvements, which is a long-term goal. Rec 26 aims to scale up the policy advice development process by creating an automated system, for example, that would send the right information to the right people according to key words, etc. 

12 May 2016 (secretariat meeting) 

• Some RALOs have little interest in the survey (e.g. NARALO), APRALO also conducted similar surveys in the past, hence very little progress in this task.
• 2 options for moving forward: 1) Humberto can move forward with Staff on the survey; 2) there will be additional staff resource to help catalog ALS information for a centralized database, and this staff resource can reach out to ALSes individually and ask targeted questions regarding their expertise, not only the ALS representatives but other members. 
• One or two multiple choice questions can be developed to explore ALS expertise. Staff to work with Olivier Crepin-Leblond, Humberto, Siranush to develop the question based on the policy taxonomy and taxonomy of other categories. 

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. 

Notes: 

• ALAC to prepare a follow up on this and send to the ICANN Board

Actions: 

• 30 Sep 2015 
  • During ICANN 54, Technology Taskforce to meet with ICANN IT (Josh Baulch) and discuss AC recording conversion into videos
    
  • Nathalie Peregrine/ Ariel Liang to confirm that whether the wiki page of the repository of webinars is included in the ALS welcome email 
  • During ICANN 54, ALAC to discuss with Nora Abusitta with regard to the internship program 

Notes: 

• Need to define 'Capacity Building' and possibly change the term
• 30 Sep 2015: 
  
  • There has been a fully developed At-Large webinar program in 2015, but the participation level has been quite low 
  • The webinars on important cross community issues usually attract participation. 
  • APRALO-APAC Hub webinars address the needs in the region and the topics have been identified collaboratively between staff and community members. This is appreciated by the community. 
  • Webinars should continue and ALSes need to be encouraged to participate 
  • One of the challenges is the ability to use the webinar materials after they take place and share them on social media. AC recordings are difficult to be converted into videos that can be shared on YouTube. 
  • It would be good to track the stats (e.g. number of downloads) with regard to the past webinars. Far more people may be watching the webinars after they have taken place. Those stats can serve as the baseline numbers to measure future participation. Participation in the capacity building program can be a good metrics/criteria to measure engagement. We need to push the capacity building information/materials to the community members and encourage them to take advantage of them. 
  • At-Large Structures should know about the wiki page of the repository of the webinars.  
  • The repertoire of the webinars is large, but it may be intimidating for a newcomer to navigate through. At-Large Community members/Staff need to provide more guidance to make webinars more accessible, highlight the key webinars, and provide frameworks on how to use the resources. Reorganization of that wiki page is needed. The listing of the webinars needs to be more intuitive and should not be merely based on publish dates. A short blurb about each webinar or some blog posts about learning opportunities may be a good way to entice ALSes to click through, as learning process itself takes time. Potential ICANN interns can work on this type of project. 
  • Re publicizing the webinars after they take place - IEEE breaks the recordings down into digestible sections, uses twitter feed and mailing lists. NTEN uses twitter feed and tweet throughout the entire webinar. They also use tools to see how long people have been engaged with the webinar, as well as other tools to retain people's attention. 
  • Twitter feed will be effective if it is targeting individuals. We don't know much about the individuals (ALS members) within the At-Large community. It is important to first get to know the individuals within the ALSes and understand who we are trying to attract in order to get them engaged. 

Action:

• 14 Jun 2016: Ariel Liang to check with Leon Sanchez/ Grace Abuhamad whether public responsibilities and public interest will be included in CCWG-Accountability WS2

Notes: 

• To be discussed in the near future

Actions: 

•  02 Sep 2015: Olivier Crepin-Leblond to ask a subset of the Board to hold a conference call with the ALAC in between ICANN meetings; Olivier Crepin-Leblond will ask ALAC Chair's permission first. 
  
• 19 Oct 2015: 
  
  • ALT(Olivier Crepin-Leblond) to follow up with Steve Crocker on this rec during Friday 23 Oct 2015 ALT meeting 

Notes: 

• Enhance communications between the Board and the At-Large community 
• 19 Oct 2015: 
  
  • Olivier Crepin-Leblond already spoke with Steve Crocker about this recommendation. He was informed that the Board has many meetings in between ICANN meetings and it won't be realistically feasible or beneficial for the ALAC to meet with the ICANN Board in between meetings. However, Steve Crocker is open to meet with the ALAC on his own in between meetings. 

Action: 

• 14 Jun 2016: Olivier Crepin-Leblond to ask Alan Greenberg about this recommendation, cc'ing At-Large Staff for possible follow-up

Notes: 

Action: 

• 22 Feb 2016:
  
  • presented to the At-Large ALS Criteria and Expectations Taskforce, per recommendation of the At-Large Regional Secretariats Meeting 2016-02-18
• 09 Mar 2016: 
  
  • Heidi Ullrich to check with ICANN Staff with regard to whether Adobe Connect rooms has built-in 'dial-out' capability to make calls at a low cost
• 12 May 2016
  
  • Silvia Vivanco to contact Humberto Carrasco to ask about their progress on this recommendation and report back to the Secretariat mailing list; progress will be noted on this page.
• 14 Jun 2016: 
  
  • ALS Criteria and Expectations TF to provide an update on this recommendation in ICANN56 

Notes: 

• 24 Nov 2015
  
  • NARALO is working on this Rec. NARALO did a survey with regard to ALS engagement, and NARALO leaders have reached out to ALSes to personally encourage their participation. 
  • RALO calls that conflict with regular work time of members is one of the factors of the lack of engagement. NARALO is in process reviewing timezone rotation options for its calls. 
  • The time conflict with work issue does not seem to apply to LACRALO. 
  • Voting is less a problem, but active participation is an issue. 
  • Since  November  we have  been  calling and emailing all the  NARALO ALS to participate 
  • Seven ALS  decided to become decertified
  • Planning to have interactive webinars for the NARALO webinar 
• 21 Jan 2016 (secretariat meeting) 
  
  • Inactive ALSes will likely be decertified in an automatic process 
  • In 2014, EURALO had to decertify 4 ALSes, meanwhile there are 3 candidates in the list and will likely be decertified in 2016 
  • NARALO is about to decertify 4 ALSes (they have explicitly stated that they'd like to be decertified); the other inactive ones have not yet responded 
• 18 Feb 2016 (secretariat meeting) 
  
  • The ALS Criteria and Expectations Taskforce will be reviewing those minimal participation requirements. The upcoming At-Large Review will also visit this issue and identify problems. 
• 09 Mar 2016 (secretariat meeting - ICANN55) 
  
  • The At-Large ALS Criteria and Expectations Taskforce has been looking into this issue 
  • NARALO leadership (Judith Hellerstein and Glenn McKnight) have been working diligently to engage their inactive ALSes through calls and emails, finding out who they are and what their interests are, and steering them in a direction of a Working Group. Their conversations are beyond the minimum participation requirements, which only concern with voting and attendance at the moment. The result has been positive, with 14 or 15 people on average per monthly NARALO call. 
  • Some ALSes that have not participated in any calls over the last year said they are no longer interested and asked for decertification. 7 NARALO ALSes are in the to-be-decertified list. Some other inactive ALSes would like to continue engaging in At-Large but do not really understand ways to get involved. NARALO Leadership is work with Silvia Vivanco to create special webinars to explain the process to these. 
  • One discovery of this process is that the contact person of an ALS has changed and the new one doesn’t get the information on how to engage, so they’re just like a new ALS. 
  • NARALO is also setting some minimum standards of participation. 
  • Timezone issue is a challenge for participation. 
  • If NARALO has reached out to ALSes and is able to actually bring some good results on this, it could be something other RALOs can do. But in some regions, high cost related to calls may be a barrier. RALO leaderships may need to get some funding for this, or advanced tools that can initiate 'dial-out' to reach ALSes. 
  • RALO has its own Adobe Connect room to make calls.
• 12 May 2016
  
  • APRALO collected the particiaption metrics for the last two years in monthly meetings, APAC Hub-APRALO joint webinars, working group calls, and so on. APRALO leadership also sent private messages to 8-9 ALSes to ask whether they are still interested in continuing their engagement. Those ALSes will be given a couple of months to respond and come back to participate. Final notification of decertification will be sent to the ALSes that do not respond or are no longer desired to be in At-Large. 
  • NARALO has been working on the decertification of ALSes and analyzing participation metrics with regard to monthly meetings and other platforms in At-Large. Many ALSes that NARALO leadership reached out to expressed their desire to discontinue their engagement in At-Large. There are some issues with regard to Rules of Procedure, as meeting participation is not really a requirement in NARALO RoP. 
  • AFRALO created a working group 2 years ago with 8 ALSes participating, and they are mandated to work on RoPs (e.g. decertification, accreditation). One of the tasks is to analyze participation metrics, but the work progress is stalled due to the IANA transition. Nevertheless, 3 quarters of the AFRALO ALSes participated in the last meeting. One particular issue about AFRALO is that some countries have many ALSes and are over-represented; some countries have no ALSes. To strike a balance of ALS representation is a goal. Rules of Procedure are a topic for the AFRALO to work on, as the unbalanced representation of ALSes may impact vote outcome. 
  • EURALO is in at an early stage of redrafting/refining the EURALO Charter. EURALO held a F2F GA in ICANN53 and mobilized members to participate; these meetings are good opportunities to update contact points. Two ALSes did not respond or participate and are subject to potential decertification. EURALO has also established a taskforce on ALS engagement and its work will start soon. 
• 16 May 2016 
  
  • LACRALO: Maritza Yesenia Aguero Minano provided an update on the LACRALO activities related to this recommendation via the RALO Secretariat mailing list https://atlarge-lists.icann.org/mailman/private/secretariat/2016q2/001179.html.