ALAC Meeting - Paris
(Held June 24, 2008)
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Name: 52 - 0.31.06 We will identify a foreign language in square brackets with a time code for the beginning and end, so that you can quickly identify those passages. At the top of the transcript, we will advise you of the name(s) of the foreign languages you'll need to search for. For example, some transcripts may contain German, so you'll have to search for "[German[ instead of |French" to find all the passages. The speaker identification is the same convention as all the others. i.e. If we know the speaker's name we'll include it, otherwise we'll put a question mark after it, or if we can't even guess, then Male, Female or SP.Translator. If translator actually translates French or German for a participant we will note it as "Translator". It will normally be evident from the dialogue who the translator is translating for. If not, we will include a note in square brackets with respect to who they are translating for.
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List of Participants
Important Note: Please note that this should not be considered to be an "official" list of the attendees. This is just a list of the participants that we were able to identify during the transcription. There may have been others present that didn't speak and some people may have participated that were not on the official list of attendees published on the internet.
Alan Greenberg
Annette Muehlberg
Beau Brendler
Carlos Aguirre
Carlton Samuels
Evan Leibovitch
Izumi Aizu
Jacqueline Morris
Matthias Langenegger
Nick Ashton-Hart
Robert Guerra
Sébastien Bachollet
Vanda Scartezini
Wendy Seltzer
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Female: Which is why my thesis… coming here to take over and then ten minutes discussion. And of course, the new website is absolutely critical to our ability to outreach effectively from RALO to ALS. So, I’m particularly keen to have the RALO people here and particularly keen to get ALS input. The Q and A… the question part of the Q and A which we will have for some ten minutes, please feel free – whether or not you are at the table or behind the table at the chairs. It is an open discussion session. I would also do the usual housekeeping to remind people that these meetings are simultaneously interpreted and that you will need – unless you are fluent in English and French and Spanish – you will need your ear buds. If you are wishing to listen to the French channel, you will need to have channel one. If you are wishing to listen to the English channel, you will need to select number two. If you are selecting three, you will be listening to the Spanish channel.
We have a number of presentations today. We have a lot to get on in our agenda and we need to leave slightly before our advertised finishing time. I do not understand about the laws of time and motion, but I believe it is impossible to occupy a different space at the same time. Therefore, if we are having our next meeting with… somebody prompt me. We’re meeting with the NCUC at 5 o’clock in a different room and therefore, we are the guests in their room. It is up to us to be there on time. So, we will be closing this session at five minutes prior to our advertised time to allow us to get downstairs and into Jacob for our meeting with NCUC. Okay. Have I filibusted enough? Now, Matias, for everything to be ready to go? Great, the floor is yours.
Matias: Thank you. You will all find the document on your table, which is called the ICANN At-Large Sites Functional Specification. It has been sent to the list a couple of months ago and I would like you to have a look at it because it shows you all the options that our new Drupal based websites provides. Not all of these will we be able to implement, but just to give you an idea of what is possible on the new website. This is very fun. Right now, we are in the transition from the old websites, which you probably all remember, which looks like this one. Laughs So, this is the old ALAC websites, which we will move to the Drupal based system, which will look something like this. And right now, the navigation on the left-hand side of the screen is still the same. And this… I don’t know how to do this. 36
Male: You can also see this on your screen.
Matias: Yeah, I mean, this is just a normal At-Large website. Laughs It is. Now, this 15 minute presentation and discussion today only focuses on the navigation tool on the left-hand side and on the second level, which means the navigation saying home, announcements, calendar, correspondence, current issues, documents and newsletter. This is the navigation we want to talk about today and I would like to get your input on how you would like to organize the content on the current At-Large website. And for that purpose, I made a little presentation with my thoughts, which you probably won’t see either. Chuckles Well… 54
Now, my idea was to have on the left-hand side of the navigation, just a quick link to the At-Large structures, the regional organizations, the ALAC, the liaisons and then, to put some of the legal and organizational references. However, there’s also the possibility to have a dynamic content website. And if you look at the last slide, you unfortunately can’t see it. I’ll send you the presentation by e-mail so you can have a look at it because the idea was to have a gateway which leads you to the current issues that At-Large is working on. And as well as the next ICANN meeting and a link to the ALS’ applications and the members’ page that shows you how to become a member on the left-hand side navigation. As well as a link to the ALSes, the RALOs and the ALAC. And this structure would then be copied to the framework for the RALO and the ALSes.
Now, for example, if you go to the RALO for Europe, then the main page would look the same – has the same design – but then, the most popular documents would refer to the documents in the EURALO web space and not in the At-Large web space. And the instruction and everything, it just refers to the regional structure, not At-Large as a whole. So, I would like you to have a look at the documents and to give me some of your thoughts in the subsequent discussion so I can take notes and start to process of implementing the new website. Thank you.
Female: Izumi, go ahead.
Izumi: Thank you for the work, just one, maybe, question inaudible. 7.33 Have you done the so-called accessibility guideline compliant thing for those visually handicapped or… You know, there are certain guidelines for the handicapped people to give better access. Are you not familiar with that?
Female: Does it meet WC3 requirements?
Nick: To the extent Drupal does, it does. To the extent Drupal does not, it does not. I don’t actually know...
Izumi: How much does Drupal do?
Nick: I don’t really know. I mean, we can find the answer to that question, but I don’t actually know to be honest.
Izumi: Meaning most of the graphical objects would have some tags that sort of… they can read the machine-readables thing 8.18 and stuff like that. I don’t know the details but these are getting more standard practice for the public website.
Nick: Okay, so I’ll just briefly talk you through a few of the options that are now available. You’ll recall at the meeting in New Delhi, I previewed what was going to be available in sort of a mock-up once the conversion was done. Of course, the data has been converted and the last few weeks, you’ll see the quick-links section at the top, which corresponds to the main ICANN.org site and allows you to navigate to all the various places you can go. This looks very grey. It’s not quite so grey when I look at it when I’m not transmitting it onto a screen, but obviously, if you ever have any issues with colour schemes or the theme and its accessibility, please do send those in.
The navigation bar down the side has slowly started to change a little bit. For example, if you choose news aggregator, you can see an example of how we can aggregate rss feeds from a number of sources and create one feed. So here, you happen to have the ICANN blog, Circle ID’s Internet News, Joey Eto’s blog. I cannot tell you, exactly, who filled these in. I think Marc Salvatierra did it as an example, because I went, “Who picked this particular selection of sources?” It wasn’t me. But anyway, gives you an idea of what can be done. The idea is that we could have a news aggregator page like this, but we could also have just an opinions link. And the opinions could simply be all the rss feed capable blogs of At-Large community members, which would then be displayed – as you see here – in date order. And it would be an easy way for up-to-date opinions from the community on various subjects to be easily seen. So that’s working there now and of course, you can then see categories of news and the like. The…
Nick?: 41
Female: Carlos, go ahead.
Carlos: 45 – 0.10.48
Translator: How can you add news to this site? Can you please explain how you can add news to the site?
Nick: All you have to do is send me the link to an rss feed-enabled source and we can add it. You’ll see an example of this aggregation feature on the far right where it has ICANN news, so all the latest announcements from the ICANN.org page are available at the top. The applications page has been considerably updated to reflect the latest application procedure and the new bylaws and all of that. At the bottom, you currently will see our Google calendar. There is a Drupal based event module that is being created. We have had it modified slightly so that an event may have multiple events underneath it. So, for example, you could create a container for ICANN meeting or some other meeting and there would be several meetings underneath that that you could then subscribe to. And that module is also much more friendly to multiple languages than the Google calendar is and it’s also more time zone friendly than the Google calendar is, which is quite tricky… is where I think we 08 If you’re not in GMT when you enter times, it’s an interesting experience.
So, the one thing that you don’t see here and the web people are trying very hard to finish it – I asked them to please have it done by Monday but with the best will in the world, they’ve been unable to do that with the volume of incoming posting requests that accompany an ICANN meeting. The forums link between our mailing lists and the forums feature in Drupal is imminently going to be enabled. And so what you will then be able to see is another block here which will have latest forum postings. Now, in the sort of regionalized metaphor that Matias has talked about, that I’ve talked about before, where you would be able to add your own news. If you were in a region, you could add news about that region or opinions about that region or events for that region.
When you go to the At-Large page, you would see latest forum posts across all mailing lists. If you went to the NARALO page, you would see the latest posts from the NARALO mailing lists and the latest news from the NARALO and the like. So, you really would have a real virtual home and there would be much more depth to the site. The reason why we have not yet enabled the feature which allows you to log in and add yourself as a user and upload material is because this needs to be done via a back door so that they can, for example, make sure that if somebody used a computer which had a virus problem or the like, that content added would not inadvertently be able to have a script loaded onto it which could distribute malware or what have you. And so they are simply in the process of building that back end element before the user authentication with editing privileges is enabled.
Male: So there would be, I guess, you’d upload into a kind of quarantined area that would be then checked and then brought into the public area, that kind of thing?
Nick: I think it will start doing a sort of two-step process. The idea is that, ultimately, it would be possible for it to be a one-step process and we could simply edit in real time. And if you had the right in Drupal to say, “Post now,” you could do that.
Jacqueline: I’ll make one quick question. Since we’re Drupal’s open source and so forth, now that you’re modifying the events calendar module, are you going to put it back into the open source community for the rest of us Drupal developers to be able to use? Because that’s a really cool modification and a lot of people have been asking for stuff like that.
Nick: I have suggested it. There has been no objection made to it. I don’t think we’ve actually taken the time because it’s not actually done completely yet, to go to the legal department and say, “Hey, do you mind,” but that’s always been the idea and I think that’s what will actually happen. One other thing I should show you very quickly before I stop is the one and two pages as people in ICANN call them. The introduction to ICANN issues – you will now find these all posted on the current issues, horizontal menu. Shortly, this page will be in five and later ten languages so that the documents will… All the issue briefs will be available in all of those languages, as will the description of those documents. So… Applause
Male: The question is when?
Nick: They’ve been put through the translator already. We have received the French and Spanish version of the first four briefs back already. We just haven’t had time to copy them because they came in last night. And so, within days, it will all be posted.
Female: Well, that’s great news indeed. Evan, is there anyone else who wants to let me know now to speak to this matter? If not, we’re closing this matter after Evan.
Evan: Just as a matter of translation and if it… In addition to the official documents that may have to go through legal and so on, there should be a facility that allows you to take any forum posting, anything that somebody has entered and if you’re capable of doing the translation, it will allow you to do so. There is a facility in this and I don’t know if it’s being enabled but it’s possible to have community translation so that official documents that have to go through legal, etc., can be translated professionally. But anything else, also have the ability to be translated by the community. So, if you can do the translation, then the unilingual people in your community will have access to it.
Nick: You don’t see the user interface for doing this, but we have… when you create new material, you may declare whether it is a source document and what language it is in, whether it is intended for it to be translated later – because then we can see a view of all documents pending translation – you may say whether the translation you are uploading is a machine translation or not. It’s quite flexible. So, when you create content, if you know that you’re going to create… that somebody’s going to give you two versions of that posting, you can mark that there’s a translation pending and then all the web administrators and us can see that there will shortly be two more versions of that. So, there won’t be any impediment to you doing that, no.
Female: Well, thank you very much, Nick and Matias. I think that’s a great step forward and those like Annette who have been around since we’ve been trying to get anything decent when in directive 16 genuinely appreciate this. For those of you who are wondering exactly what the URL is, that you should in fact be starting to use now, it is the www.atlarge.icann.org. So, you can start promulgating that now. icannatlarge.ican.org.
Nick: If I can be slightly cheeky, when you all – and you’ll see why I say that shortly – when you all put your comments into the ALAC review, I was quite cheered to have them say in the review that the new At-Large site was the only modern user-friendly website that ICANN had and also the only one that appeared to be multi-lingual or very usable. So, any comments that you wish to make endorsing further efforts along this line by ICANN would probably be well-placed in your search for a more usable icann.org.
Female: Yes, Alan.
Alan: Can I make a request – and I don’t care which way it goes – that we standardize in whether At-Large is hyphenated or not? Laughs
Nick: I can make it so that it works either way.
Alan: I was talking about in general, not just this website. But in this particular case, it has no hyphen, whereas most of our other uses do have a hyphen or a space, of course.
Nick: I was told that the official version of At-Large is At dash Large. So…
Alan: Then perhaps the website name could make it so, to quote Star Trek. Laughs
Nick: I am happy to ask them to do that.
Female: Excellent, thank you. Any other points? Okay, the next item on the discussion for work is the work on the one day action items. Now, really, I think we possibly can leave that until later, knowing that we are running very tight on time. Because we’ve discussed that at a number of points, including at our one day workshop, but if we don’t manage to get to that in this meeting, if we could note that it will be an agenda item carried over to our next teleconference. So, I’d like to move now to give Alan his five minutes of fame on front running. Alan.
Alan: Thank you. If anyone has the agenda on their laptops, if you refresh them now it should be a page about front running. All it says is what was in my e-mail. The substance of that is given that there are a number of actions being taken which should eliminate or reduce the use of the AGP, which is the mechanism for the most annoying forms of front running that have been noticed. The GNSO was considering putting a hold on the working group – I don’t think it’s a working group, it’s a something group – that was looking at front running for some period of time, probably three to six months, to give us time to find out exactly what the results are as the new measures are implemented. The first one is going to be effective June 1st. That is the budget charge on AGP 35 deletes and the second one is the actual reduction of use and the full charge to registrar for those domains.
The belief is it’s going to completely eliminate the AGP-related use of front running. There may well be other kinds that are still annoying, but to a large extent, those have not been proven to really exist in any significant measure. I put out a note to the At-Large list. I received five comments from Brett, Jacqueline and Izumi all saying yes and they variedly used three or six months or three to six months – I think it will depend on exactly when we get data back from ICANN – and two comments from Jeff Williams, which didn’t actually answer the question. I request permission that when the issue comes up tomorrow in the open GNSO meeting to say there’s general ALAC approval for putting this on hold.
Female: Let’s discuss that matter. Does anybody at the table wish to make a point or a comment on the proposal that we endorse putting it on hold? Going once, going twice… Oh, Evan. Sorry. No? You weren’t gesticulating at me? Fine. Okay, Alan, I would suggest that has the support of the ALAC and indeed the RALO secretariats.
Evan: Done, I give you back three minutes.
Female: I like the extra time. Thank you very much. That now brings us to what I think is a very important piece of work and discussion which we will go for… how long did I say? I didn’t. There you go. As long as I feel the urge takes me. The developing best practice model for the ALS with RALO with ALAC communications and here, we’re going to include the look that we’ve done at how the current policies that we’ve recently done have actually worked. So, this is a little bit of a workshop for, I would suggest, the next five or ten minutes and I’d love to be able to read those things but I think you’ll have to 45
Male: Do you have a piece of paper?
Female: Yes, I know. You gave me a piece of paper a little while ago. I put it somewhere. No, I think if everybody is able to read it... Just while we’re talking about best practice models for the ALS, RALO and ALAC, you’ll see that it’s on the agenda now because it follows very nicely on the incredible work that’s being done on the web. And I think that the new web will allow us access to a lot of tools which will make that RALO-ALS interface much easier, but also the RALO to RALO interface much easier. And I can only pray the ALAC to RALO interface far more professional and easier to work with. Has everybody got this document, Nick? And if not, where can they find it? Is it in the Paris documents?
Nick: It was handed out a bit earlier but there are also copies at the back, beneath… on the… Yeah, it’s the Policy Advice Development… PAD, yes. I couldn’t resist. I’m sorry, I couldn’t resist the temptation because PDP was obviously going to be completely confusing so I figured, well, we’ll just have to have a new one then. So then, you can go around confusing everyone at ICANN talking about, “where’s the PAD on that?”
Male: You need to translate that into the seven different languages. Laughter
Nick: I’ll get right on that.
Female: Just what we need is another set of letters to explain. Our glossary’s going to be the biggest document we ever have to produce if we’re not very careful. I’d like to open the floor for comments on what you think would be… looking at how this could be turned into a best practice model. I would like to think that with that flow chart, there’s clear opportunities where RALOs and ALSes can say, “We need information out at this point or we need information to go back in at this point.” Go ahead, Nick.
Nick: I just want to say by way of introduction to this paper that the first page flow chart, you can see there the vast skill and experience that I have in 05 tools which is to say none. After doing the first page, which is sort of a summary of how recent policy development work has gone, I capitulated and produced a similar effort on the second page, which basically is a beginning to end timeline of how long it would take if the current process that was used... If translation was inserted into the process, starting with the assumption that when the consultation and the document are first released, they’re released in English only and then I begin to get translations ordered. And as you’ll see, it turns into, at best, an eleven week process.
So, if you were to say, on looking at this, “You know, actually, this is a pretty good process to get community input…” And then, the question becomes what should ICANN do in respect of the way it sets up public consultations? Should ICANN say, “We will release the documents upon which a consultation will be done,” in advance of the comment window opening to allow community sufficient time to respond? Would it lengthen the period of the consultation itself, about which there is considerable controversy, or is it simply enough to inform the board and others, “Well, if you want advice from us and the first time we get a document to be consulted on is when we get it, you will have to wait for twelve weeks to get the answer.” So, we will not be making public comments except to say we are working on one during any public comment period. And I would suggest that that’s probably not a great thing for ICANN to routinely have.
Female: Just remember that the GAC had the same problem and made the statement in a public section saying that they will answer only the next meeting. So, it’s something that because they need to contact all the members in the government, the governors need some legal advice to respond and they need to make a lot of consults, so they have a similar problem. I believe we need to deal with that. That’s our reality.
Female: Go ahead, Alan.
Alan: Given that most public consultations are given somewhere between three and four weeks, occasionally extended a little longer. If you think of the travel one which they wanted to meet a meeting discussion on it, was at only twenty days. We are taking a three to four week timing and saying we need eleven weeks. Now, there are a number of options that we can address with this. Clearly, as an advisory committee to the board, we can submit our comments any time we damn well want to. Excuse the language but there is a danger that the world will have gone along without us anyway and it doesn’t matter. That doesn’t seem like a desirable outcome. There is the option of using ICANN’s newfound and abundant cash to advance the development of time travel so that we can start the work seven weeks before it actually happens and I strongly support that. Laughter
Nick: And may I say that that would enable us to make all domain names free in simply licensing that technology.
Alan: Indeed. The other only viable option I see is that we must start the work way ahead of time. The travel policy is an example where there wasn’t any real knowledge of what it was going to say in advance. On most real policy issues, except occasionally ones that arise very quickly, there is plenty of advance notice. In theory, if we start working on these things, including translation ware – and 46 necessary – and then when the final document comes out, all we need – I say all, it’s non-trivial – is to see how this differs from what we originally thought was coming and a summary and translation of what the differences are. We could meet real schedules.
The difficulty of that is – and it’s a very large one – is that there are far more things that people start working on and then die somewhere along the way. So, it increases our workload to do that. Otherwise, we have to pick and choose which ones we think will actually come to fruition and work on those and we may guess wrong in some cases. The time travel is the only certain one and, of course, we have the minor trouble in doing the development of that. So, we don’t have any really good solutions but the only practical one is on the things that are important and certainly anything that is already in a PDP process is likely to go all the way through in some period of time. We need to get people involved earlier. It’s not easy to do and then we only have to react to the changes in the final document or the surprises in it. And there will be some, but I don’t see any other way other than starting way in ahead of time and then, of course, trying to compress eleven weeks into less anyway.
Female: Do I have any other comments around the table on this matter? Yes, Nick, go ahead.
Nick: Just as a matter of administrative information, obviously, the process that produced the statements most recently adopted involved me – at some risk to my hide – summarizing what I believed to be the community’s views on these various subjects, which… I don’t mind trying to do that as a starting point. I really have no problem doing that and getting it wrong, I’m sure, more often than not perhaps. But the only thing I would say is that the wider question of if there are eight consultations going on in advance of an ICANN meeting – and I think there are perhaps more than eight going on right now – it’s beyond the capacity of us to produce draft papers for you to consider, even if you care about all eight issues.
Let’s just assume you care about four. If we only had to run this process for four issues simultaneously, it would consume us to do that and to staff it so that you could actually manage it. To do this as fast as possible, to even do this in this amount of time, and up against an ICANN meeting... Personally, I think it’s an unreasonable thing to ask volunteers to attempt to respond to multiple consultations, some of which have never been previously raised. The meeting paper is an entirely new consultation on a thirty-day deadline on a new document may not be the last consultation but that is completely new and would fundamentally affect all of you, the whole work of your organization and I still don’t have all the translations back yet for posting and we’re halfway through it.
So, the only thing I would say to you all is think about the sustainability of how many consultations go on around meetings, how many you think it is reasonable for you as a volunteer to be involved in at one time and if you have any points to make about perhaps stretching out consultations, making few of them at a time, trying to start consultations earlier in advance of a meeting so that people are not spending their volun-… You know, you’re all preparing to come here and doing your normal jobs right before an ICANN meeting and it seems to me if it’s difficult for us to respond to multiple consultations at once and we’re paid to do it full-time, I don’t begin to imagine how any of you could actually work for a living and do this. Maybe I’m wrong and you’re all superhuman.
And so, I would just say to you all, I think that as volunteers, you could make a larger point about when things are brought to consultation, how much notice there is – especially new items. Something that’s going through a revision seven, I completely take the point that’s much easier to respond to after you’ve done it the first time. But things just come up for consultation. I don’t even know they’re coming until I see them posted. It’s up to you because you’re the volunteers, but I would have a hard time responding to this level of request for information that we have now.
Female: Alan, go ahead.
Alan: I’ve spoken a fair amount on this. If someone else wants to get in first, I’m quite happy. No? Okay. A couple things come to mind on that. The people who write these papers and in some case – presumably they may be us in the future – that want to put things out for consultation are always going to be driven by real deadlines. And a meeting for which you have plane tickets in hand already is a real deadline. There are few other deadlines as important as those. So, we’re always going to be faced with this. I would like to see ICANN take a somewhat more hardnosed attitude on publication of things which it would be nice to discuss at a meeting but if we discuss it at the next meeting four months later, so be it. The meeting schedule, for instance, is one of those that I would have preferred to see deferred. I understand the implications of it, but it wasn’t really tied to things in the real world that are happening.
So, I would like to see a more hardnosed attitude for that kind of thing. That having been said, I’ll bring in what Evan was talking about translations done. Meeting the… I’ll wait until… Meeting the deadlines for twenty or thirty or forty-five day consultations – and I think Evan will agree with this – have been daunting without language as an issue. Part of it is because we rarely get off the mark quickly. We tend to wait for our next conference call to decide who is going to do something and by then, we may have wasted two to three weeks of the four week consultation. We have to figure a process of ways to get around that. But on top of that, there are people in regions who can do translations, number one. Number two, when we go out to consult on something like fast flux or front running or domain tasting, there’s only going to be a modest number of people within a region who actually understand the issues and can either provide a tutorial to the other people or simply be identified by the ALSes or RALO as, “These are our experts and we’ll let them make a recommendation.” Putting those two things together sounds undemocratic but I don’t think we’re ever going to be able to go through all four levels of hierarchy and respond to anything in a timely matter with a level of confidence that it’s good opinion.
So, I think we’re going to have to look at how we, within the ALAC, within the RALOs and within the ALSes identify people ahead of time who are interested in certain subjects, preferably who have some facility in English also. But if not, we can use local translation and help to try to speed up these processes. I don’t see any other way. We’ve been given the most cumbersome possible hierarchy that anyone could have invented if they wanted to show that ALAC won’t work. I don’t believe it was a conspiracy but that’s what we’ve ended up with and I think we have to be innovative in finding ways around it.
Female: Robert, go ahead.
Robert: Two things. I think, you know, kind of building on Alan’s point and another point that I want to make. The first one is we’re in the middle of an ALAC review, so if there are resources or things that we need as we’re going through this and we’ve identified them, now’s the time to actually mention that. That’s part of the point that I was trying to make. I think yesterday is… if there are ways that we can do, ways that we can work, not only will ALAC or ALSes increase over time but the complexity of the issues will as well.
So, I think what could be useful is also building what Alan said, is we’re going to face the issue of delegation. I think running everything through all the structures that we have just takes time and that delays it. But do we want to delegate a set of people from the ALAC itself or an ALS or a RALO to just work on an issue and that’s it? So, that’s something that we’re going to have to come up. And a lot of organizations come with those issues as well. A practical solution going forward is if we don’t have a list of topics or issues that each of us or our ALSes are interested in, that would be a good thing to do and that would be something, maybe, to add to the website. Because then we would know if a certain issue comes up, whether on the ALAC itself or in the ALS community, who we could contact immediately to start working on a document and things like that. So, that’s come up on many levels.
So, I think sometimes is once something is identified, time is lost and that you know about the issue but don’t know who to reach to. And we have the network and so maybe with the website, we can say, “This issue, we know that there’s an ALS in Asia and one in Africa,” and someone just pro-actively sends an e-mail. So, we have to figure out how to get that process started as well. So, those are a couple of suggestions and comments.
Female: Evan?
Evan: Just as a matter of information, from the time this actually started, how long did it take to create? Policy briefs?
Nick: The issue brief?
Evan: Yes.
Nick: I started asking for them when I started in September of 2006 and I believe the community was asking for them long before then.
Evan: Okay, the point I’m trying to get at is a practical level. Now that there’s some momentum, there’s a way to do this, not even counting whether it’s this or the stuff we’ve been talking about within ALAC, but it sounds like the idea of pulling the expertise, finding out who, within our community, understands this. Because it may not even extend to every RALO. There may not even be somebody who understands the issue in every RALO. And the idea of making something like this in a reasonably expedient period of time, for whatever comes up this way, makes this a whole lot easier to go back to the grassroots and at least make a reasonable attempt to get some background.
Just, again, building on what Alan was saying in terms of getting the information out there, let alone the translation, is the challenge. Being able to do something like this on fairly short notice, if the information is there, I think can go a long way towards doing this, which goes back to why I asked at the beginning how long it took. Hopefully, the turnaround time gets much smaller as we move forward.
Female: Izumi.
Alan?: Evan, I thought you were asking how long does any particular one take from the time you decide to start it until the time you can print it. That may not be what you’re asking but I’ll ask. That’s an interesting question. Right now, now that the process has been blessed.
Izumi?: As I wrote the first design of the ALAC, ALS, RALO five years ago, yes, I’m part of a program and I tend to agree with what Alan said. Most of the topics or issues are not really that region-centric. Different regions, of course, have different approaches often. But sometimes, you share a lot of things in common. So, depending on the nature of the policy, we can relatively easily sort of cross over the regions and the form of relatively single working group or delegate or whatever kind of thing because it can be subject to the regional thing. But so that you can bypass this one layer or you can accommodate one layer but without getting too much wait or hold. Besides, the language comes in, those who are fluent in the English tend to lead some of the policies, which is fine, so long as it goes with the overall framework of us. That’s another advantage you may have and we’ll take an advantage back.
Female: Just if I may, on the matter of delegation and, of course, working groups, the whole purpose of getting what we did – is it only two meetings ago – as to how we would structure our various imports into working group activities with leads of making sure that we had a delegated person from the ALAC in each working group. What we need to do is resuscitate and ensure that the working groups are actually active. And that, ladies and gentlemen, falls to the people sitting around this table. And of course, it is the RALOs who can be in the only position to let the ALSes know what is going on most effectively.
So, if we do get the working group models going – I see you, Carlton – properly, and we do get the enthusiasm that has to be generated at the regional level going, then we can be a bit pro-active and be preparing because we know something’s coming down the funnel. Nobody could possibly live with the length of time that, in practical terms, some of these things have taken. “Working smarter, not harder,” is something I keep saying. I’ve been saying it since the ‘70s. I’d really like to get it right sometime. Perhaps this might be the situation. It’s there. Yes, Carlton.
Carlton: Thank you, Chair. I was about to say that preference, I think… Izumi speaks about the many layers of working group that you will have and I really believe that what ought to happen is that people from the regions integrate themselves in the ALAC working group. I believe that that is the best model to use. I also believe that... And it’s coming together slowly. I can see it. The thing is, not every region is interested in every single policy statement that is put out. And so I’m not so distressed when I don’t see any response from people about certain things because it’s not impacting them at all. They don’t see it. But I believe the way to go is to have a combined working group on all the issues and that now gives people from the regions an opportunity to integrate themselves into a larger group. It also helps with the messaging back to the regions because now you know. Not just read a document, but you know what’s been happening in discussions and so on. So, that’s what I really recommend.
Female: Is there any more comments on this matter? Yes, go ahead, Alan.
Alan: It strikes me as you were talking that the concept of delegation and trust is really important if we’re going to get input from the regions. The opposite side of that is I think when we’re discussing and going to present a motion or a position of the ALAC, there is a responsibility on all ALAC members to at least know what it is the subject is about, if not to be an expert on it and that when they get something either from their RALO or from other people, to understand what the import of the decision is. And I don’t see any way around each of the fifteen ALAC members taking that responsibility on and making sure that when they’re voting on something, they have some comprehension of what it is they’re voting and being able to stand behind it. That’s a lot of work to do, I know, but that’s what we signed on for.
Female: It is a lot of work to do. It is what we signed on for and strangely enough, it was exactly what we should have been discussing in the meeting we didn’t have just prior to this one. Go ahead, Vanda.
Vanda: Yeah, just to 31 I agree with Evan that the problem is the – Alan said – it’s sometimes we could get from the region, something that’s not the matter of our interest. Just that.
Female: Go ahead, Carlos.
Carlos: 59
Translator: Yes, with regard to that, I was saying it’s true that there are some issues that don’t relate to the regions, but others that, in terms of their frequency, are irrelevant. Sometimes, we can’t cover all of those issues because of the limited time and sometimes we don’t have enough time to familiarize ourselves with all of those issues.
Female: Thank you. Last call on comments here? I think this is a piece of work that has to be a very important agenda item, not just for the ALAC and the ALAC executive and believe me, the ALAC executive have almost herniated over this trying to come up with mechanisms and ways that we think we can produce a faster flow of information and greater engagement. It is absolutely essential that this piece of work is contributed to, how we get a best practice model out by the RALOs. It would be better if it was also inclusive of your each RALO’s ALSes.
On that matter, let me share with you, and I’m taking off my chair hat now, which sounds like a ridiculous metaphor. I’m taking myself away from the role of the ALAC chair and doing something that is clearly about my ALS. ISOC AU – admittedly technically focused and speaks English, so has an advantage – is a volunteer group like, I suspect, almost every one of the ALSes in your RALOs. We, at our last strategic workshop day – and even having those could be a good idea to encourage your ALSes to do – each of the leads, the leaders, the directors, in our case, but it could simply be a committee or a working group if that’s what it is in our organization, took on a focus or topic that was theirs.
I, strangely enough, ended up with the whole multidisciplinary, multi-stakeholder, grassroots thing, but gee, nobody’s surprised at that. Another person took on the disability and access issues, another person took on IPV4 to IPV6. And so, if you had a somewhat similar set of expertise identified where you are lead in your ALS, what a wonderful opportunity that would be for fast tracking the information flow when a RALO says we need to have a comment on something. When our ALS and AP RALO people know we tend to not just have expect in an ALAC response to things or a RALO response to things. Our ALS puts in comments and responses to things independently. And I think it’s a good idea to encourage that. It gets greater engagement. It allows our members to have a direct feed into ICANN as well. When our ALS posts anything to an ICANN comment, it posts it to the AP RALO list. Why? Because just, perhaps, the work we’ve done might inspire one other ALS to pick up and modify or disagree or comment. And even at that level, now AP RALO, like every RALO around this table, has to work better as well.
I think we all recognize that we’ve got to work a little bit in this RALO area of getting that prior planning and becoming proactive rather than reactive. But just as an example, perhaps some of those lessons, some of those aspects, could be something that would be useful for you to explore. This now falls back to the RALOs. I would like to suggest that we have a dedicated teleconference meeting, which is an ALAC and RALO secretariat-wide one at a future point in time, specific to discuss this single item. See, Fatimata, I do take notice of what you say, discussing single item things is important and I’d like to know now how much time in the future should we be setting this? Two months down the track? Three months down the track? How long do you need? You need no time at all? That’s marvellous. Laughs I’m seeing two. Do I have an extension on two months? Do I hear three months? Do I get two? I have two on the table. I have two on the table. I have two on the table going once, going twice… In two months time, the normal ALAC meeting will be an ALAC and RALO secretariat meeting that will be a date which somebody will cleverly find out for me and tell you before I finish speaking. Won’t you, gentlemen? It’ll be the second Tuesday of the month to hence which – you’re too slow, boys – is…
Male: It was an action plan or auction plan.
Female: Laughs Which is, for your diaries… how can I filibust any longer than this?
Nick: How many staff does it take to figure out the date?
Female: This is scary, guys. This is really, really scary. Laughs
Nick?: So, that would be August.
Female: That would be August. The second Tuesday in August.
Nick?: Twelfth. August the twelfth.
Female: Twelfth. Okay, thank you. Sheesh. Twelfth of August at the normal meeting time, we will have single, dedicated conversation and I very much would expect that we would be using the Adobe Connect as well. So, you might want to have presentations sent along. You might want to take a piece of floor. I will work with chairs of each RALO to put that agenda together. Thank you very much. I’m painfully aware of the time and I know there’s only a five minute piece on the 05 but I’d like to bump that and ask Beau if he would like to do his presentation now and then I’ll move the PFC, which is only an awareness-raising discussion, a little later. But I don’t want to cut this important presentation by Beau shorter.
Nick: You can just tell me when to switch pages, Beau, if you like.
Beau: You can go past this one. This is slightly a slightly recycled presentation. I gave it last Thursday. Just last Thursday, it seems like a month ago, in South Korea. The reason I thought it would be interesting to all of us here is because it is research that is statistically significant. In other words, it was done representatively, but only in New York State. And the reason for that is that the funds for the survey came from the New York State Attorney General’s office, so we had to just only do New York State. I would have preferred it to be the whole of the United States, but this was all we could afford, or all the grant would cover. So, I slipped in a few questions that pertained to ICANN issues that we deal with.
This slide is up here, really, not so much for… this was something… I was contrasting a lot of the discussion that was happening around the putting together of the civil society paper on the internet economy and a lot of the talk that was happening about what issues are most important to users centered around free speech, interoperability, open-systems, multiculturalism, diversity and connectivity, whereas in the course of doing some survey work where I work at my organization, I’m beginning to challenge the wisdom of that a little bit. I think that all of those values are extremely important, but I think there are a number of other values that consumers hold when they think about the internet.
So, next slide from this one. So, this is just basic data on how this study was done. Again, the data are preliminary. It’s a very long study. It’s about forty questions, many of which deal with fraud and such that we don’t need to go into here, but the data is from the sample of 2008 respondents in three geographic areas of New York State. So, in other words, about half the respondents are from Manhattan or New York City and then the other half of respondents are spread out across New York State itself. The data will look a little bit… it’s not too pretty because I just got it last Tuesday.
So, next slide please. When I made this slide, I was thinking about presenting this data to a group of students and academics in South Korea, so I was trying to think about ways to get them interested in why they would care about this data. But it also occurs to me that it’s interesting just to think about here, in this context, New York State is very demographically interesting. It’s the third largest US State with the largest US city in it – New York City. Total population is about 20 million, sixteenth largest economy in the world. We don’t need to worry about the Korean population necessarily, unless… is there anybody here from Korea? New York State though, actually has a large rural population up in the North and up towards Canada and a lot of that rural population is politically conservative, while New York City is politically liberal. So, it’s a very robust, interesting state to look at. And the reason I make that point is I don’t suggest that we draw conclusions about all internet users from this data, but New York State is interesting to get an idea of what people are thinking.
Next. So, this is the answer to the question, “Have you ever registered a domain name, a website address such as yourname.com on the internet?” 16% said yes and 86% said no. I realize that doesn’t quite total 100, but I told you the data needs a little bit of cleaning. So, some people said this was remarkable. They couldn’t believe that actually 15 or 16% of people in New York had registered a domain name. You can look at this data any way you want. I sort of look at it and say 85% of people in this population don’t register a domain name. So, when we talk about ICANN stopping at domain name registrants, are we then just sort of talking about relating to 15% of the population? Again, this is just New York State so we can’t draw too many conclusions from the data, but…
Next slide. “For privacy concerns, did you choose an option to protect your personal identity when you registered the domain name or did you give your full name and address?” I asked this question and the next question because I’m interested in – as you know – the WHOIS issue. 35% chose a privacy option, 12% paid a fee for a privacy option, 33% did not choose a privacy option – which I thought was an interesting number – and 20% were unsure. Again, not quite the total of 100, but like I say, the data needs a little cleaning. Next.
Alan: Could you give us just a very, very brief idea of how these people were selected and to what extent they were self-selected? So, are we looking at people who are inherently interested in the internet or was it a more random selection?
Beau: It was completely random, done by a third-party using social science data and census data and it was done by Consumer’s Union. Or actually, it was subcontracted by Consumer’s Union’s Survey Research department. So, it was not an internet survey in which people… that this is just sort of a general…
Alan: But what percentage of the people who were selected actually completed the survey?
Beau: I don’t know. I’ll have to get you that number. For using WHOIS, this was perhaps most interesting to me. “Have you ever used the WHOIS database to find out the name of a website’s registered owner?” 8% said yes and found the information, 2 said yes but could not find the information, 8 said no, they were aware they could do it, 68% said “no, and I was not aware this was possible.” So, in the WHOIS debate, as many of you know, there is a working group that’s been convened. I think it’s kind of finished its work now. It was being run by Liz Gaster. Wendy was on it, Danny Younger was on it, I was on it, to make determinations about whether to do more studies on WHOIS. And we’ve told them that we’re doing our own. So, again, you can draw whatever conclusions you want from this.
When I look at it, I think if 68% of this particular population doesn’t know about WHOIS and was not aware that you could actually use it to help investigate cyber crime or fraud or whatever then we should be concerned about whether it should be eliminated. So, next slide? I think that’s actually the last one. Oh no, privacy actions. So, about privacy concerns online. This one is probably a little less germane to us but deleted cookies from web browser, 53 changed preferences on a website, 22 withheld information from profile – you can kind of see the numbers there. Again, they don’t quite total up to 100 but they’ll be fairly similar for each division that they’re in. So, it challenges, sometimes, some of the things I think we think about in terms of privacy.
So, next. This is just a slide for putting some of this data in perspective in other surveys that we have done at my organization, both the larger organization of Consumer’s Union and WebWatch itself, which I run. The stuff that keeps coming up is the stuff you’ve heard me harp about before. Even though it’s often said that a lot of it falls outside ICANN’s scope, consumers are basically concerned with things that begin with s – safety, security, stability, scams, spyware, spam. 21% of consumers in the US – that’s the entire population of the US – don’t use security measures on their PC and 30% – that’s a national number again, from 2005 – changed internet behaviour to use it less because of concerns about security and fraud.
Next slide. I’m almost sure that’s the last one. That’s it. So, again, that is just data from New York State, but it is interesting data and I should say that it was without bias in the sense that I worked with our research department to create the questions, but I could not go to them and say, “Okay, I want you to create a survey that proves to me that WHOIS is important,” or whatever. I mean, the Consumer Survey department acts independently of me. So, if you have any questions, please let me know. I’d be happy to speak to them.
Female: I see Robert.
Robert: Beau, this is great. I think these type of information, I think really helps gives us an idea of the situation of both advocacy that we might need to do, but also identify what internet users are kind of thinking about or what their needs are. I’ll add to it that in a project that I’m starting soon, I may have some funding, actually do some similar survey but in developing countries of internet users and I’d be more than happy to have a chat offline with you. But I think 05 that with the broader community here if that’s of interest… I think that’s something that kind of would maybe not only help the project I’m involved in, but others as well. So, these type of surveys, I may add… maybe a question to Nick is has this type of work by ICANN or as Beau was saying through a third party, been envisioned? Because this is the type of capacity that really helps us know about internet users. So, I commend Beau for doing this and it would be great to have kind of more global information as well.
Beau: I should also just mention regarding funding, this particular survey, although like I said, there’s probably about thirty-five more questions – many of which are about fraud and auction fraud and whatnot – cost about 28 thousand dollars. And we had a pretty good deal on that. So, it is expensive to do, but the more of it we can do would be great.
Female: Annette?
Annette: Thank you very much, Beau. I think this is really helpful and on the other hand, it is shocking to see that we’re not talking about a country where the internet is not well-known and people don’t speak the language of the internet at all. So, here, we’re actually in a country where people do speak English and do have access and do get information and all this and how high is the percentage of people who have no idea what’s going on? And I think that’s very interesting and it’s helpful. I don’t think that we actually do need that many other studies exactly the same type because that is sort of worst-case study, I’d put it. laughs And so, I would rather focus on the conclusions and get some more ideas, Beau. How did you continue to discuss what should be done and what could be measures? And maybe we could come up with an – English is sometimes trouble – come up with an idea... proposals and maybe even invest something in this finding good ideas how to deal with that problem.
Female: I actually have Carlos and then Wendy. And perhaps, Wendy, you’d like to make your way across to the table, but Nick, you wanted to respond to what Annette said?
Nick: I would just say in respect of work in this area, in consumer confidence, security issues and all the rest, there is an expanding work that is being done by SSAC with groups like the Anti-Phishing Working Group and with their studies on fast flux hosting, basically taking on the DNS element of some of the banner concerns that consumers have. And you’ll hear more about those on Thursday’s, including, I believe, some additional work in this field that is being entertained and some studies that the SSAC is trying to do with some of the organizations it works with and that Beau also is familiar with. So, I know that the SSAC wish to talk about how it can work more with the At-Large community on issues that concern the end user and as the SSAC has been very successful in raising issues like this, maybe that’s an interaction which can help propel some of these issues to greater prominence.
Female: Yes, many, many countries has this. I can translate all the data and send to you from Brazil.
Female: Sounds like you’ve really started something though, Carlos.
Carlos: 57
Translator: Thank you. The work of the… seems to be very interesting. Our ALS in the south of Latin America have been working on the issue of security as well. Security relates not only to the confidentiality of the data, it is of economic significance. I teach Economy at university level and I have done for many years and my work involves consumer defence research and lecture. Up to last month, I would have said that the problem is not only with the end user, there are people who claim to be specialists, yet they ignore security issues completely.
A month ago, I attended the Iberia-American Congress on electronic rights in Saragossa in Spain. I was invited as a member of the scientific committee and I saw there, as I was exchanging cards with various participants, that the president of the International Federation of Lawyers specialized in computer and IT rights had a hotmail address without having his own domain name or his own safe internet address. Now, I’m wondering about professional privilege and confidentiality when people are using open e-mail addresses. So, it’s not just a non-commercial, consumer problem. Many people who say that they’re specialists in IT also have security gaps and problems. And this is something that could have major economic impact. We’re dealing with millions of dollars around the world.
Female: I find that utterly terrifying but hardly surprising. We need to be very aware of our time and indeed, while Wendy’s here, she has a question to Beau, but what I would like to propose to you all just before she speaks, I would like to bump up the discussion on presentation – how we go about the presentation of the board liaison candidates. Obviously, we probably know both candidates relatively well, but we do need to organize their bio information has been provided, I assume, to Nick and an opportunity for perhaps a phone conference or two. But Wendy, your question and then if you’d like to move straight into, “Hello, I’m Wendy and…” Chuckles
Wendy: Thanks, Beau. I just wanted to thank you for an interesting presentation and I look forward to a chance to read the full study that you may be preparing from that.
Female: Any response, Beau? Just, 06
Beau: Thank you. I’ll even give you all the auction fraud stuff if you want. Most of it’s actually on people getting ripped off on eBay.
Wendy: And I’m interested in whether that, as a matter of survey design, whether that affects what people are saying about privacy one way or the other, but…
Beau: Yeah, that’s a good question. I don’t know. Probably, but I’ll give you the whole questionnaire and everything, you can look at it.
Female: Okay, it has come to pass we have two candidates – both from North America – who wish to be the ALAC board liaison. They are Mr. Brendler and Ms. Seltzer. I think you probably know both of these people, but it is in our bylaws, in our rules of procedure that we will have a presentation of these candidates at this meeting. Consider yourselves both duly presented, which, obviously, is an important part of it. I gather, Nick, that you’ve asked if there’s bio information that they’d like to go up so the wider group of people can vet you. Has that been forthcoming or…
Nick: We have Beau’s but Wendy, 23
Female: Okay, so it’s pending. It will be organized. The other thing that we have done previously and which I desperately want to tie in today in the few minutes we’ve got for this is we found it most useful, certainly in the RALOs last time, to have the opportunity to talk to both candidates with ALSes within RALOs available. Do you want us to organize a RALO by RALO meeting on the phone or do you want to organize one great big teleconference? And that’s a question I want you all to think about. And Sébastien, I see you.
Sébastien: Yeah, maybe I am totally off topic, time and so on, but once again, I have thousands of mail left in my mailboxes. I think it’s a case, not just me, but particularly this time, it’s very heavy. Then maybe, once again, I am off topic, but I read once a mail saying that we will have time to discuss 39 as 42 closed during our price meeting. It was yesterday. Then, I really apologize, but yesterday I was not in the meeting and I misread something. Because somewhere, it was written that it was the 17th of June and not yesterday and then I will come to the conclusion. I wanted to be candidate. Sorry about that, but I know that it’s off and I can be not candidate but I just wanted to let you know. I was candidate last time and I think it’s… I still feel that we need more diversity and at least we need the choice. And I would be happy not to be elected but I will also be happy to be elected. No, but it’s the way of the election. You can…
Female: Go ahead, Carlos.
Carlos: 55
Translator: Maybe I’m wrong, but I think that Hawa had proposed Sébastien. I think that was a few months ago or perhaps a month ago, so Sébastien was only being asked to accept but I’m not sure of that.
Female: No, I think you’ll find that was when we were looking for a vice-Chair and Sébastien is our Vice-Chair.
Female: 28
Translator: I had proposed 32 to be a Vice-Chair. 36
Female: Okay, we understand you not being on top of all your e-mails at this particularly busy time in your life, Sébastien. If I can just get Nick to drag out the original e-mail, which should be there somewhere, the first date in the e-mail was for nominations to be made to the public list and the two nominations went to the public list. That then closed seven days ago from yesterday. So, yesterday, minus seven days, that might have been one of the dates you had in your mind. Then, there was seven days, which finished at 1600 UTC on the 23rd for the candidates to accept. So, in fact, you would need to have been nominated in the seven days before. So, fourteen days ago, okay? So, we understand that it would be easy to miss this but… Ah, there we go. Thank you, Nick. Just get this timing right, we’ll be fine. That’s the particular message.
Sébastien: I understand. I apologize. I really read mail saying that the nomination closed during our price meeting then I was thinking that nomination was closing, not acceptances of the nomination. But that’s okay. Doesn’t matter.
Female: Okay, I do see where you’ve read there, “Nominees are required to accept their nomination – also to the public list – not less than seven days from the close of nominations,” or… yeah, okay. So, go ahead.
Sébastien: One thing more, and it will be the last one I have on this topic. I think it’s show for my point of view, the lack of discussion. I not say of transparency at all. I think the lack of discussion. We are here since four days for some of us, five days for others and I didn’t get any chance to have this discussion. Maybe just asking, if you were a candidate last time, why you are not here this time too? Or just remember that there is something to do before such and such. That’s okay, thank you.
Female: Robert, go ahead.
Robert: Not sure who made this comment earlier today but I think we might want to see this in a larger context. I’m just trying to think it’s not only for this. I mean, things sometimes come up and people forget or communications don’t get sent out. Having said that, I’ll say that last year around this time, we had the same discussion as well and so if one knows kind of the way… when stuff happens at the ALAC, you kind of knew this was coming. So, my personal feeling on this is just it’s unfortunate you didn’t know earlier but at this point where we are, unless there’s someone putting a motion forward to extend the deadline, then I would just go with the two names we have.
Female: No, there is no choice. It is in our rules of procedure and it is the one liaison position that has to be done at this time, that has to be done in exactly this way and we have no latitude to alter it, which is why you’ll notice a very precise way that I put the notice to this election out to the At-Large list and copied it to the internal list as well. That said, we have two candidates – Wendy and Beau. If you’d like to make a very short, “Hello, here I am,” and then I’d really like to know if you want to meet with the RALOs independently or with the one large group. Wendy?
Wendy: Thanks, I’m Wendy Seltzer. I apologize that I haven’t been able to attend more of the meetings among the group here but I have had several meetings of the board and with the board in which, as you know, our liaison gets to participate in all of the discussions up to but not including the vote, but to provide viewpoints from the At-Large and to discuss and argue and debate the questions from the At-Large perspective as they come before the board.
So, in my outside life, I’m a law professor, teaching intellectual property and information privacy and internet law. And so I studied the subjects that we are discussing here. Also teach anti-trust law, a subject of considerable interest to the ICANN community since that competition law is one of the checks on the power of both ICANN and the individual participants working together within ICANN. And I think that within the severe limits on the role here – limits of what we can do in a non-voting, advisory capacity. I think that I have established a rapport with board members and established a capacity to work with them in discussions to bring matters like the summit to their attention to bring our viewpoints on new gTLD policy and restrictions there to the board and to bring the agendas of board meetings and matters of discussion there, to At-Large.
As we’ve seen, many of the matters that come to the board are matters that have already been discussed in other constituencies. So, if you were to re-elect me for another liaison term, one suggestion I would make would be to co-ordinate more of our liaison’s activities among the different organizational entities to work even more closely with 19 future GNSO liaison to make sure that all of the timing… we’re synchronized as helpfully as possible and to make sure that At-Large gets the fullest opportunity to comment on… Sounds like a cell phone ringing
Female: And would you prefer, sorry, on a 42
Wendy: I’m trying to get this to turn off.
Female: Would you prefer to have a RALO by RALO or a one… My personal preference is probably for just putting you through it once, but I will offer.
Wendy: Once would probably be easiest to schedule.
Female: Okay. Yes, we’d probably have built-in bars by the time we got to the AP RALO one. Could you, Beau, take just a few minutes?
Sébastien: But you will not be able to express in French and in Spanish and 17 all together. Sorry.
Female: I’m sure we’ll have interpretation of our… Beau, please.
Beau: Well, I think we’ve come to know each other pretty well and I think you’ve come to notice that I tend to favour being brief, perhaps to my detriment to some degree. And also, this is uncomfortable for me in some ways because I think Wendy’s doing a really good job and we have developed a good collegial relationship over the time that we’ve come to know each other. So this is by no means… My running for this is by no means any sort of a statement in that way and I think there’s also an excellent case to be made for positions like the chairmanship and the liaisons running for more that just one year so that people can have an opportunity to really get their teeth into the more difficult jobs that we’re called on to do.
All of that said, I will differentiate by offering the experience I have at International Consumers Organization that has done a lot of work throughout the world, throughout Southeast Asia, throughout Europe. My organization does represent 7 to 9 million consumers in the US and Canada, so we do have a fairly strong base behind us of being able to do consumer-driven research and to be able to do policy that’s based on the consensus of a large number of people and I think that in the course of working with you all and working here at ICANN, I’ve come up against some pretty challenging issues with ICANN’s senior management and I believe that in the course of negotiating those waters, I found that they are listening both to the ALAC and to consumer organizations as well.
So, I want to make sure that no matter what takes place, we continue to strengthen the presence of consumer voices in the ALAC, which is why you’ve heard me so often kind of harp on the issue of voting representation, either with the board or in the GNSO, because as I have said before, many of the organizations I work with in civil society and consumers believe that for the ALAC to ultimately work, it needs to have some sort of voting representation. So, if that were to be a campaign platform or whatever you want to call it, I would say voter representation, voting representation, whether on the board or on the GNSO council is what I’m here to see. So, thank you for listening.
Female: Thank you, Beau. The same question to you, I assume you would prefer to…
Beau: All at once, please.
Female: Laughs And while you have the microphone, you asked for a whole 60 seconds, one minute on the RAA. The microphone is still yours.
Beau: Well, I think this must set a record for the length of time I’ve ever spoken to the group, so I will be even more brief and say that I have asked, with mixed guidance, for a translation of the Registrar Accreditation Agreement into French and Spanish. In trying to prepare for Thursday’s meeting with the registrants, I felt that we sort of needed to take a closer look at the new amendments to the Registrar Accreditation Agreement. So, I don’t think we will be able to get a translation of the RAA while we’re in Paris but maybe, hopefully, the amendments before our meeting with the registrars on Thursday. I think the RAA’s very important because there’s a lot of stuff within that that pertains specifically to consumer issues and issues of ICANN enforcement. And as you saw from the e-mail, Danny Younger regrettably has resigned as the co-chair of that group, so anyone who has a burning interest in the RAA who wishes to help me out and take over for Danny, I would be more than happy to… It would be great because there’s a lot there to look at.
Female: Thank you very much. Yes, Evan.
Evan: I think this is one of those areas where having some simple policy information might be extremely helpful. I think an awful lot of people are intimidated by the legalese in something like the RAA. And in order for public consumption, public understanding of something like this, this is almost the perfect example of the document that needs that kind of policy backing or that kind of simple information that makes it easy for people to digest. And I think part of what got Danny upset, if I can interpret his e-mail, is that he put out a call and nobody answered back that they were interested. I think that had something to do with the fact that people may have simply been intimidated and not even known how to deal with the issue. And so, I understand his frustration, but I also understand my own point of view from being unable to answer myself.
Female: Okay, thank you very much. We will get your diaries synchronized with some form of mutual time. I think the best way to do that is a doodle. Rather than go around now, it seems, to me, to be an exponential exercise if you start looking at who’s available on Wednesday the 19th versus Thursday the 47th. So we won’t do any of that. We’ll put up a doodle page and see where the most mutually suitable time for all the RALOs and ALSes for your statements. Yes, Alan.
Alan: Were you planning any opportunity for the ALAC to talk to the candidates or get some trading of thoughts since we are going to be the ones who are voting?
Female: I did actually assume that, seeing as we’d be doing it at the ALAC… I felt it was RALOs and ALAC. I’m sorry if I didn’t enunciate that ALAC as well. If you want to have one without any secretariats available, I thought we just may as well do it all at once.
Alan: Well, I just wanted to be given an opportunity. I thought, initially, it was going to be this meeting, so… Clearly not.
Female: Well, the time does permit and if I might point out what happened last time. What happened last time is we grilled the candidates – and I do mean grilled the candidates over breakfast – and then had them front up for yet another grilling on the phone with some of the – yes, we did – with the ALACs and the RALOs as well. We had our breakfast meeting with our Q and A and then we pretty well repeated the same thing. It seems silly to me to do two bites when one will work. But it is ALAC and RALO, not just… Sorry about that, if I mislead you. Alan, while you’ve got the microphone, there’s a small matter… I’m going to bump PSC to another meeting. There’s a small matter on list work, which you and Robert have prepared. I would note that whilst… Sorry, go ahead, Robert.
Robert: Just a quick question on the two candidates. I thank them for putting their names forward. You know, running for the board does require a lot of time. It’s a big time commitment and I wish both of them luck.
Female: Thank you. Regarding time and time commitment, we had a 5 o’clock meeting booked with the NCUC. Frederick is gone up… It was Frederick, I think who went up? Yes. And has established that if we come up five minutes late, which is now, that that would be fine, that they are also running late. What I was going to ask you both, Alan and Robert, is since the list structure and moderation issue has not been discussed but has been hanging over our heads, how do you want to handle this? Do you want us to discuss it quickly now or do you want to do something else?
Alan: My normal inclination would be it’s fine to do this on the list and come to closure at our next teleconference. My experience in doing that with the ALAC has not been particularly positive. So, I ask for guidance from the chair. I don’t really want to try to rush it through in 2 ½ minutes but it’s embarrassing that we have not done it. Part of the fault is mine but nevertheless, we need to come to closure on this soon and I do not want to come to closure by no one saying anything and implying that they have agreed.
Female: Robert, you’re co-organizer on this. Your comments?
Robert: I would concur, so I’d rather do it well. I mean, yeah, I would suggest that at this meeting – meeting meaning while we’re all here together in Paris – it needs to be addressed.
Alan: When is our next teleconference? Does anyone know?
Female: 15th of July?
Alan: We have a number of ALAC committee members here. Can we get a show of hands of who will actually respond to an e-mail if I send it out and who will then vote when we finish the discussion? Okay, we’ve got… I can’t… The question is can we get everyone here to promise that they will participate and we will come to a decision within the next week or two?
Female: Yes.
Alan: Then let’s give this a test. I defer the discussion for being done on e-mail.
Female: And we will have a short statement and a short discussion and if necessary, a vote on the meeting of – I do apologize – yes, the 8th of July. Thank you very much for your tolerance, gentlemen. I know you’ve 36
Alan: Or before.
Female: Or before. We could certainly do that. Okay, can I ask one thing about this discussion about lists? Can we have it on the internal list please?
Alan: I had stated in previous things and I think it was in a public list that it is inappropriate to change the rules before we’ve decided to change the rules. So yes, it will be on the internal list.
Female: Thank you. Because what I wanted to wrap in with this was some points on general moderation and I want that on an internal list.
Alan: Yes.
Female: Thank you. Let’s move up to Jacob? Jacob? Thank you all. I do mean move down. I failed to work out what’s up or down now.
End of Audio
