Was excited to see this article on the BBC: “The Next US leader? Ask a Ninja” over my morning coffee and it’s not just because I think ninjas are the coolest.
There are a number of groups around the world who are experimenting with the impact of the Internet on how people make decisions. The environment ministry in the UK recently put together a wiki on how do address climate change. Conversely, the Blair government just got smacked by a huge online petition against a proposed road-pricing system.
It is an exciting time to be involved in policy making, especially where it crosses over with the Internet. That’s one of the main reasons I became interested in ICANN. It really is at the forefront of much of these efforts and I think has a lot of lessons that it can share with the world about what works and what doesn’t in this field.
However, despite an intricate and evolving policy structure one of our key challenges is explaining what we do and how we do it. Just this week I was on a conference call with some IISD interns [iisd.org] trying to explain what ICANN was. They were completely bewildered by our website.
Happy talking talking
ICANN has a passionate dialogue going on right now where we want to encourage as much participation as we can without appearing to over step our mandate. We have these arguments internally where some people say “hey that’s not accurate, you’re not precisely outlining what we do” and others say, “if we say what we do like that no one is ever going to understand what we do.” And you get people like me who say, man, maybe ICANN just needs a ninja!
It sounds a bit irreverent to say ICANN needs a ninja, which is why it’s nice to know the Director of Comparative Media Studies at MIT is in my court. The ninja issue raises a very serious point.
ICANN has been discussing how to approach the communications and participation issue for so long its structures are in real danger of being eclipsed by new technology and modes of interaction.
We’re also in danger of forgetting that there are a lot of issues that compete for people’s attention. As the transaction cost for getting an issue into the public space declines the competition for people’s spare time has gone up. We can no longer just assume people will be interested in ICANN issues.
Most of ICANN’s website is rather web 1.0. We, and the people who participate in ICANN, do very little of the type of outreach a ninja might do. We certainly haven’t got 500,000 views on YouTube, let alone posted anything on YouTube at all.
Old-fashioned email
Our interactions are mostly via mailing lists (aside from this flashy new blog!), but email use is declining amongst people below 25 as they move to IM and myspace based interaction.
That being said, a critical reason our website looks pretty boring is that we have a global audience, and it’s important to recall most Internet users, including my mom, are still on dial-up.
So we’ve got two challenges.
First: In a space where competition for people’s time is becoming almost perfect, how can we best reach out to people? What lessons can we learn from communities like the environmental community and what lessons can we teach?
Second: How do we keep up with and inspire the people on broadband who are going video and web 2.0 while reaching out to people all over the world who are just discovering the Internet and are mostly on dial up?
They are questions that would challenge even a Ninja, but we and those with an interest in ICANN and our policy making model, need to think about how best to answer them soon.
{ 10 comments }
Kevin Murphy 03.01.07 at 8:15 am
Rather than, or in addition to, soliciting comments on mailing lists and then storing it all away in archives that are hard to find, just stick it all in a phpBB (or similar) forum.
Have sub-forums for currently active comment periods.
Have sub-forums for archived topics.
Have a general discussion forum where people can ask questions and rant and rave about all the nonsense that domain people rant and rave about.
Allow people to call you a bunch of crooks, then tell them why you are not. Get it over and done with.
Have prominent “sticky” posts that explain away misconceptions about what ICANN does and does not have the power to do.
It’ll take one of your geeks about thirty minutes to set it up. Maybe a couple of hours if you want it to look good.
Tell Kieren it’s his job to moderate it. He’ll love that. Really.
Patrick Jones 03.01.07 at 8:25 am
The phpBB idea is a good one. We looked at using phpBB internally for the 2007 Nom Com, and may decide to use it with other forums. I mentioned it to Kieren just this week. So we are discussing alternatives to the current forums, no decision has been made yet.
Kieren McCarthy 03.01.07 at 11:58 am
I hope no one is going to be surprised to know that I am looking at this. It’s priorities at the moment.
Priority one: Make the website navigation usable.
That in itself has created a HUGE amount of work because there is six years’ worth of stuff all over the place. All static HTML. And as tempting as it can seem, you can’t just dump ICANN’s entire corporate history in the e-basket.
Marc Salvatierra has done a great job making sense of all this – and is still doing so, probably as I write this. So that’s job one. Job two is to put in place a system that means that this doesn’t have to be done all over again in six years’ time. A CMS. And as anyone who has had to build a CMS for an organisation that is constantly adding content, that is a Herculean task in itself.
Hopefully once we have figured what system and approach we are going to use then I can start bringing in some more useful tools like those mentioned above and slot them into the system.
As it is I am currently concentrating on the Lisbon participation site and trying to improve that for the meeting in under three weeks. And I am working on new newsletters – so we can inform people about what ICANN is doing (there’s a chicken-and-egg thing here: do you pull people in first or set up a better system first – I think the reality is you do one step of one, followed by one step of the other).
I am also working with a number of people in making sure that the ICANN processes are very, very much easier to understand. That is probably Priority Two to be honest as it is the one thing that most bothers people about ICANN.
And then there is this blog, which I think is pretty good but I hope to encourage more staff to try out – especially in languages other than English.
And then, well, then I can start experimenting with more novel ideas. But if I did the fun stuff first before helping make the base solid then I’d be fired – and quite rightly.
Actually what I will make a priority next week is getting threaded comments on this blog – I hate this one under the other thing.
Kieren
Thomas Roessler 03.01.07 at 7:53 pm
You’re talking too much about the technical mechanics of outreach, and too little about the social aspects. It’s less a question of e-mail vs. phpBB vs. future coolness: As long as it continues to be close to impossible to find out what goes on when you’re not inside the bubble, as long as comments and inputs are a one-way road, you can deploy all the technology you want, and you won’t get meaningful participation.
You don’t need cooperation technology: You need cooperative culture.
On something else, Kieren: As you transition the web site to some CMS, for heaven’s sake make sure you don’t break links that point into the old cruft.
Kieren McCarthy 03.02.07 at 2:23 am
I can’t put *everything* in a blog post Thomas. I was responding solely to a question about forums.
I am Washington at the moment talking to senior business people. I should be at the IETF in Prague talking to tech people. I am planning to be in Paris to continue a discussion with both the ICC and OECD. I was recently in Geneva talking to the folk tied up with the IGF. I will be in Seville just before the Lisbon meeting talking to Spanish civil society groups (courtesy of Robert Guerra). I have had several long conversations with Nick Ashton-Hart, ICANN’s new ALAC outreach person, including a very pleasant dinner at his house in London – and he is constantly firing new ideas at me. I am building the Lisbon participation site to help people interact with ICANN if they can’t be physically present in Portugal. I am working on new newsletters and co-operative information sharing.
If you can think up enough good reasons why I should come visit you, wherever you are, send me an email.
It’s not just me though. There are now a number of regional liaisons dotted around the globe who are travelling about and meeting people on the ground. And we are working together to make sure that we can help those people get involved with ICANN and its processes.
And wrt to the website – yes of course we’re not breaking links. It would 1,000 times easier if we did but I remember working at one big news site where the redesign reformed all the links and then failed to link the old with the new and we lost two years’ worth of links in one afternoon with the switchover. I’m not going through that again.
Kieren
Larry 03.03.07 at 4:48 am
Kieran and anyone else at ICAAN reading this: as we have no other recourse but public blogs on which to ask — please, please, please — whatever you can do to solve this Registerfly crisis as quickly as possible please do so. I have lost several domains already with another 20 up for renewal on registerfly within the next month. And for the last six months registerfly has double and triple charged me for renewals (that sometimes worked, sometimes not). When some domains died last month when registerfly wouldn’t/couldn’t renew the domains, eNom (another problem registrar) “kindly” renewed my domains for $160 a pop.
There is absolutely no customer service happening at Registerfly, no way to transfer domains away and no way to renew names before they expire… meanwhile I have client s and customers screaming at me to get it fixed. And I am absolutely powerless to do anything to fix the situation. You guys are not powerless to fix the situation. This may seem like a minor inconvenience to you guys. But it’s keeping me from doing business, causing me lost business, hundreds in fraudulent credit card charges and hours and hours of lost sleep. Please, please, please, do something now — or at least tell us what to do to get this solution dealt with NOW!
Kieren McCarthy 03.03.07 at 6:00 am
Larry,
I’m not the person who deals in any way with registrants, but I do know that ICANN is very serious about Registerfly and is working hard to sort the matter out — as is made clear from this announcement yesterday that you may not have seen:
http://www.icann.org/announcements/announcement-02mar07.htm
Kieren
Larry 03.03.07 at 10:18 am
Kieren -
Thanks for the response. I have seen the announcement from ICAAN which was a really promising start from ICAAN. And I appreciate that you don’t deal with registrants. But it would be tremendously beneficial if you could find the folks you work with who CAN do something and who do have some answers and encourage them to jump on this blog and have an open dialogue with those of us who are really suffering through this Registerfly meltdown. The hours tick away without resolution — or even updated information about what’s happening, when it’s going to happen, who will make the decisions. So literally any kind of information to show us that there are people who care about the situation would do a world of good for us. I am quite sure your PR folks would counsel you that crisis communications demands over communicating to the affected audiences — a daily briefing, even if you have nothing new to report, would do wonders to relieve a little stress and show us that ICAAN genuinely cares about this situation and realizes the huge scope of this crisis situation. Thanks again for writing — it really does help me feel a little better to hear from someone at ICAAN that you’re aware of this mess.
Richard benz 08.20.07 at 12:10 am
Allow people to call you a bunch of crooks, then tell them why you are not. Get it over and done with.
Kieren McCarthy 08.20.07 at 1:16 am
There is nothing like reasoned and mature thought.
And this is nothing like…
Kieren McCarthy
General manager of public participation
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