Starting in Cairo in November 2008, the chairs of the different supporting organizations (SOs) and advisory committees (ACs) have held a joint meeting.

The idea was to find a formula for open communication that was more than a repeat of existing open microphone sessions. The chairs also wanted to create a forum that could break through the silos of discussion and communication in which ACs and SOs often operate. And, lastly, they wanted the opportunity to discuss topics of mutual interest and importance, and to have those topics suggested by ACSO members.

Click here to jump to the meeting agenda

Each time, feedback has been taken from the community and the session adjusted to reflect that. For Sydney, the decision has been taken to reduce the time taken on Monday to just one session of 90 minutes and to concentrate on a single topic (albeit with multiple arms).

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A Congressional Hearing is taking place in Washington this morning concerning ICANN and the conclusion of the Joint Project Agreement (JPA) that ICANN has with the US government.
President and CEO Paul Twomey is representing ICANN on a panel of six, in front of the Commerce Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet.
You can [...]

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قامت آيكان على مدار الأيام القليلة الماضية بنشر مجموعة من المستندات في إطار الاستعداد لاجتماع سيدني (٢١-٢٦ يونيو
٢٠٠٩) تمهيدا لمناقشتها خلال الاجتماع. وتشمل هذه المستندات ما يلي
المسار السريع لأسماء النطاقات الدولية لرمز الدولة: تم نشر الإصدار الثالث لمسودة خطة التنفيذ، ونسخة معدلة لاقتراح وثيقة المسئولية، وكذلك التفاصيل الخاصة بالمساهمة المالية المقترحة لدعم تطبيق أسماء [...]

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Over the weekend, we published quite a bit of material. It was published now to meet a request by the Board and the community that we post three business weeks prior to the start of a meeting; these series of postings ensure that the bulk of materials being considered during Sydney will meet this goal.

With Sydney opening on Monday 22 June, we strived to have this information up before this morning, Monday 1 June.

As such, it is probably as comprehensive a set of documents as ICANN has published for any meeting – addressing hard issues on IDNs, an important report on intellectual property issues as related to domain names, another huge piece of comment and analysis related to new TLDs, new financial analysis, more on community travel (which is coming), and other areas. I’m also pretty confident that this is the earliest (relative to an ICANN meeting) that this kind of material has been available.

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The Board made a number of important decisions at its May meeting. You can read the preliminary report online now at http://www.icann.org/en/minutes/prelim-report-21may09.htm, but here is a quick rundown of the decisions made and their import.

• A new registrars contract

After two years of work, a new contract covering the relationship between ICANN and registrars was approved by the Board.

The contract contains no less than 17 amendments and was the first overhaul of the contract since it was first approved in 2001. Read more in the official announcement: http://www.icann.org/en/announcements/announcement-2-29may09-en.htm.

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An online question box where community members can ask questions directly to the ICANN Board and staff has opened today.
The question box will take questions from Wednesday 27 May until Wednesday 17 June in preparation for the public forum at ICANN’s international public meeting in Sydney on Thursday 25 June.
Questions are limited to two per [...]

There are two big issues that ICANN is constantly questioned about and judged by, and they are:

• Security and stability
• Accountability and Transparency

Last week, ICANN announced a whole security and stability plan [pdf] and opened up a public comment period on it. But that’s not what this blog post is about.

The thing that you didn’t realize was on the ICANN site (part 5) is actually the organization’s extensive response to the accountability and transparency question. It is called the “Accountability and Transparency Frameworks and Principles” and was approved well over a year ago by the Board, following no less than 16 months of community consultation (you can see the first public comment period back in October 2006 here).

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One of the most consistent complaints we hear from the community is the lack of ICANN materials – reports, announcements, webpages and so on – in languages other than English.

We have been working hard on this for nearly two years and ICANN now has a translation manager as well as a decent size budget and much better internal systems for putting things through translation. The amount of translation we do (and interpretation at meetings) has jumped and we are doing it at lower cost and with greater accuracy than ever before.

But we recognize that this is only a partial solution. The ICANN website is the main entry point to the organization and it remains defiantly English. While we translate more documents than every before, only a tiny proportion of our webpages are in other languages, making it hard for community members to find those translated documents and to keep up to date with ICANN and its work.

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An official update on the new gTLD program / Applicant Guidebook process has just been published. Most of you reading this will immediately know what that means but I’m going to use a third label which isn’t ICANN-world terminology to talk about it: Internet extensions.

ICANN has been working on a process for opening up the Internet space for a number of years. As that process has got closer to reality, people have started paying it more and more attention. The “new gTLD program” envisions a very significant increase in the number of “generic top-level domains” – or Internet extensions like dot-com, dot-net, dot-info etc. At the moment there are 21 of these extensions of three characters or more: the gTLD program is estimating a further 500 within the next two years. It’s a huge change in the Internet’s domain name system.

The “Applicant Guidebook” is what it says it is – a guidebook for those that plan to apply for a new Internet extension. In it, all the rules, procedures and processes are outlined in some depth. And currently ICANN is running an extensive and ongoing public comment and review process using that guidebook as the focus for discussion.

Which leads to the question of this blog post: so where are we up to with these new Internet extensions?

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