Of 1,120 total attendees (excluding staff and Board), we emailed 540 of them using the information they had provided on registration and received 110 responses – a healthy response rate of 20.4 percent.

All responses were from you the community (i.e. no staff or Board responses) and the results are below (these results are also published on the Seoul meeting site at http://sel.icann.org/survey.):

Quick analysis: The results are surprisingly good. There isn’t a single question where a significant majority of people weren’t positive in their response. Obviously there is always room for improvement – two meetings after we introduced the document deadline, it seems there are still large sections of the community that are not entirely happy – we will have to look into why and what we can do about it.

In terms of what happens at meetings, the least important event according to you was the Board meeting – but even then a majority of people felt it was very important or important.

And there was a very positive response to the lively opening ceremony – in which not only traditional Korean drummers but also a young guitarist made famous by a YouTube video played. And ICANN’s new CEO is off to a positive start at his first ICANN meeting.

Combined with an extremely favourable review of the overall meeting and the facilities it offered, it seems as though we are clearly doing something right at meetings. Something that we intend to not only maintain but to improve.

Here is a quick rundown of ICANN-related events and information for participating both in person and remotely.

Open Forum

There are two main sessions from the ICANN perspective. On Sunday 15 November, at 9.30 to 11.00am local time in Room 1 (Sinai), ICANN will be running an open forum that will cover the organization’s latest developments, including the new Affirmation of Commitments, the recently approved “fast track” for IDN Internet extensions, the new generic top-level domain process, and other topics.

If you not attending the conference in person, the session will be audiocast and you will be able to send in interventions via email and through a chat function on the IGF site.

Critical Internet Resources

Then, on Monday 16 November, there will be a main session on Managing Critical Internet Resources in the main room from 9.30am to 12.30pm.

This event will be webcast and, again, you will be able to send in questions via email and through chatrooms.

Participating Remotely

Links to the webcasts, audiocasts and chatrooms will be posted on the IGF’s webpage at http://www.intgovforum.org.

There are also a number of “remote hubs” around the world that comprise local meetings where participants are able not only to watch the webcast of the IGF but also to interact with the meeting.

Those participating will also be able to discuss the themes covered by the IGF from a local perspective with others from their own region. The Forum serves as a stimulus or a starting point for the debate of local issues and implications and for the development of a network of interested people in every region.

For more information go to: http://www.igfremote.com/

Other sessions

Apart from those two main sessions, there are a range of other sessions that may be of interest to ICANN community members. These include:

Monday 14.00-15.30 (Room 2, Red Sea): Best practices in ccTLD Policy and Operations management Resources

Monday 14.30-16.00 (Room 3, Suez Canal): Managing Internet Addresses: Global and regional viewpoint

Tuesday 11.00-12.30 (Room 2, Red Sea): Domain Name Use: Theft, Threats & Solutions

Tuesday 14.30-17.30 (Room 4, Nile Valley): Securing Cyberspace: Strategy for the Future

Tuesday 15.00-18.00 (Main room): Internet Governance in the light of WSIS Principles

Wednesday 9.00-12.30 (Room 3, Suez Canal):Code of good practice on participation, access to information and transparency in Internet governance

Wednesday 14.00-15.30 (Room 4, Nile Valley): Arabic Script IDNs: Challenges and Solution

Full schedule

You can view the full IGF meeting schedule online at: http://www.intgovforum.org/cms/2009/sharm_el_Sheikh/WorkshopSchedule.html

The voting procedure needed 60 percent of both of the new houses – contracted and non-contracted – to vote in favour. A first round vote with Chuck Gomes and Olga Cavalli saw Chuck Gomes win 100 percent of the contracted house vote and 50 percent of the non-contracted house; a second round with just Chuck on the ballot saw him win all but one Council votes.

Chuck will be helped by not one but two new vice-chairs under the new system: Olga Cavalli (interim) and Stephane van Gelder. Chuck mentioned in his acceptance speech that he intends to follow the same pattern that he himself had as vice-chair, where they are included in all decisions.

So congratulations new GNSO chair Chuck Gomes and congratulations to the new Council, which has been formed after years of hard work balancing the various stakeholders’ interests.

Outgoing chair Avri Doria was given a standing ovation on standing down and we captured the moment:

A mock-up of what the new front page may look like

Since June, ICANN staff has been working hard with external consultants Revere Group to redesign the website to fit with the community’s needs. Revere first carried out a site audit [pdf], pointing out all the areas where the website didn’t fit in with best practices and guidelines.

Then it carried out the online survey as well as around 15 in-depth interviews with community members and staff to find out what it was that people felt the website needed to do. And it also went through the full logs of website visitors to find out who was coming to the site and from where. And from that created a research document [pdf] summarizing the findings.

Based on these two documents, a new taxonomy [pdf] of the site was developed in iterations. New categories and menus cover all the different aspects of ICANN as an organization and structure them more simply and logically. And from that, wireframes [pdf] – blueprint designs – for new webpages were drawn up and new functions and approaches were discussed in an effort to make the site as easy to use as possible.

Design

Once the wireframes were in place, the study then moved into a design phase where a wide range of different approaches to the actual site look were drawn up and run through a group of around 10 staff over the course of a month, and the designs were gradually honed down to the point where the blueprints for the different pages were created as images.

And that’s where we currently are, as of 21 October. The remaining steps are the important ones – figuring out how to implement the new approach, ensuring that we keep as much of the design and new functions sketched out earlier in the process.

We will be working on a timetable for that in the next few weeks and will try to be conservative in our estimates so we don’t end up over-promising. But it is probably safe to say that before the next meeting in Nairobi in March 2010, there will be an updated and fit-for-purpose website that should finally put an end to most, if not all, of the usability issues that the community has had to deal with on ICANN.org for the past few years.

We are publishing summaries of the different aspects of this whole process so you as the community can see the work that has been put into this effort. Hopefully you will like what you see.

Usability study work summaries [pdfs]

• Site audit
• Research
• Taxonomy
• Wireframes

Session goals and outcomes:

The public forum is the community’s opportunity to make comments on the main topics in front of ICANN at each meeting directly to the Board and in front of the rest of the community.

The goal is to give a public and open forum for issues to be raised toward the end of the meeting and draw the community and Board’s attention to anything important.

The public forum is split up into the main topics of the Seoul meeting with a time alotted for each subject (see below). Attendees are encouraged to be brief and concise to enable as many people to speak as possible. A microphone is placed near the front of the room and commenters line up behind it to take their turn in asking a question.

Answerable questions are much preferred to comments, and both are preferred to statements – which can be incorporated into the official record without the need to read them out. If there are a large number of commenters, a two-minute clock may be introduced.

The ideal outcome of the public forum is that everyone who has an important issue to raise is able to relate it to the Board while also making the community aware of the issue.

The issues for discussion and their time slots are provided below.

The question box will take questions until Wednesday 14 October in preparation for the public forum at ICANN’s international public meeting in Sydney on Thursday 29 October.

Questions are limited to two per individual and 50 words in length each. They can cover any topic related to ICANN and its work. Answers will be provided either during the public forum or emailed and published in the weeks following the meeting.

You can find the form below, as well as on the Seoul meeting website and on the participation pages on ICANN’s main website.

If you can’t see the form below, you can go to it directly at:
http://icann.wufoo.com/forms/seoul-question-box/

Sections are:

• JPA/Affirmation
• Applicant Guidebook/new gTLDs
• Fast Track/IDNs
• Public comment periods
• Seoul meeting
• And the remainder

JPA/Affirmation
Last Wednesday, 30 September 2009, the Joint Project Agreement with the US government ended and in its place a new Affirmation of Commitments was signed.

This is obviously of enormous significance to ICANN, so it currently sits front and center on the ICANN front page. We have an announcement, the Affirmation itself, a video of CEO Rod Beckstrom explaining its significance, and reaction from the community. The Affirmation has been signed but obviously there is much that the community now needs to discuss, and that conversation will start in Seoul.

Applicant Guidebook / new gTLDs
The third version of the Applicant Guidebook was released today. It’s all out for public comment, as we have done twice before. We are gradually moving forward with the overarching issues and, again, Seoul will be place to have more discussions.

It is worth pointing out that today, Monday 5 October, is the document deadline for Seoul (15 working days before the start of the meeting), which is why so much stuff has appeared in the past few days. The idea is that everyone will now have plenty of time to read the documents and so be in a position to talk about their contents at Seoul.

The full rundown of documents can be found at http://www.icann.org/en/topics/new-gtlds/comments-3-en.htm, including red-lined versions so you can see what has changed.

Fast Track
This is the process for introducing internationalized domain names (IDNs) into the root – but only those that related to territories i.e. ccTLDs. The Fast Track final implementation plan was published last week for public comment, and the plan is to have the Board authorize it at the Seoul meeting (end of this month).

So, this is the last chance to have a look and have your say before it actually happens. You can find all the information you should need for that process at http://www.icann.org/en/announcements/announcement-2-30sep09-en.htm.

Public comment periods
As usual in the build-up to a meeting, we have a raft of public comment periods. Ignoring the ones for the Applicant Guidebook and Fast Track, both of which are mentioned above, we have also opened comment periods on:

• A root-scaling study by TNO
• The use of proxy services for domain registration i.e. people paying to ensure their personal details do not appear publicly as the owner of a particular domain name
• Board review final report i.e. the changes to be made to the Board itself as part of the ongoing independent review process
• SSAC review report – same as Board report above but not as far along in the process
• NomCom review report – same as SSAC above

Seoul meeting
Why we have this glut of material is, of course, the upcoming Seoul meeting at the end of October.

With respect to the meeting itself, there are several other pieces of information:

• The agenda is live - check it out to see what is going on, when and who will be speaking
• If you can’t attend, you can ask questions in the public forum online
• If you haven’t see it yet, the meeting has its own website at http://sel.icann.org

And the remainder
And there’s still more:

• Nairobi fellowship applications
• A new process for registry security requests
• A bulk transfer advisory

Hopefully that helps breaks down the work into manageable chunks. If you still have queries, please add them as a comment below.

A number of people testified, including my colleague Doug Brent, but it is the testimony of Steve DelBianco I found particularly intriguing. His testimony revolved around the notion the country-code top-level domains are “controlled by governments”, and future IDN fast track ccTLD allocations will be “reserved only for governments”.

I think many in the ccTLD community will be puzzled by these repeated assertions in his testimony.

Let’s set the stage a little. Country-code top-level domains have existed since the mid-1980s — they are the domains that currently end with two-letter extensions like .FI for Finland, and .DE for Germany. Each country has one available for their use, taken from the ISO 3166-1 standard, but at present they are all written in the letters used for English, known as Latin characters. One of ICANN’s key current initiatives is to work on allowing country-codes to be deployed in different scripts, such as those used for Chinese, Russian and Arabic languages. It is not terribly convenient for those who type in these languages to have to switch their computer to using Latin characters just to put the two-letter endings on their domains, and this will address that.

Recognising that coming up with a complete solution for these internationalised country codes will take some time, the community is working on a “fast track” programme which allows countries that have a demonstrated immediate need to get early access to using these domains. Applications will need to show that the strings they would like to use (like .рф, .日本国 or .ελ) are not contentious, in addition to meeting all the existing eligibility criteria we use for assigning the Latin-based country codes.

So what are the criteria we use today?

The criteria we use in large part revolve around the consensus of “local Internet community” — a sometimes nebulous concept, to be sure, but in essence recognising it is the Internet community as a whole in the country that should decide how their domain is run, not just the Government.

IANA Staff wrote in 1994 that we assign country code top-level domains to trustees that “carry out the necessary responsibilities, and have the ability to do an equitable, just, honest, and competent job”, and have a “duty to serve the community”. “Significantly interested parties in the domain should agree that the designated manager is the appropriate party.”

With respect to national governments, in 1997 we noted that “an additional factor has become very important since [1994]: the desires of the government of the country.  The IANA takes the desires of the government of the country very seriously, and will take them as a major consideration in any transition discussion.” Subsequent to that, the ICANN Governmental Advisory Committee has also made statements regarding this principle.

Clearly national governments have an important role in country-code top-level domains, but that does not translate to controlling them. It is the local Internet community that we look to to provide guidance on how their domains should be run. We expect governments are an important actor in the local Internet community, and that they are involved in the discussion and decision making. But there is a key difference between that, and them exclusively controlling the domain, or having them reserved for the government’s use. If the top-level domain for a particular country is assigned to its government to operate directly, it is because the local Internet community consensus there has decided that is what is appropriate, versus some other alternative.

A basic description of the evaluation criteria we use are provided in the public summary delegation reports we publish on the IANA website (see here for a recent example). ICANN staff have also been working in recent months on improving the public delegation documentation, in anticipation of the launch of the fast track programme. This documentation will better elaborate our existing processes. It is our hope that this will assist prospective applicants for these domains better understand the evaluation criteria when they submit their applications.

We know that Internet communities in a number of countries are already discussing how best to run a potential fast track internationalised domain, so that they can be ready to present their consensus should the programme be launched. Until then, all countries of the world have their two-letter ASCII code and ICANN continues to receive requests to maintain and transfer these domains in accordance with the community’s wishes.

Picturesque Bled - location for the ccTLD meeting

I’ve been around the domain name industry for a while and have attended a few ICANN meetings, but this was only my second regional ccTLD-focussed conference. I’ve also had some exposure to Eastern Europe but my exposure to Central Asia and the Caucasus is almost zero, limited to watching a picture of a plane following a red line across a map of the area on overnight flights between Australia and Europe.

I therefore wasn’t entirely sure what to expect, though my background research suggested that it was likely to be an interesting affair. The attendees list indicated a healthy turnout of ccTLD Managers, representing everyone from EU member states to Central Asian Republics. As my role at AusRegistry International is to build relationships with ccTLD managers around the world, this looked promising.

The conference itself was organised (very well, it should be said) by the Coordination Center for TLD RU (ccTLD.RU – Russia’s ccTLD manager), with local assistance from ARNES (the Slovenian ccTLD manager) and the Slovenian chapter of the Internet Society.

Each of the countries represented at the conference (with the exception of guest speakers, such as myself) share similar histories and so cultural perspectives and I was curious to see to what extent this, and Russia’s historically dominant position in the region, impacts on how ccTLD managers see their role in the Internet.

Many of the attendees spoke better Russian than English so a significant proportion of the conference was conducted in Russian. This was my first experience listening to a translation, which took a little getting used to, but the translator was really very good. Trying to watch a presentation in Cyrillic though was a reminder of just how spoilt I normally am as a native English speaker in today’s world, and of how critically important IDNs are to this (and other) regions.

It was fascinating to hear some very different perspectives than I’ve been used to in the past. As I come from an English-speaking country that is politically closely aligned with the United States and well represented within the ICANN community, it’s easy to forget that there are groups of people who are much less comfortable operating within the ICANN process, especially when it comes to the role the US government plays with respect to the agreements and contracts it has with ICANN.

A number of ICANN staff attended the meeting and did their best to allay some of the concerns expressed, particularly the idea that the US government has ‘a big red button’ that can be used to turn off the Internet at will. While this at first seemed ludicrous, even paranoid to me, it was a view earnestly held by a number of my colleagues and it was instructive to hear their views and arguments.

For example, some of the countries in this region do not send representatives to the GAC, because (as I understand it) they feel that this would be interpreted as recognition of the US government as the controlling body of the Internet. Others feel it is better to work from inside the tent, rather than outside – and there was also much encouragement to join and participate in the ccNSO. I hope I was also able to provide them with some of my, Australian, perspective.

This conference therefore plays an important regional role as an event that allows ccTLD managers (and others in the industry) to share their experiences and to support each other, without becoming entangled in the political issues that make ICANN a problematic space for some of them.

From a personal perspective, it was great to have the opportunity to meet with ccTLD managers from a range of countries, and to hear about the various challenges that they face in an increasingly competitive market and an increasingly challenging security environment.

I also enjoyed the chance, as part of the Marketing panel, to present some of the experiences that we have gained during our time as Registry Operator for the dot-au ccTLD and from our work with other ccTLDs, especially our clients in the Middle East.

I should also mention the local hosts’ hospitality: we were treated to two excellent dinners – the second one being a particularly special affair held in Bled Castle with spectacular views over the lake and the mountains beyond.

The only real complaint I have is in relation to the extremely flaky wireless internet connectivity in the conference hall. I have a suspicion though that this may have been a deliberate strategy on the part of the organisers to get people to actually listen to the presentations. A strategy to be considered for future ICANN meetings perhaps…

Jon Lawrence is Business Development Consultant at AusRegistry International