The meeting will be held in two 90-minute sessions, separated by a 30-minute break, and with a 30-minute feedback period at the end. There will be two broad discussion topics of common interest, with specific sub-questions. They are:

14:00-15:30 — EXPANDING THE NAME SPACE
- What is the impact of the new gTLD and IDN Fast Track processes on the market structure of the Domain Name Space and ICANN’s processes?
- How should geographic names be handled and is there a blurring of “cc” and “g” spaces ?
- What should be the cost and the pricing structure for new TLDs (both application fee and ongoing fees)?

Sessions will be public and transcribed, but they are not a public forum. Opinion will however be sought during the discussion through the use of coloured cards to represent whether people agree or disagree with a particular comment or proposal put forward. A feedback period will follow at 17:30 where members of the community will be invited to comment on any of the topics discussed in the previous two sessions.

Please note that the session and its format remain experimental in an effort to improve discussion and interaction between Supporting Organizations and Advisory Committees. As such, not only do we expect to learn from the session in Mexico but we will be seeking feedback from the SOs and ACs themselves after the meeting is over in order to identify improvements for ICANN’s next meeting in Sydney in June.

During the Cairo meeting in general, ICANN together with Domaine.info produced a number of videos covering the main sessions and topics, with each video fronted by a member of either the staff or a chair of the relevant supporting organization or advisory committee.

You can find all of those videos posted on the Cairo site at http://cai.icann.org/video, and on the ICANN main site under the “Video” tab.

This video features consultant Patrick Sharry talking about the AC/SO session, which he helped moderate. This joint session will be repeated in Mexico City on the first day of the meeting with a slightly different format following feedback from the community on the first meeting.

Below is a transcript of the video and off to the right is the video itself.

# ICANN and Domaine.info
# ICANN, CAIRO Egypt- November 3, 2008
# Open Joint Session, GNSO,ccNSO, GAC, ALAC Domain.Name.Space
# Hello, my name is Patrick Sharry
# Today I facilitated a very important meeting.
# For the first time at an ICANN meeting,
# we had the chairs of the SOs and ACs.
# organize themselves together for a joint meeting of those groups.
# There were two topics discussed, we talked about the President’s Strategy Committee and
# the Improving Institutional Confidence work
# and we also talked about new gTLDs, IDN ccTLDs, and the issues around those things.
# It was a meeting that ran very well,
# and not least because people recognized how important it was,
# to bring these groups together to talk about issues of such importance.
# During the PSC session. we started with a presentation by the chairman, Peter Dengate Thrush.
# Peter outlined the recent work that the President’s Strategic Committee had been doing,
# and ran through a few slides that talked about the relevant areas that we needed to consider.
# We then got some views from the Supporting Organization and Advisory Committee chairs
# who were seated at the top table.
# And from there, we began a conversation with the community as a whole with an open mike session.
# There were a number of comments on many different aspects of that work.
# As the conversation proceeded, I tried to capture on the white board, some of the key topics of those conversations.
# That list of topics, will then be presented to staff and to other parts of the organization for further consideration,
# as we move into the next phase of the improving institutional confidence project.
# In the second half of our session, we concentrated on new gTLDs, IDN ccTLDs and the issues that surround that.
# We began with comments from each of the Supporting Organization and Advisory Committee chairs,
# They told us what was important in these areas from their own SO or AC perspective,
# And also why those things should be of importance to the community as a whole.
# We interspersed conversations from the SO and AC chairs, with comments from the floor,
# and in particular, we had a particularly productive session at the end where we looked at the issue of geographic names.
# This conversation produced interesting interplay between a number of people in the ICANN community,
# about the issue of what was a gTLD and was a ccTLD
# How should the process run and who should be involved.
# Again, as we had this conversation, I collected on the white board the main topics that people were covering.
# This list will be put into the process of one of a number of items that have been collected this week,
# to help the team who are working on IDN ccTLDs and new gTLDs to further their work,
# as part of the community consultation that they are doing in order to come up with the next phase of that for our next meeting in Mexico.
# Thank you for listening to all of this. It was a very important meeting for the ICANN community,
# as we work forward, I’m sure that we’ll find better ways of running these meetings,
# and that means by the time we get to Mexico and beyond, we’ll actually have even more productive ways
# of bringing these important parts of the ICANN community together. Thanks again for your time. Bye bye.
# Copyrights Domaine.info 2008 All Rights Reserved
# Your comments and reactions are welcome Vos commentaires et reactions sont les bienvenues participate@icann.org

This is a screengrab of the ICANN front page. You’ll notice that it’s slightly different. The changes are explained briefly below, but we’d like to take this opportunity to ask people to think about the future of the website – it’s overall look and it’s overall functioning.

Some of you will have noticed that the front page has been changing in small increments over the past six months or so: we’ve been trying to give the site a little more life, trying to flag up the most important and most recent information and so on.

This time, we have given announcements a little more prominence, as well as moved the bottom box that contained links through to ongoing work to the middle of the page. (And a few other small things.)

A redesign?

But despite our efforts, it remains a consistent complaint that information is hard to find on the ICANN site. (It doesn’t help that over the course of the past two years, ICANN has been producing more and more content every month.) And so we recognize that at some point soon there is going to have to be a complete redesign of the site, with every aspect reviewed and revised.

This blog post is a very small step in that direction in that we are asking you: what do you think we should do? What needs to be changed? What is better? What used to better, and why? What is the information you have difficulty finding? What is the sort of information that is of most importance to you? Would you like to see more video? Or more graphics? A cleaner design? Or a more busy one?

Please use this blog post and its comments function as a way to give us some of your ideas.

But before we get there, just for reflection and interest, here’s a quick rundown of the ICANN site over the years, complete with images.



This is the very first version of the ICANN site dating from January 1999. One link on the front page went through to the “ICANN Startup Fund”, and at the top was an explanation of what ICANN actually was: “… the new non-profit corporation that was formed to take over responsibility for the IP address space allocation…”

Bare yet simple.

As ICANN began to form (November 1999), the site grew more complex with links to announcements and to Supporting Organizations. Correspondence and Minutes appeared, as well as registration to the next ICANN meeting. The beginning of ICANN’s dalliance with bright colours began.



Two years later (October 2001), and the bright blue begins to spread dangerously…



And then, with the world governments’ eyes turned to ICANN in the first stage of the WSIS process, the site saw its second re-design in December 2003. If you wanted to know what it was that ICANN did, you could find just about every aspect of it in one of the boxes on the front page.

ICANN had, of course, continued to produce huge amounts of work, documents, presentations, letters and so on over the past five years, and the site tried to find a way of making it more accessible. To some degree, it worked, and the design stuck.



Nearly three years later (August 2006), and the everything-up-front approach had started to exhaust people. A redesign was called for and announced to the community with a special wiki site set up to gather input. The front page cooled down a little:



And all that was in preparation for the third redesign. The long lists were pulled into tabs running along the top; the migraine blue reappeared but so did calmer grades of other colours. A quick links choice was added, graphics appeared. The site started using CSS sheets and standard web design approaches. Everything seemed a little more organized.



And then the first video appeared, as well as information other than the organization’s announcements.



And then, with the front page opened up, the front page was given a more magazine feel, with more information about what was important and what people were interested in taking up space that has previously been controlled by whatever the latest announcement was.

The announcements were reduced to three, graphics pointing to main sister sites added to the left, and information on the front changed frequently as newsletters, and consultations, and public comment periods and magazines came and went.

Finally we end up where we are today, with five announcements up front, varying front page content and the main work pages of the organization given more prominence.



The question now is: what should the next iteration of the ICANN site look like?

Do we need to:

• Refocus on SOs and ACs?
• Or focus more heavily on particular issues?
• Add more graphics, or more videos?
• Rethink the colours or the design?
• Change the tabs and the linking pages?
• Reduce or increase the space given to announcements?
• Or, maybe, hire a professional design firm to suggest the answers?

As you know by now, all comments and thoughts welcome.

Mark these words: before you know it, you will grow to actually like the ICANN website.

With an eagle-eyed community keeping tabs on the organisation’s every move, the tiny tweaks that, left noticed, would irreversibly alter the entire domain name system keep getting picked up before they can work their magic.

We have decided to come clean with the latest example, henceforth to be known as the “organizational structure image conspiracy”, or OSIO for short.

Picture this

Last week, we changed the image on the About page that tries to outline as simply as possible the structure of ICANN with the SOs, ACs, Board, liaisons, staff, and so on.

The old image of a huge Board of Directors with the Supporting Organizations and Advisory Committees pointing accusatorially at it was out-of-date, not very clear, and not at all accurate for how ICANN as an organization functions.

The inadequacy of this image was realized around a year ago and so a new graphic was produced to be used in the Annual Report.

This graphic would explain a little the split between SOs and ACs, and try to outline what exactly they were and who they represented. It would also try to get across the fact that the Board of Directors is made up of representatives from the different constituent parts of the organizations. Plus, include the vital role the Nominating Committee plays within ICANN. Not an easy task.

But a graphic was arrived at, boldly stuck in the Annual Report [pdf] on page 7, and then the whole report was released with as much fanfare as possible in December 2007. It was printed out, emailed, linked to, stuck on a carnival float bare-chested and wheeled around Los Angeles, all in the hope that people would actually read it.

This was clearly less than fully successful as the first time many people have seen the graphic on page 7 was when we finally got around to sticking it on the About page last week.

Here it is:

No doubt those of you that have not already read the various email messages decrying this new image will have spotted the conspiracy.

But just to make our culpability absolutely clear, you will note several things.

• There is no Ombudsman in the new graphic. The secret hope here was that by not including his name on a graphic, the Ombudsman would be destroyed by feelings of personal inadequacy and so be unable to continue with his job, leaving ICANN free to claim full control of the Internet unhindered.
• The gTLD registries and registrars are featured *in bold* under the GNSO, while the other constituents are not. This was done on the advice of a Puerto Rican witchdoctor while in San Juan last year. He told us that to make one constituency bold, while making another not bold, would provide strength and unassailable mental prowess to the bold party. In the interests of full disclosure, that witchdoctor’s exhorbitant fees were paid for by GoDaddy.
• In the same box, on the advice of said witchdoctor, the NCUC was hideously malformed from Non Commercial User Constituency to just “universities/consumers” despite the glaring evidence that there is at least one person in the NCUC that is not a consumer or from a university [can we fact check this, please? - Ed]
• If that wasn’t bad enough, the NomCom is disparaged, some would say libelled, but being represented using the colour black. What can this mean? Yes, that’s right, we were hoping that the NomCom wouldn’t be noticed at all. We wish you’d forget all about the NomCom so we can call it “The President’s Appointing Board” and replace all the Board members with the children of ICANN staff – and no one would ever have known. At least until bedtime.
• But hang on… the NomCom also only has arrows to the Board, yet it appoints members of the SOs and ACs as well. We have yet to even discover what fiendish plan we have in store with this one.
• And if you look really carefully are the number of seats selected by the NomCom and the ACs being subtly hidden with an expedient dot?
• But probably worst of all: what exactly do the strange sucker-like graphics on the side of the GAC and President boxes mean? That’s right – they are the power suckers. By putting these tiny images on a graphic on a page of the ICANN website, we have managed to unravel the bylaws and nearly a decade’s worth of real-world practice and allow ICANN to be run entirely by the President and GAC.

Or at least that’s what would have happened had it gone unnoticed for just another five days. But gah! the organizational structure image conspiracy (OSIO) was uncovered on various mailing lists before it could take place.

Your turn to undermine the entire multi-stakeholder model

Our spin on all this is that it is actually incredibly difficult to produce a graphic that covers the complexities of the ICANN multi-stakeholder model while still appearing mildly comprehensible. As such we have had to simplify and modify.

You will all, quite rightly, dismiss this excuse out of hand. To which we say, in all seriousness, please come up with your own graphic and email us and if it’s better we will use it instead – feature it on the website, in the Annual Report, brochures, whatever. Think of it as a competition.

And feel free to have some fun. We won’t use any daft ones of course but if they make us laugh we’ll feature them here on the blog. This is not a competition competition in the sense that we are not going to pick a winner and then parade the winning entry, but we would sincerely like to see the ICANN model represented as clearly and simply as possible so if you fancy picking up the gauntlet, here’s your chance.

Please draw up your graphics, or make your comments, and then either email Kieren McCarthy at kieren[dot]mccarthy @ ICANN [dot] org, or stick a link or a comment below.

And good luck with cracking the other conspiracies. There are, I am told, three more.