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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Our Annual Report has been published, covering the organization’s achievements and progress during 2008.

The report includes information on the three major initiatives ICANN undertook last year (and continues with this year): the process for introducing new generic top-level domains (gTLDs) to the Internet; the introduction for the first time of internationalized domain names (IDNs); and an extensive Improving Institutional Confidence consultation, to enable the conclusion of the Joint Project Agreement (JPA) with the United States government in September 2009.

Reports from the chairs of ICANN’s Supporting Organization and Advisory Organizations are included alongside detailed rundowns of each department by the organization’s staff.

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For the first time at an ICANN meeting, we held a joint Supporting Organization and Advisory Committee chairs public meeting. The idea was to get the different arms of ICANN to cover the topics and areas that most concerned them and to have their different viewpoints on the same topics outlined and discussed.

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.

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This is a Response and Summary to the Cairo public forum that took place on 6 November 2008.

A PDF version of this document is available at: http://www.icann.org/en/participate/cairo-public-forum-response.pdf

Note from the Chairman:

One of the most significant features of ICANN meetings is the Public Forum, where members of the ICANN community are able to present their views on issues of concern to them to the ICANN Board, in public session. The fact that we rotate meetings through each of the geographic sectors of the world enhances the opportunity that people from every region to present their views to the ICANN Board, in the presence of Staff and the whole ICANN community.

As a long-time participant from the floor presenting views, in my case from the ccTLD community, I am well aware of the time, effort and expense that goes into the preparation of such statements. As a board member, I have valued hearing those submissions, from individuals, governments and constituencies. I am determined as Chair to continue this tradition, and to maximise the opportunities for information sharing it represents.

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Over the past four meetings, we have experimented with different approaches to chatrooms as a way of providing remote participants with an opportunity to interact in real time with a meeting.

There have been pluses and minuses to each approach. With some, slow responses times; others, heavy server loads. We have tried different types: PHP, Flash, ICQ. In each case some people can’t get into them whether because of technical knowledge or operating system or browser software.

Last time around, people told us that having to go to a particular webpage in order to get into the chatroom for that meeting was adding a step and so reducing their likelihood of joining.

So we are testing another approach in Cairo for the Improving Institutional Confidence session on Thursday 6 November at 2pm: embedded chatrooms.

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La prochaine réunion de l’ICANN se tiendra du 1er au 7 novembre 2008 au Caire, Capitale de l’Egypte. L’agenda est maintenant en ligne sur le site dédié à cette 3e et dernière réunion internationale de 2008.

Après la réunion du Conseil du GNSO le samedi 1er novembre, plusieurs ateliers sont prévus dès le dimanche, notamment des sessions d’explications sur deux des sujets phares du moment : les nouveaux gTLDs et les IDNs.

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As part of the Improving Institutional Confidence in ICANN consultation, we are holding a series of regional consultative meetings where the documents created by the President’s Strategy Committee (PSC) are outlined and attendees are given the opportunity to ask questions and provide feedback.

The first of these occurred last week in Montevideo at the LACNIC meeting; the second will take place in a few hours in Christchurch, New Zealand at the APNIC conference. At 1.30pm local time, for an hour and a half, in Hall C of the Christchurch Convention Centre, the issue of vital changes to be made to the ICANN model will be addressed (see below for info on other timezones).

As with previous meetings, we have prepared a “briefing note” for Paris to act as a broad summary of what happened over the five days. It has been published on the Paris meeting site and we republish it below.

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