Why should you bother?

Because ICANN is responsible for the expenditure of tens of millions of dollars in the interests of the Internet community and the Internet infrastructure itself.

Many times a year ICANN is asked to explain its spending decisions. Each time we point to the Strategic Plan and Operating Plan processes to explain that the community itself has significant input how ICANN spends its money and on what. For the past two years, we have followed a process that allows over four months for the public to comment on how ICANN spends the budget.

This public comment period that will close on Thursday 30 April is the last time you will be able to provide input that will have a significant impact on next year’s budget. Per ICANN’s bylaws, we will post a draft of the FY10 Budget by 17 May. Then there will also be an opportunity to post your comments on the draft before the final FY10 Operating Plan and Budget is put before the Board for approval at the Sydney meeting in June.

What’s so special about FY2010 for ICANN?

The next year is especially significant for ICANN and the community because it represents the financial plan that has been developed for dealing with the introduction of new generic top-level domains and internationalized domain names.

There has been a significant amount of discussion about the impact that new gTLDs and IDNs may have on ICANN and the Internet itself, and particularly the potential financial impact.

Internally, ICANN has tried to assess what this expansion of the domain space could mean for the organization – and the money received, spent and its allocation is a vital element of that. We will be posting a budget amendment focused purely on the new gTLD rollout several months before the program is launched but the community’s views on where we are currently would be invaluable.

Other significant issues addressed in the Operating Plan and Budget requesting community input include:

• Is the approach to meetings scaling with the ICANN community’s size and diversity, and work style over time? Should ICANN take action in FY10 to reduce or redirect the substantial expense – both directly by ICANN and indirectly by participants – in three meetings around the world?
• As ICANN grows to support application processing for the new gTLD program, what is the best way to staff (hire vs. outsource) and what are the appropriate geographic locations for this effort?
• How does the community want to explicitly prioritize work such that the costs to support additional work don’t just grow?
• How can ICANN better report on and measure the effectiveness of many activities such as outreach and policy development, so as to allow these areas to be tuned/improved?
• What other ideas does the community have for prioritization or cost reduction consistent with the Strategic Plan goals?

If you have views on these or another other parts of the budget, please do review the Operating Plan and Budget and email us your comments within the next 10 days.

All the information you need should be available on the public comment webpage here: http://www.icann.org/en/public-comment/#op-budget-fy2010

Thank you

Kevin Wilson
Chief Financial Officer, ICANN

Just under a month ago that scorecard was published on the ICANN website. COO Doug Brent has been pointing to it frequently ever since but as ever, with such a large and diverse community, most people remain unaware of it.

So this scorecard – which is effectively a summary of the entire ICANN operating plan, with discrete, clearly identified deliverables – is Part 3 of things you didn’t realize were on the ICANN site. You can view the scorecard (a pdf file) by going to the Dashboard and clicking on “PM Scorecard” or, alternatively, click the link below.

View the Scorecard for 2009 here [pdf]

Enjoy.

Previous hidden delights

Part 2: IDN Glossary
Part 1: Virtual Bookshelf

Mexico City is no exception. Although this time, it is very much easier to get a quick overview of what is out for public comment by looking at the front page of the ICANN website (the third box down on the right).

Just to present you with another avenue to finding out about these public comment periods, there are all listed below with quick explanations of what they are and the dates when they close.

Open comment periods

1. GNSO Constituency Renewals. Closes 25 FEB
As part of the ongoing changes to ICANN’s main policy-making body, the GNSO, all the existing constituencies have put in submissions stating that they have followed the bylaws and so should be reconfirmed as valid constituencies. You are free to comment on these submissions.

2. IPv4 Global Policy. Closes 26 FEB
We are running out of IPv4 address space and so ICANN has been working with the Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) to decide what system we follow as the addresses get more and more scarce. The policy here proposes that each RIR be allocated one “slash-8″ – equating to roughly 16.7 million IP addresses – as soon as they are only five blocks left. If you have a comment on this you can make it between now and 26 February.

3. Single and Two-Character .BIZ Domains. Closes 15 MAR
The company that runs the .biz registry, NeuStar, wants to make single and two-character domains available. Until recently, no registries were allowed to do this because of technical concerns. But those rules have relaxed over the past year or so. To be allowed to create, for example, i.biz, NeuStar has to change its contract with ICANN, and ICANN puts all contract changes out for public comment and review. So if you have an opinion about this, you can make it online.

4. Geographic Regions Working Group Charter. Closes 24 MAR
As an organization hoping to represent global stakeholders, ICANN has followed the common approach of splitting the world up into different regions in order to make things manageable. The problems is: where do you draw the lines? It may seem simple but the closer the issue is looked at, the more complex it becomes. So, in order to review what these regions are and who they include, ICANN has created a Working Group to go through all the issues and make recommendations at the end of it. The first step in that process is to create a charter for the group – outlining the scope and methodology that will be followed. This public comment period opens that charter up to public review.

5. Fast Track Proposed Solutions. Closes 6 APR
The Fast Track is the process by which governments and the managers of different countries’ registries will be able to apply for and receive versions of their country name in different languages scripts at the top-level of the Internet i.e. the part after the dot in a domain name. An example would be “China” in Chinese characters. These “internationalized domain names” or IDNs are being put out on the Internet for the first time as the technical issues that make it possible have only recently been resolved.

It is not a simple process by any means, so ICANN has been producing drafts of an “implementation plan” to make this process a reality. In this iteration, as well as the latest version of the Fast Track Implementation Plan, there will be three papers identifying specific issues that still need to be resolved. You can see all the papers in question and make comments about them now and until 6 April.

6. ALAC Review Final Report. Closes 17 APR
ICANN regularly reviews of its main supporting organizations and advisory committees to make sure they remain relevant and in the correct format. The At Large Advisory Committee or ALAC exists to represent ordinary Internet users and it has been under review for roughly a year and the process is drawing to a close. A final report of the working group created to carry out much of the review has been released for its final piece of public comment before being formally submitted to a Board Committee that then puts it forward to a vote by the whole Board. So if you want your say on how ordinary Internet users should be represented within the ICANN model, this is your last chance. Until the ALAC is reviewed again in a few years.

7. Operating Plan and Budget FY2010. Closes 30 APR
People are constantly asking how much money ICANN has and how it decides where to spend it. What few people recognise however is that those decisions are heavily influenced by the community itself. Every year, ICANN runs through a public strategic planning process that outlines what the organization needs to do in the next year. It then turns that into an Operating Plan and from that devises its budget. The community is invited every year to provide their feedback on the process of where ICANN spends it money. This is a comment period on the first version of the Operating Plan and Budget for ICANN’s 2010 financial year. The comments from this will be used to revise the plan and budget and it will then be put out a second time before being approved by the Board in June.

And that’s it for now. Much of the community will be focussed on the revised Applicant Guidebook for new generic top-level domains that will come out in the next day or so, but please do not forget these other public comment periods.

You can view all open and recently closed public comment periods on one page, as well as an archive of older comment periods: http://www.icann.org/en/public-comment/.

You can view it as a pdf here.

The report contains a full rundown of ICANN and its work, including information on its mission, values and structure; messages from retiring chairman Vint Cerf, incoming chair Peter Dengate Thrush, and president and CEO Paul Twomey; a section demonstrating progress on the completion of the Joint Project Agreement with the United States government; a run-through of this year’s international meetings, as well as the work carried out by the different supporting organisations and advisory committees; a section on ICANN’s Strategic Plan and Operating Plan; a section on ICANN’s different divisions; and finally the annual report from ICANN’s auditors and a glossary of terms.

In short, if you want to know what ICANN is, does and has done in 2007, it is all here in 62 pages.