*** Disclosure: The following is the output resulting from
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Public Participation Committee Community Update
Thursday, 23 June 2011
ICANN Meeting - Singapore


>>MIKE SILBER:  Okay.  We have a very large room for a very small
audience.  We could have done this in a far more intimate manner, but
notwithstanding, I think it's worthwhile that we start and hopefully
others who may be interested will come and join us in due course.

Just to introduce the public participation committee, I see the
members of the committee over there.  We have some core focus items
and at the moment the core focus items that we've been dealing with is
firstly the public participation process.  In particular as affected
by a number of recommendations in the ATRT report.

There are some significant recommendations relating to public
participation that hopefully will enhance accountability and
transparency.

The second issue that has been off the radar screen pretty much since
Cartagena last year, but which is still being considered by this
committee and once the priority work around the ATRT recommendations
moves towards implementation will be the question of meetings and the
most effective and effect way for this community to participate at its
face-to-face meetings, bearing in mind that not everybody is able to
enjoy the benefits of travel to face-to-face meetings, the question of
remote participation, the tools, the processes and the significant van
Rijswijk that have been made from Nairobi and beyond, and then the
question of outreach and engagement.  How do we broaden this
community, include newcomers, make them feel welcome, maybe them able
to participate in what is a rather closed and relatively cohesive
unit.  Certainly we may have internal divisions, but to the external
world we seem to be rather close and cohesive.  So how do we bring
outsiders into that little unit.

So what we wanted to cover today was just firstly the remote
participation, a little bit of a report back on how it's going, how do
we measure success.  There are certain metrics that we are collecting.
There are obviously some that we aren't collecting and as the tools
improve and as our use and knowledge of the tools improve, we will be
going with that.

Some of the newcomers activities from San Francisco and beyond, and
then I think the -- as I said, one of the priority areas, the ATRT
recommendations and specifically 15, 16, 17, 18, and 21.

Now, rather than talking to this thing, seeing as Filiz, who supports
this committee, has been doing the majority of the work, begging
staff, chasing community members, nagging the techs, I'd rather let
Filiz speak to the specific metrics that are discussed in the next
couple of slides.  Filiz?

>>FILIZ YILMAZ:  Thank you, Mike.

Yeah, Filiz Yilmaz here, senior director of participation and
engagement at ICANN, and I'm supporting the committee in a lot of
different ways, but most of the time they are guiding us, giving us
direction, and then we go home and we implement them and we report
back.

So this is the relation.  That's why I'm sitting here and I'm going to
go through these tools now.

The first thing we want to talk about is remote participation.

This has been a highlighted topic for quite a while now within ICANN
circles, but it's not, you know, unique and it's not only ICANN who
works with these tools nowadays.  Obviously Internet within the 30
years of its evaluation over the time became a utility and a very
common tool among people.  It came into our lives and it became more
than just an academic experimental utility, if you will like to call
it that way.

And in time, obviously, as we make these advances and when we come
here talking about very complex Internet issues within ICANN, you want
to expand your boundaries of these discussions beyond the boundaries
of the meeting size, and -- because Internet as a utility and as a
tool now is giving you these possibilities.

With that idea enlarging our participation efforts and making sure
that we get more participation than just the people that are on-site
in physical terms, we started using these tools way before -- more
than a couple of ICANN meetings, actually.

And when I came in, the -- came on board, I mean, to ICANN, these
tools were already functioning there, and I think there's a good
decision in behind where the choice for the tools were made.

The systems are getting better and better.  We are getting much better
in understanding how we can maybe customize some more of the parts of
the service we are providing, so that the users will be benefitting
from them even better.

And my -- as Mike said, the tools themselves are advancing each time.
These things are quite new, as you can imagine.

What we have been seeing mostly in the last -- since we've been
providing these services, the one thing that is an increase is
basically the number of rooms we are providing these services for.

At the beginning, when we started, it was very much on a very small
level.  Only certain rooms were being Webcasted outside, and only
certain rooms were provided for two-way communication.  So Webcasting
is one thing for the observers, but also when you make it available
for people to bring back comments in, that's another thing.

So at the meeting site, people are walking to the mic and asking
questions, and the remote people are asking their questions in a
virtual environment, and their voice comes through some staff's voice.

These are different services, and different levels of services.

In Singapore, we have 12 rooms, and in all of them -- 12 physical
rooms.  In all of them, these facilities and tools were enabled.  So
this is a full-on meeting.  As long as the session organizers and the
chairs of the meetings would like to use these services and they ask
for the service, they get the service.  This is the important message
that we are giving.

And this has been increasing all the way through.

You'll see that here.  In San Francisco, the number of the rooms with
services was higher.  That was just because the number of the physical
rooms in the San Francisco meeting was higher than what we have here
in Singapore.

So the next thing I want to talk about on remote participation, this
is not only the tools.  This is also the awareness about the tools.

What I understand is, as we talk about these tools and we -- people
realize that they are out there for their reach and they can make use
out of it, they start using them.

What we have been seeing is, looking at the raw data, the number of
connections that we receive over the course of the meetings is
increasing.

You'll see here, for example, Nairobi has a higher peak than San
Francisco.  This is also about the logistics of the meeting itself.
In Nairobi, we had fewer -- or less physical attendants compared to
the -- compared to the virtual attendants.  Nairobi was somehow -- was
found to -- was found hard to get there for some -- for certain
reasons, and there, most of the attendants to the -- there was a
considerable amount of attendants to the meeting through virtual
services and tools.

Then you look at San Francisco.  Although if you will take out
Nairobi, you'll see that constant increase or steady increase in terms
of the connections for our services.

San Francisco was a very well-attended and one of the biggest ICANN
meetings, and I'm talking about on-site registrations and physical
people in the rooms.  And despite that fact, still virtual connection
and participation remotely was also high.

So that's the important message to take on here.

One thing, though, what we are seeing in these graphs, we are not yet
differentiating individuals, so people sometimes tend to connect two
rooms and do multitasking while they're following one room, what's
happening in one room, they're also in the other room.  For us, they
are just connections in our system, so we are looking at ways of maybe
differentiating better.  However, we need to be careful about how we
come up with these measurements, so we are talking to -- working with
the PPC to give us better direction and let us know how to proceed.

>>MIKE SILBER:  Just to give an example -- and I'm sure you've all
come across this -- sometimes nonnative English language speakers will
pull up a room while they're actually in the room, so that they can
follow the transcript if they can't see the screen, so they can follow
the transcript on their laptops.

There's also the possibility of one person in one room also monitoring
what's happening in a meeting in another room.

So within the meeting location as well as external to the meeting
location.  So we're trying to work without turning it into a massive
expense.  We're trying to be -- to work out how to drill down using
our existing tools, so we understand how they're being used, how
they're being used internally, how we can potentially save on
bandwidth, so that internal meeting participants get the use and
benefit of the tools without necessarily sucking up some of the
bandwidth that's being used by external participants.

So various ways and means to improve the overall user experience,
whether it's internal or external to a meeting.

>>FILIZ YILMAZ:  The last thing I want to say on this is this is --
this is what we are focusing on, yes, measuring the success of these
tools.  But we want to hear from the users of these tools as well.

I think they have very valuable feedback to bring in for this purpose,
and there is an online survey and I'm again repeating this for the
remote participants, hopefully, for this meeting too -- of this
meeting, too.

They can share their experiences with us how these tools are working
for them.

So we are looking forward for this feedback.

Now, the next activity I want to talk about is the newcomers
activities.  We have started this in San Francisco, and this is the
second time, and we did some structured program.  We applied a
structured program to integrate the newcomers into the ICANN community
quickly.

This is something that I've been hearing from various groups, that --
and I also experienced this personally.  I think everybody experiences
this personally.  When you go to your first ICANN meeting, there is
this huge crowd talking about very complex issues, talking about so
many abbreviations that you don't understand what they stand for, and
it can be quite overwhelming.

In terms of overload of knowledge as well as in terms of the whole
capacity of the building -- build of the meetings.

So the idea is basically making sure that we don't lose these people.
They made an effort to come here and they are interested in this fora,
in this community, so we want to make sure that they feel comfortable
as they leave after a week that they got something out of it and they
are well informed and hopefully they are willing to come back.

As you are all mostly involved with, coming from this community as
well, capacity building is an important pillar of this community work
that we are trying to engage here.  Multistakeholder systems and
community bottom-up processes, these are there as long as you make
sure that your capacity building programs are successful and there are
people involved and interested in your issues.

That's part of the job of this community, too.

They are trying to make sure that the current people, the members of
the community, they stay engaged, they participate meaningfully, but
also we make sure that when -- once you are through the door, as a
newcomer, you get the best out of it, because we want to make sure
that you are welcomed in this community, you feel that, and you get
the best you can out of the -- out of the week.

So having these in mind, what we did is basically we activated two
certain activities.  One of them is building a team, which we called
the newcomers greeters.

They stay at the newcomers lounge.  You might have seen it throughout
the week --

>> (Speaking in a non-English language).

[Scribes are receiving the interpreter feed instead of the live feed]

>>FILIZ YILMAZ:  What does it mean to be a newcomer.  They were a
newcomers a couple of meetings ago.  And the nice thing I -- what I
really find important for this activity is that it is community giving
back to the community and the community engaging with the community.
We, as the staff, we facilitate the environment.  We make sure they
have a -- you know, a place to engage with each other.  We make sure
that they have the necessary material and the documents to pass
through, and we support them, but they really do the job themselves,
and I have two members of that team here with us, so I want to thank
you guys for putting all the effort here because they do this on a
voluntarily basis and it's very important that we recognize the effort
here.

This effort, same similar setup again.  When we did it in San
Francisco for the very first time, we also had a post-meeting survey
about this, and all I heard was very constructive feedback, what could
we do even better, but a lot of praise as well coming from the
newcomers that they felt really well-attended and they felt really
taken care of, and they found this initiative quite important, because
that was their starting point, and I believe we can make it even
better with your feedback again.

I also heard from -- this week from several people, there was this
example given to me that somebody was at an ICANN meeting like two,
three meetings before and they had a break, little break, and now they
are back, and they stopped by the newcomers lounge.  They could tell
the difference.  At their first meeting, you know, a couple of
meetings ago where they didn't have such a meeting point or an address
to go to, and now they had one, so they could tell the difference and
that was really good for them.

So it's all good to hear the good enough.

Please let us know if you also have improvement suggestions so we can
make them even better.

What we also did, since San Francisco, this is the other leg of the
program, newcomers activities, is that we tagged Sunday as a newcomers
track.  We -- Sundays is -- for some people, especially for the
newbies, newcomers, it can be a light day, and instead of, you know,
trying to make sense of this huge organization out of some paperwork,
we thought maybe we could bring them together in a room and, you know,
give them some seminar-like presentations where they can find
information in a more structured way.

So what we do in this track, we started with a welcome to ICANN
session.  In this session, we described the supporting organizations
that were advisory committees and their roles and how they interact
and how they work all together within the ICANN fora, and then the
next thing we talked about, we have another presentation from the
policy team and they give a policy update in regards to what's going
to be discussed throughout the week.

So first, you see who is who and what is done how, and then you see
who is going to be talking about what, this meeting.

So we think that that is a good flow, and we want to enhance this day
even better with extra presentations, depending on the times we are
living in and sometimes the geography we are going to.

For example, this time, new gTLDs are the hot topic, so we included a
new gTLDs basic presentation in San Francisco and as well as here.

We are working on making this even more solid and robust, this day, so
more hopefully will come.

Again, we asked about this in the post-meeting survey we have done,
after San Francisco, and again, we received good feedback, so it seems
to be working.

Now, I will continue with the ATRT plans, Mike, if you want --

>>MIKE SILBER:  Yeah.  Please.  Filiz has been very involved in
putting together the plan, together with some of the other staff and
she'll also be the primary focus point for implementation, so Filiz,
please take us through it.

>>FILIZ YILMAZ:  So, yeah, I guess ATRT implementations and then
recommendations -- sorry, ATRT recommendations have been -- they have
been quite an agenda topic for a couple of ICANN meetings right now.

When I came on board, I had to first learn the abbreviation, what it
standed for, and then since then, yes, I've been involved.

We are talking about 15, 16, 17, 18 and 21 here.  If I may just make a
little note there, public participation committee of ICANN board, they
are tasked with overseeing these five recommendations and the way we
are going -- we are planning to deal with them as ICANN staff.

And what we see -- basically, these recommendations are about making
sure that -- for example, Recommendation 15 is talking about
stratification and prioritization as a tool for people to make sure
that something is important for them and it will catch them when they
go to the public comment Web site.  They will see, "Okay, this is a
topic that I want to follow and I want to read."

So there is that "catching" effect as a theme being stated in the ATRT
recommendation 15.

16 and 17 is -- they are talking about coming up with a comment/reply
comment structure, so that the participation to these public comment
processes are more meaningfully done than the way it is now.

What's happening now, you have a public comment period, and people put
up a comment or not, but if you put it at the very last minute -- say,
it was for 21 days and you put it in the 21st day -- other people do
not have a chance to go back and comment over your comment.

So this was addressed in the 16 and 17 of the ATRT recommendations.

21 is talking about raising early awareness for the issues that are
coming up.  There's a lot of complex issues that we are dealing at
ICANN fora, and different groups again.  Some of them are interrelated
but some of them are very specific to the groups themselves.

And there is often that information build-up going -- in order to make
meaningful comments, somebody needs to go through the topic, somebody
needs to go through the related documentation, and understand the
subject well, and then put up some feedback and input in regards to
that specific topic.

So in order to accelerate that process of raising awareness, the
recommendation 21 is talking about making the -- making an annual
plan, work plan, published about the upcoming topics that will be --
that will be out there for community consultation and community input.

So looking at all these, what we have done, we went through it and we
think that some of it is about actually how we display the current
information.

At the moment, the public comment pages are a list of topics that are
seeking for community input, and it's improving the navigation and the
presentation of the content.  We are of the opinion that it will -- it
will help people to find the right information they are seeking for,
the topics that they are really seeking for, and make some -- make it
easier for them to get information out of these very important
information source.

So we are targeting the end of this month, which means next week, to
have a -- launch a new set of Web site -- Web pages for the public
comment pages where we list the open issues and the issues that are
waiting for summary and the archived issues.

While doing that, we will also publish the -- publish an upcoming
public comments list for 2011, so this relates to recommendation 21 in
regards to the early awareness.

So you will have a chance to have a look at the list and say, "All
right, GNSO will be talking about this and that and seeking for wider
community input maybe in September."  They will also make an
indication of estimated time to give that period for early awareness
to be built up."

The other thing I -- we are focusing on in regards to the plans for
the ATRT recommendation implementations is the setup of a focus group.
The thing is, we have some basic ideas how we can address these, but
the ATRT recommendations were very specific in saying, "Okay, come up
with some structures for these public comment processes, but while
doing that, make sure that you receive good enough public consultation
on that.  Do it with the community."

So following that guidance, we want to first set up a focus group
there.  We will bring our initial ideas and plans towards them and ask
their initial review, and depending after their input, we hope to
continue with Phase 2, where we will go with those structures for
wider community input through the public comment itself.

So what the staff proposes will be reviewed -- is already reviewed by
PPC committee of the board, and then it will be evaluated to some
extent by the focus group, and then it will go to the plate for the
entire community for wider input.

And we estimate the second phase will take obviously longer because
the public comment process itself is running through the certification
and comments, reply-comments structure that we want to incorporate.
After these are over and we received the feedback from the community,
we want to integrate these elements -- last bits of the elements into
the improved pages that we developed and publish in the first page.

So this is all coming together.  There is the implementation going on.
There is the technical infrastructure that we are working on, so the
structures can be embedded in an efficient way.

Do you want me to continue?

>>MIKE SILBER:  Please clarify.

>>MARILYN CADE:  May I just ask a clarifying question?

>>MIKE SILBER:  Yeah, please.

>>MARILYN CADE:  May I just ask when you are going to take questions?

>>MIKE SILBER:  Pretty soon.

>>FILIZ YILMAZ:  I'm almost finished, yeah.

The last step of these plans is also looking at the forum interface,
the technical interface that users are using in order to put up their
comments.  That's also something we are working on.  We want to make
sure it is more interactive which is going to satisfy the
recommendation that was put up in 16 and 17.  And that's it for the
ATRT.

>>MIKE SILBER:  So then just to sum up in terms of the to-do list from
what Filiz has been talking about, at the current, it is the
implementation of the ATRT recommendations, and then second issue
which unfortunately has taken a somewhat second place, just given the
urgency of implementation around the ATRT recommendations, is the
question of the future of the ICANN meetings location and physical
structure which was touched on in a survey last year but also how do
we engage the community more effectively.  And another thing that you
most likely have been seeing at this meeting and I know it is a little
bit self-referential but how does the community engage with the board?
I suppose we may want to add an extra item there or deal with it under
community engagement, which is how do the communities engage with
themselves and with each other.

So looking at the structure because we've defined a structure almost
through use and it's become relatively set, and the key question that
we're going to be going back to the community about is whether that's
the most effective structure for meetings to take place.  That being
said, we haven't pulled the data points.  We haven't run the surveys.
We're not in a position to engage fruitfully on those issues.  So if
people have comments, we are more than happy to listen to them.  But
it is going to need to go through some sort of process before we can
actually look at next steps, which means that, now, Marilyn we can
take questions with the greatest of pleasure.

>>KIEREN McCARTHY:  I got here first.

>>MIKE SILBER:  Kieren, if you wouldn't mind deferring.

>>KIEREN McCARTHY:  Oh, really?

>>MARILYN CADE:  My name is Marilyn Cade.  Let me start out by
thanking you for the presentation.  I am going to tell you that I am a
little confused by a couple of linkages that I'm going to need you to
make for me.  And I'm also a little concerned about some proposals
that I see that I'm not clear how the people who are going to be most
affected by them get to comment on them and perhaps shape them before
they go to budgeting and implementation.

So I'll be clear about what they are.  Public participation is,
indeed, an overwhelming interest of the business constituency and the
business community at large, meaning the business community at large,
not the At-Large, sorry.

But I think I would just really reinforce that it cannot be just a
board committee supported by excellent staff and information that
finally determine what the best and most effective public interaction
and engagement approaches are, aside from tools.  That's one thing I'd
like to come back to talk about, how the interactive feedback from the
affected parties is going to be done before there is an approved final
approach of moving forward.

The second one is -- which is a little more granular, was when we're
talking about first priority being the implementation of the ATRT
recommendations.  I'm assuming that means of the 27, the ones that are
specific to public participation.  So my question is:  Since one of
the ATRT recommendations is a complete reform and significant change
in the public comment process, including a reply round, which will
require restructuring and major changes within all of the bodies of
ICANN and how we approach public comment, is that on your list or is
that on somebody else's list?

And then I have a final question.  I'll come back.

>>MIKE SILBER:  Thanks, Marilyn.  I think -- I do understand the
confusion because you're entirely correct.  The question of public
participation, meaning broader participation, is subsumed under some
very practical recommendations from the ATRT and in particular they
look at issues of the comment process, which is one element of public
participation, an important one, but just one element.

Now, we focused as a committee on the implementation of those specific
recommendations as they relate to particularly the comment process,
the notification of impending items, the listing of key policy
initiatives being undertaken by different aspects of the community.
Those are very practical issues that the ATRT recommended be
implemented to make public participation and public engagement on
specific policy issues easier, more effective, more transparent.
That's where we're focused on at the moment.

And I think Filiz made it clear, but let me just state it again.  The
idea is to start fixing the process.  At the moment, icann.org, the
primary Web site, is undergoing a massive restructure.  While that's
taking place, we're putting some interim steps in place.  Those steps
are going to be tested against a focus group.  Once the focus group
feedback has been taken into account, then it will be open to the
broader community for their feedback.

Some of the items that will be pushed through to the focus group will
be the listing of upcoming items, say, essentially calendaring,
prioritization and the comment-reply-comment facility within the
technology underlying the Web site so it is clear to see comment and
reply-comment as they come in rather than at the moment the specific
forum areas of the Web site don't actually segregate and give a clear
indicator of the current status.

In addition, there will be templates and Filiz and the team have been
working very significantly on templates.  But that's a first step
given that ATRT requested implementation of this by June.  And seeing
as we are very rapidly approaching the end of June, this is a first
step.  It is going to be an iterative process.  It is never going to
be final, and hopefully we will continue to improve.  But more
importantly, it implements the key ATRT recommendations as they relate
to public comment and public processes and will then be further
improved as the Web site design -- or the Web site redesign continues
as well.  So it's going to be going through that process of continuing
refinement and iteration.

In terms of more general public participation, we don't have specific
recommendations.  We don't have specific timelines.  So the next
element we want to address is the meetings issue.

Thomas, please?

>>THOMAS NARTEN:  Thanks, Mike.  Let me just make a general comment so
maybe get to some of the things you have been saying here and some of
the things that haven't been said here.

For all the ATRT recommendations and the implementation, there is
going to be public review.  People are going to have a chance to
comment on them before they go live.  That's a general statement.

Now, unfortunately, proposals are not fully fleshed out.  You know,
they're still being developed internally and the public has not seen
them yet.  In some cases, the committees are still working on them.
And part of this is until the board actually sort of approves the
general direction and some budgeting, the decision was made they're
not going to be public.  You can argue whether that's the right way or
the wrong way to go.

Personally, I feel that we have a bit of a missed opportunity this
week because we had the community here and if we had been able to
surface more details on what the thinking was and what was going to
happen, it would allow some dialogue and eliminate some angst.  I
understand from an external perspective you don't know the details so
you don't know what's happening.  You can't comment and you worry that
all of a sudden things are going to be approved and it is going to be
a done deal and it is going be too late, okay?

So the challenge now is it is very difficult to talk specifics because
we're talking from PowerPoint that nobody has reviewed in advance,
from your perspective, and the details aren't really fleshed out in a
way you can talk about it.  So it is a very squishy, high-level
discussion.

>>MARILYN CADE:  So let me offer you a follow-up.

>>MIKE SILBER:  Please.  We thrive on problems.

>>MARILYN CADE:  I was on the President's Strategy Committee for three
years.  We made a series of recommendations, and one of the two of the
primary recommendations we made were adopted by the ATRT.  And that
includes a complete reform of the public comment process, not just the
forms we use, okay?  And not just when we post something but a
complete reform to make the process meaningful, to make sure that we
no longer get summaries -- let me finish, Mike.

We were very concerned, and the ATRT work reflected that concern, that
we must have a more effective and meaningful public participation --
public comment process that is across ICANN.

Now, that -- those changes have implications for every one of the
supporting organizations and the advisory committees.  So any real
change has got to be taken down into and taken into consideration
broadly.  So that would be Point Number 1.  And the only way we can do
that is to engage at least the leaders across the board, not the chair
of the council, but the constituencies.  So hold that thought.

But, secondly, it requires a reply round and that is major change as
well.

A third major change is the establishment of an independent
reconsideration process.  These are major changes.  It's more than a
missed opportunity.  We are implementing -- and I'm sorry to give this
message to this committee.  But we are implementing changes in
accountability and transparency.  So we've got to have an answer for
the community on how we are going to present the material to them so
that they can embrace it.  And I don't hear that just yet.

>>MIKE SILBER:  Marilyn, firstly, I take your point.  And I think
they're all valid.

In terms of a reconsideration and independent reconsideration process,
that doesn't fall within the recommendations with which we're dealing.

>>MARILYN CADE:  I know.

>>MIKE SILBER:  The second issue is that a complete institutional
reform to be implemented by June of this year is a timeline that could
not and cannot be met given the timing of the finalization of the ATRT
recommendations -- or report.

On that basis, we're implementing based on the strict letter of the
report.  We've had no option.  At the same time, I think there is
validity and I think the requirements or the recommendations allow for
and, in fact, require an overhaul that goes into substance and not
form.  And that's what I'm really hearing you saying as we're talking
about substantive reform rather than some structural reform that
allows -- which makes it easier to engage in some of these issues.

>>MARILYN CADE:  Mike, you guys are missing -- you are missing an
opportunity with the entire community.  But you're also missing an
opportunity to at least get the leaders of the organization together
and figure out how they can help you with this.

>>MIKE SILBER:  Point well taken.

Thomas, you wanted to respond as well?

>>THOMAS NARTEN:  Yeah.  I mean, Marilyn, I largely agree with what
you are saying.  I think -- if you look at what's going on here, at
the end of the day, it is critical that the changes that get
implemented as a result of the recommendations actually address the
concern that people have.  And the only way we're going to get there
is if there is an iteration with the community and with the leaders as
we're rolling it out so if we're getting it wrong in the
implementation step, we have the opportunity to correct it before it
is a done deal.

And I think we haven't really started that dialogue with the community
at one level because you haven't seen enough of the details of what's
being planned to know.  It doesn't mean what we're doing is wrong, it
means you don't know.  And from our perspective, we can't assume it is
right just because we think it's right.

>>KIEREN McCARTHY:  Hello.  This is an incredibly frustrating
conversation that we're having here.  The reason the ATRT team put
very clear specific instructions in a very tight deadline is so that
we don't enter this crazy ICANN world where you have got work but you
are not going to show us until another process is in place and then
we're going to have another public comment on the public comment and
then we're going to think about what changes -- I was trying to get
all of this done three years ago, and we've had public comment and
public comment.  And we finally get to the end point and the report is
just lost and it pops up again.  We are doing it again.  The team said
do these things, do it by this deadline and the reason they did that
is to avoid this ridiculous process that we go through.

I would like to encourage you to experiment.  The world will not end
if you experiment.  You don't have to produce a report and put it out
for public comment.  I mean, we're doing public comments on how broken
the public comment process is.  The comments aren't going to be any
good.  It has already been done.  It is so frustrating.

Just the other thing which I find --

>>MIKE SILBER:  Sorry, Kieren.  Can I interject?  I really must give
credit to the team because I think they have taken that factor
precisely into account which is why instead of going through that
process, they have put something together to meet the tight deadlines.
It will go to a focus group and be tested against a focus group, not
for the focus group to tell them what they really want and to use the
very technical term that Thomas introduced, give us back something
that's really squishy.  But to actually give us a user feedback on an
actual, practical tool as implemented so that we can refine it.

Then that tool will be made public, having made any alterations coming
through from the focus group.  And then that tool will be implemented
and there will be an invitation for people to respond, not a public
comment on public comment but a user experience of the tool with
requirements and iterations.

Then we can engage in the broader process that Marilyn is talking
about of substance rather than form.  Because at the moment, to meet
the tight deadlines, we're looking at changing some of the form of
what we're doing to make it more effective and to take into account
the recommendations that have come through from the ATRT.

So I'm interested in hearing you further, but I just wanted to make it
clear, it is not going to be another public comment about public
comment.  It's real practical tools as implemented going out for
community response.

>>KIEREN McCARTHY:  Okay.  That sounds much better.  That's now how I
understood the conversation that you just had.  And then Marilyn said
you got to give us an opportunity to comment and you were all nodding
your heads.  I was just thinking, No, just do it.  Just do it.
Because we can have discussions about discussions about discussions.
Just do it.

>>MIKE SILBER:  Thomas wanted to respond as well.

>>THOMAS NARTEN:  I was just going to add one comment.  When you say
"just experiment, just do it," unfortunately it's not that simple.
We're not a small organization where somebody has got a patchy Web
server in their basement they can tweak.  The Web page we have today
is basically broken in the sense we know it doesn't work.  It is hard
to have the right information.  People can't find it, et cetera, et
cetera.  There is a Web redesign project that's in place and we have
been told that any tweaks to the current design basically push the
other project off into the future.

>>KIEREN McCARTHY:  That's not true.  The reason that public comment
page exists is because I built it overnight and didn't tell anyone.
Before we just had a long list of -- there was a link and that was it.
And I said, look, we need to change this so people can actually see
what public comments are live at any given point.  I was given 55
reasons why that wasn't possible.  I did it myself.  I put it up and I
didn't tell anyone.  And I e-mailed it out to the community and before
it could be pulled down, everybody said it was great.  That's the
reality of how it works.  These things are actually very simple.  What
holds them up is this interminable process of we never should get
where we get.  Just do it.  Take one public comment period, do it with
some different software and say we are trying some different software.
Just go and do it and then you will learn from it and then say, what
did we learn from that?

>>THOMAS NARTEN:  The reality is if you say "just do it" those are
somebody's resources and those resources come from a different project
that they're already on.  That's the reality, too.

>>KIEREN McCARTHY:  Anyway... I don't want to be totally negative.  I
think the newcomers thing is great.  I think the Adobe Connect is
much, much better.  I think you need to look at the rules for your
Adobe Connect to get more interaction.  And I think you should stick a
survey whenever you leave a room, rather than say there is a survey.
Have one so when you leave the Adobe Connect room, it pops up and says
blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

But the biggest thing I think you need to look at once these tools are
in place is the culture.  So I don't know whether you notice, but
we're standing in an enormous room and I'm talking through an enormous
PA system and there is about 20 of us here.  This is totally an insane
way of having a conversation.  All of us could be in a smaller room
and have a conversation and get a thousand times more done.  You could
have back, forth, back, forth, rather than me standing up here --

[ Applause ]

This is crazy.  I'm nine rows back here.

>>MIKE SILBER:  That's certainly not at our creation.  But point well
taken.

>>KIEREN McCARTHY:  My point is this is the default.  You have to
question the defaults for participation.  The default is you were put
in this room.  You probably had no choice.  This room is open.  It is
all wired up.  Okay, we'll go in that room.  We don't need these
microphones, and we don't need this room.  We need a small room and we
can all chat about it.

You don't need to wait until the budgeting process is done before you
tell us what you're going to do.  You don't need to do that.  We just
need to chat about it.  We can say, I'm thinking of doing this.
That's not a bad idea.  We tried that before.  You can actually do
that.

Question the defaults.  Question the culture that we have of this big
grand approach to very simple problems.  We need to fix that.

So I'd say question the cultural defaults.  And, very quickly, with
that -- and I'm just going to say this until something finally
happens.  The public comment -- the public forum is a really bad,
broken format.  So I would like to -- rather than saying, Well, we'll
tweak the actual forum because people will fight it, experiment with
something else.  Get a small room and invite people in and try a
different kind of public forum and say, Did that work?  You could say
this worked, by the way, because the public forum is horrible.  And I
don't think it works, and it just makes it aggressive.

>>MIKE SILBER:  I think that comment is very well taken, and I think
certainly in terms of meeting structure, it is one of the items that
we certainly want to look at, how to make our work more effective, how
to enable the community to make their work more effective, to make
sure that they're heard, they're able to engage each other, other
communities and the board.

Please?

>> RAQUEL GATTO:  Hi.  Allow me just to change the subject now.  My
name is Raquel Gatto from Brazil.  I'm a member of the IGF remote
participation working group.  And I have been a fellow and a newcomer
in Brussels and a fellow in Brussels and Cartagena and talked to the
Public Participation Committee.  Didn't talk in San Francisco because
there were no meetings.  But here I am again.

And I would like to make a consideration about a next step in the
remote participation which concerns the hubs.  The hubs are local
meetings that we implemented in IGF, and it was a success.  How can I
say that?  First, we got -- in 2008 when we started, we got eight hubs
around the world and mostly in developing countries.  And last year in
2010, we got over 30 hubs.  And some hubs brought together 100 people
to listen to the discussion and raise awareness locally.  This is very
important.

You were talking about that as a strategic plan.  So right now we are
going -- we know we are going to have a meeting in Senegal.  Why not
set up a local meeting there where people could get together, who
cannot travel for many reasons, and raise -- and get them aware of the
issues so when the meeting is going to happen, they are prepared.

And, also, why not set up a hub in last host countries, for example,
here so you don't lose the community that you brought in while you are
changing the continents, which I believe it is one of the reasons
ICANN makes meetings in different continents.

And, for example, for Latin America, we had last year three times more
remote participants than physical participants.  This is very, very
important for developing countries and regions.

And one of the problems -- or among the problems, there are several
that we faced in IGF, for example, infrastructure.  We need to go for
the first basis of choosing our software, training volunteers, our
remote moderators.  ICANN doesn't need to face that.  It already has
the software infrastructure.  It already has the staff that work with
that.  So it is a simple procedure, a simple solution to be done to
publish a call for hubs interested and see it growing more and more.

So my question after all those considerations are:  What should be
done to push this idea?  I really don't know.  As I said, I was in
Brussels and Cartagena.  I told about this experience.  Now I have
more numbers.  But I really don't know if it is a strategic problem.
You are prioritizing -- sorry about my English.  But you are
prioritizing the ATRT targets, but this is not so important right now
or it is a budget problem.  So if you could please share.

>>MIKE SILBER:  Right.  Firstly, thank you very much.  I think that's
very useful input.  As Kieren indicated, even the most simple things
can be made more complicated by adding structure and process around
them.

Just in terms of the board's commitment to the ATRT and the
recommendations, that's been taken as a priority.  It doesn't mean
that everything else has been shelved completely, but it has meant
that we very much focused on our prioritization.  And I think that's
understandable to most, if not all, people.

That being said, another one of my colleagues, Katim, has had a number
of interactions with this committee on a very similar issue.

Katim, I don't know if you want to come in on this?

>>KATIM TOURAY:  Thanks, Mike.  I think it's a very good suggestion
that, you know, we try to see what we can do to leverage existing
networks for remote hubs.

As a matter of fact, you might recall this was a matter that was
discussed in Vilnius at the session under remote participation.  And
one of the recommendations that came out of that was that we should
explore the possibility of partnering or building partnerships between
the IGF and ICANN and other similar organizations.

The matter has certainly been considered by the PPC, and I think it
remains even at the level of the board.  And I think it remains to be
implemented to see what we can do to go about the practicalities of
actually developing these links.

As you can imagine, some of these things take a little bit of a while
to put in place, but certainly it is something that's been considered.
And thank you for raising it.

>>RAQUEL GATTO:  Just as a final note, we are here to help, so I think
I can say for the whole IGF working group, remote participation
working group, so -- oh, sorry.

>>MICHAEL SILBER:  Thomas, please.

>>THOMAS NARTEN:  Yeah.  Thanks for this.

I guess the question I have is:  Is there any kind of like written
report or sort of, you know, summary of experience that we could look
at?

>>RAQUEL GATTO:  Yes.

>>THOMAS NARTEN:  Because this sounds to me pretty interesting but,
you know, the next-level discussion would be useful.

I'd like to understand, for example, how many hubs there were, you
know, what was the distribution of size is, what was the incentive
structure for people to go there, and what was the funding model, so
we can see to what degree it would apply to ICANN and then discuss
possible next steps.

>>RAQUEL GATTO:  Sure.  We have some information at the Web site,
igfremote.info, but I can wrap up some of the information in a
document and send to the Public Participation Committee with the
numbers all over the years, because the reports are yearly, so I
didn't -- we didn't have an historical view, but I can wrap up
something and send to you.

>>THOMAS NARTEN:  That would be useful, I think.

>>RAQUEL GATTO:  Sure, sure.  Thank you.

>>MICHAEL SILBER:  Thank you.  We have another participant at the mic.
We're running very close to time, so if I could just ask you to keep
it short.

>> I am (saying name) from Pakistan, an ICANN fellow.  Consider a
suggestion from my side.

>>MICHAEL SILBER:  Sorry.  Just for the sake of the scribes, if you
can just speak a little closer to the microphone.

>> I am (saying name) from ICANN.  I am an ICANN fellow from Pakistan.
Consider a suggestion.  You should integrate social media like
Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn in ICANN public forum because new
generation likes it.  I don't find this public forum interesting,
being a newcomer, so please consider it in your next upgraded version
to include this.

>>MICHAEL SILBER:  I think that's a very valid comment, because at the
moment, while we certainly are using social media, I think our use is
very limited.

Gonzalo, you wanted to respond?

>>GONZALO NAVARRO:  Excellent suggestion.  But if you go to Twitter,
you will find a lot about us.  Yeah.  Yeah, I think that we need to
work on that kind of tools, and Kieren was pointing to that idea too,
so I think that it's under the consideration of -- and you will see
some -- probably something in that regard soon.

>> Thank you.

>>MICHAEL SILBER: Janice, please, and then we can wrap up.

>>JANICE LANGE:  Absolutely.  Janice Lange.  I'm speaking on behalf of
a remote participant, (saying name) from Indonesia.  (saying name)
states, "I was wondering if ICANN doesn't mind providing remote
participation for all meeting, except for the GAC meeting.  It's time
we're able to see how the government representatives work to discuss
issues and policies so all people can see and understand how the
government points of view are and how they work.

The audio facilities for the GAC meeting is not enough.  At least the
participants should be able to put comment, especially for the
government who cannot attend the meeting.  Thank you.

>>MICHAEL SILBER:  Thank you very much.

Filiz, I don't know if you've got any comment there.

I know that the GAC took -- a couple of years ago, having closed
meetings for many years, the GAC took a decision to open most of their
meetings.  They still do have some closed sessions.

Thomas?

>>THOMAS NARTEN:  Yeah.  Just to follow up a little bit, I mean, my
assumption and understanding is that, you know, the policies
concerning, you know, who can participate and so forth, that's a GAC
responsibility and they would have to agree to it, and my assumption
is that all the public GAC meetings are open remotely to the same
degree that they are at the physical meetings.

Now, at the public -- quote-unquote, public GAC meetings, they're
public a lot of times in the sense that the -- you have observers in
the room that can listen but they cannot speak, because it would be
like an open meeting between the board and the GAC or it would be a
GAC meeting with some constituency.

So that's part of the reason, at least, why they're not open, and I
suspect that you'll never get sort of a completely open meeting where
anyone can speak remotely or in the room in the GAC meeting, but
that's really for the GAC to work out within their own world.

>>MICHAEL SILBER:  Absolutely.  And I think that's something that we
need to speak.

There being no further questions and given that we're out of time, if
I can ask if any of the committee members want to say anything more
before we wrap up.

Okay.  I see general shaking of heads.

On that basis, I think the comments are well taken.  The comments
mainly are around meeting structure, design, engagement, and use of
new technologies.  I think those points are well taken, and, as I
indicated, will be a next item of significant study for this
committee.

The other point being I think very well taken by Marilyn, in
particular, that the underlying structure of the public engagement and
comment process is not just the pure mechanics of how we're doing it,
but the underlying engagement itself.

And I have to respectfully disagree with both Marilyn and Thomas.  I
don't think we've missed an opportunity.  I think we've delayed an
opportunity to try and improve some of the tools and meet our
obligations to -- or our commitment to implement the ATRT
recommendations.

If we had to open this up completely and restructure and do an entire
organizational redesign, there would be no way for us to meet the
deadlines that had been called for.

On that basis, there's an interim step.  Is it perfect?  No.  Does it
require some significant shakeup?  I agree completely.

But at least it should bring about and we're going to expect some
feedback and some serious engagement if it doesn't.  It should bring
some significant improvements into how the process is working at the
moment.

Thank you very much.

[ Applause ]