ICANN|ARCHIVES

Welcome to the December issue of ICANN's magazine. Since it is the last issue of the year we have decided to ask you, the readers, what you think about the magazine. And about what changes we can make to it in the New Year that will make it more readable and relevant.

The magazine was first published in August 2007 in order to give the community a monthly update of what ICANN was working on and what had happened recently. At the time, it was very difficult to follow what the organization was actually doing unless you attended phone conferences and scoured the website for information.

A huge amount has changed in that time. There is now a monthly Policy Update, which details every aspect of policy work ICANN is doing, where it is up to, and where it is going. There is also a Compliance newsletter that outlines the work that department does.

And...

There is a blog - recently redesigned - which gives insights into work that doesn't easily fit into official announcements. There is the public comment page - where everything that is out to public comment can be found at one URL. And of course there are extensive Board minutes, published swiftly and to which Board Committee minutes will be added in the New Year. And then there's dashboard stats, videos, a redesigned website, meeting websites, and so on.

Which leads to the question: What role does the magazine now serve?

In recent months, the magazine has effectively acted as a summary of all the other outlets of information, compiled into one monthly email.

That may well still be a valuable service to some of you, although we suspect that for others we are simply repeating what people already know - while including lots of material on other aspects of the organization that they aren't interested in.

So this is your chance to reform it for 2009. If you want more interviews, or more information on particular areas; if you want polls, or more community-created or provided information. If you want more humor, or possibly less humor. Or if you think the magazine is perfect the way it is, please let us know.

There is a survey below after the content links but you may not be able to see it if you are reading this on email, so if not, here's a link to a webpage with the full survey:

http://icann.wufoo.com/forms/magazine-survey/

Thank you, happy holidays, and we'll see you all in the New Year.

Links

• Magazine survey
• Policy Update
• ICANN Board
• Cairo public forum
• Compliance
• Participation
• Fellowships program
• Announcements

Magazine survey

[Thank you for your interest. We are no longer soliciting input through this form.]

Policy Update

To view in-depth information on any of these issues:

• Policy briefings
• Multilingual mailing lists
• GNSO Improvements
• Geographic Regions review
• Registration abuse policies
• Inter-registrar transfer policies
• Whois studies
• Fast flux
• Domain name recovery
• ALAC advisories
• The At Large Summit
• IPv4 policy
• SSAC review of domain hijacking and phishing
• ccNSO Board members
• IDN Fast Track

Please review the December Policy Update.

ICANN Board

Recent Board meetings

The Board has met twice since the last magazine - in public at the Cairo meeting on 7 November, and on 11 December.

Each Board meeting is preceded by at least a week by a meeting of the Board’s Executive Committee which decides the agenda.

The adopted resolutions of the Cairo meetings are online at http://www.icann.org/minutes/resolutions-07nov08.htm. You can also review the transcript of both the main Board meeting, and the second "organizational" meeting that comes with each Annual Meeting, the new members take their seats, and the Board selects its chair and vice-chair.

Main meeting transcript: http://cai.icann.org/files/meetings/cairo2008/cairo-bod-regular-07nov08.txt
Organizational meeting transcript: http://cai.icann.org/files/meetings/cairo2008/cairo-bod-organizational-07nov08.txt

Highlights of both these meetings included:

• Approval of single-letter domains for .mobi and .coop
• Selection of Sydney for the June 2009 meeting; recommendation that the October 2009 meeting take place in Seoul
• Creation of four new Board Committees covering: IANA, Public Participation, Risk and Structural Improvements
• Thanks to leaving Board members Susan Crawford, Njeri Rionge and Reinhard Scholl
• Reselections of both Peter Dengate Thrush and Roberto Gaetano as chair and vice-chair respectively

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A preliminary report of the 11 December Board meeting is online at: http://www.icann.org/en/minutes/prelim-report-11dec08.htm.

Highlights include:

• An official request that the GNSO work with the ALAC to identify a new structure for the non-commercial users constituency
• Discussion of a number of topics, including: new gTLDs; the Internet Governance Forum; the possible impact of the US election; the Strategic Plan; the At Large Summitt in Mexico City.

More extensive minutes of the discussion than in the preliminary report will be available in due course.

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You can view all past, current and future Board meetings, along with minutes and agenda on one webpage on the ICANN website at http://www.icann.org/minutes/.

And from the New Year, Board Committee minutes will also start to be posted.

Cairo public forum

ICANN has produced a summary and response to every question and comment raised during the public forum in Cairo.

You can view it at: http://www.icann.org/en/participate/cairo-public-forum-response.html

Compliance

For more information on the following topics:

• WDPRS compliance reviews
• New contractual compliance staff
• The recent AIPLA Conference in Washington DC
• WDPRS Redesign
• Whois Data Accuracy Study Developments
• 2008 Whois-Related Enforcement Statistics
• Upcoming Events

Please review the December Compliance newsletter.

Participation

Public comment

Every piece of substantive work that ICANN produces goes through at least one period of public comment, where anyone is free to provide their reflections, which are then summarized and used to revise whatever documents are under review.

You can view all public comment periods that are currently open from the front page of the ICANN website: http://www.icann.org (a the Public Comment box appears on the right-hand side).

Alternatively, you can view all open comment periods, as well as recently closed public comment periods, and an archive of older comment periods - complete with explanations, links to comments and links to summary/analyses of the comments on the dedicated comment page at: http://www.icann.org/en/public-comment.

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Blog

The blog has been redesigned to make it more friendly, improve navigation, including tag and comment boxes and add quick category searches at the top.

To coincide with the redesign we have also increased the number of posts, and will seek to continue to do so into the New Year and beyond, making the blog a useful and constantly updated source of information for the community.

You can find the blog at http://blog.icann.org.

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More details on participating with ICANN can be found at: http://icann.org/participate/

Fellowships program

The 2008 Fellowships program - where ICANN selects a small group of individuals from across the world and different sectors and invites them to international public meetings to see how ICANN works and gets them involved in the process - has ended.

For a quick summary of the program and the year please visit: http://www.icann.org/en/announcements/announcement-10dec08-en.htm.

Announcements

The latest announcements can be found on the ICANN front page and also in full at: http://www.icann.org/en/announcements/.

The announcements are also available in other languages, including Arabic, Chinese, French, Spanish, Russian and Portuguese. All different language versions of the same announcement are links to one another, where available.

What Does ICANN Do?

To reach another person on the Internet you have to type an address into your computer - a name or a number. That address has to be unique so computers know where to find each other. ICANN coordinates these unique identifiers across the world. Without that coordination we wouldn't have one global Internet.

ICANN was formed in 1998. It is a not-for-profit partnership of people from all over the world dedicated to keeping the Internet secure, stable and interoperable. It promotes competition and develops policy on the Internet’s unique identifiers.

ICANN doesn’t control content on the Internet. It cannot stop spam and it doesn’t deal with access to the Internet. But through its coordination role of the Internet’s naming system, it does have an important impact on the expansion and evolution of the Internet.