ICANN56

Overview: Over the years, the manifold of topics and issues to address in parallel within ICANN has increasingly stretched the capacity of many participants in the Supporting Organizations and Advisory Committees. In particular, stakeholders with limited resources available have significant problems in following what is going on and even more in actively participating in all ICANN work streams that would be relevant for them.
This poses a number of risks to the well-functioning of ICANN: If not all affected parties are adequately present and can make their voices heard during ICANN’s decision shaping and decision making processes and if not all relevant input is being fed into these, there is a risk that the resulting decisions will encounter resistance from at least parts of the community, as they may not have been made in the interests of the global community but only of those that have had the resources to be present in these processes. This in turn may be a risk for ICANN’s legitimacy as a global and inclusive organisation acting in the interest of the global Internet community.
Hence, solutions need to be found to better organize and if necessary prioritize the work streams underway in ICANN in order to help all stakeholders from all over the world to digest these work streams and to be able to actually participate.   What to expect from this session: The session will explore and discuss ideas about how to make the workload at ICANN more digestible and manageable for all members of the community.   There are several elements to this that may inspire the discussion:  - Improved planning through issuing annual objectives on key issues (based on the multi-year strategic and operating plans), including estimates of necessary resources, reporting and feedback loops for future planning
- Prioritizing of issues and annual objectives according to the estimates of resources necessary and available
- Improving accessibility of processes and work streams through improved, streamlined and simplified process management and monitoring (easier access of relevant work streams on website, more understandable naming of work streams and documents, “quick look mechanisms” for “outsiders” to find out where and how to get engaged, etc.)
- Improving cross-constituency-coordination and reporting in order to facilitate and simplify interaction between the “silos” in ICANN.
These elements may be discussed on two levels: - What can/should the “silos” do in order to improve accessibility and “digestibility” of ongoing work at ICANN?
- What can/should ICANN as a whole, including the Board and Staff, do to improve the situation?   Further, the concept of “volunteers” is another important element that needs to be taken into account when discussing workload and accessibility of work streams at ICANN and it should be noted that ideas to improve the sustainability of the “volunteer model” have been and are discussed in several fora within ICANN.   Who should attend and why: All community members are invited to participate and contribute to exploring and discussing ideas to improve accessibility and “digestibility” of ongoing work at ICANN. The idea is to have an interactive session allowing as many ideas as possible to float with a view to producing (or at least to start preparing) concrete recommendations for improving the situation. The session will be led by Thomas Schneider, Chair of the GAC.
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Staff Leader: Olof Nordling