ICANN Launches Digital Innovation Platform, ICANNLabs 23 July 2013 Los Angeles, California ICANN has unveiled a new digital platform intended to foster collective experimentation and innovation to increase the levels of community-wide engagement. The platform, called ICANNLabs, can be accessed at labs.icann.org <http://labs.icann.org> . Anyone can sign up to receive updates and provide feedback. The platform will create a truly transparent process, essential to ICANN and consistent with the organization's multi-stakeholder model. "It's all about increasing our reach and relevance to new digital audiences which are engaging us through the web," said Fadi Chehadé, ICANN President and CEO. "We are searching for new ways to innovate and stay true to our principles of bottom-up, community driven policy formation. ICANNLabs is quite simply an open experiment aimed at creating new digital forms of communication." Initially, ICANNLabs will launch prototypes focused on four initial tracks: * Communication: How can ICANN drive increased awareness and participation in Internet policy discussion by exploring new models for content creation, growth and distribution? * Education: How can ICANN leverage new online learning models to increase knowledge about ICANN the organization, its process, and its constituents? * Conversation: How can ICANN facilitate deeper discussion and collaboration around policy development, which could extend to ICANN's public comment process? * Discovery and Personalization: Given the diverse interests and needs of its community, how can ICANN recommend relevant policy news, discussion, and education resources? "ICANNLabs will give us an experimental digital space where we can showcase beta versions of proposed digital tools and assets and then seek community feedback," said Sally Costerton, Senior Advisor to ICANN President on Global Stakeholder Engagement. "Using that feedback we will improve, or perhaps abandon certain tools then re-introduce improved versions and continue in that cycle until we have new and useful tools." During its initial unveiling, ICANNLabs will look at tools which frame issues around digital conversations, on social media, on education and on discovery. Those who are interested are invited to register at labs.icann.org <http://labs.icann.org> . ### To read and comment on the ICANNLabs blog, please visit: http://www.icannlabs.tumblr.com To follow ICANN labs on Twitter, please visit: https://twitter.com/ICANNLabs Media Contacts Brad White ICANN Director of Global Media Affairs Washington, D.C. Tel. +1 202.570.7118 brad.white@icann.org Andrew Robertson Edelman Public Relations London, U.K. Tel. + 44 (7811) 341 945 andrew.robertson@edelman.com James Cole ICANN Global Media Coordinator Washington, D.C. Tel. +1 202.570.7240 james.cole@icann.org About ICANN: ICANN's mission is to ensure a stable, secure and unified global Internet. 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 public-benefit corporation with participants 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. For more information please visit: www.icann.org <http://www.icann.org/> .