[http://www.icann.org/images/gradlogo_bow.jpg]<http://www.icann.org/> News Alert https://www.icann.org/news/announcement-2-2014-06-12-en ________________________________ Announcing Plans for Public Comment Improvements 12 June 2014 ICANN's Policy Development Support Staff recently assumed day-to-day oversight of ICANN's public comment infrastructure. This responsibility includes coordinating, evaluating, developing and implementing targeted improvements to all of ICANN's community input and feedback mechanisms. The team has spent considerable time reviewing the existing public comment infrastructure, processes, and procedures and gathering data on community activity to determine what changes inspired by the original recommendations of the Accountability and Transparency Review Team have been effective. In conjunction with those efforts as well as the recent ATRT2 recommendations currently being reviewed by the Board, the Staff has been working over the past several weeks to develop a public comments improvement implementation plan. This effort builds on previous feedback from community leaders that identified a number of potential areas for public comment improvements. The plan has been shared with members of the Board of Directors who have encouraged the Staff to move forward with it. The team expects to move forward with the implementation of specific short-term process improvements after the ICANN Public Meeting in London (ICANN 50). Those short-term changes will be evaluated for their effectiveness after six months while longer-term improvements are developed. David Olive, Vice President, Policy Development Support, outlines those plans in a post on the ICANN Blog at – https://www.icann.org/news/blog/sharing-a-plan-for-public-comment-improvements<http://www.icann.org/news/blog/sharing-a-plan-for-public-comment-improvements>.