Thank you for your report John... If you agree we will include this text (or you can provide a separate document directly to the ALAC Wiki for the Oct 14th meeting because as you are an ALAC appointment you could and I believe should be reporting their) such text will then be included as part of our annual Working Group, Liaison and general activity reporting at the Cairo meeting (for annual Reporting to ICANN and internally to the One Day workshop where we will be (amongst other things) reviewing all our job descriptions (as currently listed in the ROP's) and any participation requirements (Rule 21 of the ROP's) along with related accountability (reporting KPI's etc.,) that may be associated with all of the ALAC Roles, specifically in relation to whatever recommendations are going to be coming forward from the ALAC Review WG, which will be public by then. The specific matter of next year's dotMobi appointment form the ALAC was on the ALAC Meeting Agenda last night, (as we had received both the request you mentioned and background information from Caroline Greer {which is all appended to the meeting page}) and we agreed that this appointment will be included with the call for nominations for all our ALAC Liaisons and appointments for 2008-2009. It is intended that this call will go out before the end of the week. I trust you will either be nominated or self nominate for this important appointment at that time... It is also intended and I have let Caroline know that the matter of this appointment (and all the other liaison or appointment roles) will be finalized by the ALAC during the Cairo meeting and after the Sunday OneDay workshop. Cheryl (CLO) -----Original Message----- From: at-large-bounces@atlarge-lists.icann.org [mailto:at-large-bounces@atlarge-lists.icann.org] On Behalf Of John L Sent: Wednesday, 15 October 2008 2:05 AM To: At-Large Worldwide Subject: [At-Large] dot-mobi policy advisory board positions Speaking of elections, the .MOBI domain has a policy advisory board which includes a seat selected each year by the ALAC, and it's time to make this year's selection. I've held that seat for the two years that it has existed, and would like another year. The PAB meets quarterly by phone and once a year in person. Its task is to provide policy advice for the management of the .MOBI domain. As you may know, .MOBI is intended for users of mobile devices, and the idea is that content in the .MOBI domain works on your mobile. So far that's been mostly a technical goal, since the state of the mobile web is sort of like the PC web ten years ago, with slow connections, small screens, and browsers with varying and sometimes incompatible features and capabilities. (There is a guy at .MOBI whose full time job is to maintain an encyclopedia of devices and browsers.) This year in the PAB we've addressed a variety of issues that affect users. The biggest problem is that in .MOBI there are a lot of domains owned by domain speculators who care little for the interests of users. In many cases they just leave their domains parked, which isn't great, but at least follows the rules, but sometimes they just point the domain at random parking sites that don't work on mobiles at all, due to large images, frames, etc. The domain has a compliance process so they know which sites don't work, and I've been helping them develop a combination of carrots and sticks to get the sites to do something reasonable on mobile phones. Farther out I'm trying to figure out ways to encourage domains to build useful content rather than link farms, with weather.mobi being a good example of a site that could have been a link farm but instead has useful weather forecasts. Even farther out than that, it seems pretty likely that mobile devices will catch up to PCs in capability, so any site that works on a PC will work on a mobile. At that point the other characteristics of mobiles become more important, that people tend to keep them with them much more than they keep their PCs with them, and that they physically move around so you can do stuff like have a site that uses geolocation to recommend restaurants near where you are right now. It'll still be important for .MOBI content to be good for mobile users, although the issues will be quite different. Anyway, I've enjoyed doing this with .MOBI and would like to keep at it for at least another year. The .MOBI management has sent Cheryl a note explaining when they'd like to hear back (fairly soon). As far as I know I'm the only candidate for this position this year, but the ALAC should set some dates so we can be sure and so if need be there can be a vote. Regards, John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://www.johnlevine.com, ex-Mayor "More Wiener schnitzel, please", said Tom, revealingly. _______________________________________________ At-Large mailing list At-Large@atlarge-lists.icann.org http://atlarge-lists.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/at-large_atlarge-lists.icann .org At-Large Official Site: http://atlarge.icann.org