Nick Ashton-Hart wrote:
Dear All:
For your information, the Report of the Staff of At-Large may be accessed at the following URL:
https://st.icann.org/data/workspaces/alac/attachments/11_december_2007:20071...
I have not attached it to this email in order to limit the bandwidth consumption required for those on low-bandwidth connections.
For those who find it more convenient to read and comment in text, I include the text below in the hope that the At-Large community will indeed comment. ICANN EN ALAC/2007/SD/9 ORIGINAL: English DATE: 10th December 2007 STATUS: FINAL Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers 2007 Staff Document Series AT-LARGE ADVISORY COMMITTEE MONTHLY REPORT OF THE AT-LARGE STAFF prepared by the Staff Introductory Note The staff provides the following as the written report summarizing staff activities for the month of December 2007. Questions arising may be sent to staff@alac.icann.org. [End of Introduction] ALAC/2007/SD/9 Administrative Matters Decisions of the community at the Los Angeles ICANN meetings have engaged the Staff in work on a number of areas of administrative activity: • Creation of SocialText workspaces for At-Large policy working groups. Note that there are independent URLs for these working groups but since the links to these pages have been incorporated into https://st.icann.org/alac the changes to the structure of the wiki system are invisible to the browser/end user. o GNSO Liaison, incorporating the WHOIS, Domain Tasting, and new GTLDsworking groups; o IDN Policy, incorporating all matters related to IDNs including the IDN working group Note that there is further work to be done in early January in moving content from the ALAC working wiki to new workspaces which requires Marina Del Rey-based staff to complete. The community will be kept up-to-date on developments. • Creation of and/or updating subscribers of working group mailing lists for all working groups based upon the ALAC and community volunteers to the various working groups. • The At-Large Staff have posted the list of ALAC members and focal points for working groups at https://st.icann.org/alac/index.cgi?at_large_officers_and_working_group_lead... in hopes that this information will be useful to the broader community and the staff will endeavour to keep this up-to-date; • Implementation of a new master Documents page for At-Large, which may be found at https://st.icann.org/alac/index.cgi?documents. This is being expanded into a onestop listing of all documents published by At-Large and will also imminently link to the public document storehouse at: http://atlarge.icann.org/public. • Revision and updating of www.alac.icann.org with new working groups and URLs for new working group wiki pages. • Working with ICANN staff to find alternatives to Verizon in order to improve the quality of teleconferences. Testing of Adigo, Inc.’s offering (http://www.adigo.com) is underway; the Director of At-Large has also procured a test account for the conferencing services of Swisscom that will be trialled on a small call in the near future. • ICANN have retained Stacy Hoffberg on a permanent basis as from 10th December to arrange travel – representing an important increase in ICANN’s capacity to handle the increasing number of travelers to ICANN events. Stacy was retained in a temporary capacity to do travel coordination for At-Large and the Fellowship programme for the Los Angeles meeting. At-Large is one of the primary beneficiaries of this development and Stacy will continue to handle all At-Large travel on a going-forward basis. ALAC/2007/SD/9 page 3 Membership Database The Membership database is ready to be tested once the contractor preparing the system has completed the move of the internal test site to the server at http://atlarge.icann.org. As soon as this is completed, the ALAC members and the Secretariat will test it. A note is being prepared by the staff to acquaint the community with the features and in particular the elements of data privacy which are built into the system; once reviewed internally this will be provided to the community in multiple languages in advance of the production use of the system. Website Improvement As previously reported, the work to replace the current static ICANN microsite for the community at www.alac.icann.org is nearing completion. The new site will be located at: www.atlarge.icann.org. Members of the ALAC and the regional secretariats have been provided with access to an alpha-test version of the site and some comments provided. The developers are expecting that a release-candidate test version of the site will be available for testing and as part of that test the information on www.alac.icann.org will be converted and available on the release-candidate site. This will be put online and the community as a whole invited to review the usability and suggest improvements. Staff Capacity Increases The recruitment of a full-time ‘At-Large Coordination Officer’ and the ‘At-Large Regional Affairs Officer’ is at an advanced stage, with shortlisted candidates in the process of being interviewed by the responsible ICANN staff. The objective is that one or both positions will be filled within the first sixty days of 2008. More information on these positions is posted at http://www.icann.org/general/jobs.htm. Translation Framework Development The Director for At-Large is one of the members of staff engaged in the process of helping ICANN develop a policy on translation in specific and multilingualism in general. A highlevel consultant to advise on best practices and the development of the framework has been chosen and many members of the community were able to meet him during the Los Angeles ICANN meeting. The beta test version of an interface that will ultimately extend multilingual access to mailing lists and public comment forums is now ready for testing internally by the staff; we are aiming for the first release edition of this interface to be ready on or before 1 March 2008 though this is subject to what issues the testing cycle discovers. Planning for New Delhi The New Delhi meeting will have travel support for three parts of At-Large: • At-Large Advisory Committee members, the IDN and ccNSO liaisons (the Board liaison is covered by travel support related to Board members); • The APRALO ALS community (with travel support available for one delegate from each ALS); ALAC/2007/SD/9 page 4 • The Secretariats of the RALOs (with a maximum of two persons per region – the Secretariat, and where it exists, the Chair or Vice-Chair of the RALO). A provisional calendar, based upon that of the Los Angeles meeting per the decision of the ALAC, has been established and can be viewed at https://st.icann.org/alac/index.cgi?new_delhi_meeting. This will be kept up-to-date as things change. The At-Large Director has provided Stacy Hoffberg with the details necessary for the Regional Secretariats, ALAC Members, and IDN and ccNSO Liaisons to begin travel booking; further communications to those travelers can be expected imminently. RSVPs will shortly be solicited from the APRALO community. Membership Recruitment As is widely known, an outreach effort to consumer groups worldwide was begun by the Staff starting at the end of 2006. Whilst the staff shortage in the At-Large department have not allowed this to be taken forward as quickly as would be most desirable, four consumer groups have joined in the past 12 months. Continuing conversations between Consumer Reports WebWatch (a North American ALS), the Director of At-Large, and representatives of Consumers International and the National Consumer Council of the United Kingdom are likely to result in further ALS applications from major organisations in the worldwide consumer movement in the first quarter of 2008.