Forwarded from Roman Pelikh

    Dear ICANN Community:             

    This letter is in response to the lack of bridge streaming audio during the August 5th GNSO Council conference call.

I take full responsibility for the lack of service provided on August 5th conference call and want to ensure you that the IT department is committed to providing this service to the community.

The bridge streaming audio service prototype was developed by ICANN's IT department about 3 weeks ago. Although it was successfully piloted during the July 15th GNSO council meeting and subsequent ATRT meeting, it is still currently a prototype platform and requires manual intervention and oversight. The technician responsible became unavailable on 5 August, and because there is currently no documentation on how the bridge streaming system works, we were unable to assist at the last minute. Essentially the phone call in order to start the streaming was never initiated, thereby no audio was actually streamed.

In order to be proactive in preventing this happening in the future, we will undertake the following steps to guarantee that the service is available and properly supported for the upcoming meetings:

· Train additional engineers and staff the calls appropriately until service can be handed over to Policy group
· Complete service development
· Setup redundant systems
· Complete service documentation
· Develop user documentation and support procedures
· Provide user training

We appreciate your patience as we work through the issues to solidify the solution and feel free to contact me directly.

Sincerely,

Roman Pelikh
Sr. Director of Applications and Service Development
ICANN