Darlene, With regard to an outreach plan, the text below may be of help; it comes from the naralo.info website (now decommissioned -- you can still view it through archive.org) that I set up for my local ISOC chapter many years ago: 1. Organizations throughout North America need to be contacted and made aware of the opportunities for participation in this endeavor. On the "organizations page" you will note that a list is being compiled of organizations that possibly may be responsive to this initiative. The list is being built by feeding keywords to search engines such as COMPUTER USER ASSOCIATIONS, PUBLIC INTEREST ORGANIZATIONS, etc. Deadline for this segment of the project -- February 20. If your organization is not on this list yet, please send us a note. 2. Upon completion of this Outreach List, chapter members will divide the list into manageable units for contact purposes. Contact addresses will need to be researched, and letters and/or e-mail will need to be sent to these organizations so that they may be aware of the opportunity for involvement. A proposed introductory letter is posted here: Subject: Organizational collaboration requested To: the members of [ORGANIZATION], We, the members of the New York Chapter of the Internet Society, have launched a project to facilitate the expression of the public interest to the Board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN); if at all possible we would appreciate your collaboration in this endeavor which calls for the eventual launch of a North American Regional At-Large Organization to channel such public input to the ICANN Board (please note that ICANN is the private sector, non-profit corporation with technical management responsibilities for the Internet's domain name and address system). Project details are posted at: [URL] At this time we are seeking to collect "Expressions of Interest" from the community which will be forwarded to the Board-appointed North American representatives on ICANN's At-Large Advisory Committee. We ask you to review the nature and scope of the project, and to decide whether your organization might be willing to participate in this effort. Should your organization choose to become involved, we ask that your correspondence be sent to the following address: [e-mailing address] Deadline for initial organizational outreach efforts -- March 20. 3. As we will be collecting "Expressions of Interest" from organizations throughout North America and posting information pertaining to these organizations on the website, it is imperative that a Privacy Policy be established and posted. Deadline for policy development -- March 20. 4. In that the At-Large community consists of individuals as well as organizations, efforts need to be made to reach out to non-affiliated individuals; this will require the drafting and posting of letters to appropriate venues (examples: Slashdot, ICANNwatch, community discussion lists, etc.). A list of such distribution channels will be compiled here: [URL] Deadline for the list preparation -- February 20. Deadline for initial outreach to individuals -- March 20. If you are aware of other outlets for such correspondence, please send us a note. Additional project steps will be added in due course. -------- Darlene, please note that our chapter received an extremely limited number of positive replies to this initiative. I'll be happy to speculate on why this was the case if need be... Frankly, while I am not keen on the concept of pursuing outreach (as I am of the view that when people want to contact ICANN they will -- as illustrated by the flood of correspondence during the RegisterFly fiasco) I am offering this "plan" as a possible guide in the spirit of mutual assistance (even though I don't support the expenditure of such effort that in my view could better be applied to policy development or fact-finding initiatives). best regards, Danny ____________________________________________________________________________________ Looking for a deal? Find great prices on flights and hotels with Yahoo! FareChase. http://farechase.yahoo.com/