ICANN-58: Update for our Members

Dear Member,

This is an interesting time for all the stakeholder communities in ICANN, and if you are attending ICANN-58 we encourage you to get in touch with our Secretary, Roberto Gaetano, who is in Copenhagen. Here is an update on our activity, and some pointers to future challenges and activities.

Recent elections

– Seat 15 on the ICANN Board: as you are aware,  this seat is filled by a person nominated by the At-Large community. ALAC (ICANN At-Large Advisory Committee) set up a structure and procedure to receive candidacies, and organized a vote throughout the 5 ICANN regions. The final slate retained Leon Sanchez Ambia and Alan Greenberg. Our Association is one of the ALSs (ICANN At-Large Structures) who consulted all its members, and your choice was Leon. The vote throughout the 5 RALOs resulted in the nomination of Leon, who will join the ICANN Board at the next Annual General Meeting (November 2017), click here.

– ALAC Leadership Team: ALSs were asked to appoint a new member; the candidates were Oksana Pryhodko and Bastiaan Goslings. We conducted a poll among our Members and your choice was the same as a majority of other ALSs: Bastiaan. He has already taken up his position. Click here.

– EURALO Board: in order to replace a person who resigned for personal reasons, there was a call for candidates. Olawale Bakare, Vice-Chair of our Board, expressed his interest and was elected. Congratulations ‘Wale!

Survey of our Association Members

We are grateful to Members for having taken the time to respond to the survey. You can read some lessons learned here . In order to implement the recommendations or preferences you expressed, your Board will be making proposals in the near future. One of the indications from the survey is that a number of Members are prepared to engage actively, either on an enlarged Board, or in Working Groups: please read the next two items.

Association Board

Members willing to engage actively in an enlarged Board are invited to give their vues on these topics: preferred number of seats on the Board (currently 3), tasks to be performed in the next 2 years, desirable areas of expertise.

Working Groups

Members who wish to take an active part  can do so via the links:

(A) EURALO Taskforces:

  • At- Large Structure Engagement, here.
  • EURALO ByLaws, here.

(B) At-Large Community Working Groups:

  • Public Interest WG, here.
  • ICANN Evolution WG, here.
  • At-Large Review Party, here.
  • All other Working Groups can be viewed here.

(C) ICANN Cross-Community Working Group (CCWG) on Accountability Work Stream 2 (WS2), which deals with the 9 topical areas within the remit of ICANN’s accountability process, as well as its operations:

  1. Diversity
  2. Guidelines for Good Faith Conduct
  3. Human Rights
  4. Jurisdiction
  5. Ombudsman
  6. Reviewing CEP
  7. SO/AC Accountability
  8. Staff Accountability
  9. Transparency

At-Large Review

Our Secretary, Roberto Gaetano, will be sending out an email to Members, calling for Members to give their views on the Review.
We hope you find this update useful.

On behalf of the Board:
Jean-Jacques Subrenat, Chair.

Our Association survey: results & lessons learned

In June 2016 the Board sent a survey to Members, in order to gain a more accurate knowledge of their views and expectations. At the time, the tool and methodology we used did not provide the necessary functions for a proper survey. This is why a new survey was conducted in January 2017, the results of which you can now consult here.

In addition to the very useful information thus gathered, here are some remarks:

  1. A majority of Members (15 out of 25) responded. In most cases, they had learned about our Association through ICANN circles, and in fact many are already involved in ICANN through Working Groups and/or ALAC (At-Large Advisory Committee). Our Members present quite a variety of profiles (in this order of decreasing frequency): Internet governance, Internet user experience, sociological aspects, ICANN policy, technical issues, legal issues. Areas of professional expertise and interest are quite evenly distributed: IGF and academic fora share first place, followed by legal, business and technical fora (in that descending order).
  2. Our Members look to the Association and its website for information on Internet governance in general (1st place in responses), to get to know other individual Internet users (2nd); information about ICANN, which is widely available through other channels, comes in 3rd place. Respondents consider that our website should provide « current policy issues in ICANN » (1st place), closely followed by upcoming events (ICANN, Internet Governance Forum IGF…), and links to other fora.
  3. Our Members are interested in contributing to the ICANN policy-making process (1st place), rather than being simply informed (2nd). With this in mind, respondents think that joining a Working Group is the most efficient way (1st place), or consider being a candidate for a leadership position in an ICANN structure (2nd). With regard to becoming involved in the work of our Association, a number of respondents are willing to participate in, or if necessary to set up a Working Group, or calling for and being a candidate for a position on an enlarged Board of our Association (both 1st place), but only 2 respondents have actually volunteered.

At is next meeting, your Board will consider the lessons learned from this survey, and will act accordingly in the coming months. Stay tuned!

Best regards,

Jean-Jacques Subrenat, Chair