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A radically different public comment period opened today for 30 days to allow community discussion of a summary document of the joint AC and SO meeting in Sydney.

The comment period is an experiment in online collaboration and uses Jive software to allow simple interaction and discussion between community members on particular topics. The hope is to increase the speed and effectiveness of consensus-building while allowing for broader, simpler participation in ICANN's processes.

You will need to register with the site to post comments, responses and blog posts as well as rate other's comments and vote in polls. But we have included a traditional email-only input method as well.

The AC/SO Summary is a one-page summary of the joint meeting of ICANN's Supporting Organizations and Advisory Committees in Sydney. That meeting drew out six main issues as well as seven suggested solutions to fix those issues. The online comment space will therefore restrict itself to discussion of those issues and their related solutions. There is also a discussion space for people to comment on the software itself.

The top two issues identified by the community in Sydney were frustration and exhaustion at the huge volume of work, and the lack of visibility of the impact of volunteer input on decision-making.

The top three suggested solutions were: prioritization of the workload; better scoping of issues at the start of policy processes; and improving accessibility to issues by providing summaries.

Now we need you as the community to flesh out these broad points into specific ideas and suggestions.

The discussion space will be shut down after 30 days as the experiment closes and a report will then be written covering what happened as well as the feasibility of using Jive or similar software for future community discussions.

So if you want to make your voice heard not only about how ICANN can improve but the ways in which those improvement discussions are held, then please login on today and start interacting. The comment period will end 24 September 2009.

You can log-on to the collaborative space at: https://jive.dev.icann.org/community/acso.

If you would prefer to email in your comments, please send them to acso-discussion@icann.org.

Related links

The AC/SO session summary: http://syd.icann.org/acso

Collaborative space: https://jive.dev.icann.org/community/acso

Public comment box: http://www.icann.org/en/public-comment/public-comment-200909.html#asco