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ICANN Launches Improved Public Comment Feature

31 August 2021
By

Today, I am pleased to announce that the Information Transparency Initiative (ITI) has reached another important milestone with the release of an improved Public Comment feature. This enhanced feature is part of the ICANN organization's ongoing commitment to increase the findability and transparency of our information.

Feature Improvements

The ITI team has made several improvements including:

  • Submissions available in search results
  • Number of submissions published to individual proceedings available in real time
  • Filtered search by category or date range
  • Improved keyword(s) search for proceedings, submissions, and files
  • Email subscription alerts for individual proceedings and their submissions
  • New guided form submission feature
  • Submission management feature allowing individual users or ICANN groups to track their submissions
  • New consolidated Other Public Consultations pages to provide the community with a central location for other ICANN community surveys or public consultations that fall outside the Public Comment process
  • Improved layout and user experience

Accessing Submissions and Subscriptions

To publish a submission or subscribe to Public Comment updates, you will need to create an ICANN Account using a unique username and password. You will be asked to add basic profile information. If you already have an ICANN Account, you can log into your account to publish a submission to a proceeding or sign up for Public Comment alerts.

For more information on publishing a Public Comment submission or how to subscribe to the latest Public Comment content, please read our Public Comment Step-by-Step Submission Guidelines. You can also watch a recorded training webinar about the improved Public Comment submission process.

About Public Comment

Public Comment is a critical part of our multistakeholder model. It provides a mechanism by which stakeholders can have their opinions and recommendations documented in a formal, public manner. It presents the ICANN community with the chance to provide inputs for consideration within ICANN's decision-making processes.

As I have written about previously, we received a lot of feedback from our stakeholders and the ICANN community about the Public Comment information available on https://icann.org. You told us that it was challenging to find information and that it was as equally challenging to stay up to date on the latest Public Comment news. This feedback informed our requirements and recommendations for improving search, the submission process, and content subscriptions.

Thank You to the Community

On behalf of the ITI and Policy Development teams, we'd like to extend a huge thank you to all the ICANN community members who took the time to participate in and provide feedback on how to improve Public Comment. Your input was invaluable, and we hope that you can see the steady progress we are making at improving the findability of content on https://icann.org.

If you want to learn more about ITI, visit https://www.icann.org/iti. As always, if you have any questions or comments, please email the ITI team at: informationtransparency@icann.org.

Authors

David Olive

David Olive

SVP, Policy Development Support & Managing Director - Washington, D.C.