Today, ICANN org released the new ITI search experience for over 38,000 pages and files on https://icann.org. This is the first of many future releases as we transform https://icann.org into a destination where you can easily find the content you are looking for. This is a significant milestone for ICANN and sets the path for the remaining https://icann.org content, in addition to the Supporting Organization and Advisory Committee (SO/AC) site content.
What Content is Launching with the New ITI Search Tool?
The ITI team focused on the following content for this release:
- Accredited Registrars
- Acronyms and Terms
- Announcements
- Blogs
- ICANN News Subscriptions
- Registry Agreements
Announcements, Blogs, and Acronyms and Terms also include easier access to translations via a new multilingual site navigation.
How Do I Sign Up for ICANN News Subscriptions?
We have replaced and expanded the ICANN News Announcement Alert feature with ICANN News Subscriptions. This new feature is available for Announcements, Blogs, and Registry Agreements. As more content is replaced with the new ITI search experience, more content will be available for email subscriptions.
The previous ICANN News Alert will no longer be available. If you want to continue to receive email alerts, you will need to sign up for the new feature. For complete instructions, read this blog.
Accessibility, Mobile-First Technology, and Search
ITI's goals include ensuring accessibility, improving search, and developing our site using mobile-first technologies. Mobile-first refers to the practice of designing a user experience for mobile devices before designing for desktops. Our framework leverages a mobile-first method and is tailored for accessibility. The new authoring experience provides governance over accessibility and our mobile-first approach, whereas the older https://icann.org (non-ITI) pages did not take those rules into consideration.
Our taxonomy work involved adding information tags to all ITI content, which improves overall search and allows for filtered search features.
We are also working on improving the accessibility and searchability of PDFs by applying tags to improve search and enforcing authoring guidelines for images and tables.
Note: The ITI team references the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1.
What Does It Take to Add Content to the ITI Search Tool?
As you all know, ICANN creates a lot of content. Our primary site, https://icann.org, contains over 200,000 pages and files. If you add in the ICANN Public Meeting and SO/AC sites, we are looking at well over 400,000 pages and files.
To give you a perspective of what is involved in adding a content type to the new ITI search tool, let me walk you through a single content type: Announcements.
An ITI audit team member manually reviews each Announcement published on https://icann.org and adds tags to that content using an audit interface. The auditor performs this tagging work on each Announcement ever published to the site.
Once all the tagging work is complete, all Announcements and related translations are migrated from our current site into the new document management system (DMS). The content is then published to our website through a new content management system. The Announcement is now available via our new ITI search tool.
This work is then replicated for each content type on the site. Of course, there is much more work involved but these steps give you a sense of some of the effort and time involved in adding more content to the new ITI search tool.
If you want to learn more about the ITI technical and content foundation, visit our ITI page.
What's Up Next?
In the coming months, we will release more content into the new ITI search tool. We will also add the SO/ACs sites, beginning with an audit of the Country Code Names Supporting Organization site.
It is important to note what hasn't changed on https://icann.org. Until we migrate all https://icann.org content into the new ITI search tool, the site's primary navigation and global search will remain the same. Once all content is migrated into the ITI search tool, we will launch the new global search and navigation.
Currently, the search changes you will experience are at the content level, and will allow you to perform filtered search on the content types listed earlier in this blog.
Report Bugs
As with all new releases, there will be bugs. I ask for your patience as the ITI team works through any issues that may arise. Please do send any bugs that you encounter to: informationtransparency@icann.org.
Thank You to the Community
I want to thank the many community members who have provided invaluable feedback and supported us throughout this project. We hope it delivers the experience you want and need, and that you see your feedback implemented.
If you want to learn more about ITI, visit https://icann.org/iti and if you have questions or comments, please email: informationtransparency@icann.org.
