ICANN remains as busy as ever working towards its strategic objectives to "support a healthy, stable and resilient unique identifier ecosystem" and "advance organizational, technological and operational excellence."
The technical community has an ever-growing list of priorities which are paramount to ICANN's mission – whether it's preparing to update or "roll" the Root DNSSEC Key Signing Key, implementing recommendations from the AOC SSR Review Team, or developing metrics that will provide a way to measure the Internet's overall "health." All of this work aims to ensure the Internet remains secure, stable, interoperable, and open for all with a great level of coordination with all related parties. With so many work streams and efforts underway, it's important to remain cohesive and leverage synergies between each other to work towards these shared goals.
I am pleased to say that we've recently created a dedicated team of ICANN executives led by David Conrad, Chief Technology Officer focused on invigorating ICANN's commitment towards technology. Working together with Adiel Akplogan, VP for Technical Engagement, this team will lead to better coordinate and align ICANN's Internet technology efforts within the limited scope of its mission. John Crain, Chief Security, Stability and Resiliency Officer, will also now report directly to David Conrad and be a part of this executive team, and David will report directly to me. ICANN's Internet Technology Coordination team will continue to work closely with the technical community at large to develop a roadmap and strategy that focuses on enhancing the Internet's technical competencies, expanding ICANN's involvement and participation in technical matters and work closely with the technical community to identify key areas of improvement. Our technology budget which has increased by 48% from FY15 to FY16 to $5.1m shows our commitment to this important work.
Adiel will spearhead all technical engagement relating to the identifiers ICANN coordinates to help build stronger relationships and alignment between ICANN and the technical community including the IETF, RIRs and TLD communities. Of course we've been proactively engaging with these communities already, but we're taking this to the next level now.
The first task ahead now will be to create this roadmap and plan, with extensive input from the technical community. I encourage you to participate, and reach out to David Conrad and Adiel Akplogan to get involved.