I'm pleased to announce that today, we launched the ITI feedback site (feedback.icann.org). As I have written about in previous blogs and discussed at ICANN60 and ICANN61 sessions, this site is intended to provide you, the ICANN community, with the ability to share your input on the content and features the ITI team is working on to improve the findability, transparency, and accessibility of ICANN public content.
The first item we are looking for your comments on is an updated Acronyms and Terms feature to replace the existing feature. Our update doubles the number of terms available, provides up-to-date definitions for the terms, and improves search. Unlike most of the ITI project, we will launch this updated feature on the current https://icann.org before 31 May 2018. The deadline to provide your input on the proposed updates to Acronyms and Terms is 30 April 2018, 23:59 UTC. Please visit feedback.icann.org to experience the proposed changes and complete a short survey.
How the ITI Feedback Site Works
The ITI Team will regularly post documents, mockups, or video walkthroughs of new content and features. The proposed content or feature items are listed on the homepage under the heading "Feedback Needed." Each item lists a deadline by which you need to provide input. Simply click on the item you're interested in. This will take you to another page, which provides you with the option to either download a mockup or watch a video walkthrough. Once you have completed that task, click on the "Feedback" button to complete a short survey or email your feedback to informationtransparency@icann.org.
Once the deadline has passed, the ITI Team will collect and publish all comments to feedback.icann.org. All published results of the survey will be anonymous, unless otherwise requested by the submitter.
We will review all submissions and make our best efforts to implement the feedback, prioritizing input that serves the goals of improving search and accessibility, and increasing the transparency of our content.
Feedback Deadlines
We do have a tight deadline for community comments – one week for each new item. The reason for this timeline is we need to maintain a rigorous development schedule to ensure we are delivering the project on time and within budget. However, feedback.icann.org is not your only avenue to share input. ITI has many other opportunities to learn about ITI and provide comments including:
- Regular sessions at ICANN Public Meetings.
- Special sessions or webinars for Supporting Organizations and Advisory Committees (SO/ACs) on request or for special features and content like Public Comment.
- Monthly blogs and newsletters.
- Via email at informationtransparency@icann.org
Feedback Translations
As I outlined above, we are working at a brisk development pace. This does limit our ability to fully translate feedback.icann.org and its survey. But, if you want to share feedback in another language, email us at informationtransparency@icann.org. It is important to emphasize that one of the primary goals of ITI is a multilingual https://icann.org, and the sooner we complete this project, the sooner we can deliver on that goal.
ITI Goals
ITI's goal is not a revamp of https://icann.org. While the ITI team is working on making improvements to your User Experience (UX) on https://icann.org, the vast majority of our efforts are focused on:
- Creating content governance through new, enforced workflows and the creation of a consistent, multilingual taxonomy.
- Building new technical infrastructures including a first-ever for ICANN document management system (DMS) and a new content management system (CMS). This new infrastructure will enforce this governance and enable improved content findability.
Much of this foundational work won't be available on the feedback site for your input, but we will show the intended benefits of this work through the content and features we will share.
ITI Update
The ITI team has been hard at work completing that foundational work I mentioned above. We have completed the following tasks since the January 2018 launch of ITI:
- The foundational build of the DMS and CMS, and the integration between the two platforms.
- Sixty percent of the content audit and the taxonomy creation.
- Interviews with SO/AC leaders, registrants, registrars, Fellows, and other ICANN stakeholders.
We have also begun work on the following items:
- Content modelling, workflow creation, and content governance enforcement in the DMS.
- Accessibility guidelines and multilingual site implementation planning.
ITI will launch in December 2019.
ITI Backgrounders
For those of you unfamiliar with ITI, you can read about what it is and how it will benefit the ICANN community in my kickoff blog.
You can learn more about how the content audit and taxonomy will help your search experience in my January blog.
We also outlined the differences between ITI and the Open Data Initiative (ODI) in our pre-ICANN61 blog.
We Need Your Feedback
Remember, we need your input to help us make the specific improvements to search, transparency, and accessibility that you need and want.
Please visit the ITI feedback site and email us anytime at informationtransparency@icann.org.
