As many could have predicted, the IANA Stewardship Transition and Enhancing ICANN Accountability topics remained center stage for the ICANN54 meeting in Dublin. As we reach the latest stretch post-Dublin, both the IANA Stewardship Transition Coordination Group (ICG) and Cross Community Working Group on Enhancing ICANN Accountability (CCWG-Accountability) have hosted almost 70 hours of meetings, including working sessions and engagement sessions, plus presentations on behalf of their groups to numerous SOs and ACs through the week. As a result, both groups reached significant milestones.
Notably, the ICG finalized their IANA Stewardship Transition Proposal, dependent upon the outstanding dependencies between the naming community's CWG-Stewardship and the CCWG-Accountability. You can find the IANA Stewardship Transition final report and full announcement of progress here. In addition, the CCWG-Accountability progressed on many of their outstanding recommendations, notably deciding upon a Sole Designator as the enforcement mechanism for their new community powers. For a full update on their progress, please read their co-Chairs report here.
As we acknowledge this significant progress, I think it's important to note and just a glimpse of the participation and engagement details that got us to this point:
Calls and Meetings: The working groups have held over 360 group calls and 9 face-to-face meetings. The time spent in these calls and meetings totals more than 600 hours, and that does not include the countless hours of drafting, prep/debrief calls, document finalization, public comment assessment and information sharing.
Mailing List Exchanges: The working groups have exchanged more than 26,000 emails through more than 35 publicly archived community mailing lists dedicated to discussions of the transition and accountability processes. In the CCWG-Accountability alone, almost 9,000 emails have been exchanged since December 2014, whether amongst the full group or within one of 14 sub-groups debating methods for enhancing ICANN's accountability. As noted, the mailing lists are open to join, and publically archived, making them available to anyone to engage and follow the discussions, whether they chose to post to the list or not.
Global Discussions: At ICANN itself, we have calculated that staff and Board members have participated in an estimated 860+ events around the world where the IANA Stewardship Transition or Enhancing ICANN Accountability processes were discussed, debated, organized or planned between March 2014 and October 2015 — That is the equivalent of almost 45 events per month. Of these events, roughly 520 were joined through global webinars or calls, while an additional 345 were attended in-person spanning over 87 countries around the world. Of course, all operational organizations, and partners, have held and participated in discussions – the global discussions are extensive.
While we are able to track more closely the number of events that ICANN staff and Board have participated in, there have been countless people around the world who have participated in both the numbering resources processes, coordinated by the Regional Internet Registries (RIR) and the protocol parameters processes coordinated by the IETF, via email and meetings and phone calls. These global discussions reflect the breadth of participation in the process.
To view all of these statistics in one place, view our latest infographic here.
In addition to this remarkable community involvement in the processes, it is important to note that engagement in the transition has proven to be much broader than just the ICANN community. Whether exhibited by submitting public comments, attending webinars, or asking for and receiving updates, it is apparent that there is no shortage of effort dedicated to this historic undertaking. We encourage the community to stay involved in this process as we enter the final stretch.
Theresa
