One of the consistent gripes about ICANN is that we don’t provide sufficient information (which, incidentally is why there is an online survey for people right here to help us understand what you are looking for). This usually prompts the response from ICANN that in fact that information is already available, and has been for years. Which in turn leads to people complaining that it may be there but it is impossible to find…
… which then, by the way, prompts ICANN to try to bring the information up a level from three-clicks-through to two-clicks. Which has the unfortunate knock-on effect of a heavily cluttered page of information. Which, some way down the line, prompts a tidy-up of webpages that then shifts certain types of information down a level again. Someone then can’t find it and the circle turns again.
Quite aside from the fact that ICANN will be transitioning to a new content management system starting in the next few months which will hopefully solve this problem, we thought that this time we would pre-empt the problem by trying to flag up an interesting and relatively new feature on the ICANN website that most of you have probably yet to come across. It is known internally as the “virtual bookshelf” but to everyone else it is most easily described as an archive of the various presentations and speeches that ICANN staff give and have given all over the world to do with ICANN and the issues that surround the organisation.
So if you want to find out what CEO Paul Twomey said earlier this month in Sydney about the future of the Internet, or what Theresa Swinehart said about Internet Governance in Dubai in June, or what Anne-Rachel Inne told the Club of Rome about participating in ICANN back in April, then this is the page to visit. Where is it? Very simple: http://icann.org/presentations/. Enjoy.