In accordance with ICANN’s FY2026–2030 Strategic Plan, ICANN is committed to building a culture of continuous improvement and excellence to better serve the global Internet community. As part of this effort, we are working to improve the visibility and transparency of how work across the ICANN community is tracked and reported.
ICANN’s multistakeholder community produces outputs in a variety of forms, such as policies, advice, and other recommendations. The outputs come from different community groups, such as the Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO) policy development process (PDP) working group or a Specific Review team. The outputs are typically directed to the ICANN Board to consider, and, if adopted, implemented by ICANN org. However, sometimes recommendations are directed to a particular community stakeholder group for further action.
To help the community more easily track this work, ICANN org has prepared a Consolidated Scorecard Document. This resource brings together information about community-developed policy and other outcomes in one place. We welcome your feedback on whether this approach is helpful for keeping our global community informed, whether reporting should expand to other areas (such as non-policy efforts), and whether it should be published regularly.
This effort is part of a broader set of improvements aimed at increasing awareness and community engagement. Longer-term options under consideration include improving how updates about the multiple community initiatives are presented on the ICANN website, developing more intuitive visuals to facilitate better understanding of the work, and introducing additional or enhanced key performance indicators to better track progress.
Evolving Current Reporting Resources
Below are examples of existing resources we are looking to evolve in order to improve tracking and visibility across policy, non-policy, advice, and other community-developed work:
- Policy:
- The Policy Outlook Report, published ahead of each ICANN Public Meeting, provides an overview of current topics and activities across Supporting Organizations and Advisory Committees (ACs). Recent updates include clearer highlights on policy development progress.
- Additional pre-meeting resources include the GNSO Policy Briefing and Pre-ICANN85 Briefing, which summarize the status and progress of generic top-level domain policy work in both the development and implementation phases. These reports draw from existing resources such as the GNSO Project List, which provides the status of policies in development, and the Consensus Policy Implementation Framework webpage, which includes information on how ICANN conducts policy implementation work and links to all relevant projects in progress.
- Advice:
- ICANN org maintains an Action Request Register webpage that links to a regularly updated community workspace (Wiki) where advice received from each of the ACs is documented and tracked.
- Other Community-Developed Recommendations:
- Specific Reviews: A dedicated webpage tracks recommendations from the latest cycle of Specific Reviews and includes quarterly implementation status reports.
- Enhancing ICANN Accountability, Work Stream 2: A dedicated webpage includes quarterly implementation status reports.
- The IANA Naming Function Review 2: Updates on this Bylaws-related work are published on this dedicated webpage.
Looking Ahead
ICANN continues to assess and improve how we report on the community’s and organization’s work. In addition to the existing resources listed above, ICANN will begin publishing regular scorecards highlighting:
- Community policy activities in progress.
- Recommendations under consideration by the Board.
- Board-adopted recommendations being implemented by ICANN org.
Recent updates already underway include improvements to the Policy Outlook Report and increased internal coordination to better track action items arising from community meetings with the ICANN Board and President and CEO.
We welcome your feedback and suggestions as we continue to improve the visibility, accessibility, and understanding of the collaborative work that is core to ICANN’s mission to ensure the stability and security of the Internet’s unique identifier systems.
