Online participation – practicising what you preach

I am having a bloody busy time of it at the moment. I lost most of last week due to an appalling cold and chest infection (which is still nagging me now), I have my publisher breathing down my neck asking for my Sex.com book back with the copy editor’s changes included (to be frank, a job that takes *much* longer than the few days I have apparently been alotted); and I have the ICANN Lisbon meeting to prepare for, where I have to try to organise “public participation”.

That’s more complex than it sounds, but my hope is that a big chunk of it will simply be directing people to the participation website at http://public.icann.org and hoping that it is intuitive enough that people simply get stuck in. This participation thing – especially online – is complex and difficult. Despite alot of people in the Internet community being very comfortable with the online world, as human beings we have trouble interacting as large groups at the same time in anything but a face-to-face way. You can’t ignore millions of years of evolution in a generation it would seem.

Terminal Too

Nonetheless, people are willing to try – even if it means not having to spend so much time on planes – and it is my job both for ICANN and partly for the IGF to try to come up with ways to make this online interaction as effective and comfortable as possible. As such I am practicing what I preach as we speak – sat in a soul-destroyingly drab and busy Heathrow Terminal 2 accessing a meeting of ICANN’s President’s Strategic Committee.

You see the agenda here, you can listen to it here [Real], there is a chatroom here, and a forum here.

The meeting is all about the strategic future of ICANN: what it should do, how it should do it, for the future. There are three panels, but my fear is that there are a lot of people that would want to tune in but will only find out about the meeting after it is over. The information has been up for five days or so, and ICANN has put out an official announcement, fed through the news alerts service. But even so, it doesn’t seem enough. My job is to try to find ways of telling the people out there that this is happening. The system is pretty much in place for interaction, the theatre is built, the play is on, how do we get the punters in?

All suggestions welcome. Incidentally, if anyone is at the IETF in Prague tomorrow and fancy having a chat, call or email me or leave a comment here…

  1. Well as I’ve said before, its about making people aware that ICANN even exists. I’m doing a Computer Science degree and I bet that 80 or 90% of the people on the course (who are all relatively geeky!) wouldn’t have heard of ICANN, let alone know what it is or that they can get involved with it. We’ve had whole courses on the Internet, without any mention of ICANN or anything related to Internet Governance…

    Maybe ICANN should start promoting itself to the public if it really does want input. Look at groups here in the UK like Offcom – many people are aware of roughly what they do, yet they clearly have little individual impact to most people. ICANN is in a similar situation, except even worse – it’s international.

  2. I agree Ed. I’ve been pondering this. My broad feeling is that there’s no point advertising ICANN per se, but instead it is worth being very public about matters that come up that will interest people and then point out the role that ICANN plays in it.

    Kieren

  3. Well, perhaps you should be aiming at the “tech” audience more. Obviously writing for The Register helped with that – are you still going to do that, or will someone else?

  4. I’m at the IETF – what more do you want?! 🙂

    Kieren

  5. It’s worth noting that ICANN staff and board members regularly attend all sorts of technology industry events, including IETF, RIR meetings, various NOG meetings and so on. I don’t think there’s a problem with the techy crowd not knowing about ICANN. Getting involvement from a wider slice of ‘public’ is not easy, though. That’s where the creative thinking will be useful.

  6. Actually – that isn’t a bad place to start. Hey, Kiers, have you thought about doing guest speaker spots for comp-sci undergrads?

    Luce

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