I wish I had time this week to give you a more complete explanation, but since I don't, let me give you a short list.(posted 8903 days ago)* What's worked best?
To date, ICANN has achieved a certain amount of "buy in" to its mission. That's very important. The agreements with NSI and the satisfaction of registrar concerns at the LA meeting were a major success. ICANN has also achieved "buy in" for the concept of competition at the registrar level. ICANN's implementation of the registrar accreditation scheme and the SRS appears, from the outside, to have been a success.
Although still in the awkward toddler stage, the Supporting Organizations are up and running. The "Advisory Committee" concept also has proven an effective tool for completing work, as both the MAC and the IRAC completed difficult jobs in a short amount of time.
The partnership with the Berkman Center has worked very well, as webcasting and the recent pre-meeting workshop in LA have proven to be invaluable tools.
* What's worked least?
In many respects, ICANN is still not as open and transparent as many would like. Opening the quarterly Board meetings has been a step in the right direction. I've personally been disappointed that only a handful of ICANN Board members and staff (Esther, Mike, Joe, Louis, Andrew, Greg Crew, George Conrades, for example) have openly engaged the community on mailing lists, e-mail, etc. I think this is more a function of the individuals involved though, and I expect and already see that the elected Board members are more comfortable in this electronic forum.
The drafting and implementation of the UDRP was not the model for how policy should be made in a consensus organization. It was rushed through a Working Group of the DNSO. The Working Group had a closed membership and Chairs who had strong opinions on what the UDRP should do and look like. It was approved as a "consensus" policy by the DNSO's Names Council, even though there was substantial dissent within the DNSO community. At the Santiago meeting, ICANN took steps to correct that and tasked a small group to make modifications. But that group worked independently and without consultation with the community. Regardless of whether the UDRP itself is acceptable, the process was a mistake and should not be repeated. Necessity or urgency should not be valid excuses for such a flawed procedure.
We need a better definition of ICANN's scope. Yes, we know it's names, numbers, and protocols, but we can't turn a blind eye to the fact that some members of the community would like to move ICANN into a vehicle for public policy. I think if you definitively define ICANN's scope and adopt a real means for stopping ultra vires policies, many of the current participants will go home. This is not an academic concern. ICANN will have to confront this soon, as the DNSO is moving forward on a proposal for the protection of "famous names." As you probably know, the protection of "famous names" in U.S. trademark law is a (relatively) recent development. It has not been adopted widely around the world. For ICANN to force this concept on the rest of the world would be, I believe, beyond its scope.
Individual domain name owners still are not effectively represented in ICANN or the DNSO. It's taken much too much effort to convince existing DNSO constituency groups to open their memberships to qualifying individuals, and by the time that they did, elected officials and secretariats were already in place. ICANN could have made this process much easier by requiring the constituencies to open their memberships when the membership applications were reviewed and approved in Berlin. The fact that ICANN approved them as they were submitted led to the "IDNO" and the conversion of the DNSO's General Assembly into a forum for the disenfranchised. I personally believe that there are many talented, interested individual domain name owners and users who want to contribute to this process. To date, much of the process and structure has disenfranchised them. Correcting this at this late stage is a challenge.
ICANN has not made the best use of the Internet for conducting its business. The mailing lists are a major disaster and the ICANN web site "comments" page is not designed in a way to allow ideas to grow and build upon one another. I wish I had a ready solution for this. Maybe another advisory committee tasked with examining how to better use the Internet for online meetings and decision-making?
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Okay, that's longer than I intended. Hope it is helpful.