by kierenmccarthy on February 23, 2011
Where is ICANN’s 2010 Annual Report?
It is typically produced at the end of the calendar year. The 2009 Report was published on 24 December 2009, and the 2008 Report on 31 December 2008. It is currently 23 February 2011 and so far no 2010 Annual Report.
Two months late is sloppy by any measure, and it is most likely down the high level of exits in ICANN in the past 12 months – not least in this case Sara Stohl who as publications manager was responsible for chasing the disparate groups in ICANN and pulling together the report in time (Sara left in November 2010 and her post is still unfilled).
But there’s sloppy and there’s breaking bylaws. According to ICANN’s bylaws:
The Board shall publish, at least annually, a report describing its activities, including an audited financial statement and a description of any payments made by ICANN to Directors (including reimbursements of expenses). ICANN shall cause the annual report and the annual statement of certain transactions as required by the CNPBCL to be prepared and sent to each member of the Board and to such other persons as the Board may designate, no later than one hundred twenty (120) days after the close of ICANN’s fiscal year.
ICANN’s Fiscal Year ends on 30 June each year. In this case it means that Board should have received the annual report no later than 29 October 2010. The fact that the report still hasn’t been published doesn’t mean Board members didn’t actually receive the report before 29 October – they may still be holding it or checking it – but it might be worth asking as four months is a pretty long time to read 50 pages.
However the bylaws say that “The Board shall publish, at least annually” – and it is pretty clear that 14 months and counting is definitely not “at least annually”. No one is going to bat an eyelid if an Annual Report is published a week within the previous year’s but it is now 60 days later than the 2009 Annual Report (taking today, 23 February as the date).
So has ICANN broken its bylaws? I’d say, well, yes.
And I would lodge that complaint with the ICANN Ombudsman, but he left on 31 January, and ICANN is still looking for his replacement as well.
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by kierenmccarthy on October 29, 2010
Credit where credit’s due, the disclosure of Board materials of the organisation that oversees the domain name system, ICANN, has greatly improved since its first and woeful effort.
The materials for a special Board meeting held in September over the “new gTLD” process are clear, organised and understandable. They also help to publicly demonstrate the large amount of professional work that goes on at ICANN. The issues in front of ICANN are clearly and concisely laid out, complete with arguments and recommendations with rationale. ICANN should be rightly proud of this sort of work.
The September materials also show clear improvement over those for the previous meeting in August – which are not as well structured and suffer from many of the same fault as previous months. That said, and despite a clear improvement for September, several significant procedural problems remain with the publication of Board materials, namely:
- There is no notice that the materials have been published. This is important and very easily rectified
- There is no explanation or apparent timeline for publishing the materials. This is unprofessional
- Entire sections – including their titles – continue to be redacted. There is no explanation for this redaction, and no mechanism for querying the redaction. So long as this unaccountable process is allowed to continue, there can never be full confidence in the publishing process as at any time, staff are in a position to redact whatever material they wish with no requirement to justify that redaction. The Board should be in charge of the redaction process – and they should be in a position to justify any redaction publicly. There should also be a process for publishing redacted material after a certain period of time.
- The materials are published in a very unhelpful format: long PDFs on a page four pages deep on the ICANN website. This hugely limits the ability to find and digest the information. If ICANN were to spend a little more time making its most important documents available as text on webpages, it would benefit significantly from all the tools that exist on the Internet. As a result, its work would find a far greater audience.
- There are some errors in the work product. If ICANN were to learn to relax its control mechanisms, it may find that the broader community is in a position to *improve* the Board materials, and so improve decisions made by the Board
- There materials continue to demonstrate a very insular approach to information provision – everything given to the Board comes through a staff filter. What is lost is a broader context. There is plenty of high-quality commentary and analysis on issues before the ICANN Board; the Board should be in a position to see this. If the staff work product is sufficiently high, it will stand on its own. Without a mechanism for external material, Board members will continue to be lobbied on a personal basis, encouraging the insider culture that remains entrenched within ICANN and continues to damage its reputation on the broader stage.
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