Designing a 21st Century ICANN

Hello!

Today, the ICANN Strategy Panel on Multistakeholder Innovation (the MSI Panel) and The Governance Lab @ NYU (The GovLab) launched an online engagement effort aimed at helping to redesign the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) – the public interest organization responsible for coordinating the Internet’s Domain Name System (DNS) – for the 21st Century.
 
We are writing to request your participation in this important initiative and to help us spread the word!
 
The MSI Panel has been charged with:

• Proposing new models for international engagement, consensus-driven policymaking and institutional structures to support such enhanced functions; and
• Designing processes, tools and platforms that enable the global ICANN community to engage in these new forms of participatory decision-making.

The Panel is a small group of seven with no monopoly on the best ideas for what ICANN should or should not do to coordinate the DNS in the public interest. All suggestions to make ICANN more effective and more democratic – whether constitutional, structural, legal, procedural or technological – will be welcome.
                       
While we cannot decide for ICANN, the aim of the MSI Panel is to use its authority to push for real change. Thus, we want ideas that are concrete and specific for innovative processes, structures, platforms, and techniques to design a 21st century ICANN.
 
To gather and organize your input – we’re launching this campaign in three stages:
 
Stage 1: Idea Generation – STARTING TODAY and running for six weeks via an ideation platform, Ideascale. You can access our MSI Panel community page here. On the page, you can submit any and all concrete ideas you have. You can rate and rank others’ for importance and practicality. November 19 - December 31.
 
Stage 2: Proposal Development – Submissions will be grouped into general proposals and opened to discussion using a blog with line-by-line annotation features. This phase will be designed to take ideas closer to implementation. January 14 - January 21.
 
Stage 3: Collaborative Drafting – Using a wiki, we will invite collaborative drafting on specific proposals that the Panel will submit to the ICANN CEO, Board and community. January 28 - February 11.
 
To help us spread the word, we ask you to do any of the following:
 

• Submit ideas and encourage members of your network/community to contribute to the Ideascale community site by providing them with the link: http://thegovlab.ideascale.com/.
• Broadcast our “Call To Action,” for this initiative, which is online here, as widely as possible within your networks. Feel free to link to this post or repost on your website edited to fit your needs.
• Share this information within your community and network via mailing lists and listservs.
• Use social media platforms such as Facebook or Twitter to spread the word about the campaign. Don’t forget to use the hashtag #WeCANN.
• To inspire participation and learn how to contribute, watch and share a video The GovLab has made for the launch of this distributed brainstorm.
• Host your own brainstorming forum and share ideas generated with the MSI Panel on our Ideascale community page.

 
For more information, visit The GovLab at www.thegovlab.org.
                                                                                                               
Thanks and best,
 
The MSI Panel & The GovLab