In Brief
The Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO) Council seeks volunteers to serve on a new Working Group (WG). The Data & Metrics for Policy Making WG will be tasked with exploring opportunities with respect to reporting and metrics recommendations that could better inform policy development via fact-based decision making, where applicable. The GNSO Council approved the WG's charter at its 23 Jan 2014 meeting and assigned a Council Liaison.
What This Team Will Do
The WG will research and deliberate the issues identified in the Final Issue Report on Uniformity of Reporting and as defined in the Charter approved by the GNSO Council. Activities will include:
- establishing a baseline of current practices and capabilities to problem reporting
- evaluate previous PDP and non-PDP efforts and how metrics could have enhanced the WG process
- review existing GNSO work product templates, like charters, issue reports, and final reports for possible enhancements to inform the PDP and non-PDP process
- evaluate external data sources that may benefit the policy process such as abuse statistics or DNS industry related data and define a possible framework in how it may be accessed
- prepare preliminary recommendations and obtain community input
The expectation of the WG is to produce a Final Recommendations Report addressing all community input and then submit it to the GNSO Council for their consideration and next steps, if any.
How This Team Will Work
ICANN WGs use transparent, open processes. The meetings of this WG will be recorded, and the recordings will be available to the public. The mailing list for the WG will be archived publicly and WG members are expected to submit Statements of Interest (SOI). The group will collaborate using a public workspace for draft materials and all final work products and milestones will be documented on the WG's project page. The WG is expected to follow the GNSO Working Group Guidelines.
How to Join
The GNSO Council invites interested parties to provide names of expected participants who can then be added to the WG mailing list. The WG will be open to anyone interested to join. Community members who wish to be invited to join the group should contact the GNSO secretariat (gnso.secretariat@icann.org).
Background
The 2010 Registration Abuse Policies Working Group (RAPWG) identified the Meta Issue: Uniformity of Reporting which it described as "need for more uniformity in the mechanisms to initiate, track, and analyze policy-violation reports." The RAPWG recommended in its Final Report that "the GNSO and the larger ICANN community in general, create and support uniform problem-reporting and report-tracking processes."
The GNSO Council recommended the creation of an Issue Report to further research metrics and reporting needs in hopes to improve the policy development process. The report created by ICANN Staff outlined accomplishments regarding reporting and metrics by the Contractual Compliance function and it also reviewed other reporting sources that may be of relevance. The GNSO Council subsequently adopted the recommendation to form this non-PDP Working Group tasked with exploring opportunities for developing reporting and metrics processes and/or appropriate standardized methodologies that could better inform fact-based policy development and decision making. The GNSO resolution states:
Resolved,
The GNSO Council does not initiate a Policy Development Process at this stage but will review at the completion of the ICANN Contractual Compliance three-year plan expected for 31 December 2013 whether additional action is required;
The GNSO Council further approves the creation of a drafting team to develop a charter for a non-PDP Working Group to consider additional methods for collecting necessary metrics and reporting from Contracted Parties and other external resources to aid the investigation.
More information can be found on the GNSO Metrics & Reporting WG page.