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Analysis of Board review materials

  • To: atrt-public-input@xxxxxxxxx
  • Subject: Analysis of Board review materials
  • From: Kieren McCarthy <kierenmccarthy@xxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Wed, 18 Aug 2010 13:18:49 -0700

Hello all,

I have done an analysis of the Board review materials that were released
this week and posted it to my blog.

It may be useful to you, especially considering that as a team you have
actively flagged up the release of Board materials as an important
accountability and transparency issue.

You can find the blog post at:
http://kierenmccarthy.com/2010/08/17/icann-board-briefing-materials-more-cover-pages-than-information/

I have also pasted it below. If you have any questions, please feel free to
ask.

Cheers


Kieren McCarthy

---------------------------


ICANN Board briefing materials: more cover pages than information


At its recent meeting in Brussels, the ICANN Board resolved that it would
publish the briefing materials that are supplied to it in order to make
decisions.

This decision was widely seen by those familiar with ICANN as an effort by
the Board to pre-empt what would be a recommendation from the independent
review team that is looking at the organization’s accountability and
transparency (the ATRT). The failure of ICANN to publish any of the material
supplied to it by staff has been a bone of contention for a number of years
and a large number of people had highlighted the issue to the ATRT in public
sessions.

ICANN’s staff this week published, in two parts, 318 pages of Board briefing
materials for its meeting in Brussels [Part one | Part two]. Two things
immediately struck me when going through the material: one, large
proportions of the material released was already publicly available; and
two, huge chunks of the documents were redacted. How much exactly? Well, I
endeavoured to find out:

Publicly available

The first thing you will notice is that 190 of the 318 pages – or 60 percent
– comprise material that is already publicly available. Examples are:
preliminary minutes from previous Board meetings; published documents such
as summary/analyses; and materials that have been either formally sent or
received from ICANN itself – such as letters.
What does this tell us?

Well, first is that if the two documents represent *all* the material that
the ICANN Board is being supplied with in order to make decisions, then the
Board is being poorly served.
On the topics under discussion at the June Board meeting there are a
multitude of other documents that could and arguable should have been
provided by the staff in order to assist the Board in making a decision. The
only documents that are supplied are internal to the organization, with the
partial exception of the declaration of ICANN’s Independent Review Panel,
which was a formal report provided at the end of a formal ICANN process.

There are no materials that provide broader context or external view. No
third-party reviews or magazine clippings or even reviews of discussions
external to ICANN staff reports. This is a dangerous and introverted
approach.

In terms of making the Board materials transparent and accountable from the
reader perspective – you and me – the huge amount of publicly available
material is an unnecessary distraction. It would be far more useful for this
information to be referred to using a URL or added to an appendix. Or a
separate file.

Redacted redacted redacted

This is the most troublesome part of the materials. The Board resolution
directed staff to “publish the non-confidential portions of the Board
briefing materials”. At the time, many wondered what would be considered
confidential and what would be seen as non-confidential.

The answer would appear to be: 21 percent, or 68 pages of material. This is
an excessively high percentage and on a par with military releases of
information – clearly something that gets to the heart of ICANN’s
accountability and transparency since ICANN is most definitely not in need
of as much secrecy as the military.

ICANN staff and Board have not provided a definition of what constitutes
“confidential” nor have they provided explanatory notes about the extensive
redaction, nor is there an apparent process for questioning the decisions
behind redacted material.

There is a long history of processes and procedures, particularly in the
United States, for the release and publication of materials. ICANN’s
approach would fail to meet any of these. Most troublesome in this set of
documents is the complete removal of advice to the Board about the dot-xxx
issue, and the blacking out of an independent report into the issue of
chairman remuneration.

With no procedures, accepted rules, or external overview of the redaction
process, it is a certainty that anything even mildly concerning will be
removed – which would appear to be the case here when even a simple timeline
has been blacked out in its entirety.

Cover sheets and actual information

It is telling that there are the same number of cover sheets provided as new
material: 30 pages each.

Of the new information, and of the 316 pages in total, 13 pages contain
material that is intended to guide Board action, and the remaining 17 pages
are provided to the Board for information only. In two of the three main
documents where “actionable” material in provided, the documents contain
parts that are redacted.

So, of the 30 pages (or 9 percent) that contain new information, what are
the subjects covered?

    •    A President’s Report: A summary of what the CEO has been doing and
a general overview of ICANN works, with parts redacted. This report might be
useful but due to the long delay in releasing the report (it covers events
from April and it is now August), it has little or no value beyond an
archive.

    •    IRP review: The controversial dot-xxx situation, where ICANN’s
independent review panel decided against the organization and said it had
broken its own bylaws in denying dot-xxx back in 2005. The IRP/Dot-xxx issue
is heavily redacted to the point that you are able to make out that the
staff provided the Board with papers concerning the issue but unable to
ascertain very little beyond the background of the issue.

    •    Chairman compensation: This covers the proposal that the ICANN
chairman be compensated at $75,000 a year. Again though it is redacted in
all parts that go beyond basic background. The Board has already approved
the measure so you have to question the decision to not release any
information that went into the resolution, even after the resolution has
passed. As such the material that is provided is of little or no value.

The good news

There is, however, some good news. Of the remainder pages that offer new
material are three documents from ICANN’s policy department concerning: GNSO
improvements; a GNSO constituency charter; and a Geographic Regions report.

These documents are the staff reports that help summarise the work done by
the community and give an overview of how things are progressing to the
Board.
It is extremely helpful to see these documents being published, particularly
when policy documents have in the past proved controversial, with some
parties claiming they have been purposefully misrepresented in documents
provided in secret to the Board.

None of the documents in this case are particularly controversial so it may
have been easier to publish them in full without having to fight the urge to
redact portions. Nonetheless, ICANN’s policy department deserves credit for
making its documents readily accessible, even if they are contained within
two very large PDFs.

Conclusion

If I were grading ICANN’s effort to provide additional accountability and
transparency, it would get a B-minus.

There is nothing in these documents that is not readily known already. There
is a huge amount of redacted material and no effort to explain that process
or even a suggestion that a process along the lines of other
information-release programs is being looked into. The documents were
released with no indication or notice. They are large files. And they are
available from download on a single page that is four pages deep into the
ICANN website.

What’s more, if these documents do in fact represent all the material
provided to the Board in order for it to make decisions, it demonstrates a
dangerously introverted approach in which staff summary documents carry far
too much weight. The documents overall appear to be poorly structured –
different reports are simply laid on top of one another – no doubt making it
harder to Board members to keep abreast of changes and developments.

In conclusion, the release will do little or nothing to assuage concerns
about ICANN’s accountability, and will again point to the fact that the
extensive provision of (largely irrelevant) documents does not equate to
transparency.

The Accountability and Transparency Review Team would do well to look at
this self-created effort on the part of ICANN’s staff to be more accountable
and review how it differs from what external reviewers would have
implemented. Understanding this accountability gap may prove far more useful
in really understanding how to improve the organization.

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