For me, today was the first real day of the ICANN meetings. It was neatly broken up into two discrete bits – everything that happened before lunch, and everything that happened after.

First thing this morning I had a meeting with the GNSO Review team from the London School of Economics. These very pleasant folks are conducting a review of the GNSO’s effectiveness for ICANN’s Board of Directors. We talked for roughly two hours about everything – good, bad and ugly as it related to the function of the GNSO within ICANN. I can’t help but thinking that a review of ICANN by the ICANN Board of Directors might be more suitable.

At the end, they asked me specifically what I wanted to make sure they heard from me. I had three points that I underlined with them:

a) Someone needs to ensure that the expectations of the Board, GNSO and Senior Staff are well communicated and understood. This is management 101 stuff. People cannot succeed for you if they don’t know what you expect of them. People cannot be expected to be accountable for their behavior unless these expectations are clear.

None of this is in place today. The Board doesn’t set clear expectations for the GNSO, and the GNSO doesn’t set clear expectations for the ICANN policy staff that support its policy development activities. And each wonders why the other isn’t doing things in a way that supports the common goals. This is indicative of a classic management failure. i.e. ICANN’s Board has been A Bad Boss. The GNSO Council has been A Bad Boss. We shouldn’t settle for this mediocrity – change must be had.

b) That ICANN is a tremendously opaque organization and that the GNSO has wrongfully inherited much of this legacy. ICANN does not render itself accessible, nor does it properly communicate the basis for its decisions. A lot of this has to do with poor organization and some of it is by design. The GNSO can only be as transparent and accessible as its parent structure. In its current state, the GNSO is tremendously inaccessible, which is more representative of ICANN’s failures, not necessarily of the GNSO itself. Please help us be better by improving yourself. Do something simple – start with your website. Use it as an exercise to start setting best practices and minimum standards for your Supporting Organizations. In the meantime, expect us to continue to live up to the example that you set for us.

c) That ICANN needs to give the GNSO enough room to fail – and succeed. ICANN has a history of attempting to engineer the success of the GNSO. This is a top-down approach that is clearly not working. The GNSO needs to be comfortable in its capabilities and be in a position to exercise a certain amount of discretion in how it achieves its goals. If it fails to live up to the mandate provided to it by ICANN’s Board, the Board should be prepared to designate a successor organization that might be in a better position to fulfill the Board’s expectations. Start with Annex A of the bylaws. Lets move all of the procedural requirements out to a new document that the GNSO manages. The bylaws should only include as much detail as is necessary for you to ensure that our work product is consistent with ICANN’s requirements. Right now, this isn’t even clear because these very important objectives are hidden beneath 20 layers of procedural crud that say silly things like “You have 10 days to produce specific report X” and “You must conduct a serious discovery process in Y time period”. The doesn’t need deadlines from the Board – the GNSO needs the Board’s guidance so that the GNSO can perform. Set your expectations clearly and we’ll live up to them.

Lunch was, well…lunch. If you have lunch at the Intercontinental and are looking for a substantial meal, avoid the chicken breast – a very small chicken breast accompanied by a miniscule portion of poached potato slices. I wondered whether they had left half the dish in the kitchen or something. While tasty, it really didn’t do much to satisfy my appetite.

This afternoon was a mish-mash of meetings. It was an interminable proceeding and I can’t actually say that much of substance was accomplished. The highlight for me was review of some of the starting elements of ICANN’s next budget. If you are a consultant, get in line at the Marina del Rey office. The trough is deep and wide. Cash for consultants everywhere. I asked Kurt Pritz what the impetus for these massive consulting expenditures was and didn’t really get a great answer. In a normal company when you see consulting investments like the ones in the budget document we looked at, you can usually track it back to some explicit strategic decision made  to fulfill some growth imperative, deal with competitive threats or to implement massive change processes etc. According to Kurth, these decisions haven’t been explicitly made – which really left me scratching my head. Why is such a heavy investment in consultants being made?

During one of the breaks I had a great discussion with some of the ICANN policy support staff about how we can better organize the GNSO website to maximise its utility to the various stakeholders and participants. I described my vision of the GNSO website as being two parts of a whole – one specific set of resources geared towards ensuring that the GNSO could more effectively coordinate the works of its various task forces, commitee’s and council. This really means better tools for the GNSO. Right now we rely way to much on email and basic website links. We need more interactive group tools like file managers, calendars and the like that make it easier for us to work with one another in the online environment.

We also need to realize that its unlikely that anyone is going to hand us the tools we need to make this happen. If we’re serious about acquiring better tools so that we can guarantee better results, we’re going to have to do it ourselves. I have some thoughts in this area that I’m going to write up to see if I can get the ball rolling in this area.

The second half of the whole includes a set of resources that help the GNSO communicate more effectively with its stakeholders and interested parties. This really just means “making it easier to find stuff on the website” and “making it much easier to understand our processes and become involved in them”. Really though, these communications initiatives would be better suited for implementation on the ICANN website first so that the parent organization has a clear hand in setting the best practices for the rest of its supporting organizations. Not sure why such a hard-core, internet focused organization has such as hard time getting its act together on a basic website strategy. Somebody needs to make this a priority.

We also reviewed the GNSO Rules of Procedure, the basic documents which outline how the GNSO gets stuff done. Some substantive changes were made to the current proposal – all for the better in my opinion. There was some disagreement about how forceful we should get about deadlines for getting items on the agenda. My view was that we should err on being more rigidity in the process because it would lead to greater predictability in the outcome. Marilyn Cade of the Business User Constituency wanted to leave enough flexibility in the process to ensure that we could be responsive to issues that jumped out of the bushes at us.

While I agree with the point in principle, I don’t think that it makes much practical sense leaving something as important as our agenda open to last minute surprises. I would much prefer to reschedule a meeting, or schedule an emergency meeting according to some special procedures rather than leave everything open until the last minute. Wdidn’t resolve this in the meeting – the right people weren’t at the table, but we will pick it up again in future discussions this week.

I was quite pleased that I managed to convince the group to commit some resources to testing out whether or not we could cheaply and effectively start transcribing the meeting recordings of the GNSO Council. I’ve recently discovered that machine transcription services like Castingwords.com are remarkably effective and very affordable. We’ve submitted an MP3 recording of  recent meeting to their service for transcription.  If the group is satisfied with the results, we will be undertaking a longer three month trial to determine whether or not there is some lasting value to having our meetings transcribed. Personally, I’m a big fan of transcriptions because I can search them, copy from them and incorporate them into the policy documents that I’m continuously working on. There’s a lot to be said for implementing this degree of accessibility.

This evening will be purposely quiet for me. The calm before the storm. The point of no return. The schedule from tomorrow through next Saturday is non-stop. I’m going to make the most of it, do some reading and try and get a good nights sleep.

Unless you’ve got a better offer.