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May 2014 ICANN Report

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May 2014 ICANN Report A Blueprint Subsidiarity Inclusive Accountable & Adjudicatory Crowdsource Decisionmaking Crowdsource Oversight and Develop Standards to Measure Success Move to Global Engagement Establish “Citizen” Juries Use Rotating Term Limits Decentralize Accountability Innovative Voting Techniques Use Participatory Budgeting Innovate the ICANN Public Forum LEGITIMATE EFFECTIVE EVOLVING Experimental Smart Be Experimental Use Expert Networks Transparent Learning Embrace Open Data Generate New Insights and Evidence and Open Contracting Embrace Evidence Agile & Innovative Encourage Games Enable Collaborative Drafting Cost-effective Draft May 2014 ICANN report To: Fadi Chehadé From: The ICANN Strategy Panel on Multistakeholder Innovation (Alison Gillwald, Joi Ito, Karim Lakhani, Guo Liang, Geoff Mulgan, Bitange Ndemo and Beth Simone Noveck) RE: Final Draft MSI Panel Recommendations Date: May, 2014 Enclosed please find the Final Draft Recommendations submitted on behalf of the ICANN Strategy Panel on Multistakeholder Innovation, with support from The Governance Lab @ NYU. The framework for these recom- mendations is described by a Blueprint proposing the creation of new channels for international engagement and consensus-driven policymaking to enable meaningful ways to test new institutional arrangements at ICANN. Proposal summaries can be found on pages 7-11 of this report. In crafting our proposals, there was, of course, no “approved” textbook answer, certainly no textbook suited to the realities of the 21st century. So we started from what we know from experience. To be effective, the actions of an organization like ICANN, in accordance with its public interest mission, must be – and must be perceived to be – legitimate. We now know that a contract with the agencies that originally funded and created the Net will no longer unquestionably provide such legitimacy. So what can? Further, the idea that any single organization has the requi- site expertise and know-how to govern the DNS is a simple non-starter. No entity of whatever sort enjoys that kind or level of legitimacy. As Bill Joy famously quipped, the “smartest person in the room works for someone else.” What we found – with helpful insights contributed from the ICANN community and public at large – is that, to be legitimate, any approach to DNS governance requires, at a minimum, working in a distributed yet coordinated fashion with multiple actors in both the private and public sectors. The practical question we faced and, of course, still face is how to know the best way to do that. Unless we under- stand better what are the processes, tools and platforms that enable a global community to engage in participa- tory forms of decision-making, we will be hard pressed to know who has the right to decide about what and how. To begin to answer that question, the Internet governance community first has to start experimenting imme- diately with different ways of doing and deciding across the Net. Two emerging practices we propose seem ripe for ICANN to consider further in carrying out its specific mission: crowdsourcing wisely through expert networks and releasing and using open data. A decade ago, realizing that it was farming out every R&D problem to the person with the best credentials, Eli Lilly launched Innocentive, a solver community, in which a quarter million people have by now submitted more than 30,000 solutions to more than 1,400 posted challenges, earning more than $9 million in awards and going far to overcome the challenge of not always knowing at the outset who has the best ideas. Similarly, in 2010, Harvard Medical School undertook an experiment to improve the impact of its research. Typically, an academic decides on the direction for his or her lab. In an effort to generate from unlikely sources new ideas for promising approaches to fighting Type I Diabetes prior to investing research funding, Harvard sponsored a $30,000 prize-backed chal- lenge to come up with research topics that might be promising. After six weeks, it received 150 solid research hypotheses. Subsequently, the Leona Helmsley Trust put up $1 million in grant funding to implement the best new ideas. In addition to normal advertising of the grant opportunity, Harvard Catalyst used expert networking to identify researchers whose record indicated that they might be particularly well suited to submit proposals and 2 ICANN report marketed the opportunity to them. In the end, a matching algorithm yielded over 1,000 scientists who potentially had the knowledge needed to create research proposals for these new hypotheses, largely improving the way research resources are allocated to achieve the most impact. Even if it were possible to identify the person with the most useful insights on a particular problem, that individual might not learn of the opportunity to participate. That is why we recommended that ICANN start to pilot the use of expert networking to match people with relevant participation opportunities. In addition, our efforts have taught us that really understanding what works requires a deeper view of the problem and a careful assessment of how well various approaches solve it. This, of course, is something greatly facilitated by the embrace of open data. The World Bank, for example, is helping countries collect and share data about their education policies openly, enabling them to benchmark their practices against others’ and better prioritize reform efforts aimed at keeping children in school and learning. In Nigeria, a country with 11 million children out of school, this effort has already helped to highlight the lack of standard information on student learning, as well as the gap between the skills of educators and the needs of students. Our panel was at the beginning of identifying the full range of possibilities for governing in a more participatory and, thus, more legitimate fashion. Techniques such as crowdsourcing, expert networking, and reliance on open data are only the beginning. There are many other such approaches we’ve proposed as well. The critical point here is that ICANN will not and cannot know what works best without encouraging real-world experimentation and trial. Dealing fairly with the immense and growing variety of Internet uses and users – and doing so in ways that pro- mote efficiency, as well as social, economic, and political innovation – will require a lot of learning about new ways of doing and deciding. All of us have a stake in the future of the Net. So it is incumbent on all of us to build and test the processes that give us legitimate governance. In conclusion, we have proposed 16 recommendations, including the critical few described above. We feel that, once their merits and faults are duly considered, these concrete suggestions could provide a means for ICANN to transform itself into a more effective, legitimate and evolving 21st century coordinator of the Internet’s unique identifier systems. In fact, we don’t think that one of these, by itself, will do the trick. We thank all those who participated in each stage of the Panel’s work, and especially the many individuals and groups who provided thoughtful commentary through the GovLab Blog and through the formal ICANN public comment chan- nels. The comments we received, most of which provided helpful elaboration, questions and clarifications to be con- sidered if these recommendations move forward to implementation, are included in an appendix to this report. In key places we made emendations to the text as well. In summary, we would like to stress that deliberation and further input from ICANN staff and community are paramount to ensuring these proposals can become as practicable as possible for ICANN. We hope that you, the ICANN staff and the community will work closely together to determine how some of these tools and techniques could be piloted and meaningfully tested to the benefit of ICANN’s global community. We look forward to your receipt of these recommendations and would welcome the opportunity to work closely with you, the ICANN staff and the community to assist in the design of experiments and pilot projects for testing the recommendations where applicable. We thank you for the opportunity to work on this important initiative and we look forward to future dialogue and collaboration. 3 ICANN report Table of Contents Quest for a 21st Century ICANN Blueprint . 1 Key Principles . 5 ICANN’s Practices . 7 Constraints & Challenges . 8 Proposals . 9 Resulting Paradigm Shifts . 14 About the MSI Panel . 15 Panel Resources . .16 Appendix of Proposals . 17 Proposal 1: Get Smart with Expert Networks . 18 Proposal 2: Get Broad-Based Input by Crowdsourcing Each Stage of Decisionmaking . 24 Proposal 3: Enhance Accountability by Crowdsourcing Oversight & Developing Metrics for Success . 30 Proposal 4: Get Agile & Innovative by Enabling Collaborative Drafting . 35 Proposal 5: Become More Inclusive by Innovating the Public Forum . 42 Proposal 6: Enhance Decision-Making Legitimacy by Experimenting with Innovative Voting Techniques . 48 Proposal 7: Increase Transparency by Using Open Data & Open Contracting . 54 Proposal 8: Increase Accountability Through Participatory Budgeting . 64 Proposal 9: Get Inclusive by Imposing Rotating Term Limits . 68 Proposal 10: Become More Inclusive by Moving from “Stakeholder” Engagement to Global Engagement . 72 Proposal 11: Become Agile, Adaptive, and Responsive by “Embracing Evidence” . 79 Proposal 12: Enhance Learning by Encouraging Games . 88 Proposal 13: Provide an Adjudication Function
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