It was released to the ICANN community in Durban last week, now it’s slightly more formal with the issue of a press release, which for the sake of completeness is reproduced here:
Los Angeles, California… ICANN has unveiled a new digital platform intended to foster collective experimentation and innovation in the hopes of increasing community-wide engagement.
Anyone can sign up to receive updates and provide feedback. The platform will create a truly transparent process, essential to ICANN and consistent with the organization’s multi-stakeholder model.
“It’s all about increasing our reach and relevance to new digital audiences which are engaging us through the web,” said Fadi Chehadé, ICANN President and CEO. “We are searching for new ways to innovate and stay true to our principles of bottom-up, community driven policy formation. ICANNLabs is quite simply an open experiment aimed at creating new digital forms of communication.”
Initially, ICANNLabs will launch prototypes focused on four initial tracks: Communication: How can ICANN drive increased awareness and participation in Internet policy discussion by exploring new models for content creation, growth and distribution?
Education: How can ICANN leverage new online learning models to increase knowledge about ICANN the organization, its process, and its constituents?
Conversation: How ICANN facilitates deeper discussion and collaboration around policy development, which could extend to ICANN’s public comment process?
Discovery and Personalization: Given the diverse interests and needs of its community, how can ICANN recommend relevant policy news, discussion, and education resources?
“ICANNLabs will give us an experimental digital space where we can showcase beta versions of proposed digital tools and assets and then seek community feedback,” said Sally Costerton, Senior Advisor to ICANN President on Global Stakeholder Engagement. “Using that feedback we will improve, or perhaps abandon certain tools then re-introduce improved versions and continue in that cycle until we have new and useful tools.”
During its initial unveiling ICANNLabs will look at tools which frame issues around digital conversations, on social media, on education and on discovery.
ICANN is deeply committed to its multi-stakeholder, bottom-up model. And when an organisation is spread as widely as we are, the key is in balanced listening and engagement: to make sure we’re engaging with stakeholders in multiple geographies and across all communities.
As more stakeholders from more places want to be involved in the processes and decisions ICANN makes, how can we manage collaborative working and policy processes? How do we do what we do better at a time when we need to do dramatically more of it?
Our overall goal is to broaden and deepen our engagement with existing and new stakeholders.
Some of you will have come across this three circle explanation of what we’re trying to do.
All this means is that we divide ‘users’ into broad groups so we can think through how we provide them with what they need. The purpose of ICANNLabs is to accelerate the digital tools we can provide for those groups so that we can deliver to bigger and more geographically spread groups.
ICANNLabs will innovate and share beta versions of tools and approaches - it’s then up to you whether they are fit for purpose, and so your feedback is vital. Each of these groups needs a different kind of digital service - for some it’s to better support established workflows; for others is to better engage and bring them into the fold and for the outer group, it’s to explain better what ICANN is and how they can be part of it. Looking across all those circles, it becomes a continuum of engagement: moving from knowledge and understanding to participation to full and active membership of the community. If we can put more people on that ‘journey’, then the input of ideas and energy can hugely benefit ICANN.
So let me explain what we’re trying to represent here, and how the ICANNLabs project may work And if you think we’ve got this wrong or missed something, then please, please comment below):
The inner circle: Where we need to provide support
The people in that inner circle are the existing community members, the volunteers, those of you on working groups. What we need to do here is jointly identify problems for which we may be able to provide a digital solution (or, more likely, a set of digital solutions). If people in this circle can propose areas where they feel they need further support, then we can build the digital platforms to serve them better. What this shouldn’t be, though, is just another digital gizmo for people to play with - more doesn’t mean better, so we’re anxious that we think these things through properly and don’t just throw out gimmicks to add to the pile of digital kit you already use, and simply add to confusion. The goal is to make the working process easier, and minimize disruption.
So we may look to evolve the tools we have (Adigo, Lucid or Adobe) or build on social media tools that you’re already familiar with, or extend the scope of myICANN. We could also look at tools that help create policy - looking at the public comment process and see if we can provide tools to make that better - not to change the process itself, but to make it smoother and more productive.
Middle circle – Where we need to Engage
Much of the activity in this group happens regionally - and it’s an area where we’re strengthening offline and will need to support that process digitally. Expanding internationally brings resource problems, and we need to be able to scale activity, and education about ICANN, to enable staff and volunteers to work at a regional level on creating and implementing engagement strategies and activities. Here, we may focus on tools of collaboration and education - getting people working more smoothly together, though shared tools and shared understanding.
Outer Circle – Where we need to Inform
Here, we’re looking at the newest entrants to the party - bringing new stakeholders in who may not yet know the effect that our work may have on their businesses and on their lives. The more obvious examples of this group have already been referenced a number of time by Fadi Chehade, who talks of ICANN’s ultimate ‘customer’ as 'the registrant’. So this becomes a pretty wide circle: anyone who owns a domain name and those who influence them and care about domain names more widely. For this group, the tools are about communication - getting messages to them about the high level issues (new gTLDS, internet governance and suchlike), and that may mean sharing data or sharing insight on the platforms we have in common, social media and our own website. When we do reach them, we have also to be sure we’re using terminology they understand. More than in the other circle, the tools for use with these users should be intuitive and simple.
The hope, therefore is that through transparent experimentation, we can use ICANNLabs to build the digital tools to enable current users to work better and to encourage new users into the fold. For that to work, we need your feedback as we go. So let me know what you think about this post and about the work we’ll be putting in front of you very soon. It’s you who will shape the future of this project.
When you have a new idea for a product, two questions jump to the forefront: Can you build the product and should you build the product?
This is how Neo, our product innovation partner, helped us frame the approach to ICANNLabs.
When Neo starts a new project, their ultimate goal is to create a successful product. Behind the scenes, they use a few different methodologies to get there. Two of the strongest influences on how they work is “agile software development“ and “lean startup” approaches.
Agile emerged in 2001 as a reaction against rigid, over-planned software development practices. There are lots of flavors of agile, but ultimately it presumes that a product’s requirements will change over time and builds flexibility into the process itself. They do it through short time cycles (called “iterations"), early and constant release of code to the market, with automated testing to keep quality high, and lots and lots of human communication rather than formal documentation.
But agile by itself had two failings: It was primarily an engineering approach, and it focused on how you built products as opposed to questioning what you were building.
This is where lean comes in. Lean product development emerged from the thinking of folks like Steve Blank, Eric Ries and Marc Andreessen.
Lean values evidence above everything else. It says, “Ok, you have a neat idea — now go prove that it is a good idea.“ With lean, you try to apply this proof-based approach to all parts of the process, from the core vision down to a feature of the product itself. Lean also requires a healthy balance of contradictory impulses: vision and humility; rapid execution and patient analysis.
How do you test and prove ideas? The answer depends on the idea, but it usually consists of a mix of qualitative research (i.e. talking to people) and quantitative observation (i.e. put people through an experience and measure the results).
On ICANNLabs, we’ll be putting agile and lean together in practice, and it will looks like this:
- We’ll work in small, cross-functional teams that bring business, design and engineering together into one group.
- We’ll view ideas as hypotheses to be proven, rather than requirements to be built.
- We’ll try to create what are called “minimum viable products” (MVPs). An MVP is the smallest experience you can put in a customer’s hands that helps you learn and validate (or invalidate) an idea.
- We’ll scale up our engineering rigor as our belief in the product increases, but we don’t over-engineer when an idea is still speculative.
- We’ll continually gather qualitative and quantitative feedback from real users of the product, and use that learning to drive rapid improvements and necessary changes in strategy.
As Neo partners with ICANN on the four tracks of Discovery, Collaboration, Communication and Education, this is how we will be working. We won’t pretend that we have all the answers at the start. Instead, we will all be undertaking an honest and open journey to solve real problems with truly effective solutions.
At ICANN, we are built around the bottom-up, multi-stakeholder model. A model almost purpose-built to use technology to share, collaborate and contribute. Add to that, ICANN’s remit around the domains and routes of the web, then it’s strange that we haven’t made the most of the possibilities offered by digital tools.
Technology can help us work together in different locations, share knowledge and make decisions - and it’s time we seized those opportunities more firmly. We have used wikis and other digital tools to help us make connections and to contribute to policy processes, but there is so much untapped potential in the variety of ways we can use digital tools to improve the way we work collaborate.
It’s a space which will act as a digital space for experimentation and innovation. Here, we’ll showcase beta versions of proposed digital tools and assets which we’ll put before you, the community, for feedback. On the basis of that feedback we’ll improve, or even ditch, the tools, and continue that loop of build-feedback-iterate until we have useful tools that we can use in the community. In this first round, we’ll be looking at tools which touch on issues around digital conversations, on social media, on education and on discovery.
How those tools develop is up to you - we will make the whole process as transparent as possible and will blog, share, upload everything we can think of that will help you understand the work and allow you multiple opportunities to comment and shape it. The project is being led from within ICANN by Chris Gift who you can contact if you have specific issues. So as not to swamp him, remember that it’s our intention to open up the platform so that you can suggest issues which might benefit from a digital approach. So if you are thinking ‘why can’t we fix…’, then that’s the avenue to explore for that.
We will blogging here, explaining methodologies and the genesis of projects. You can sign up to follow each of the four work tracks listed above, and can follow it all on Twitter too.
So join in, get involved - it’s an exciting project, one that will help shape the future of ICANN.
ICANNLabs is to be the digital innovation space for ICANN, where we will create prototypes of digital tools to help solve a range of issues. It’s been prompted by a desire to buttress the bottom-up, stakeholder model that ICANN holds dear by increasing the digital footprint of the organisation, pulling in more people to understand, engage and become involved with ICANN. The number of users of the internet is, of course, continuing to grow rapidly and ICANN has to make sure it remains relevant to new user groups.
For this project to succeed, it needs to be transparent and accountable. We’re committed to a build-feedback-iterate loop where prototypes and raw ideas will be put up for rigorous feedback from the whole ICANN community. That feedback will be fed back into a second stage or even lead to a project being abandoned entirely (although failures still offer useful learning). And the next stage will be submitted for feedback… and so on. You can sign up for updates on the first tranche of projects here, but this blog will also be something to follow.
Here is where we will explain what we’re doing, show the context and motivations and some of the designs, early stage wireframes and explain what we’re trying to achieve as we go, with maximum transparency and the accountability of this format. Simply comment as we go and let us know what you think and we will feed that back into the process.
We need that feedback, we can’t innovate to a silent audience. We trust that you won’t hold back, but we hope that you share our enthusiasm for this project which has the potential to change ICANN’s digital presence fundamentally.
Jimmy Leach: Digital consultant to ICANN on communications and engagement. @jimmytleach
