ICANN to publish board meeting transcripts
In a surprising move towards further transparency, the ICANN board of directors has decided to start publishing transcripts and possibly recordings of its meetings.
It passed a resolution during a meeting in Amsterdam this week stating:
the Board directs the President and CEO, or his designee(s), to work with the Board to develop a proposed plan for the publication of transcripts and/or recordings of Board deliberative sessions, with such plan to include an assessment of possible resources costs and fiscal impact, and draft processes to: (i) ensure the accuracy of the transcript; and (ii) for redaction of portions of the transcript that should be maintained as confidential or privileged.
Transcription services can be picked up dirt cheap, so I can’t see money getting in the way of this proposal becoming a reality.
A question mark of course hangs over the “confidential or privileged” carve-out, of course. ICANN is sometimes over-generous with what it considers redactable material.
Still, it’s great news for the ICANN community, which has been calling for greater board transparency for years.
When I started covering ICANN back in 1999, board sessions at the then four-times-a-year public meetings were conducted in the open; all the thinking was done aloud.
At some point in the early 2000s that stopped, however, and the board’s public sessions became a case of rubber-stamping resolutions that had already been debated behind closed doors.
Minutes, staff-prepared briefing materials and broad-stroke narrative reports have been published, but they give limited insight into the depth of the discussions.
Chair Steve Crocker has even stated in recent years that its goal was to make these public sessions “as boring as possible”.
That’s obviously no good for those of us who’d like to know how top-level decisions at ICANN actually get made.
The plan is for new CEO Goran Marby, who starts on Monday, to come up with a proposal before the Helsinki meeting next month, with a view to start publishing transcripts not long thereafter
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