ICANN wants your feedback on international meetings, but it won’t be easy.
ICANN is kicking off its “Meetings for the Next Decade” consultation process to figure out how to handle its international meetings. ICANN has been criticized for its large travel budget for many years. I remember at DOMAINfest last year Steve Wozniak joking about when he was asked to join the ICANN board, and how he viewed it as just a way to take some free vacations during the year. (He declined.)
At any rate, ICANN wants your feedback and has set up a survey. But it’s a very difficult survey to complete.
First, you need to register. Then when you take the survey, each individual question is set up as a different poll. After submitting the first response I thought it was only a one-question survey, which didn’t make sense. You need to click on the “Poll Menu” link at the top of the page to see the other polls.
Poll question 2.1 asks “How often do you attend ICANN International Meetings?”, but there’s no option for “Never”.
Question 2.2 doesn’t actually ask a question, but states “Registry/Registrar Regional Meetings”, and it seems that the question is asking how often you’ve attended these meetings. Again, there’s no option for “Never”.
Question 3 asks a series of questions on what would make you more or less likely to attend a meeting. The last three questions have to do with the time it takes to travel to the event.
H. The amount of time it takes to travel to and from the meeting is less than 36 hours, door to door
I. The amount of time it takes to travel to and from the meeting is less than 24 hours, door to door
J. The amount of time it takes to travel to and from the meeting is less than 12 hours, door to door
It’s very hard to say what effect these have on your decision to go. Question H. includes both question I. and J. by how its worded. So if it’s less than 36 hours, that also could mean it’s less than 12 hours. So I can’t check the box “Would make me less likely to attend” for H the way it’s worded; if it asked “the total travel time is greater than 24 hours”, then I could select that answer.
Worse, question three doesn’t have a “not applicable” option and requires you to respond to each question. I think a lot of people will have a hard time answering “F. I have support from my employer to attend (financial or otherwise)”, because they don’t have an employer.
My suggestion: just send in a regular email comment for the consultation rather than completing the survey.
It’s hard to believe that question 3 on travel time was constructed by someone with a sense of how to ask a question, since the first option is inclusive of all of the other options. If the travel time is “less than 36 hours” then what difference does it make if it is “less than 12 hours” since travel time of “less than 12 hours” is already “less than 36 hours”.
@ John – that was the point I was trying to get across on that question, but not as clearly as you.
ICANN = EMAIL FAIL
The email provided on the poll site does not work either.
You have to send your email to :
janice.lange@icann.org
That’s the email that comes back in an autoresponder since the old email is for a guy that has left ICANN.
They have their vacation priorities straight, just not simple things like polls and emails.
Hey ICANN….how about video conferencing? Ever heard of the Net? You don’t need to spend millions of dollars anymore to jetset around the world like a superstar.
How about you save the tax payers some money and quit vacationing to each end of the earth?
The funny thing here is they are thinking about their vacations for ten years out. I bet most people wish they could plan vacations for ten years out also.
Corrupt!
As the fellow who was in charge of bringing this to market, my apologies that some are having issues. I know that the staff and the survey manager are responding to issues that people have. A couple of things that are important I think:
1) The email address “participate@icann.org” does work – it goes to multiple people; you are getting an autoresponse message from my old account but that doesn’t mean that nobody is seeing emails sent to that address – they are. Keep using it, that’s the best address to use.
2) If a response you think isn’t listed, you can add it. This is one of the strengths of the BigPulse surveying tool. I notice in the online results page that respondents have added the ‘never’ options that you mention as being needed.
3) With respect to the awkwardness about the travel time question all I can say is ‘mea culpa’ – though many of us checked it we missed the phrasing issue you reference. However, interestingly, the responses do indicate that people are using the survey to indicate greater preferences for shorter travel times, and since the point of the question is to find out how travel time impacts attendance, it seems people are understanding this better than at first glance is mentioned above.
4) So far, 60 people have responded to the survey, and only one has sent in an email comment. Considering how few people generally respond to most icann public comment periods, it seems that a survey-based tool is increasing comment period participation.
Results are visible here, for those interested: https://www.bigpulse.com/pollresults?code=1180dzNP2EaQuK65RB44EFpp
Thanks for sharing you guys. You are soo cool. i learnt a lot from you. keep sharing. thanks. i love travelling.