Communications and Coordination Work Team

CCT is the abbreviation for Communications and Coordination Work Team. The Operations Steering Committee chartered the CCT in March 2009 with a mission to enhance the communication within the Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO) and increase the coordination with other Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) bodies, such as the Supporting Organizations of ICANN, Advisory Committees (ACs) and also the ICANN Board. However, the goals of CCT are not restricted to these and may change as and when required.

Composition of CCT

The CCT comprises of participants who are mostly selected from the GNSO Council, GNSO constituencies and from the ICANN community as a whole. These members are mostly the ones who have good amount of interests and experience in the arena of communications including the expansion of development of online collaboration tools as well as strategies for internationalization. The CCT is composed of the following members:

• Minimum of one GNSO Councilor and most probably two Councilors to work as liaisons between the Council and the team
• Three Councilors to maintain separation between Council’s oversight role and team’s work
• One representative from each Constituency
• Representatives from GNSO Advisory Committee and Supporting Organizations
• Members not associated with Advisory Committee (apart from NomCom appointed Councilors) or any Constituency
• Interim Chair comprising members from associated steering committee [1]

Recommendations of the CCT As part of their mission to enhance the communications within the GNSO the CCT came up with several recommendations which are mentioned below: A website for GNSO: Creating a GNSO website with a view to provide a productive environment to support communications as well as coordination and to serve as a center for inter and intra organization communication. Content Sharing: Building a platform to share the content across the various ICANN sites. For this, it suggested that all the content should be stored in a relational database having robust tagging capabilities for greater accessibility. Multi-Language Support: To make the GNSO web site accessible to non-English users in compliance with the ICANN’s translation policy. Tactical Actions Recommended by CCT The CCT had also recommended tactical actions as a means to contribute towards enhancing the communications within the GNSO. Some of these recommendations were as follows:

Community Feedback Solicitation: The CCT recommended that a lot of community feedback can be increased by making communications accessible and intelligible. For this, it recommended various activities such as providing opportunity for the community to comment on pending GNSO policies with a higher frequency, linking of ICANN and GNSO web sites, summarizing all the GNSO documents, creating an easier document search system, making localized policies consistent and others.

Board-GNSO communications: For this, it recommended that the Board should take steps to update the members appointed by the GNSO about pending GNSO issues, articulation of near-term objectives regarding policy development and co-ordination, following all the ICANN public meetings, briefing Council and Board members about effective use of revamped GNSO web site and so on. Cross SO/AC Communications: The CCT was also of the view that the GNSO would benefit heavily if there is a greater information sharing and collaboration between ACs and SOs.

Simplifying Complex terminology: The CCT also recommended that the complex terms of ICANN should be simplified as it will ensure common understanding. For this, it recommended that ICANN and GNSO to come together and develop and support a dictionary that would help to know the ICANN and GNSO acronyms.

Apart from these, the CCT also recommended the Board to provide extra rationale behind the decisions it takes. It banked for establishing a proper context to handle the communications and work of the GNSO.