The ALAC should work with all RALOs and ALSes to map the current expertise and interests in their membership, to identify Subject Matter Experts and facilitate policy communication.
All RALOs completed a Professional Expertise Survey (APRALO Survey was a bit different with more questions and analytical results included ). This work was consider a very good start to map the current professional expertise.
It is important to prepare a new survey to obtain more detailed information from At-Large members, professional help may be needed.
The survey should not only include ALS representatives but also other members in the ALSes. There is issue of openness of the survey. Some ALSes are tremendously large with lots of members. The survey needs to be more widely distributed with certain cap.
If we open the poll of survey respondents, the results may be complicated, as certain large ALS respondents may skew the results.
Ask ALSes themselves to provide the range of their members' knowledge, skills, and competencies that they can offer ICANN.
Professional survey creation is needed; ICANN may have in-house expertise to create professional surveys. Heidi Ullrich is following up on this action item.
EURALO is working to form a taskforce to review the past survey and to add further questions for new survey; this taskforce will build the database of EURALO ALS expertise
LACRALO is waiting for the professional help re building the survey, also to learn about the number of members in the ALSes is important (e.g. some ALSes may have tens or hundreds of members)
NARALO had very little participation in the first survey with little impact. Similarly, an IEEE event held an extensive survey but only a handful of people responded. Survey may not yield the desired result as response rate could be low. Alternatively, RALO Chairs and Secretariats probably should contact ALSes directly instead of waiting for responses to surveys.
All RALOs should use the same survey, so it may be better to wait for professional help
APRALO: the idea of calling ALSes does not work in APAC region. The response rate in the previous APAC survey was high, and the result was clear with regard to professional expertise. Since new ALSes have joined, it would be valuable to do a new survey.
The last survey was only asking the ALS representatives, although the target is ALSes (e.g. members). Target audience needs to be defined clearly this time.
Survey that is short and sweet may get better response rate.
To find ways to promote the survey and encourage people to participate (e.g. amazon gift card for filling out the survey) may be needed.
Several ways need to be used to reach out to ALSes, and survey itself can be administered in different ways (e.g. emails, polls, calls) to be effective. The list of questions used in the survey need to be consistent across RALOs. Professional help may be useful in defining the survey questions. Each RALO can decide how to promote and inform the ALSes to take part in the survey
(secretariat meeting - ICANN55)
Heidi Ullrich: There does not appear to be any particular expertise on survey development within staff. There have been some staff resources allocated to a personal survey in terms of staff being able to reach out and call the ALSs and the identified representative of each ALS. And we are hoping to use this Staff resource in the context of the ALS Criteria and Expectations Task Force. It would be great if there is collaboration between the efforts in the Cross RALO Secretariat Group as well as the ALS Criteria Task Force.
Alberto Soto: ALSes should have the flexibility to provide the number of contacts for completing the survey, but we should demand at least a minimum of three contacts from each ALS.
Humberto Carrasco, Siranush Vardanyan, and Heidi Ullrich need to first discuss and agree on the content of the survey. A small working group should be formed for this effort, with at least one representative from each RALO. The purpose of the survey needs to be clarified, besides gathering information of professional expertise, do we want all RALOs to do that? Because for APRALO it no sense to do the similar one. We just did it in last year. the RALOs differs from each other, so like Judith is telling there is no sense for NARALO to do this type of survey because it probably will not give a proper information to them. we need to find out the purpose of it in order to move forward with this.
Heidi Ullrich: 2010 ALS survey they were asking basic questions about what their areas of interest. There was, also timely, it was when the At-Large improvements were going on so there were some questions on that. And then there was also a subset of questions that Rudi Vansnick made on some ccTLD issues. So what happened after that was that all of the RALO Secretariats, Chairs, and Secretaries did an analysis of each of their RALO’s results and then that was reported back. So it was really a very useful approach, a deep dive into the ALSs.this might be a really useful way to collaborate with the work that the ALS Task Force and the Expectations and Criteria Task Force is carrying out.
Olivier Crepin-Leblond: If we did have a database of the actual knowledge that we have within our community – and not only just the ALS representative, but also within the At-Large Structure – they might have somebody who knows about this specific topic. We could, on a push basis rather than just waiting for someone to answer, we could on a push basis solicit those people and say, “Hey, this is something that is right up your alley and you’ve got the knowledge for this. Could you please spend some time on this?” But at the same time, it would certainly reduce the amount of people that we have to send this out to. At the moment, the way we send our request for comments out to is just by putting on the mailing list, and one of the big concerns that we’ve always received from most of the people that joined our Summit in London was that their mailbox is absolutely filled with virtually every single question possible under the sun, 30, 40 e-mails a week. And often they completely miss out the request for public comments because it’s in the flood of e-mails and so on. It’s really about working smarter and not harder. Now whether we’re able to put together such a database, what the modalities of the database will be, and so on, these are just details. But we have to move forward on this.
Humberto Carrasco: all RALOs differ in their backgrounds. For instance, in Latin America there are many more lawyers than in other regions, so each region has different numbers of professionals. And we also have experts within our RALOs we are not aware of their assistance. So the more information we have, it is not because we are going to do data trafficking, but we will be able to customize, to personalize, the information, leaving ICANN to the communities. And vice versa, we can leverage the knowledge of the RALO members for the benefit of ICANN.
Olivier Crepin-Leblond: that the groundwork that is done here can then feed into another recommendation which speaks about the policy management process system, something which is a long-term goal. And there we would be completely redesigning the way that we can carry out policy work in a scalable fashion. The whole idea is to be able to scale this up, with having a blueprint for some kind of an automated system that would make sure that the right information goes to the right people and all according to key words, etc. that the groundwork that is done here can then feed into another recommendation which speaks about the policy management process system, something which is a long-term goal. And there we would be completely redesigning the way that we can carry out policy work in a scalable fashion. The whole idea is to be able to scale this up, with having a blueprint for some kind of an automated system that would make sure that the right information goes to the right people and all according to key words, etc.
Siranush Vardanyan: I would be more than happy to run this survey again, and probably to use this opportunity to update our database on ALS primary and secondary contacts as well. So we can put a couple of questions there to identify the expertise, to update our database, and to ask questions how RALO leadership can be helpful with what kind of information, and what do they need to become an active ALS if that’s possible? And based on this we can move forward.
