The letter was posted on the Nominet members’ private mailing list, nom-steer, and contains “sensitive and confidential board and HR matters”.

In it, Davies provides details of an executive compensation package through which he accuses the CEO of unfairly profiting from the non-profit organization, and also alleges that the previous head of IT was kicked out the company for raising a concern about the CEO’s behaviour.

This is just the latest broadside in a war that has been raging at the heart of Nominet for almost a year.

Continue reading ‘Nominet Board fight rolls on’

In fact, 90.97 percent – which in reality meant that a Nominet member or two either way would have seen the whole thing fall over. I’m very pleased this got through. I think Nominet should be able to move into other areas – particularly ENUM and particularly the next generation of Net infrastructure. The domain name system in itself is a set system now and despite the expansion in new gTLDs, and the upcoming IDNs, it’s not where the growth and Nominet has bigger eyes and better talent than that.

Of course, there is always the risk that it could become increasingly corporate and aggressive. But then shoulda, woulda, coulda. The Board has learnt its lesson about not taking the members for granted, and these two votes – especially the e-voting one which got 96.66 percent approval – are good for the company.

I’m particularly interested to see what Jay Daley comes up with along his digital identifier lines.

Anyway, I have to go as I have some fancy black-tie do in London to get to – the BCS Annual Dinner, but here are two stories I have done about it for The Register and for Techworld.

And some nice pics. The full set are here for perusal.

Both of them made mention of my paella (I note with sadness that only one was interested in the actual recipe however). Now this was a tremendous paella, there’s no doubt about that, but I suspect that there may be a few people out there that don’t want to know about my lunch and so I am going to highlight here an easy solution to the problem: separate RSS feeds.

I have the blog set up so that you can grab individual automated RSS feeds and so avoid having every post appear if you subscribe. I will stick the links below so at least people have an option. Of course, if you want to continue to know a little too much about my life, feel free to stick with the main RSS feed. I don’t mind in the slightest.

• Main blog feed
• Internet feed (includes all ICANN, IGF and Nominet stories)
• ICANN feed
• IGF feed
• Nominet feed
• iPod feed
• Journalism feed
• Oxford feed
• Photos feed
• Podcast feed
• Sex.com feed
• Technology feed
• WSIS feed

You can subscribe to as many or as few as you like.

I have grabbed the audio from the meeting and produced a series of MP3 files which you can download and listen to here. I will also post them on the IGF200.info blog. All files below:

• Opening Panel: Emily Taylor (Nominet), Alun Michael MP, Nitin Desai
  MP3 file (22 mins)
  
  

• Security Panel: Jean-Jaques Sahel (DTi), Mark Sunner (Messagelabs), Dave Evans (Information Commissioners Office), Guy Hosein (Privacy International/LSE), Richard Allan (Cisco)
  MP3 file (35 mins)
  
  

• Child Abuse Panel: Peter Robbins (Internet Watch Foundation), John Carr (NCH), Camille de Stempel (AOL/ISPA)
  MP3 file (22 mins)

• Openness Panel: Andrew McLaughlin (Google), Dr Yaman Akdeniz (Cyberliberties UK), Prof Jonathan Zittrain (OII/Berkman)
  MP3 file (34 mins)
  
  

• Emerging Issues Panel: Howard Williams (Worldbank), David Harrington (Communications Management Association), Malcolm Hutty (LINX), Chinyelu Onwurah (Ofcom)
  MP3 file (42 mins)
  
  

• Closing remarks by Nitin Desai
  MP3 file (10 mins)
  
  

I have also done a file combining just Nitin Desai’s opening and closing remarks, which you can grab here (mp3, 20 mins).

I should add that I was hoping to post videos of each sessions but have been thwarted by the combination of video formats and video editing software. I have a (very large) grab of the whole event in .asf format but have given up on editing after wasting hours trying to get it into a more usable format and only ending up with out-of-sync pics and audio.

Hopefully Nominet will ask the webcast company to do the split and post them in .avi or .mpeg files. The pictures are not that important anyway and are huge files so the MP3s are more useful and shareable.

In some ways, it was a sort-of mini IGF in that it took the same free-ranging panel approach and that it explictly held two panels on two of the four main themes of the IGF – “security” and “openness” (Nitin Desai pointed out that had the meeting been in a developing country, the panels and debate would have been on the other two themes – diversity and access).

It was also similar to the real meeting in the role that I have been asked to play: “chief blogger” – meaning scouring the Internet for interesting comments and reading them out to the room. Actually, this term “chief blogger” has led some to ask whether I’m some of kind of official IGF blogger, which I certainly am not, so I will refer to my role as “blog watcher” from now on.

The general feeling is that the meeting was a success. The room will filled with people who know alot about Internet issues – and for once it wasn’t dominated by the political issue of US control but rather the question of what problems the Net has thrown up and the best way of dealing with them. Moderator Sarah Montague of BBC fame did an excellent job of keeping the discussion moving, not allowing people to get away with platitudes and, crucially, not allowing discussions to slip into jargon.

In fact, the only part of the meeting that fell down was my part. The interaction from online users was pitiful. As such, this post will cover that element of interaction with online users, and I will cover what was actually said at the meeting in a different post. But I want to tackle this issue of interaction because it strikes me that there are serious issues here and it needs some good brains on the problem to figure out how to make it work.

There was an early success with the wireless router I brought from home (the building staff were unhelpful about such matters apparently) which I had pre-configured at home, plugged in, and managed to supply the room with Net access. Although my decaying laptop failed (yet again) to smoothly link to the network so I had to borrow one from the webcasting company and rebuild all the editorial web connections I needed from scratch.

This was the essence of my role: scour the blogs for any information about the meeting and interject it as and when asked. Since this was only a small and short meeting, there was never going to be blog coverage so an addition was a question tool, used at the Oxford Internet Institute IGF meeting a month ago. The question tool was rapidly deployed at the last minute with the aid of Jonathan Zittrain and enabled people to post questions online, plus vote on posted questions, thereby pushing them up the list, and so registering wider interest in the question being asked (you can see the end result of this here).

I had done a story for The Register in the morning covering the meetings and encouraging bloggers to interact, and this was picked up by one of the biggest blogging sites out there – Boing Boing – so I was fairly confident of some interaction. It was not to be. Some work colleagues look in on the meeting and posted a question or two, and Jon Zittrain also contributed one or two items but apart from that, the whole process attracted only three people.

Feedback

As a result the feedback I was able to supply to the moderator was minimal at best. And, with some irony, the one time I had an excellent question, supplied by Glyn Wintle, and indicated to Sarah Montague I had something, she couldn’t see me above the lights and ended the panel discussion before I had a chance to jump in. In the break, we worked out a system between me, the webcasters, and the moderator but very little else was forthcoming. Many of the people in the room were only aware of the online element because it was explicitly referred to by the moderator and also it was possible to bring up my laptop screen on the screens either side of the stage and on screen built into the panel’s desk.

Interestingly, some of the questions on the question tool were usefully answered by others within it – i.e. there was a parallel discussion going on online.

So what?

Well, a big element of the IGF is – or is supposed to be – interaction and involvement from people outside the room. After all, we are talking about the Internet Governance Forum. There has been a lot of talk of collaborative software, much of which has been ignored or poo-pooed by governments, but the IGF really is an opportunity to get these new technologies working and show their value.

Of course the great advantage of this type of interaction is that people don’t have to physically travel to the meeting to find out what is going on, plus there is the opportunity to have input into the meeting. This is particularly useful for people from developing countries who simply can’t afford to travel to Athens, even if they had the time and inclination.

Not everyone is happy about the idea of these tools being used to produce input into the meeting. And it is now my considered opinion that at this moment, this year, real-time feedback and input from the Internet is not going to work as a formal interjection. The input is too inconsistent and it requires intelligent filtering. I found in the Nominet meeting that listening to what was going on, plus checking out what people were discussing online, combined with attempting to boil this information down into something that could be interjected into discussions at the appropriate point was frankly too taxing. It is simply impossible for one person to do it by themselves and requires a team of people.

Talking fast

Discussion in a room actually moves incredibly quickly so the time that it takes to get feedback from people online, filter it and supply it to the room produces a delay that stilts real discussion. As such, the best method of including web-produced questions and content is to make it a separate cut-off from discussions. The moderator drawing a distinction. In the same way that on some TV shows, they make a point of “going to the phones”. Phone technology and, more importantly, humans’ comfort with phones has increased to such a level that you can now have conference calls, but even so they are not the same as face-to-face interaction. With most people still uncomfortable – or even unaware – of the new Net collaboration tools, perhaps it isn’t surprising that this divide exists.

But all that aside, I was still expecting between 10 and 20 people to be online during the Nominet meeting and they simply weren’t and that raises some important questions now only about why, but also about how you can encourage interaction.

These are my thoughts and ideas and I welcome anyone that has other input. First, reasons why the interaction from online was so low:

1. Very few people knew the meeting was going ahead (The Reg and Boing Boing stories appeared only hours before the actual meeting started)
2. Most of those who knew about it before then were in the room
3. Very few in the room had laptops and so could not interact online (I counted three people)
4. People couldn’t get the webcast or were not able to watch live (apparently, the controls didn’t work in Firefox so any new entry to the webcast started at the start of the meeting even as it was still going on).
5. People didn’t know where the interaction was going on – or even if there was any

The more technological and social reasons:

• The system was not friendly or simple enough – people were put off interacting
• People couldn’t see the point in interacting (after all, the questions made weren’t actually asked in the room in the end)
• People don’t want to interact (most people in a conference room don’t ask questions)
• The system wasn’t made clear – what would happen if you did type something in?
• The system was confusing or set up in a way that didn’t work – most people are not journalists and/or used to framing precise questions

Now, there are some things that separate the IGF meeting from the Nominet meeting:

• More people know the IGF meeting is going ahead
• The IGF is larger, so even if the small interaction is scaled up, there will still be enough people online for it to have value – especially since these people are likely to be more motivated to interact
• The IGF meeting is worldwide, meaning that there will be more people who know of the meeting that can’t physically attend – making online interaction more attractive
• More people at the meeting itself will have laptops and/or Net access

But that still leaves a number of hurdles:

• Making the interaction simple enough
• Making clear to people the point in interacting
• Trying to find a way to pull the online interaction into the ongoing real-world discussions
• Letting people know exactly where and how they can interact online
• Finding a way to filter and condense information into a form that has real practical use

This job will be made harder by the fact that I’m not sure it will be possible to bring up the online interaction on screens in the IGF conference room (I will have to ask Markus Kummer if this is possible), and by the fact that alot more information makes it more difficult to pick out useful material.

These then are my tentative conclusions from the Nominet blog watching experience into how to make IGF interaction better, wider, and more useful.

1. Get the interaction areas up online as soon as possible and allow people to start using them so they can get comfortable with the idea
2. Encourage free and open use of the system by as many people as possible both inside and out of the main meetings
3. Make the system as simple as possible
4. Explain how the interaction will work
5. Have a team of people watching and working with one another to help flag and fasttrack interesting comments
6. Try to get agreement for screens in the venue that can be switched to the online interactions when appropriate (this still leaves the issue of making whatever content is important fill the laptop screen so it can be viewed by people a distance away)
7. Expect for most of the useful interaction online to work in parallel to the actual ongoing meeting rather than within it (and find a way of connecting the two without disrupting either)

I’m sure there are others, but those are my thoughts at the moment. I hope they strike a chord with someone out there.

In fact, I am the official chief blogger for the Internet Governance Forum itself in Athens at the end of this month. That basically means that I will spend a good chunk of the conference reading what others have to say about the meeting online and I will occasionally be asked to summarise to the room what is being said by the rest of the world. At which point I will read out the most interesting and incisive blog posts to the assembled masses.

I actually see this as a vitally important role as it gives a voice to the people that haven’t flown to Athens and who have nothing more than a Net connection and a good point to make. That’s why I accepted the role and now I need your help to make the most of it.

Update: You can now see exactly what is happening at the IGF meeting, and simply and easily interact with events there through a website at IGF2006.info.

The role of a chief blogger was actually created by IGF head Nitin Desai when he attended the We Media conference in London in May and they had a chief blogger there (Alf Hermida, the BBC’s online news editor) reading out people’s responses from the wider Internet.

The advantage that We Media has over the IGF though was that We Media was very much a media event since media companies had invested large sums of money in it. And media folk love nothing more than writing about themselves and their friends in the media. The IGF however has been notable by people’s reluctance to provide money and does not have any big media companies in tow so the ready availability of bloggers is in question.

The IGF is in fact incredibly and wonderfully important – it is the first time that governments, business and everyday ordinary folk will sit down as almost-equal partners in something that hasn’t been pre-decided. It is a vast experiment and everyone is watching to see if the chemistry either creates an incredible new compound or blows up.

I think it’s important enough to involve myself a little deeper than I am usually comfortable with since I like to remain an independent observer. But then no one else appeared to be able to get stuck in and be in the middle of things, reflecting what the wider world things of United Nations discussions.

To get very rapidly back to my point – Nominet is having an IGF meeting tomorrow. The agenda is here [pdf], and it will be webcast here. I implore anyone who is interested in this area (i.e. anyone who cares about where the Internet goes) to check it out and to write their feelings about it – and then make me aware of the those feelings so I can tell everyone in the room.

To this end – and for the bigger IGF meeting in Athens, I have set up an open blog which I hope will serve as an interesting discussion point. You can find it at http://igf2006.info/blog/, and the site itself (http://igf2006.info) will soon have a range of interesting collaborative tools.

Get involved. Listen to what people have to say, then write what you think, and I will do my best to make sure that everyone knows what it is.

In a nutshell: ICANN is taking the chance to escape US control seriously; everyone remains annoyed with the US administration’s failure to actually do anything except give easily breakable assurances (I am pretty sure this will change when the Bush Administration is no longer in power).

And Nominet? Well, it is running with the elections results as they were, meaning Gordon Dick and Fay Howard become directors again. But the justification of sticking with the results is poor at best, and I understand there are more questions that need to be answered, including the fact that many members, it would appear, didn’t actually receive their voting slips in time to vote. This has the potential of blowing up in Nominet’s face.

Never a dull moment on the Net.

I arrived in San Francisco an hour ago to no less than four voicemails and 50 non-spam emails – in the spate of 10 hours. I knew ICANN was going to announce its MoU late on Thursday but was unable to speak to Paul Twomey before my plane this morning. As I write this I still don’t know what’s in it, but I have had eight emails and two voicemails about it.

Likewise, I understand that this blog went down this afternoon (UK time) while I was on the 747, reading iWoz, and trying to ignore both Mission Impossible III being shown inches from my face and a woman asleep and lolling dangerously to my side.

Update: Incredibly, it would appear that my site was brought down by a denial of service attack from Mac maniacs because of this article on Techworld and my response to some aggressive criticism.
And I still don’t know what’s happened with Nominet’s elections either – although I also have several emails about that.

So, in summary, I have chosen the worst day in a year to sit on a plane. Why can’t they sort out Net and phone access on board plane for chrissakes? Fortunately everyone apart from Californians are asleep so I might be able to catch up with some pithy analysis and no one will notice.

It’s a shame I’m not in Los Angeles, I’d go knock on ICANN’s door…

In a nutshell: a change of accountants because Nominet is getting bigger; another bit of vote chaos that may blow up tomorrow when the result from the Board election is announced; Nominet is making too much money for its own good; a tentative move forward on another EGM to let Nominet get at ENUM and other registry services (maybe.eu, they say).

As for the Board election, well according to a poll I quickly knocked up on this site and which an extraordinary 15 people voted on, the winners are due to be Gordon Dick and Lord Erroll.

Actually I was surprised in talking to each of them how plausible each person was for the role. And from the people that I’ve spoken to, they were struck by the same thing. Gordon is very capable and approachable and knows Nominet; Lord Erroll knowledgeable and well-connected; Andrew Bennett has a perspective that Nominet needs to understand; Fay Howard is very experienced; Angus Hanton is also very experienced, especially as a Board member; and Peter Gradwell knows the business side of things.

I’ll predict that Andrew Bennett won’t get it because he’s too young and a domainer – but I hope that Nominet members and staff sit down with him and try to pull him into Nominet’s processes. Peter Gradwell is viewed with suspicion because of Pipex and the recent aborted EGM. I’m not sure Angus Hanton is well enough known within the voting Nominet community. And I suspect that Fay Howard will lose out because people want to have at least some kind of change in the Board and Lord Erroll is clearly very capable.

So that’s my weak prediction – which of course aligns with the poll on this blog . Of course, if it’s a close run thing, Nominet may be forced to re-run the whole shebang after some discussion about confused voting procedures.

The vote is now on my “polls archive” page, and I’ve stuck up another one about what the most pressing issue on the Net at the moment is. Please feel free to vote. I’ll be able to run this one a little longer than two days (Nominet really has to change its incredibly short voting process).

Poll result

Who gets your vote in the Nominet board elections?

* Gordon Dick (33%)
* Lord Erroll (27%)
* Andrew Bennett (20%)
* Fay Howard (13%)
* Angus Hanton (7%)
* Peter Gradwell (0%)

Last week, Nominet announced that there were six candidates and released a statement from each. Despite the extremely tight time period (for example postal votes have to be with Nominet tomorrow (Monday)), I thought it would be a good idea to do very brief interviews with each candidate asking what I hope are the questions that Nominet members would wish to ask and then post them on the Net to help people arrive at a decision.

So far I have done and edited four of the six, and I have just received an email from Lord Erroll so will hopefully talk to him this evening and post his tonight [Update 8.30pm: Done and now up]. I have yet to hear from Andrew Bennett which is a shame, but if he wants to get in contact and get his points across, there is still time [Another update 12pm: Andrew got in touch and his interview is now also up].

You can read each candidate’s statement here [pdf], but below are MP3s of the interviews. They are slightly different in length but average at around four minutes, and I don’t believe I have given anyone an advantage one way or another, although I may have been a little more aggressive with Fay Howard due to tiredness.

Also during Angus Hanton’s interview either myself or he was called by someone else so there is “call waiting” blip at various points (just in case you were wondering). And Fay Howard was on her mobile so the very beginning is slightly garbled.

In alphabetical order:

• Andrew Bennett (mp3)

• Gordon Dick (mp3)

• Lord Erroll (mp3)

• Peter Gradwell (mp3)

• Angus Hanton (mp3)

• Fay Howard (mp3)

If anyone has any problems getting or listening to these files, please leave a comment below or email me.

Update: Yes, the MP3 player has started playing at odd speeds again. It must be the recorded bitrate, or maybe the fact it’s a variable bitrate. Anyway the files themselves work fine, so click on the MP3 link to listen while I try to sort out the problem.

Second update: No, I’ve wasted 40 minutes on it, so I’ll kill the Flash player until I can get it working without mishap.