Having Trouble Understanding ICANN?
You’re not the only one!
ICANN is a fast-growing organization with a lot of sub-organizations and a large staff. ICANN’s own org chart doesn’t list the myriad working groups, executive committees, and regional organizations that proliferate within it.
If you’re used to working on the Internet, you might think, “I’ll just join a mailing list and lurk for a while until I understand the lay of the land.” Good thought, but which one of the mailing lists should you sign up for? The array is bewildering. Take it from us, you’ll learn a lot of about some minutiae of a sub-sub-topic, but you won’t get a sense of how this organization functions.
Understandably, ICANN staff members don’t want to be identified as the go-to person for general questions. They all have their specific duties and they all seem to be overworked.
So who do you talk to? How do you find information? It’s a hard question.
If you’re at an ICANN meeting, you can go to some of the sessions and make note of the people who seem to know what they’re talking about, then go up to them afterwards. That’s how we all got started.
But if you don’t have the time, energy, or inclination to engage in deep-pit archaeology, and just need an answer to a question, then please just ask us.
We’re happy to act as a resource.
