ICANN Labs Want A Panel At SXSW

Over the past year ICANN has been undergoing a period of change.

With the appointment of a new CEO any organisation will undergo change, but when you combine that with other factors like the new TLD program, the new contracts for both registrars and registries, changes across the industry and much much more, it’s easy to see how the organisation would be forced to change.

Some changes are welcome, while others might make people a little nervous.

While I’m still not 100% sure if the ICANN Labs initiative is a good idea or not I am intrigued by what they’re doing.

And when you see them pitching for a panel / session at SXSW you can see that things have changed quite a bit.

They’ve been encouraging people to vote for their proposed session for SXSW 2014 in the last couple of days.

You can have a read over their panel proposal here and vote for it, but watch the video where they explain some of their thinking – it’s definitely interesting. The key message being that participation methods need to evolve

In the last few days they’ve rolled out a number of “experiments” with announcements going out via Twitter, as well as their blog.

However there is also a certain degree of naivety in how some aspects of these experiments are being handled. As Andrew pointed out, the domains being used for the experiments were not registered to ICANN, but to the 3rd party developers working on the project. What’s even more concerning is the ICANN Labs’ response to Andrews article in the comments.

Hopefully they’ll learn from these  mistakes.

Related articles

• Who owns the domain names ICANN Labs is using? (domainnamewire.com)
• ICANN launches ICANN Labs (domainnamewire.com)

The whois data for the domains has been updated to reflect ICANN since Andrew’s piece was published, but the rationale behind allowing employees of a 3rd party to register domains in this fashion hasn’t been shared beyond the reply mentioned above.