Re: [ICANN-EU] Any interest in an alternative interface to the ICANN Q&A Forum?

[Alf Hansen <aha@uninett.no>]

Andrew,

I think you are thinking in the right direction, because openness is a
good thing.

One thing I am concerned of is that we should be careful to make
"official" tools that makes it easy for non-At-Large-members to
distribute information to At-Large-members. In general this is no
problem, but there is and will allways be a few people or organizations
that may misuse this channel and destroy constructive discussions.

Best regards,
-- 
Alf Hansen                     Mail address:
                                 UNINETT FAS A/S
aha@uninett.no                   N-7465 Trondheim, Norway
Home page:                     Phone: +47 73 55 79 00
http://domen.uninett.no/~alf/  Fax:   +47 73 55 79 01




Andrew Bloch wrote:
> 
> Use the power of the Internet -- let's not restrict ourselves by the ancient
> limitations that ICANN imposes on us.
> 
> As most of you probably know by now, ICANN has set up a question and answer
> forum for members (only) to ask questions of nominees
>  http://members.icann.org/qa.html ).  Unfortunately, there are a few
> features missing that could be useful, and I've started thinking about
> creating an alternative interface to make up for the shortcomings.   I could
> create a mirror of all the questions and answers on ICANN's official site
> and provide some advanced features.
> 
> Here are some of the features I'm considering:
> 
> 1.  Allow users (members and non-members) to post comments in response to
> the nominees' answers.
> 
> 2.  Forward new answers to interested users by email, so they don't have to
> visit the website frequently.
> 
> 3.  A compact table showing which candidates have answered which questions.
> 
> 4.  A clearinghouse or other method for activated members to volunteer to
> ask questions on behalf of non-activated members or members from other
> regions.  (Under ICANN rules, active members can only submit questions to
> nominees in their own region.)
> 
> Before I start working on this, I wanted to measure people's interest
> (because I have a lot of other things that I should be doing with my time
> ;).  Please take a few seconds and send me your comments (to me only, unless
> you really think it's important enough to distract 100 people).
> 
> Would you use any or all of these features?
> 
> Can you think of other features you'd like?
> 
> Which features are most important, if there isn't enough time to implement
> them all?
> 
> *** If you are a candidate, would you try to read and/or respond to users
> comments?
> 
> Do you think a significant portion of at-large members will find this
> useful?
> 
> This would be most useful if as many members as possible know of its
> existence and use it.  Would you help promote it via any contacts you have
> with appropriate websites, email lists, etc.?
> 
> If a lot of people do use it, we will probably need to run it on another
> server, perhaps mirrored locally to each region.  Do you have access to a
> web server that could handle the possible traffic?  (preferably a unix box
> plus perl with the cgi and lwp libraries).
> 
> I have other projects that I should be working on.  Are you a web developer
> that could do this faster and/or better than me, with time to get this going
> in the next 24-48 hours?  Do you have any scripts that would be very useful?
> Or, should we instead involve a site like http://www.slashdot.org that
> already handles user comments and can support the bandwidth?
> 
> Thanks for your responses,
> 
> Andy Bloch