ICANN Launches Digital Innovation Platform, ICANNLabs

Los Angeles, California… ICANN has unveiled a new digital platform intended to foster collective experimentation and innovation to increase the levels of community-wide engagement.

The platform, called ICANNLabs, can be accessed at labs.icann.org.

Anyone can sign up to receive updates and provide feedback. The platform will create a truly transparent process, essential to ICANN and consistent with the organization’s multi-stakeholder model.

“It’s all about increasing our reach and relevance to new digital audiences which are engaging us through the web,” said Fadi Chehadé, ICANN President and CEO. “We are searching for new ways to innovate and stay true to our principles of bottom-up, community driven policy formation. ICANNLabs is quite simply an open experiment aimed at creating new digital forms of communication.”

Initially, ICANNLabs will launch prototypes focused on four initial tracks:

• Communication: How can ICANN drive increased awareness and participation in Internet policy discussion by exploring new models for content creation, growth and distribution?
• Education: How can ICANN leverage new online learning models to increase knowledge about ICANN the organization, its process, and its constituents?
• Conversation: How can ICANN facilitate deeper discussion and collaboration around policy development, which could extend to ICANN’s public comment process?
• Discovery and Personalization: Given the diverse interests and needs of its community, how can ICANN recommend relevant policy news, discussion, and education resources?

“ICANNLabs will give us an experimental digital space where we can showcase beta versions of proposed digital tools and assets and then seek community feedback,” said Sally Costerton, Senior Advisor to ICANN President on Global Stakeholder Engagement. “Using that feedback we will improve, or perhaps abandon certain tools then re-introduce improved versions and continue in that cycle until we have new and useful tools.”

During its initial unveiling, ICANNLabs will look at tools which frame issues around digital conversations, on social media, on education and on discovery.

Those who are interested are invited to register at labs.icann.org.