Yes what you are saying may be true, but if our staff cannot use the tools we plan on using than it creates more problems for the volunteers.  So having reviewed tools and having chosen ones and even with ICANN IT involved we found out the hard way that if staff cannot get the blessing of their bosses it does not make sense to go down that route.  We are all extremely busy and to take on a job that does not have a likelihood of success is a path that people may chose not to go down.  this could change but having gone down these paths several times before I choose not to go down these path again until we get approval.

Best,

Judith 



On Wed, Apr 2, 2025 at 2:45 PM Judith Hellerstein <judith@jhellerstein.com> wrote:

 

The TTF would happily review these technologies but until we know if ICANN staff would be able to use it, we see no sense in reviewing them. When we did our extensive trial of Loomio we found out that if ICANN is not approving it, than At Large staff are not allowed to use it.  Thus I see no sense in reviewing discord or other technology unless ICANN Org allows staff to participate in our trial.

When we (meaning I) originally created the At-Large Skype conversations, no permission was either granted or requested from ICANN. I am not even aware of any other ICANN constituency that uses Skype, though over the years others may have followed our example. Clearly ICANN has no official solution or it would have been implemented by now and moved everyone over as happened with Confluence. Maybe ICANN staff have internal tools like Slack but that has never been offered to its volunteer communities.

But that's perfectly OK. Creating an ALAC shared space is trivial to do. If a consensus of people simply goes there and starts chatting, then that's it. No permission, no approval.

Just watch. Here is an ALAC Discord server, complete with voice capabilities and subgroups for every RALO and a few committees, ready to use IMMEDIATELY. Feel free to try it right now:
https://discord.gg/94Q2wFFM

The only next step necessary is for people to start using it. No cost ever to users or to the Discord server administrators.

And if the consensus is that people here don't want to use it? Fine, while unpopulated it's as easy to dissolve as it was to make. Signal, WhatsApp, and Telegram all await as alternatives.

The TTF was formed as an ALAC committee, not an ICANN one. Any restraints it imposes on itself to require ICANN blessings are of its own, voluntary, absolutely unnecessary, design.

- Evan