I was elected as one of six UKRAC (.UK Registry Advisory Council) councillors on 23rd July 2021 in the Mid-Small Segment. You can find my Statement of Interests here.
While the initial governance sets out 4 – 6 half day meetings a year, this is currently significantly more with the UKRAC meeting every 6 weeks (8 times a year). My time spent on UKRAC matters is taken as holiday from my employer where required.
Here’s some of the work I have done so far for the UKRAC so far:
Stats:
| Days Worked: (including meetings, working groups, calls, and time spent reviewing papers & minutes) |
15 |
| Expenses Claimed: | Nil. |
| Other Payments Received: | Nil. |
| Meetings Attended: | 8 |
Meetings attended:
27th August 2021
First UKRAC meeting, covering design group handover, reviewing UKRAC Terms of Reference, Expiring Domains, Online Harms, Price Good Practice and Proxy Service Incident Planning.
8th October 2021
Covered Terms of Reference Redline updates, Policy Updates, DLIWG Minutes/Update, Online Harms, Price Good Practice, and the Members Forum – which became the community.nominet.uk
19th November 2021
Nominet Policy, Work Programme, Proxy Services Incident Plan Update, Members Forum Guidelines & TOS, DLIWG Update, Briefing Note on Proposed Process for Working Groups.
14th January 2022
Vacant UKRAC Position, .UK Registration Policy Review, DropList Working Group update, Working Group Process Update, Online Harms Briefing from IWF, Code of Conduct Paper Discussion, Access to the .UK Zone File, Member Engagement Update, including updates on progress of Community.
The Access to .UK Zone File is a paper I put forward to review who is able to access the .UK Zone File and consider opening this up to non-members such as security researchers – this is on going.
24th January 2022
1 hr 15 minute meeting to discuss Community moderation escalation case.
25th February 2022
DLIWG updates and proposed recommendations to the board. We also discussed potential refinements and consolidation of .UK Registry Terms and conditions as well as the relevance of .me.uk and .net.uk SLDs today. A Code of Conduct for UKRAC was also introduced and discussed.
An important issue to me was the discussion on the Community moderation process and UKRACs role in overseeing complaints and challenges in doing this. We concluded that the UKRAC has a role to play here to give members confidence in the fairness of Community moderation and Nominet Engagement and I agreed to form a WG to discuss further and provide a proposal in improving this at the next meeting.
7th April 2022 (CEO Call)
I represented the UKRAC on the CEO call to give a brief overview of the UKRACs work and highlight the upcoming elections to members as well as a Q&A. Members can watch it in the Nominet Member Hub here.
29th April 2022
We discussed key issues such as proposed amendments to the community terms & guidelines which came out of a working group between Nominet Engagement and I, and an improved complaints handling process to ensure any future complaints regarding community moderation can be handled efficiently.
Other key issues on the agenda included next steps for the T&C review for .UK domains, and .UK EPP Standardisation – This was a lengthy discussion where many key concerns were raised such as the impact of auto-renew as default (I hope that this will become a tag option so registrars can choose if their domains should auto-renew or auto-expire for easier management), the impact of changing the transfer process from push to pull and the removal of tag types – particularly the benefits of enabling low-compliance burden options for smaller registrars and the ability to opt-in to higher standards for Accredited Channel Partners. I expect this to take a number of meetings to discuss all points and the eventual proposal to go a member consultation. I’m particularly interested in member thoughts on this so please do reach out.
You can read more on the UKRAC meetings in the Nominet Member Hub here: UKRAC Meeting Papers & Minutes