At the ICANN Meeting today Kurt Pritz who is in charge of the new gTLD program laid out a timeline for the new gTLD program.

“In December, we’re going to hold this prioritization drawing.

This drawing will prioritize the applications, meaning it will be the order in which applications are released and then processed through the rest of the evaluation.

So the ability to choose the form agreement as your form of contract, to select an appointment and to go through predelegation testing and then, finally, go to delegation will be determined by this drawing number.

That drawing will occur in December.

The first initial evaluation results will be published in March, so this advances the schedule for publishing any evaluation results.

We were going to publish all the evaluation results in June or July by prioritizing the applications, this allows us to pull forward and release some of the evaluation results early.

And then we’ll continually publish evaluation results in lots, i will not say “batches,” in lots, weekly lots, say every time, say every Friday at 5:00 or something like that we’ll publish a set of applications.

The objection period around which anyone can object, anyone with standing can object to an application, will close just before the initial evaluations are posted. So that objection period will last nine months, and then it will end on march 13th.

Now, it’s important to note for reasons we will go through in other session that is no contracts will be executed or delegations be made before the Beijing meeting.

(The Beijing will be held in April 2013)

But shortly after that, we’ll execute agreements that have been selected or negotiated and then pass the applications on to iana delegation.

And we should be through all the evaluation results in June.

We are actually finishing four or five months ahead of what we projected.

I could talk a lot about why that is, but it is due to the work people in this room and beating the heck out of our consultants.

So some statistics, seven applicants have withdrawn applications or sent us notice to withdraw applications.

Six of them are completed.

The money is given back and their names are posted.

One is still in process because there’s back and forth between us and the applicants, so in order to make everything official, that’s where that is.

No objections have been received.

We’ve received mistakes in attaching objections, typos, changing string names, changes of primary contact as organizations morph, so we are really careful to create a process so that all these change applications were considered the same way using the same criteria and having worked through that, worked through it with the board and the executive staff, we now have a rutennized way of considering these. We expect the processing of these now to happen pretty fast.

We’ve approved 29 of the change requests. 84 of them are still in review and 14 of them we’ve requested some additional information from the applicant. As those changes are made — am i going to talk about this later in the thing? A little bit? So i will just — and then the other statistic is we receive a lot of comments, 8900 comments have been filed so far against each application.

So how are we doing? Here’s seven types of evaluation that each application undergoes.

Some of the reviews are targeted at the applicant.

Some of the reviews are targeted at the string and the application.

We’ve narrowed down finishing dates for each of the firms. And we’ve essentially allocated, so to go through some of the detail, we’ve essentially allocated all the applications to the different firms with the two exceptions that you see and the financial review and the technical review, the two most complex reviews, these are the questions all the applicants filled out and their scored questions. We have many evaluators who want to normalize results, make sure they’re consistent.

The way we’re managing that is we assign applications in lots, or batches, to those evaluators with the idea that we want to maintain competition and consistency across the application. So we assign a lot of applications. We give them, the evaluators, the chance to do that work and come back to us with a price of the remaining new applications. Based on that price, one panel might get more applications than another panel. So it is a way that we continually keep competition in the evaluation process, keep our costs low and keep our speed up.

We have this formalized process where we can ask clarifying questions.

So, for example, in a technical evaluation, if there is insufficient information or some incorrect information or conflicting information, some applicants, you know, they’ve attached 60 or more documents to every application, sometimes they — there’s such a wealth of information, sometimes they contradict and the evaluation panels need to get to the bottom of that.

So the technical and financial panels might ask for more information. There might be a really clear requirement in the guidebook that the applicant just skips, and it happens quite often because a failure to attach required documentation, that can be easily cured.

And geographic names, the supporting documentation of the government might be missing or it might be insufficient. The guidebook is pretty clear as to what that supporting documentation should say.

A few words about the evaluations, the technical and financial reviews are being performed by Ernest & Young and KPMGH and the third firm is Jas Global Advisors.

Why three firms? One to give us capabilities to process this many applications. Two is to manage conflicts so that if one firm as a conflict we can add that application off to another firm and that is managed very strictly.

These panels have done three pilot runs and gone around the table and traded answers and traded scores. We’re getting to a pretty steady state consistency with scores. When you get to the final scores, pass/fail after cq, they are pretty much 100% consistent. There are still questions in how they might ask a clairying questions, so we are working on normalizing that.

So all this work around pilots and normalizations is leading to a release of these clarifying questions that’s targeted for november 26th. So you’ll see real clarifying questions around that time.