ICANN Meetings - Future Structure 2006 12 6

Susan Crawford - ICANN Board Member / Speaker and Moderator

Sao Paulo Session on how to improve ICANN meetings <- Susan Paper which is open to edit

Susan Crawford

[edit] Communcations

• Greater Online interaction
• Translations into other languages - French, Spanish, Mandarin
• All minutes posted online
• Agendas/key docs posted earlier
• Public Access to board meetings and transcriptions
• More dialogue at meetings
• Virtual participation / presentations

Comments

• it is important to better focus on clear communications to non-english speakers
• user online tools, RALO signing on YouTube as an example

[edit] Offline Topics not mentioned

• Ability for all to participate (should include people with disabilities)
• Smoking in the meeting rooms and in the halls of the venue should be banned. If meetings were in the USA it would not be tolerated. ICANN should insist that venues not allow smoking in their contracts during the venue week inside the venue secured area. The point were guards are manning the door is the point were smoking should stop.

[edit] Meetings Protocol

• we should know if we're in a public or private meeting
• All stakeholder meetings should be public (default setting). Those that are private should be subject to clear guidelines

Comments

• Michael Palage - regarding the "small fee", he thinks a fee potentially creates a barrier to entry (speed bump), most people who come invest thousands of dollars already and doesn't think that a fee does much.
• Keith Davidson - Voluntary fees? Worked in the past and might work here.
• Bertrand de la Chapelle -
• Chuck Gomes - all meetings should be public might be overreaching, better to have good guidelines for private meetings
• Amadeu Abril i Abril - public and open as much as possible
• Jacob Malthouse - holding deliberations in public generally end in better results
• Steve Metalitz (IPC), as far as he knows, all of their meetings have been open. Depends upon the purpose of the meeting, a private meeting may be appropriate if you are deciding the position of a given topic, etc.
• Paul Levins important to realize that we do a lot of things right and we are moving into good and new territory. We will be making improvements to our website. We should recognize what we are doing right.

[edit] Meeting Structure

• More interaction among board members in the board meeting
• Open meetings of GAC
• More face time for working groups
• More market tutorials
• More cross-cutting single-issue meetings

Comments

• Amadeu Abril i Abril - Small group discussions are important. Belonging to small clans shouldn't be as important as it is now. We shouldn't fill up the public forum with reports that we could read online. We need to foster more dialog -- we need to go further in this area.
• Bret Fausett - in the last 60-90 days ICANN's communications has improved a lot. There is still no excuse for "reading to me", this time together is important so we need to focus on dialogue when we are together. If we can take better advantage of this time, we can lose a day or two off the length of the meetings also.
• Naomasa Maruyama - Sessions are tough for newcomers. Some meetings are continuations of previous meetings and without that knowledge it's hard to pick up on.
• John Nevett If we want to encourage more attendance, having more information online ahead of time is great.
• Adam Peake Public forum upfront
• Wendy Seltzer - scheduling made available as soon as possible
• Susan Crawford time spent in small meetings is valuable
• Marilyn Cade - the board gets "so scheduled up" in working together that they have little time to work with the community.
• Thomas Narten - We have almost a full day to meet with constituencies, but more interaction of course is good
• Thomas Narten - It's inevitable that a public board meeting will be somewhat staged.

[edit] Meetings Locations

• These three meetings should take place in larger metropolitan hub locations

Comments'

• Paul Twomey - Sponsorship for meetings and appropriate parties for sponsoring the meetings. Host groups have taken on some of the cost and they raise sponsorship. If you have "hub meeting" then who sponsors?
• Keith Davidson - it is very expensive to host a meeting, tossing a couple hundred thousand dollars into a meeting isn't what many ccTLD managers want to do. ICANN could buy some of the necessary equipment and ship it from meeting to meeting.
• Jean-Christophe Vignes of EuroDNS - In this online world we live in, the value of face to face exchange cannot be replaced, but I think twice/year would be not be enough.
• Wendy Seltzer - non business backed folks have a harder time coming to all these meetings
• Jon Nevett - ICANN could support the meetings a bit more
• Chuck Gomes - do we collect any participant data? Do these meetings really benefit the local communities?
• Paul Levins - we could have one meeting in a non-hub location and 2 in hub locations. We should have ICANN cruise ship <laughter>
• Steve Metalitz - we'd have more participation if the locations were easier to get to, and support 2 meetings vs. 3, but understands there are tradeoffs
• Paul Twomey - 60 plus people have said that they'd come to the meetings if they could get to them more easily.
• Bret Fausett - travel is really a burden, these aren't 5 day meetings, they are 7 day meetings with 2 days of travel on either side. The expectation is that you need to be away from home 1 month a year. Shorten the meetings or go to 2 meetings/year.
• Keith Davidson - read some stats showing local support
• Bertrand de La Chapelle - permanent location is a no-go. We shouldn't be discussing the # of meetings without discussing what happens in between. Are there regional meetings for outreach?
• Peter Dengate Thrush - There is a real advantage to having the meeting move around.
• Susan Crawford - please feel free to contact the board and staff on these issues
• Paul Twomey - Many thanks to Susan Crawford for her leadership on this issue