The Mexico City meeting is a landmark for At-Large. For the first time, the whole At-Large community will be meeting together face-to-face in the ‘At-Large Summit’. About 90 representatives of the At-Large membership of organisations (called “At-Large Structures”) are already confirmed. Mexico City meeting attendees will be able to spot them easily, as each will have a ribbon indicating their status as a Summit delegate attached to their ICANN meeting badges.

It is being held 28 February through 5 March, at the Sheraton and also at the nearby Melia Mexio Reforma hotel.

All ICANN staff, board members, and community members are invited and encouraged to attend the sessions, all of which are open to everyone.

In the build up to every ICANN meeting, there is always a glut of public comment periods as reports are finished in time for the community to review them before discussing them in person.

Mexico City is no exception. Although this time, it is very much easier to get a quick overview of what is out from public comment from the front page of the ICANN website (the third box down on the right). Just to present you with another avenue to finding out about these public comment periods however, there are all listed below with quick explanations of what they are and the dates when they close.

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Our new Interim Trust Anchor Repository has been launched to help people more easily deploy DNSSEC.

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Over the past two months the Internet has faced yet another threat to its security and one that directly involves the Domain Name System.

The Conflicker/Downadup worm infects computers running Windows operating systems variants. The infected computers can be remotely controlled (i.e. forming a botnet) and the infection propagates through a number of different routes. The worm has been estimated as infecting as many as 10 million hosts and data from the security community indicates the number is at least 1.5 million. One mechanism the worm’s code uses to enable control is to download commands by accessing specific date-based domain names.

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On the Monday of the Mexico meeting, there will be a joint meeting of the Advisory Committees and Supporting Organisations. The objective of this “ACSO” session is to share views and perspectives on common issues in a way that will inform the discussions within those groups during the week.
The format is a discussion among selected members of each of the Supporting Organisations and Advisory Committees. Each SO and AC will designate up to four people in order to represent a range of perspectives.

The meeting will be held in two 90-minute sessions, separated by a 30-minute break, and with a 30-minute feedback period at the end. There will be two broad discussion topics of common interest, with specific sub-questions. They are:

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As explained in an earlier post, we have created an online question box for Mexico City public forums. That question box is embedded into this post so you can respond simply and directly from the ICANN blog.

The box should appear below (you may have to click on “[read the rest]“). If you have trouble viewing the box, you can access it directly on the web using this URL: http://icann.wufoo.com/forms/mexico-city-question-box/.

If you were at the Cairo meeting, you will know that there was no small degree of irritation about the time that was available for the traditional open mic session on the Thursday.

If people are really keen, I can explain why that came about, but perhaps more importantly, we have ensured that there is plenty of time available at the Mexico City meeting next month for “public forum”.

In fact, there is four-and-a-half hours dedicated forum time: 90 minutes on the Monday solely covering the Applicant Guidebook; 30 minutes at the end of the Joint ACSO meeting; and two-and-a-half hours open-mic time on the Thursday.

Click here to visit the online question box

Just to be clear: this is more open-mic time than at any ICANN meeting since Vancouver in 2005, and that meeting was marked out as being where both the dotcom contract and the .xxx application were discussed. We are also starting to separate out the delivery of reports (AC/SO chairs, staff and Board Committees) from “public forum” time, meaning open microphone time. That means that open microphone time is not dependent on anything else and stands alone as dedicated time.

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So, no doubt you have all been wondering what exactly ICANN and its staff have been up to over January with respect to the Applicant Guidebook and the reams of comments covering the new generic top-level domain process.

In order to provide some answers and perspective, ICANN’s most senior executives dealing with the process – the CEO Paul Twomey, the COO Doug Brent and the Senior Vice President for Services Kurt Pritz – have done a video update on where we are now and where the process is going.

You can see it on the right-hand-side of this post. Enjoy.

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Estamos muy contentos de poder recibir a la comunidad de ICANN en la Ciudad de México el próximo mes de marzo. En ICANN, junto con AMIPCI, NIC-México e ISOC-México (las organizaciones locales que forman el comité organizador de la reunión), estamos trabajando a todo vapor para que esta sea una reunión exitosa, la primera del 2009 y la primera que tiene como sede a México.

¿De qué se trata la reunión de ICANN?

ICANN coordina a nivel mundial el sistema de direccionamiento de Internet (el DNS) a través de un modelo participativo basado en el consenso. Cualquier persona interesada puede participar e influir el proceso de toma de decisiones de ICANN. Los gobiernos, las empresas, la comunidad técnica y la sociedad civil tienen todos la misma oportunidad de expresarse en lo que respecta a la elaboración de políticas.

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