Following a very successful experiment at the last meeting in Mexico City with remote participation, we have expanded its use to the main room for the Sydney meeting.
We are using Adobe’s Connect software which will allow people to see everything going on in a particular session in one screen: live video, live audio, a live [...]

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The Public Participation Board Committee (PPC) is holding a public meeting on Wednesday in Sydney at 9am. In order to get the most out of that session, a backgrounder documents covering the topics that the Committee has been working on has been published.
Those topics are:
Status reports

Document deadlines
Language
Calendar of meetings

For discussion

Public comment process
Public Forum
Electronic [...]

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In just a few days, hundreds of people from all over the world will reach Sydney to participate in the upcoming 35th ICANN Meeting.
Many interesting discussions and important decisions will involve people with many different backgrounds, areas of expertise, opinions and expectations. Probably one of the few things they will all have in common is [...]

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Each meeting, we provide a guide that provides basic information for all attendees.
The guide features information about the venue, the main topics of the conference, information about how to participate, the lowdown on social events, pictures of the Board and chairs, emergency details, and lots more.
The meeting guide is printed and included into attendees bags [...]

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As part of my job at ICANN… I have to read a lot of news clips. This morning, one headline in particular caught my eye: “Domain changes coming”. It was from Reuters and started: “Two thirds of businesses are unaware they will be able to use their own name in place of domain extensions [...]

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Starting in Cairo in November 2008, the chairs of the different supporting organizations (SOs) and advisory committees (ACs) have held a joint meeting.

The idea was to find a formula for open communication that was more than a repeat of existing open microphone sessions. The chairs also wanted to create a forum that could break through the silos of discussion and communication in which ACs and SOs often operate. And, lastly, they wanted the opportunity to discuss topics of mutual interest and importance, and to have those topics suggested by ACSO members.

Click here to jump to the meeting agenda

Each time, feedback has been taken from the community and the session adjusted to reflect that. For Sydney, the decision has been taken to reduce the time taken on Monday to just one session of 90 minutes and to concentrate on a single topic (albeit with multiple arms).

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A Congressional Hearing is taking place in Washington this morning concerning ICANN and the conclusion of the Joint Project Agreement (JPA) that ICANN has with the US government.
President and CEO Paul Twomey is representing ICANN on a panel of six, in front of the Commerce Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet.
You can [...]

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Over the weekend, we published quite a bit of material. It was published now to meet a request by the Board and the community that we post three business weeks prior to the start of a meeting; these series of postings ensure that the bulk of materials being considered during Sydney will meet this goal.

With Sydney opening on Monday 22 June, we strived to have this information up before this morning, Monday 1 June.

As such, it is probably as comprehensive a set of documents as ICANN has published for any meeting - addressing hard issues on IDNs, an important report on intellectual property issues as related to domain names, another huge piece of comment and analysis related to new TLDs, new financial analysis, more on community travel (which is coming), and other areas. I’m also pretty confident that this is the earliest (relative to an ICANN meeting) that this kind of material has been available.

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The Board made a number of important decisions at its May meeting. You can read the preliminary report online now at http://www.icann.org/en/minutes/prelim-report-21may09.htm, but here is a quick rundown of the decisions made and their import.

• A new registrars contract

After two years of work, a new contract covering the relationship between ICANN and registrars was approved by the Board.

The contract contains no less than 17 amendments and was the first overhaul of the contract since it was first approved in 2001. Read more in the official announcement: http://www.icann.org/en/announcements/announcement-2-29may09-en.htm.

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