Dear community leaders and members of the Community Meetings Planning Group,

Thank you for attending the ICANN75 kickoff planning call yesterday. I am sending this note to follow up on the discussion and action items from the call. Please also find attached the slides that were used for the call, showing the highlights of the ICANN74 survey results, the ICANN75 block schedule, and other details.

The staff team hopes that the following points will be helpful to you and your groups as you continue your planning for ICANN75:

• Community Meetings Planning Group members who were present on the call agreed that ICANN75 should be a 6-day meeting, with the first two days (Saturday and Sunday) largely dedicated to internal group work (e.g. PDP working sessions, administrative committees and membership meetings as well as bilateral meetings between SOAC groups), and the remaining four days (Monday through Thursday) focused on community-facing sessions and discussions.
• The block schedule from the slide deck reflects this understanding. Based on the block schedule, the Monday-Thursday schedule will include an Executive Q&A session, Public Forum, one un-conflicted plenary session and the Geopolitical Forum.
• Although ICANN75 will span six days, the schedule should allow for ample breaks as well as time for networking and community discussions. The availability of rooms will also impact the number of concurrent sessions that can be conducted.
• The suggested deadline for submission of plenary topics is 15 July. In view of the tight timeline leading up to mid-September (when ICANN75 will take place), SOAC groups are encouraged to consider a plenary topic that is based on one of the previous topics that community feedback had highlighted as potential topics for a follow up plenary session. In addition to the three such topics highlighted on the slide deck, the RSSAC had previously suggested a topic on data privacy for consideration at a future meeting.

Based on the kickoff call, the staff team would also like to encourage you to consider whether a topic that your group may decide to submit as a potential plenary topic can also be scheduled as a regular session or as other than an un-conflicted session. We will be happy to work with you to showcase those topic(s) and session(s), to ensure that the broader community is aware of them and can plan to attend.

In addition, and as usual, we also encourage you to prioritize those topics, issues and discussions that would benefit most from hybrid participation at this time. This will help with room allocations and the minimization of conflicts.

Thank you all for your time and for once again taking the lead in planning our second post-pandemic hybrid meeting.

Cheers

Mary (on behalf of the ICANN org team supporting your meeting planning)