Dear All, We will promote our sessions, not only widely to the ICANN Community but internally as well. At-Large week details will be sent out on our mailing lists, passed on to GSE, Fellows, NextGen and on the other SO AC lists. The Social Media working group is also geared up to assist with the promotion of our sessions. We are looking forward to a productive At-Large week and ICANN72! Thank you. Kind regards, Gisella From: Maureen Hilyard <maureen.hilyard@gmail.com> Date: Monday, 11 October 2021 at 18:49 To: Olivier MJ Crepin-Leblond <ocl@gih.com> Cc: At-Large Staff <staff@atlarge.icann.org>, Jonathan Zuck <jzuck@innovatorsnetwork.org>, Joanna Kulesza <jkuleszaicann@gmail.com>, ALAC Working List <alac@atlarge-lists.icann.org> Subject: [Ext] Re: At-Large and ICANN72 Hi Olivier and all Well that sounds like that was an interesting meeting, and great to see that what At-Large is doing is being seen as impacting to some level of importance on other areas of ICANN. ICANN decided that the meeting was going to be over three weeks. The ICANN community is now experiencing its sixth virtual meeting, and half of the community live outside of the European and the US time zones. Not surprisingly, ICANN statistics have shown that the attendance by the other half of the world has not been great. For At-Large, I wanted to look at how we could use the ICANN meeting time more effectively to get more attendance and participation among those members who have not or could not attend even our own sessions at ICANN meetings. Naturally, we would welcome participants from other communities to join into our sessions and hope that they do not feel disadvantaged by our making use of what is considered to still be within the ICANN meeting timeframe. The week in between Prep Week and the ICANN meeting, despite whatever purpose ICANN originally intended, was created as the At-Large Week for the convenience of our community members whom we are encouraging to attend our sessions at least. It has given us an opportunity to experiment and do something different that considers our community of volunteers first, and to look at how it might impact their participation and attendance. Because they are real volunteers, many cannot sustain the timeframe of a full-on ICANN meeting even over four days. Because of my lone timezone, I myself have found that trying to stay awake across a block of nearly 10 hours in the middle of the night to attend irregular sessions has been very difficult, and more so when I have also had to work during my daylight hours. It has taken me at least a couple of weeks to get back to some sort of normality after a meeting. The At-Large week schedule is being held during what is our normal At-Large meeting times and at a more manageable load of two sessions a day. Our sessions do not conflict with other ICANN community sessions as they normally do when we participate in an ICANN meeting. At-Large involvement in the ICANN meeting this time is minimal and enables our members to attend other community sessions and to learn about what is of interest to the rest of the ICANN community. Our social media working group will be doing its best to ensure that other ICANNN communities are informed of our sessions as well as those of other communities that might be of interest to At-Large. I find it interesting that at a time when ICANN itself is asking the wider community how they think future meetings will be held, that some ICANNers are persisting that other communities must fit their expectations. Fortunately, we have been given an opportunity to consider what best meets the needs of our community first. There were no objections made when it was first raised at the SOAC meeting nor during our own planning sessions. However, if we find at the end of the ICANN meeting that it had no real effect then so be it. Back to the drawing board. I hope that helps. Regards Maureen On Tue, Oct 12, 2021 at 4:16 AM Olivier MJ Crépin-Leblond <ocl@gih.com<mailto:ocl@gih.com>> wrote: Dear Maureen, I am just off a call with UK ICANN Stakeholders, a sort of an ICANN Read-Out with selected UK based ICANN participants, and I shared the At-Large Activities, both during the ICANN week, but also in the so-called "At-Large Week". Whilst there were congratulatory remarks all about for the At-Large to convene such interesting sessions, two comments, from Susan Payne and Chris Disspain questioned the organising of the "At-Large Week". Susan, in particular, explained that the ICANN72 organising committee debated at length how long the ICANN meetign should be, whether it should be a short meeting or a longer one and the consensus that was reached across SO/AC/SG was to have a shorter ICANN week that was 4 days in length. I explained that for the At-Large Community, 4 days were impractical as it had to conduct its own business whilst offering its community the ability to attend plenaries, official meetings of the Board, public forum etc. So the At-Large week was primarily organised for At-Large participants but open to everyone, as in many At-Large meetings. This did not quite satisfy Susan nor Chris: both said that the topics and line-ups of these meetings were very interesting, yet they were not on the public meeting schedule and it would be interesting if they were, so as for many more participants to be able to attend them. Chris in particular mentioned that if members of the ICANN Board were attending these meetings, they should be part of the overall ICANN Schedule. But of course, that cannot happen since this is not technically part of the ICANN meeting. So I didn't know what to say. How are the At-Large Week meetings going to be advertised? Are the At-Large happy to have anyone attend? How do you respond to those who say that the At-Large has effectively created, in its policy sessions, more potential plenary ICANN sessions outside the ICANN plenary session schedule, as it has invited guests from across SOs/ACs/SGs etc? Kindest regards, Olivier