I have had neither any involvement or knowledge of this change, but I do note that it comes in parallel with the change from requiring a local host who made a very substantial contribution to the meeting, to ICANN being largely responsible for (at least some) meetings - a change for which there has been a great deal of demand within ICANN. If the budget (from ICANN fuinds) for such meetings is to not go up, increased sponsorship revenue is pretty much required (or a VERY reduced budget and/or charges for attendance). Alan At 12/01/2011 07:36 PM, Fouad Bajwa wrote:

...and just in case anyone may has noticed it or not, if you go to the sponsorship page of the ICANN meeting page at http://meetings.icann.org/sponsorship , ICANN has increased the sponsorship costs by factors of 2.5 to 10, so much about "multi-stakeholder" and bottom-up stuff. Top sponsorship per ICANN meeting is half a million dollars and the minimum sponsorship to have a stand was increased to USD 25K from USD 10K. This excludes alot of stakaeholders and people that may want to also set-up stall and raise awareness about their groups.