Brendler, Beau wrote:
I imagine many of you have seen this. What do you think? Seems to me that the RALOs and ALAC should register an official opinion on this, probably in Paris. The report's also kind of an interesting read.
I was on the record ages ago as being against the concept of only going where bids existed -- ICANN is not the Olympics. Wanting to use transit hubs for meetings is extremely logical, and cost saving, but may go against the political aims of wanting to be seen to be globally accessible. If ICANN goes to two meetings a year -- perhaps a hybrid system might be a good idea. One meeting each year is purely based on practicality and minimizing travel costs, the other is more attuned to political and accessibility needs.
From an At-Large POV there are repercussions related to the ability for RALOs to do face-to-face meetings. Generally a RALO can do a F2F when the meeting is in their region (ie, EURALO in Paris). But with the ICANN meetings cut to 2 a year, this could affect the frequency of RALO F2F.
One possible solution to this is to have regional mini-conferences -- precedents for this have already taken place. Indeed, maybe there is a case to be made for one global annual meeting and multiple -- maybe concurrent -- regional ones. Also, an increasing number of workshops may be delivered by electronic means. In any case, this requires some thought. I share Beau's suggestion that this should be discussed within each RALO. - Evan PS: Using data from Los Angeles, how can they be surprised that many attendees at American? There were many factors biasing that data; cost of travel, visa restrictions and (more than anything) the last-minute nature of the venue choice. The LA meeting was probably the worst possible one from which to extract valid data. Having said that, the dominance of the financial interests was indeed troublesome.