Hi, Evan. At 11:09 24.12.2007 -0500, Evan Leibovitch wrote:
Here are my specific additions/changes to meeting policy: [cut]
having served on the ICANN Meetings Committee, I can tell you that there is not a single argument in the recent discussions that has not been taken into consideration by me, by other members of the Committee, and recently, by Susan Crawford. You might understand that while ICANN tries its best, it can not always have all ideal features, and sometimes there are certain problems that both ICANN and the community have to deal with. I could go one by one through your suggestions, but we have gone through them over and over, and there will always be bugs and features around the meetings. It is not easy to try to accomodate 3 times a year a huge meeting, which has to take place on a different continent every time. If you go through the meetings since 2004, when I was charing the committee, every time we woudl choose a venue, there would be pro and against Every time. And whether we talk about hotel prices, distance from the airport, stop overs, weather conditions, etc. - there will always be issues. The good thing is that no one but the directors and staff is forced to go to each and every meeting. For some of them, which are not convenient, people may just participate remotely - web casts, wiki, etc. In 2004 not all of that was available, but today it is here. I missed a couple of meetings in person, but thanks to the remote participation, I didn't really miss them. So, my advise is to think of all aspects, not only some, when discussing this issue. As for the last paragraph of your
If ICANN takes public participation seriously, it must consider the issue of accessibility to its meetings as just one of many obstacles that now exists. Arguably, ICANN's lack of accessibility may even be one of the reasons it's having a harder time finding local sponsors...
It is exactly because ICANN takes participation seriously, that now it has interpretation in several languages, web casts, audio-casts, instant messaging, wikis, etc., etc. To say that this is not enough is just not fair. It is what you could get with the current technologies, and the techincal staff are doing whatever possible to make sure more people have access to more sessions. The important part of the meeting is the substance, not the form. Best, Veni