Hello Veni.
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. I have no doubt of this; ICANN volunteers are generally well-intentioned and intelligent. However I submit that they are constrained by policies that make their tasks slow and difficult. My policy suggestions are a direct attempt to change that.
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. I am not talking about bugs. I am talking about systemic obstacles to timely selections and venue accessibility. If these are not primary issues driving meeting selection than any process behind it will produce flawed results.
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. It is not easy but it is not impossible either. ICANN is hardly the first organization in this situation and it has had many years to collect experience in this field. Expereience should have taught that you need to book hotels a year in advance, that is about as basic as it gets. Continuing a process that leads to last-minute operations, time after time after time, (the city for Africa still hasn't even been selected!) is inexcusable.
This is not a series of individual bugs. This is a fundamentally flawed process, whose massive inefficiency is only saved by ICANN's deep pockets. If staff and directors had to pay for meeting expenses out of their own pockets, this would be addressed quickly.
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. Well, of course. But that's irrelevant. The point is that there need to be deadlines set and decisions made in adequate time -- even if (especially if!) local hosts are not found.
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.
Having meetings that can be attended in person only by the expense-account set leads to power dynamics that work horribly against the end-user public. The ICANN of today is a cacophony of competing self-interest groups, each of which is attempting to influence direction -- and almost none of which have the interest of the general public in mind. Arguably, the very makeup of today's ICANN has shut out direct public votes from its board, due to the successful work of interest groups that seek to minimize the public voice. As part of At-Large we are trying to reverse this trend, not to accelerate it. Innovation in teleconferencing is a potential step forward. But holding that it is an excuse to maintain the inaccessibility of direct meeting participation, or the miserable process for choosing venues, is not acceptable. - Evan