Vittorio Bertola wrote:
FYI, for what I learned from the Board - After the AP bids fell through, and before falling back onto LA, there was an attempt by staff to have ICANN organize the meeting in one major city in AP. Unfortunately, after about a month of scouting and negotiations, there was still no availability of a fit venue I don't doubt that, there was so little time to work with.
I've never been in the Meetings Committee (incidentally, the ALAC could ask for its Board Liaison to be added to it) but I think you are making lots of suggestions that seem good and obvious at first sight, but then become more and more difficult as you try to implement them. As I've said from the beginning, the fact that a challenge is difficult does not mean it should not be addressed.
For example, if you stay with the current model of soliciting bids from local communities, it's hard to ask local groups to plan two or three years in advance. You might move the timeline earlier, but then discover that you get no bids. I think it is reasonable to request a city be selected within 18 months; if bids cannot be presented before then it is not ICANN's fault.
On the other hand, if you move to a model in which ICANN organizes the meetings, you pose plenty of additional effort on ICANN's side (not just in terms of money - and I agree with Ross that ICANN could put more of it, especially for Southern locations - but in terms of local know-how and practicalities), and you risk wasting possible support and sponsors from local communities because you're not asking for them. And yet... we had a situation last year in AP and apparently one this year in Africa in which nobody wants it. Given that every choice involves tradeoffs, it is reasonable IMO to sacrifice the sponsorship of local communities in order to bring some badly needed stability to the process. As Ross suggested, it is often an unreasonable burden on local communities, and limiting venues to bid cities often eliminates the most accessible selections.
I have been suggesting a hybrid approach. Invite bids, but do not be afraid to select a city arbitrarily if no bids in a region are available. And do it sufficiently in advance to make the fallback practical.
Politically, it would put ICANN in an even more difficult situation: today already, rejected bidders and their communities are disillusioned, if not upset; but you can reply that the other bid was factually better on an objective scale. If ICANN will choose the venue indipendently on its own, all sorts of political pressures will start, for choosing country A rather than country B.
ICANN thinks too much of its own attraction, then. From my perspective there now seem to be more cases of "nobody in the region wants it" than "we have too many good bids". We were in that situation with AP last year and we appear to be approaching it with Africa '08. How many bids have been received for events in '09? When you invite a bid war you encourage competition, and inevitable losers as well as winners. Perhaps the concept of a queue, ("who is next in line to be the LAC city based on previous expression interest") may help.
About the "hub" requirement - I was not involved in the discussion, but I will note that it is true, as you say, that each continent has some hub cities, but it is also true that not all countries include a global hub. Of course it depends on the definition, but, in Europe, only the UK, France, the Netherlands and Germany have truly global transportation hubs. Can you really tell to the other 30+ countries in the continent that they will never get a chance to host an ICANN meeting? Who said a suitable "hub" had to be a "truly global transportation hub"? That is being overly restrictive. To me, any airport hosting a reasonable number of scheduled intercontinental flights would be suitable. Ie, Madrid is a hub by my definition but Barcelona is not. In the current era of airline groups (ie, StarAlliance) even secondary hubs are well served internationally.
In any case, I am personally suggesting that only one meeting per year should be mandated for a hub. And lastly, I believe that the global demand to host ICANN meetings is significantly overstated. Perhaps ICANN should concentrate on putting on the best (and least expensive) conferences, and stop thinking of its meetings as a source of national pride. If ICANN drops the attitude, so will the hosts. - Evan