Dear SOAC leaders,

An action item from your informal meeting with Sally in Kigali was for the Policy team to facilitate a dialogue with you about “How We Meet”, viz., how our in-person and hybrid meetings can be optimized to ensure that resources (including financial, staff and community time) continue to be allocated appropriately to ensure the community can do its work effectively and efficiently, while staying within budgetary constraints. As a starting point for this dialogue, we have drafted the attached discussion paper with some initial ideas for your community’s consideration and to invite your suggestions for further discussion.

To capitalize on the momentum of recent conversations and to facilitate a constructive and substantive dialogue, we’d like to suggest the following cadence of meetings, structured around a few foundational questions:

• Late/end-July: first call with SOAC Chairs and Vice-Chairs to share feedback on agreed strategic questions
• Mid/late August (following collation of ideas and input): second call to discuss and agree on concrete ideas for implementation or further exploration
• End-August/early September (if agreed is needed): third call to review agreed way forward, including any next steps for additional (longer term) ideas to be discussed further  

The sort of strategic, foundational questions we were thinking might be helpful for focusing the dialogue include:

• If you or your group could change one thing about how we meet that will facilitate efficiency in how we deliver ICANN’s mission while remaining sustainable into the future, what would that be?
• What other key changes do we need to make to continue to ensure we can meet these goals?

Thank you for your support and willingness to collaborate with us in seeking to improve and optimize how we meet. Assuming you are comfortable with the proposed approach, I’ll make sure to come back to you with some suggested dates for the calls. Please let me know if your group have any questions or would like any additional information that can assist with your internal discussions about this topic. Thank you!

Cheers

Mary