Hello All, The basic rationale for the scheduling on Wed,Thurs,Frid was to schedule the forums/workshops where there is a dialogue with the ICANN community (as opposed to watching a ccNSO or GNSO Council or task force meeting) in the core hours of the day (e.g 9am to 5pm). Thus the strategic planning workshop on Friday was placed earlier in the day to maximise the opportunity for dialogue, and the GNSO Public Forum is also early in the day. The outcomes of a meeting like the ccNSO Council, GNSO Council or Board meeting, are captured both via a transcript of the meeting as well as via the minutes of the meeting. Quite often a significant proportion of our GNSO Council meetings cover administrative issues rather than policy work - which has already been carried out during other forums/meetings earlier in the week. The outcomes of the GNSO Council meeting will also be reported in the ICANN Board public forum. Note also that the GNSO Council will also be meeting on Monday, which has a pretty packed agenda. I do not believe that there is any attempt by staff to give the Council meeting a low priority - on the contrary I think that Diane Schroeder has done her best to accommodate all requests. With respect to the order of events, I agree with Ross that it would be better to have the GNSO public forum immediately proceed the GNSO Council meeting as it has in the past couple of meetings. I don't know if this is possible to change though, as there are other dependencies. With respect to the GNSO public forum - I am thinking that 2 hours is probably not enough time to really cover the range of topics currently before the GNSO Council - e.g - WHOIS improvements - secondary market - new TLDs - IDNs - single letter domains Etc We should probably look at a longer time slot in future. As Marilyn points out - we do need to improve our planning process for ICANN meetings. Hopefully we can arrange a meeting of a planning group on the Saturday afternoon 4 Dec to discuss scheduling for Wellington. I think the planning may also need to be looking at a year at a time, rahte rthan a single meeting. Ie it may make sense to rotate some meeting timeslots across several meetings. Regards, Bruce