Hello All, Mawaki Chango has raised the general issue that those that attend an event in person and make public comments could gain an advantage over those that participate through email or web public comment forums. I tend to agree that those that have the budgets (and/or time) to attend physical meetings - whether they are for IETF, ISOC, WSIS, Internet Governance Forum, or ICANN do have a richer opportunity to both learn from other participants and also convey their views on a particular topic. Although telecommunications technology in general has improved the ability for people to interact remotely - nothing is close to the value of a face-to-face meeting. As discussed before, ICANN, GNSO, and various constituencies (e.g registrars) do hold physical meetings in different locations of the world. The best we can do is try to move those around to give as many as possible an opportunity to be involved at least once a year. Our formal processes however are srtuctured in a way to help provide fairness in terms of taking into account public input. Any comments made at the microphone at ICANN meetings are transcribed and form part of the public record. When the staff prepare reports on public comments they take into account both the written comments received via the email and web based public forums, as well as the transcribed verbal comments at public forums. It is sad that presently the quality of material submitted to the email and web based public comment processes is low. I have noticed that the ICANN culture at public meetings is for speakers to carefully prepare their statemetns on their laptop while they are stting in the audience, and then read from those statements at the public mike. However rarely do they email this material to the email or web forums. I am sure we would save a lot of time at public events if people could email their detailed comments in advance, and just cover the highlights in any verbal presentation. For the new gtld policy process we have tried a couple of new things. One is to formally seek papers on the topic, and the other is to advetise in the press that we are conducted this work and encourage contributions. So - I believe that as a principle when we are having a physical meeting we should at least allow the opportunity for members of the public to speak on an issue, but these comments should be assessed on an equal basis with formal written material. We will also have any papers that have been submitted formally, and have the ability to ask the authors of those papers to give a short summary of their paper and allow the opportunity for questions. This was discussed in January when we discussed the call for papers. This is no requirement for the authors to be present in-person. Regards, Bruce Tonkin