Hi Everyone (apologies for the long email) As you are probably aware there are a few activities going on in preparation for the ICANN 59 Policy Forum meeting in Johannesburg. On one level there are a number of SO/AC representatives participating in the Planning Committee that is convened by the ICANN Organisation. Separately, the GNSO Leadership Team have been working with staff to develop a GNSO related schedule, which is attached. Given the GNSO has a number of PDP WGs currently underway, we are affording the requirements of those efforts priority and we are trying to ensure that no two WGs will be scheduled at the same time. In addition, the RDS PDP WG and the New gTLD Subsequent Procedures PDP WG (you might recall Jeff and Avri forecasting this in Copenhagen—they want to have a substantive discussion with the community about geographic names) will be submitting requests for cross-community discussions or high interest topics that have the potential to take up 5 of the 8 currently allocated slots. The Planning Committee will be considering topics for cross-community discussion next week and I am anticipating resistance to the slots requested by the two WGs. It would be greatly appreciated if you could encourage your representatives on the Planning Committee to support the submissions from the WGs because they are important to progressing the PDP WG efforts and require interaction with the community beyond those on the WGs. And after all—this is a Policy Forum meeting. We will start engaging your respective Stakeholder Groups and Constituencies regarding individual meeting requests in the near future, once we have some other information confirmed, for example, the number of rooms the GNSO will have available for other meetings and what services will be available. But I would ask that you respect the priority we have afforded to the PDP WGs given that this meeting is a Policy Forum, it is only four days, we will have fewer options for rooms, and we would like to see bums on seats in the PDP WG sessions. Happy to answer any questions folks might have and we will let you know when we better understand what services will be available to us in Johannesburg. Thanks Donna