Hello All, Thanks for all the contributions and suggestions around this meeting.
From reviewing the dates when people are available or not available, I have selected Friday 24 February and Saturday 25 February 2006.
It seems that several Council members are involved in either the 3GSM World Congress (http://www.3gsmworldcongress.com/) from 13-16 Feb in Barcelona, or the Internet Governance Forum (http://www.intgovforum.org/) from 16-17 Feb in Geneva. So this event is about a week later allowing time for members to get work done between meetings. The meeting is also being held sufficiently in advance of the Wellington ICANN meeting to ensure that we can progress the work. I will ask Glen de Saint Géry to investigate options for hotels and venues to see if we can get a suitable group rate. With respect to the location chosen in the world. This is always a hard decision. Both ICANN and the GNSO try to rotate the locations of physical meetings around as much as possible. The GNSO last held a separate meeting in Amsterdam in February of 2005, and ICANN held meetings in Mar del Plata, Argentina, Luxembourg City, Luxembourg, and Vancouver, Canada during 2005. We will be meeting in the Southern Hemisphere again in Wellington, New Zealand. On this occasion I have chosen Washington, DC as I will be available on the USA East Coast at that time, and there is at least a critical mass of members of the GNSO community that are located nearby (ie within a 1000 kilometres or so) that are available to assist in organising an event at such short notice. We have yet to meet in Germany - and Frankfurt certainly sounds like an appropriate place for when we next arrange a meeting. I think when we get onto the topic of policy related to internationalised domain names, it would certainly be good to pick a location where English is not the dominant language. While I am sure that with further discussion we can optimise the dates and location further, I think it is also important for all parties to be able to arrange their travel schedules to lock down a date and location as soon as possible. For those that can't attend in person, we will do out best to arrange for some sort of Internet based audio and video feed - although it is doubtful that it will be of the standard of a full ICANN meeting. Regards, Bruce Tonkin