Hi all, This morning we had the official Opening Ceremony: The New Delhi meeting is the first of the three public ICANN meetings in 2008. Afterwards in the Public Forum - President's Report and Comments: “This year is an important one for the future of ICANN. The U.S. government is in the middle of its Midterm Review of its Joint Project Agreement with ICANN, and we’re arguing it’s time to take the final step to originally envisioned private sector model for ICANN,” said Peter Dengate Thrush, ICANN’s Board Chairman. “In fact the public comment period closes on the final day of this meeting – so we expect plenty of discussion about this in New Delhi, and we will be encouraging everyone who believes in the ICANN model of coordination not control to make their thoughts known.” “There wlll be key discussions at the New Delhi meting about our ongoing work to develop a new application and approval model for new generic top-level domains or gTLDs, and our work on Internationalized Domain Names or IDNs, which will mean the languages and scripts of most of the world could be used to write domain names,” said Dr Paul Twomey, ICANN’s President and CEO. There was a question from Wolfgang (by remote participation) asking for the future of At-Large at ICANN and the Summit which is supposed to happen in June 08 in Paris. The question was repeated by Sébastien. But there was no answer or comment neither from Paul Twomey nor from Peter Dengate Thrush. Whether the planed Summit will happen in Paris is still uncertain and no ICANN representative wanted to expose himself on this question. Public Discussion / JPA Review session Peter Dengate Trush gave a presentation on ICANN’s submission to the US government over the JPA midterm review. ICANN’s view is that the JPA should be concluded. In the afternoon Workshop we had an Update on Internet Governance and the last IGF with Nikin Dessai and Markus Kummer (what seems to be a new step towards peaceful coexistence ;-). The last part of the afternoon programme was a controversial debate on IDN (Progress on the Fast-Track Process for Introduction of a Limited Number of IDN ccTLDs). Discussions around IDNs will include two workshops, one on the Fast-Track Process to find a way to represent territory identifications in local languages as country-code top-level domains as quickly as possible in the areas of highest need, and another on the pioneering work India is doing on IDNs in Indian Languages and Scripts. The complete schedule for ICANN's 31st meeting, as well as links to webcast sessions and our public participation website, can be found at: http://delhi.icann.org/. So far, Best regards from Delhi, Wolf comunica-ch phone +41 79 204 83 87 www.comunica-ch.net http://blog.allmend.ch - Digitale Allmend