ICANN has published a ICANN Consolidated Meetings Strategy Proposal for public comment. English version of the Consolidated Meeting Strategy document http://www.icann.org/en/about/participate/meetings-proposal-02oct12-en.pdf Spanish version of the Consolidated Meeting Strategy document http://www.icann.org/es/about/participate/meetings-proposal-02oct12-es.pdf (Spanish) The purpose of this document is to advise the ICANN community of the issues surrounding the current process for selecting ICANN Public Meeting locations, and to propose an alternate method of doing so. Currently, ICANN rotates its meetings in host cities among the 5 geographical regions. ICANN announces a call for location recommendations for an upcoming meeting in a region, ICANN staff evaluates the two or three recommendations it receives and recommends a single location to the various ICANN Board Committees for approval. However, ICANN has noted that given the increasing size and scope of ICANN Meetings, the number of facilities capable of hosting an ICANN meeting has decreased considerably. Also, the facilities that meet the meeting location criteria is very limited and with ICANN Meetings having been held in more than 40 cities worldwide, identifying new host cities with appropriate facilities is becoming increasingly difficult. ICANN is considering a Consolidated Meetings Strategy for future ICANN meetings from 2014 to 2016. The strategy is to identify the best facilities (typically convention centers with adjacent supporting hotels) for conducting an ICANN meeting, confirm the availability of such facilities during the ICANN meeting dates and negotiate multi-year contracts, resulting in reduced costs for the ICANN community and ICANN. Such a strategy would facilitate the long term identification of future meeting locations. The Consolidated Meetings Proposal for 2014, 2015 and 2016: * Hold the first meeting of the year in two cities in Asia Pacific. * Hold the second meeting of the year in two cities in Europe. * Rotate the third meeting of the year through North America (2014), Africa (2015) and Latin America/Caribbean (2016). These will be the Annual General Meetings for each year. In the document, ICANN does realize that in seeking to improve operational efficiency, the proposal may impact regional diversity and highlights several issues for consideration by the community. * Is equality of regional rotation important or not? * Is it sufficient to rotate in a "non-equal" way? * What can be done to mitigate any negative impact? The deadline for comments is 16 November 2012 Kind Regards, Dev Anand Teelucksingh