Dear SOAC leaders:

Thank you all for your continued hard work as we prepare for the ICANN71 Virtual Policy Forum. It is sometimes strange to recall that this will be the fifth consecutive ICANN Public Meeting where we will be meeting virtually rather than in person. Over the past 14 months, we have worked together to find ways to improve our interactions, including how the Board and the community engage with each other. This has inevitably meant that, in trying to be sensitive to the Board’s and community’s preferences while taking into account factors such as potential Zoom fatigue, time zones and volunteer burnout, we have not been consistent from meeting to meeting, resulting in some understandable confusion on the part of community members and in some cases the org staff as well. I therefore write to clarify the practice that we think is most appropriate for the upcoming Virtual Policy Forum.

As you know, the three ICANN Public Meetings in our annual meeting cycle are the Community Forum, the Policy Forum and the Annual General Meeting, each with its specific objectives and duration as developed by the community-led Meetings Strategy Working Group and adopted by the Board in 2014. Where the Community Forum and AGM are each approximately six days long and include the traditional Constituency Day, the Policy Forum runs over four days and is dedicated to the community’s policy development work and regional outreach activities. This means that the Policy Forum was not designed to include a day set aside for Constituency Day.

Over the past year, however, thanks to the community’s decision to organize fewer, more focused sessions for the virtual Public Meetings, we have been able to accommodate a number of community groups’ requests to meet with the Board at the last Policy Forum (ICANN68) as well as prior to and just after the AGM (ICANN70). We hope that this flexibility has meant that the Board and the community were able to maximize the time together, especially in view of time zone and other limitations imposed by a wholly virtual meeting format.

For ICANN71, we have again received a number of community group requests to meet with the Board. As the Board wishes to continue its dialogues with all our community groups without affecting either its or their ability to attend and engage in the community sessions as was originally intended for a Policy Forum, we would like to maintain the traditional Policy Forum format for ICANN71. As a result, with the exception of the regular Board-GAC bilateral meeting, we will schedule all other Board-community meetings for after ICANN71. I have asked Mary Wong to contact all the affected groups to work with them and the Board Operations Team to ensure that these meetings can be scheduled as soon as is feasible. For those groups who had already requested meetings with the Board in the week after ICANN71, we will schedule these as requested.

Thank you for your understanding and for working with all our staff to ensure that the ICANN Public Meetings continue to be productive and useful in advancing your work.

Best regards,

David Olive

David A. Olive
Senior Vice President

Policy Development Support

Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)

Washington, D.C.