ICANN participation

There is an ongoing issue about how to have real and effective remote participation at ICANN meetings.

As most of you will hopefully be aware, a specific website is set up for each meeting - you can see Delhi's here: http://del.icann.org/, and Paris' at http://par.icann.org - where a webpage is provided for every meeting. That webpage contains its own chatroom; it contains the agenda, links to presentations , and, when over, a link to the transcript.

However there is still a disconnect and an advantage if you are physically in the room. As an Internet organisation trying to serve a global audience with limited resources, ICANN wants to get to the point where participation is real and possible remotely.

The biggest issue from experience is time. Meetings start and go extremely quickly from the perspective of someone not in the room. Often meetings happen at inappropriate times for those that wish to attend. Sometimes by the time a question raised remotely can be introduced into the conversation, the conversation has moved on. And this in itself discourages interaction.

So the question is: what can be done to fix this? Is the answer to make sure agendas are posted earlier? How can this be enforced? Should questions be accepted ahead of time? Should meetings on one topic be stretched over several days, allowing for more effective remote input?

What are the practicalities? How do you get the physical meeting to take remote input seriously? What needs to be done? ICANN is very interested in your views on this. And for that reason we have set up a forum on this site in order to help the community discuss, review, brainstorm and formulate possible solutions which ICANN will then experiment with in an effort to provide the global community with a more effective route into the organisation's work.