by kierenmccarthy on June 24, 2010
I’ll be honest: I didn’t go to many Wednesday sessions at ICANN Brussels. At least not physically. The remote participation tools mean that, unless you want to actually raise a point at the microphone, you can settle yourself down somewhere more comfortable and follow events on your laptop (and even your iPhone with the Adobe Connect app).
No need to cram into a room, or ask 10 people to stand up so you can squeeze past them. You can instead pick a more comfortable chair, next to a table, get a nice cup of coffee or maybe a beer or glass of wine and follow events online. The majority of ICANN meetings rarely heat up so you’re not missing much by not being in the room.
I’m not the only one to have realized this. Which explains entirely and absolutely why the 1,000-seater main room had an audience of roughly two for the GNSO Council meeting.
When it comes to bums on seats, the GNSO Council beats only the ICANN Ombudsman in turnout and yet, year-on-year they insist on being in the main room, leaving popular events (DNSSEC this time) to be forced into smaller rooms.
Why? Well the Council claims that it needs the full stage to hold all its members (conveniently ignoring the fact that it actually doesn’t, and they could use the GAC room for one). The real reason is habit and a grand sense of self-importance.
[click to continue…]
Popularity: 1% [?]
by kierenmccarthy on June 22, 2010
Nothing aids careful discussion and debate more than loud repetitive ringing. So thank you the Square Meeting Centre in Brussels for introducing not one but two ringing systems that go off every 30 minutes: a fire alarm and the bells from the nearby cathedral.
Despite this auditory assistance, the second (third) day of the ICANN meeting saw plenty of discussion. And some testy exchanges.
Most lively was when ICANN finally came good on its six-year promise to provide the country code managers with a figure for how much they actually cost the organization.
This has been a long-running argument: the country code managers will only providing voluntary contributions (because they don’t want to implicitly accept ICANN has authority over them), and ICANN wants more cash than it gets through this system.
The stalemate was finally broken when ICANN finally produced some figures this morning. Unsurprisingly, the ccNSO didn’t react to an annual invoice stretching to millions of dollars with unbridled glee. So what did it do? Well, it reads like a punchline to an ICANN joke: it created a working group to discuss how it might pay it.
This approach irritated ICANN’s chairman – who comes from the ccNSO – who complained that maybe the ccNSO should have thought about how to pay before now. Current chair Chris Disspain complained back that there wasn’t much point in going down that path when it wasn’t known whether the bill would be $1 million or $10 million. And so on, back and forth.
What was interesting though was, like receiving a restaurant bill and wondering whether your group really did have six bottles of wine, the ccNSO started drilling into what it was actually being asked to pay for.
[click to continue…]
Popularity: 1% [?]
