The public forum is the Community's opportunity to make comments and ask questions on the main topics at each meeting directly to the Board and in front of the rest of the community.
Who Should Attend? | All members of the ICANN Community.
Organization of the Forum
The public forum is split up into the main topic areas with a time allotted for each subject (see below). Attendees are encouraged to be brief and concise to enable as many perspectives to be heard as possible. To facilitate this, a time limit of three minutes per intervention will be enforced.
A microphone is placed near the front of the room and commenters line up behind it to take their turn in asking a question or making a comment. At the same time, remote participants have been provided with URLs where they may record a question or comment to be read to the meeting; these can be found next to the subjects, below. For transparency, a report has been provided which is updated in real-time to allow all comments and questions raised in this way to be viewed by everyone.
Interventions from the room and those from remote participants will alternate on an equal basis, with the Forum Remote Participation Manager, Filiz Yilmaz, reading comments or questions from remote participants in the order they are received. ICANN Board Chair Peter Dengate-Thrush will call upon those at the microphone. Questions raised will be dealt with by the appropriate party.
Answerable questions are much preferred to comments, and both are preferred to statements - which can be incorporated into the official record without the need to read them out.
Guidelines for Comments and Questions
All comments and questions, both in-person and remote, are subject to the Guidelines for Chatrooms and Remote Interventions, based upon the Expected Standards of Behaviour section of the Accountability and Transparency Frameworks and Principles agreed by the ICANN Board on 15th February 2008. You may find the details of the guidelines at http://www.icann.org/en/accountability/frameworks-principles/community.htm. Questions or comments in breach of these guidelines will not be read out, if from remote participants; if from an in-room participant, that person will be called to order.
What if there isn't enough time for everyone to be heard during the session?
The ideal outcome of the public forum is that everyone who has an important issue to raise is able to relate it to the Board while also making the community aware of the issue. However, if that isn't possible, you can still be heard. If you have a question or comment which you could not read out, or which was not read out for you (for remote participants) you can enter it at the URL provided associated with each subject which is provided for remote participants. Questions will be forwarded for an answer by the relevant party.
