ICANN meetings

Session Goals and Outcomes

The public forum is the community's opportunity to make comments and ask questions on the main topics in front of ICANN at each meeting directly to the Board and in front of the rest of the community.

Organisation of the Forum

The public forum is split up into the main topic areas with a time alotted 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 Chat Attendant, Robert Hoggarth, 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://nbo.icann.org/behaviour.

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, and all questions, comments, and any answers received after the meeting is over will all be annexed to the session records.

The issues for discussion and their time slots are provided below.

Following the Meeting Remotely

If you find that you cannot enter the virtual meeting room today for any reason, please use the audiocast most relevant to you, the chatroom link, and the scribe link, to follow the meeting remotely - and accept our apologies for the technical difficulty.