ICANN Public Forum President's Report and Comments ICANN Meeting - Paris Monday, 23 June 2008 >>PETER DENGATE THRUSH: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, could you take your seats, please. We will be beginning in one minute. Thank you. Welcome to Paris for ICANN 32. My name is Peter Dengate Thrush, and I'm the chairman of the board of ICANN. And we will shortly, later this morning, be having a formal opening ceremony. But we are going to begin now with our first order of business. And I'd like to call upon the president and CEO of ICANN, Dr. Paul Twomey, to present his report. Dr. Twomey. [ Applause ] >>PAUL TWOMEY: Thank you, Peter. And welcome, everybody, to this -- our meeting in Paris. To give you some sense of the interest we've had in this meeting, we've had over 1300 formal online registrations to attend this week. Usually we get several hundred more, so we're expecting at least 1500 attendees, which will make this one of ICANN's largest meetings. In the spirit of not repeating messages to many audiences through the week, we have now a tradition of having a president's report at the beginning of the meeting, which outlines several of the key issues that are being addressed by the community during the week. And let me just take the chance to go through those. On the agenda is the operating plan and budget. There's a series of things in policy development work. Just like to report a few things on new CC agreements. On internationalized domain names, on new gTLDs, obviously, a Joint Project Agreement activities, the improvements in IANA function, continue to direct people towards the IANA reporting mechanisms. Some specific things on V4, V6, some issues about changes to meetings, translation programs, and compliance activities. My purpose this morning is not to talk to each of these issues in detail, but to specifically point out two or three key points and direct you to meetings and to Web sites where you can follow up on each of these issues in preparation for the various 40-plus meetings taking place this week as part of ICANN Paris. Let's start with the operating plan and budget. The public comment period for this ended on the 17th of June. People will recall that we have now moved to having a strategic planning process in the first half of the fiscal year, and the second half, combining more of the operational process and the budgeting process. Today's workshop, which is at 10:00 o'clock at the (inaudible) room, will be your best opportunity to give final input into that operational plan and budget. The process has been available -- has been up for consultation since February. So this has so far been a four-month consultation on the operating plan and budget. The board is due to approve that at this meeting. And you'll see on the screen here the draft plan can be found at the following Web site. And this presentation is also available up on the Paris site. So if you just go to the icann.org site and click on "Paris meeting," you will also see my report, which will give you those links to follow. The operating plan includes a lot of things. I'm just going to leave that for you to read rather than go through in detail specifically for 10:00. Policy development activities. The GNSO improvement process is presently underway and still in discussion, still very active discussion, there were lots of good discussions in the different last night with the GNSO council. There's also two committees being proposed in the GNSO. One is the process standing committee to revise policy development process. And the second one is an operation standing committee to develop operational guidelines for the GNSO going forward. Some of the issues that are being considered are domain tasting, WHOIS studies, implementing CC IDN TLDs, and interregistrar transfers. These are some of the issues that the GNSO is considering. The meeting on improving -- implementing the proposed GNSO improvements again takes place at 1:00 on Wednesday at the Utrillo room. There's a Web site that you can go to to follow more details. ICANN presently has something over 40 accountability frameworks or exchange of letters between itself and country code operators. Since the New Delhi meeting, I can report to you three new accountability frameworks put in place, .az, Azerbaijan; .za, South Africa; and .is, Iceland. We now have well over 60% of the registrants of the country code environment in CCs that have relationships with ICANN. Internationalized domain names is clearly a very big issue. We've had enormous amount of work being done on the -- on this activity over the last -- over the months and years. They've done it with -- the lights going out, it all goes dark when we mention IDNs. The IDN Wiki page, which we have up for further test evaluation has had several languages added to it. The language of Amharic, Ethiopia, Hebrew, Urdu, and Thai are the newest languages added to that testing environment. And the IDNC working group has been developing its process both for the fast -- so-called fast-track introducing a limited number of IDN ccTLDs and also the long-term process. That group is working feverishly this week. And we expect some further reporting by Thursday. There is a workshop on IDNs Thursday at 9:00. And, again, the workshop on the fast-track process is today at 10:00 in the Hemingway room. And again, if you want to find more information on their draft initial report, you will see it at that particular link. New gTLDs. Clearly a very big issue, clearly a very big issue for this meeting. There will be a session starting at -- apparently very precisely at 10:10 in the Picasso room on both new gTLDs and IDNs, and very specifically, there will be a workshop on new gTLDs at 4:00. And I would exhort all people who have an interest in this -- which I suspect is 1,499 of the 1500 people who are here -- that -- to that happened workshop at 4:00, where Kurt Pritz and others will make a -- will be taking us through, in detail, some of the proposed implementation processes for discussion. I just want to put on public record, Chairman, that the work being done by a team led by Kurt, Doug, and, frankly, nearly half the staff, I suspect -- I won't go through all the names here -- has been a spectacular piece of work. And I want to put on public record my thanks to those people for the amount of work they have been doing. Obviously, they're not yet finished. But I think you'll find a fair amount of impressive thinking being shared this afternoon at 4:00. [ Applause ] >>PAUL TWOMEY: The Joint Project Agreement, there's obviously the midterm review process took place, to which we reported to the community more details at the New Delhi meeting. The President's Strategy Committee has been tasked, was tasked by the chairman to work through some potential responses to much of the feedback received through that process and other processes and has released a round of papers for consideration by the community about what are the final or set of things that potentially we should be considering to cement institutional confidence in ICANN and move towards defining what transition is in the final stages of the Joint Project Agreement term. There is a workshop on this activity taking place today at 1:30 in the Utrillo room. And the three documents that have been released -- and I would exhort members of the community to have a look at those documents. They're on the very front page of the Web site, icann.org. And have a read of particularly what's being proposed for discussion over consultation period that will take us through to November/December. IANA performance continues, I think, to track well. I have a series of slides here which are supposed to just indicate to you that there's a lot of detail in the monthly dashboard metrics that are posted. For those of you who have got an interest -- hopefully that's nearly all of you -- have an interest in how the IANA function operates and the detail of the IANA function, you will find a lot of quantitative data on performance metrics which we post on the ICANN Web site and the related IANA Web sites. And I would yet get exhort to you use that. It's a form of transparency. We, obviously, you know -- those numbers are things that I look at very regularly. And so I would exhort you to look at them. And now there's a lot of pretty slides, just to prove there's lots of slides in the IANA dashboard. I'd ask you to look at that. Root zone changes continue to track reasonably well in terms of performance time. Indeed, some of the difficult case studies have been worked through, some of the sort of delay times have been improved. IPv4, IPv6 is obviously a big issue. And I think beginning to get greater attention. I gave an interview in Korea during the -- for the OECD meeting, and the "Korea Times" ran a story, which gives an indication that in some places of the world, IPv4 depletion and IPv6 takeup is an important issue for network operators, ISPs. It's obviously an issue that ICANN has some interest in, in the sense of the V4 depletion, but mostly in terms of trying to reinforce the message that we can't afford to sit around until everything just depletes before we start thinking about the implementation of V6. There is a workshop today at 12:30 in the Giacometti room upstairs specifically looking at new products and service using IPv6. And there's a number of people actually involved, network operators actually involved in rolling out V6 who are going to be speaking at that workshop. I would exhort people to attend that to further understanding and education. We have moved to shortening the ICANN meeting by one day to try to optimize time. There was some feedback from the community they would like to see that. And we also, very importantly, have added to this meeting a meeting to focus on business access. So we have a business access agenda in -- for the businesses in the domain name space, quite specifically focusing on ensuring that we increase the interaction between business and the ICANN community, and ensure that there's full understanding for people who would not necessarily attend every meeting about what are the issues that are before our community and what we're doing to address them. And this is some example of the events that are available in that specific targeting of business activity, business attendance. So this is a broader sense of engagement than just the business constituency in the GNSO. This is a broader engagement about getting business associations and senior business people aware of what ICANN and its community does, how it affects them, and how their voice can be heard. The translation program. Again, there will be a workshop on this Thursday at 1:00. And there are four categories of documents that we are looking at to do in translation. Outreach information, strategic documents, policy documents, and then the generic "other documents." And interpretation during ICANN meetings is to be the host nation and in regional languages. And we have interpretation and real-time interpretation at this meeting. So, again, if you would like to listen to that interpretation, please make certain you take one of the earpieces, and that will be available during this meeting. There's more, again, on the translation program at that link. Compliance activity continues to grow as a part of ICANN's resource dedication. You would see that significantly in the operational plan, which is put forward for approval. The compliance department oversees and enforces the terms of consensus policies. It conducts and reports on regular compliance audits and surveys and publishes advisories to registries and registrars. We will have a workshop today at 11:00 on registrant protection in the Utrillo meeting. And there is a weekly or monthly newsletter that is available for information about what's been done concerning compliance that month. Again, I would hope that many people in the 1500 people in this room and the many more people online would actually take the opportunity to sign up for these newsletters. We have monthly -- a monthly sort of magazine, online magazine. We have alerts about changes. There is quite a lot, if you like, push communications that people can sign up for to get more detailed information about what's going on inside the ICANN community. And I think this is a very important one to understand what's happening in terms of compliance. So, Chairman, that's a quick summation of activities taking place. Obviously, there's actually more going on this week than I've actually covered here. But I wanted to sort of give a sense of the main issues being addressed, where you can find more information about them, where the meetings are that are taking place this week, and then I'm sure Kieren McCarthy, the general manager for public participation, will give us a briefing now, sometime, about exactly how to follow this meeting in its public participation forums. >>PETER DENGATE THRUSH: Thank you, Paul. We do have time just for a few questions, but I remind you that we will be having full public sessions with open microphones later on to deal with all of those issues that Paul raised. So, then, I need to just -- we need to move to the next topic, which is one of the consequences of the multistakeholder format of ICANN, and one of the unique ways we do business is through constant attention to transparent, bottom-up policy development, so that everybody involved in the decisions and everyone affected by the outcomes can participate in the making of the policies. A crucial role in ensuring that the community can participate in that decision-making process is one of our senior staff members, Kieren McCarthy, who occupies the role of general manager of public participation. So I'd like to invite Kieren to come forward and explain some of the work that his group is doing, in particular, how you can participate this week. While Kieren's coming forward, I will just add that with your leave, Dr. Twomey and I will depart the stage and go and greet the French minister of state, who is our official guest for the opening ceremony. So I leave you in the hands of Kieren McCarthy. Kieren. [ Applause ] >>KIEREN McCARTHY: Thank you, Peter. Well, this is delightful to be able to have some time with a captive audience to tell you how to participate within ICANN. Something that I spend far too much of my time trying to figure out and trying to encourage people to do. So first of all, I'd like to take the opportunity to get you all to go to the -- this Paris meeting Web site, which you can find at PAR.icann.org. It's linked to on the front page of ICANN's main site. That's where we set up a meeting site for each meeting, where all the updated information is, where all the presentations are, where links to the audio feeds are, where everything that you should want to know about the meeting is there. And so I want to take this opportunity to say, really do go there. If you're looking for any information about the meeting, we try and make sure that everything that you need is there. And if it's not there, then -- or you have some changes, then you simply have to ask me, and I'll make them. I make a rolling series of changes over time. Additions this meeting, we have a chat room on the front, an IRC chat room. We have chat rooms, we have a page for each meeting that goes on. You should be able to find the panelists there, the presentations there. There's a chat room at the bottom where remote participants can interact. And we are adding an IRC chat room. We should also -- we're trying something which longtime ICANNers will be fairly excited about, is we've been trialing a scribe feed. You see the scribes at the front. And for a fair few meetings now, you can see the words appear on this huge screen on the left. We have been trialing running that as a text feed across the Internet, which should help with remote participation. We have been testing that this week. I think we're going to go live with a (inaudible) of that on Wednesday. On Wednesday, we should be able to show that you. That should help if you can't make future meetings, that should make life much, much easier for people to follow what the discussions are. One thing in particular is the public forum on Wednesday. I think it's very important that you all recognize that the public forum is for you to discuss what you want to discuss. And that's the way that I intend to run it on Wednesday, which is that you provide the issues that you want to discuss, and I'm going to break up the time according to topic, and we'll discuss that topic. There's a lot of intelligent and brilliant minds in the room, often. So I think it's time we use it per topic to discuss that. What I've done, if you have a look at the front page of PAR.icann.org is I have stuck a survey on the front. Now, you'll need to register to log in with big pulse, that's a system we use quite a lot for surveys. Then we have a long list of possible topics that you may want to discuss. You can add your own topics, if you wish. And then if you vote for whatever topic you want to discuss on Wednesday, then I'll accord -- attach more time or less time, according to how much you vote on. So, really, if you want to discuss something, go in, vote, say, "I would like to discuss," say, "new gTLDs." "I would like to discuss the PSC discussion," and I'll provide either more or less time based on what you say. It really is -- That's the opportunity to have a discussion about whatever you want. If everyone decides they want to talk about the color of Paul Twomey's suit, if you type that in and everyone votes for it, we can talk about Paul Twomey's suit. Actually, I'll probably ignore it if you all vote for Paul Twomey's suit. But you understand the point I'm making. Another feature is, I'm sure a lot of you know ICANNWiki, if for nothing else the fact that you've got your cartoons done by ICANNWiki and you walk around with them on your badges. ICANNWiki, we've worked with them for this meeting to provide an interactive notes feature. One of the problems, I think, we've had is we have these big meetings and we have a lot of good discussion, and a lot of that information gets lost because it's a meeting, because everyone's so involved. We have transcripts, but not many people dig in that deeply. So I'm constantly trying to find ways of capturing the information that you all provide and discussions that you all have. ICANNWiki has set up a very easy-to-use notes feature which you'll find at ICANNWiki.org. You'll also find it at ICANN -- par.icann.org, at our meeting site. I call it type and share. You click the button, you can select your session, and then provide whatever notes or reflections or anything on what you thought happened in that session. If you provide it and you click it through, it will appear and we'll accumulate, hopefully accumulate a lot of knowledge and a lot of the discussions that go on. And I hope to then use that to provide summaries, provide newsletters. But the main difficulty that I personally have is that there's such a huge amount that goes on, and with each meeting, there's more that goes on. And it's impossible to gather all that information. So this is a -- you know, we're a community. If you provide the information, I'll find ways of piecing it together and then provide it back to you in a very usable, useful format. So I urge you to use the ICANNWiki notes feature which they have set up for us for this meeting. I wonder, Jason, if you could -- I brought up the par site, but -- there we go. I'll come up to the site. Is that working? Wonderful. Also, I'm going to put -- once this -- the main sessions are open, I'm going to put out some feedback forms at the back of various meetings. It's a simple form. It will be what was the meeting you just attended, what did you get from it, have you got any feedback. That's incredibly useful. We don't tend to gather enough information about why you're actually here and what you want to get out of the meeting. And it's my job to try and find out from you all. And that's often -- I usually do that by walking around and talking to you, often trying to find people in the bar in the evening and asking what they think. I thought maybe we could have a better system, which is that you could write down what you think. So we put in feedback forms at the back of all the main rooms. If you have any ideas, if you say, "This was a very useful session because of this," "This wasn't a useful session because of this," and we'll change the meetings. We'll change how we approach things. So be of greatest use. Sometimes it varies depending whether you're a government person or a technical person or a civil society person. That's fine. Any feedback is good feedback, because then we can start structuring the meetings around what you most want. And I'm serious about that. So if you -- if you have any concerns about meetings, that's the way to do it. Fill it in, and I'll read them all and I'll compile them. In terms of consultations, I don't think -- people always say, "How can I get involved with ICANN's work? How can I provide feedback with ICANN's work?" There's a lot of ways of doing it. I think sometimes there's too many ways. I think meetings, obviously, is the big place where you can come and you can say what you think and you can -- we tend to always have question/answer sessions at the end of meetings. I strongly urge you to use them. We don't use them enough. And we don't structure them well enough. So this is why I'm looking for feedback as well with that, so we can structure conversations more. There's two big -- I would say the two big consultations in this meeting which we're specifically trying to make it more open, make it easier for you to provide your input is the -- this -- the President's Strategy Committee and the Joint Project Agreement, which we're calling improving institutional confidence. That's specifically going to be opened up to you in the second half of that meeting. The first half will be the chairman, the CEO, and the President's Strategy Committee outlining these documents about where ICANN is going. The second half is specifically set aside for you to provide your input. So if you want to say this is where you think ICANN is going, that's the time to ask for the microphone and put in your input. And I'm in charge of gathering that input and providing it to the committee for review. So I stand here on stage and say, if you get up and you say something, it will go into my summary, which will go to the committee. And that could change the way that ICANN is structured and the way that ICANN works. So I very strongly urge you to do that. That's a very important session. Another interesting session, seeing as you've all traveled very long distances to come here, is there's a meeting consultation. There's a paper out there, I don't know how many of you have seen it. And there's several major suggestions for structural change, the main one of which, which you may -- I saw a few people talking about yesterday, was moving from three meetings a year to two meetings a year. Now, we need your feedback on whether you think that's a good idea or not. If it is a good idea, how do we do it? But we need your feedback on that. You go to a lot of trouble to fly to these meetings. We assess it. But it's ICANN staff assessing it and it's board members assessing it. We need to know what you think about it. And it is out there. There is a public comment period out there, there is a session out there, and we really urge you to get involved in that so that we can then make a decision based on what your feedback is. On the ICANN site itself, -- Mac doesn't seem to be working. On the ICANN site, what's the main area for providing feedback? It's the public comment page. I don't know whether people -- everyone is aware, but, basically, everything that ICANN produces is put through a public comment period. Everything that ICANN produces of substantive issues is -- there's a public comment period on it. And if you have a look on the icann.org site, on the top right is a link saying "public comment." Is it working, Jason? That will do. Thank you very much. So this is the par.icann.org site. As you'll see here, this is the link. If you want to talk about something on the public forum, you click here, you register, and we discuss what you want. It's really that simple. There's the schedule. And you click -- Every meeting has its own Web page. So where are we now? Here we go. And there you go. There's the president's report, which you've just looked at, et cetera. But to get back to what I was talking about, the public comment period, so this is icann.org page. If you wanted to find out what ICANN is doing at any moment in time, click on "public comment." And there you'll find there is this page, and this says -- this is -- this shows the amount of work that's going through at the moment. This is the -- what's open for comment now, down the side. These are recently closed. And here are the archives. So if you scroll down, I'm happy to have feedback on this. I helped design this, and the effort is to try to make it as simple as possible for people to see what's going on, to understand what it is, and to provide input on it. So, for example, draft proposed changes to the registrar accreditation agreement. A lot of interest on that. There's your explanation. There's your link to where you can find the text. This is the staff member who is responsible. If you don't think there's enough information and you wanted to find out more information, just click on there. We'll send an e-mail directly to the staff member in charge, and they will get back to you. Here's the official -- link to the official announcement. Here you can see all the comments that people make. There you go. There's mine. And to add a comment, you simply click here and it provides an e-mail and you type in a comment. And that is, fundamentally, how ICANN makes a lot of its decisions, is we provide these public comment periods, we wait for the comments from the community, and then we draw up papers following that and put back into the system, back to the constituencies. Then, eventually, up to the board. That's the system. And I keep trying to persuade -- remind people of this. That's the system. So if you want to know what's going on at any point, here is the improving institutional confidence. There's the link to all the documents. I'm in charge of the consultation aspect of that. And the same goes on. So there's the ALAC review. IDNC recommendations, and so on and so forth. Now, if people have a better idea for how we can make that process clearer, simpler, then I'm all ears. But that's the method I've set up so that you can provide your input on whatever work ICANN is producing at any given time. In terms of getting -- finding out -- Paul Twomey was talking about the newsletters we have. We've got several now. You can see them all listed here. So these are very easy to sign up to. You simply click on that link at the top. I don't know whether you saw that. Subscribe newsletters and news alerts. We have a whole range of these. We have the news alerts. Whenever there's an important announcement that goes out, we send out a news alert. So if you simply sign up for that, you'll get an e-mail saying, "This has happened," and a click-through to whatever has happened. We have the newsletter, which is more of a sort of newsy summing up of what's going on around ICANN and around the sphere around the community. We have the monthly magazine, which I am responsible for, which I try and, effectively, say, "This is what's happened in the last month and this is what's going to happen in the next month," that's what I try and achieve each month, open feedback. You sign up for that, you get that once a month. It will say, this is what's happened. I usually have an interview with the CEO, and I usually persuade someone from the community to talk to me as well and get their insights on what's going on. There's the meetings updates, which, whenever anything happens with the meetings or whether, you know, there's some issue or, for example, the Cairo meeting, which will be in November, if you want to find out any information, what's going to happen on the Cairo meeting, you sign up to meetings updates and we'll tell you. Every time there's something new that happens, we'll tell you about it. There's the contractual compliance, which is fairly -- there's two which are new here, actually, three which are new here. Contractual compliance newsletter is in its third issue. That's once a month. And it provides you with whatever you want to know about what the contractual compliance people are doing. The policy update provides you with what all the -- the policy information on what policy issues are going through ICANN. The improving institutional confidence consultation, which I have set up to tell people where we are with that whole JPA and improving institutional confidence consultation, so each time something happens, each time we arrange something, each time we put up a summary analysis, you will get an e-mail saying, this is what we've done. This is where it is. So this is the system by which I try and push out the information to you all, is the newsletters. I'll show you the magazine while I'm here. Yes, someone said ORG. Here we go. So there's Sébastien. So I gave -- I interviewed Sébastien, who is the -- I don't know if you know, he's the local host who's helping organize this meeting. I interviewed him very quickly about what he hoped to get out of this meeting. And then we have the policy update, which is taken from the sort of brief view of the policy update and so on and so forth. The board decisions, actually, I'll talk about the board in a second. The board decisions, very quick run-through about what the board's decided and when the next board meeting is, a run-through of what's in the compliance newsletter, the public comment periods, the ICANN blog. Basically, you get this and any other news that's going on. The magazine is designed to basically be an easy way for people to keep in touch with what ICANN is doing this month and did last month. While I'm here, I should talk about -- briefly talk about interpretation. As you notice, there are some great booths at the back. We're providing interpretation of this meeting in French and Spanish. Spanish will only be available on Wednesday. But it will be available in most of the main rooms, in this main room and Hemingway and Rodin. There's several things that the interpreters always want me to point out, which is, please speak slowly. I don't -- I have not seen any waving hands, so I think I have been speaking slowly. With regard to headsets, if you do pick up the headsets, please don't wander around, it's easy to put them in your pocket and walk off. Remember to hand back the headsets. If there's any difficulties with the interpretation -- I don't think there should be. It seems to be working well. I'm looking for someone who has a headset on so they can nod at me -- it seems to be working well -- then come to me and I will try and -- if there are any issues with that. And that's also -- that will tie in with another effort which I am trying to push out, which is the -- trying to make ICANN a little bit more multilingual, so we have a translation program, which we're going to outline more on Thursday. I have it written down here. Thursday, 1:00 p.m. So if you are interested in being able to get ahold of what ICANN does in languages other than English, then that's the session to come to, where we'll be -- me and the translation committee, we have an internal translation committee, we'll be pointing out the different systems that we're setting up in order to provide non-English speakers with information about what ICANN is doing. Obviously, the Internet being global, it's fairly important to try to get at people. As a major part of that, major part of that, is we need to find ways of working with you, the community. And we don't quite know how to do that yet. Because it's complex, and we need to work with you on providing that information, finding out what information you want, and finding a way of checking that and accessing that. So if people -- if people here are interested in being able to get at what ICANN is doing in French or Spanish or Russian or Chinese or Portuguese or German, please come along to that session and talk. We're happy to talk. And we'll try and provide you with the information in a way -- in a usable format, in a fast format, et cetera, et cetera. The front page of the Web site, I don't know how many of you closely follow ICANN's front page. I'm hoping most of you. You will note that it's been through a fair few changes recently. This has been an active decision to try and make it more -- as more transparent or more accountable. We have -- basically, the format we used to have was just a long list of announcements on the front. We are trying to go to more of a newspaper, stroke, magazine style, where the most important thing -- we have the announcements first of all. But the most important thing is up front and then we have two minor issues -- well, minor issues -- less-important issues beneath. And then at the bottom, we have sorted links through to the main areas that you would be interested in, new gTLDs, et cetera, et cetera. We do change this, we change the site whenever anything interesting happens. And so it's worth coming back. We're going to try and put more videos in. I think video is a very useful way of getting people to interact. If you disagree with me, please tell me so and I will find another way of doing it. But I want you all to recognize the fact that the Web site, the front page of the Web site we're changing. And if you think it could be changed better or if you like it or dislike it, just come and talk to me. With regard to the translation program, this is another element with regard to participation, we've been trialing a few times online polling software. People are very uncertain and skeptical with use of online polling software. But we've been -- we've run it on a few occasions, and it seems to be pretty successful in that it -- it enables you a quick entry route into what ICANN is doing. It also forces people seeking the information to provide -- to boil it down to simple questions so that people can answer. It also forces people seeking the information to provide -- to boil it down to simple questions so that people can answer. So, for example, the most recent one we ran was for the translation program, and I think it's the most successful one we have ever had. And we have had 204 people, last time I looked, respond to the survey. And also put in their comments. And I can't stress enough how incredibly useful that is from an ICANN staff point of view where we are acting as a sort of Secretariat for you. I can't begin to describe how useful it is when we have a large amount of feedback in a structured format. It makes life very, very much easier to figure out what you want and how to provide it. So we're going to be using more surveys. I think that will be my recommendation to all of the ICANN staff and to the community as well, is to use surveys more. Because they are very simple and they pull people in. And so I hope that you will take part in one or two surveys. There are one or two running on at the moment. Another interesting discussion going on at this meeting is the at-large review, which I know a lot of you will be interested in. We're trying something new with that as well, and that is that Patrick Sherry whom some of you may know is working with the working group, and they are running several sessions but they are also running what they have decided to call office hours, which is a more informal chat. If you go to the par.icann.org. I can do that now. Where are we? There's one today. Here we go, in Hemingway. So they have two office hours events. One on Wednesday and one on Thursday. And that we're testing out to see if having a less formal -- rather than me standing up on a stage talking down to you and, you know, you wondering why I'm standing up on a podium, then we're trying to figure out is that the most effective way of getting conversations flowing. Sometimes it's useful. If you are presenting, for example. But I think when we have got things like reviews, which people have a lot of thoughts and feelings and passions about, it's probably more useful to sit down and have a discussion. So if you are interested in the at-large review, then I strongly suggest you try -- go along and see if you can make this informal discussion work, which will then be fed back into a more formal discussion. That's something we're trying. So I hope you attend and I hope you talk to people about it. With regard to -- it would actually be useful with regard to the social events is the cocktail this evening, and there's the gala event on Wednesday. We should have a meeting guide. Where did I put my meeting guide? Is it on the chair? We have a meeting guide that should be available this morning from the registration booth which outlines -- which has a -- all the sessions of the day and has various other information in. And on that there's instructions on how to get to the cocktail and the gala session. So because we're in Paris, the most effective way of doing it is to actually get the metro. It's not that complicated. And there will be people to guide you. But it's worth, while I'm up here and you are all there, it's worth mentioning the fact that that's possibly the best method to getting to both. And there's clear instructions in the meeting guide and there will be clear instructions out there as well. And there will be people to guide you through. So just so you know, that's how to get to the cocktail and the gala event, which will both be very worthwhile going to. The gala event is at the grand arch, which is beautiful, and also there's a new wing of the computer museum up there, connected to the -- specializing for the Internet, which they have just added, and there's an ICANN little section there. And the Minister will come and that should be good fun. And the gala event will be in the hotel de ville, which I don't know if any of you have been into central Paris yet, which is a beautiful building, and we should have the mayor of Paris coming to that. So that will also be worth going to. I think tickets are available now, so if you go to the registration booth, I think there's a limited number so if you want to go to them, I would recommend after the opening ceremony going getting tickets to both. They both should be excellent. And with that, so I've got here to ask Paul, Paul is the V.P. of corporate affairs, and he is running the meetings paper. Seeing as we're at a meeting, it seems like a good idea to give Paul an opportunity to run through the meetings paper and the consultations he will be running on it, which he will come up and explain to you now. >>PAUL LEVINS: So thanks, and bienvenue, everyone. My name is Paul Levins. I am the executive officer and vice president of corporate affairs for ICANN. And as Kieren mentioned, we, about a little over two weeks now, posted on the ICANN Web site in the public comments forum and to the front page a paper that we have put together, which the board has agreed for the distribution of that paper, to examine two issues which are very important, I think, to all of you. Two key issues. One is meeting regularity. The number of times we have meetings per year. And the second is meeting location. So the reason that we focused on those two in particular, to commence a discussion around meeting reform, is that we had a lot of feedback from people that the -- in the first instance, the three meetings a year is a large investment of time, regardless of where you are from, government, business, if you are an individual. To invest the amount of time that these meetings require, often up to seven days, you are looking at 21 days per year at the moment of investment. Now, I'm somewhat agnostic on this, but there is -- it may well be that 21 days is the right number it's now an historic number in the sense that we have been doing that for ten years, in the organization's life. Is it the right number? Should we, could we, and the paper argues this or suggestions this, get, in fact, more organized work done with a reduced number of meetings? I know that sounds a somewhat peculiar suggestion, but a lot of policy work, we're wondering whether or not policy work and some of the discussions could, in fact, be more focused if we, in fact, had a shorter investment of time, knowing that those two meetings were going to be the meetings where that activity had to occur. We are not precluding intersessional meetings that would take place, for example, for some of the policy organizations and constituency groups. I've heard suggested to me that this is just about cost saving. It's not, although that clearly is an element of the discussion. These meetings now are a large drain on the community finance. We're a very transparent organization, so you will find all these figures are not telling it's tales out of school but you will find all these figures online under preliminary reports of the board, discussions that take place in board meetings. The meetings now cost, on average, $2 million a year to mount. Some of those can be more expensive than that. So we're pretty anxious to really invigorate the discussion. And I would encourage all of you, when you have a spare moment, to go to that public comment site and drop us a line, tell us what you think about that proposal. Take the five to ten minutes it will take to read the paper and drop us a line. The second element of that paper is location. There's a proposal in the paper that says rather than simply rotating through the ICANN nominated regions that we should have at least one of the meetings at a hub location. So, for example, many of you who are regular attendees at this meeting will understand that there's been meetings in the past where you have had two, three, four, and perhaps the delightful prospect of a bus ride at the end of it for connections to get to the destination. Is that an essential element of outreach, to continue to do that? Or is that not? Is that an ill use of valuable resources, both in time and money? I heard someone say yes. If you think that, lodge the comment. Lodge the comment. So that's the key thing on meetings that I would like to raise. And with that, I might hand it back to Kieren because I think he wanted to ask and evolve a little bit more about how this public forum session will run on the wings. >>KIEREN McCARTHY: Wonderful. I actually have more time. [ Applause ] >>KIEREN McCARTHY: Usually it's a matter of trying to stuff in what I have to say in two minutes. So this is great. The public forum -- I want to go back to the public forum because it's not going to work if you don't interact with it. This is my intention. My intention is to ask you all to either go on that survey, which you can see here. See, look, there's the link. Click on that, register and say, "This is what I would like to talk about." I'll grab the stats for that and separate up the public forum into time periods according to how many people want to talk about which part. And then that's what we will sit and we will talk about. And then I'll provide a summary of what we talked about, and then we'll use that going forward, and I'll put that in all the different parts of the organization where it needs to be put. I really hope that people do that, and I really hope you come along, and I really hope that we are consistently trying to make the public forum more discussive and more interactive. I know for -- there's been a long tradition, for a lot of reasons, which I won't go into, of having a microphone at the front, which people come up to. And I know the scribes are now looking at me worried because they like that system. Otherwise, they have to figure out how on earth who is talking. But what's tended to happen, I have been to a lot of ICANN meetings, you tend to have a ten-minute diatribe from someone who talks about this is what I think. And it's natural human interaction, you start grasping different elements of issues. And the next person gets up, when it's a queue they already have their ideas so they start going. And the difficulty, I think, with that is that we jump around a lot of issues and we don't build up discussion. And there's a lot of very intelligent people here and we are all fully capable of understanding people's perspectives. And the way the discussion is so useful is if someone says something and someone else can immediately respond and then someone else can immediately respond. And that's what I am going to try to get to more with the public forums is people can start having a real discussion. Whether we end up getting anywhere, I don't know, but at least we will understand people's different perspectives. The hope being we talk to each other more, we understand each other more. And the way ICANN is moving, where there is much more discussion in between constituencies, because we found that's just a more effective way of running the policy processes, which is what ICANN is all about, then the better. So I encourage you to come along and to come along with the spirit of trying to understand what people want to say, having your say, and trying to get somewhere. Trying to tackle some of the subjects. And there's a lot of subjects that are coming up. Try to tackle them and try to come up with a process by which we can improve the way the Internet works. So with that, I think, are we ready? Oh, okay. Well, let me -- I could be here all day. This is great. Let me show you through the par site, which I am hoping you have all gone to. Also, we have got it in French, which I think is -- it's the first time that we have provided a translation of the site in French. We are going to try to do the same, we will try to improve on that for Cairo so we will have it in Arabic, which is a struggle in itself. Incidentally, if anyone wants to help out sorting out the technical issues of right-to-left text, it's something I am struggling with, and we're struggling with. There's a lot of technical issues. So if there are any experts out there, I hope to God there is, if there is anyone out there who has solved that or is working on solving that, please help me out with that because it's not simple. Do you want to find out what's going on at any point, I will run you through the schedule again. So we're on Monday. Each meeting has its own page. So, for example, look at the JPA discussion. There's an explanation of what it is. There's presentations. There is the type and share. In fact, I will show you the type and share. I will also put when the panelists are available, we will put the panelists there. When the presentation is available, we will put the presentation there. When the transcripts are available, we will put that there. When the translation of all that is available, we will put that there. So this is what I am stressing, if you want to find out what is going on, this is the place to go to. So the type and share feature, for example, public forum, Monday the 23rd, cut and paste your notes. Kieren demonstrated the ICANNWiki type and share. I hope to God this works. The type and share feature. Save. There you go. So that's what -- If you want to provide any information about any of the sessions that you are in, that's how simple it is. Type it, click save, and then the rest of the community will find out what's happened. I really urge you to do that. It won't take long. I know people -- I have seen people sending long e-mails around after each session about this is what happened in the session to all of their friends, and there's hundreds of these e-mails that go around every single meeting. It would be terrific if we used a bit of the Internet technology and we all see how it works when you have collaborative technology, that's why we are all in this room, to work together. So if you provide information there that we can all look at what other people have provided and we can actually work together to move along faster. Would you like to talk about the PSC? Paul is itching to tell you about the PSC. >>PAUL LEVINS: Less so that than to say that it's 9:34, I think it is, and obviously we're just waiting on the attendance of the Minister. He is here. And we're just -- I think Peter and Paul Twomey and others are meeting him as we speak. So I wanted to state the obvious, and that is that we're filibustering a little bit. [ Laughter ] >>PAUL LEVINS: Make no apologies for that and, in fact, I am going to take the opportunity of this, and it might be cut short by the arrival of the Minister, to show you some things which -- on the Web site. So now we have you captive in the room, I often get the criticism, or the organization does -- in fact, I will be cut short by the arrival of the Minister. So there will be another opportunity perhaps during the public forum where I can show you some of these items in relation to transparency and how they work on the Web site itself. So I will get off the stage, and our officials can join us. >>KIEREN McCARTHY: Could I just say very quickly, if people want to grab their headsets to understand the French and the English, now is the best time to grab headsets. They are at the back, they are on the side there. If you could please return them afterwards as well.