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 Agenda below). This agenda is developed with input received from ICANN Community Leaders of Supporting Organizations, Advisory Councils and Stakeholder Groups/Constituencies.

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. Attendees are encouraged to be brief and concise to enable as many perspectives to be heard as possible. To facilitate this, ICANN Board Chair Steve Crocker sets a time limit per intervention (2 minutes).

At the same time, remote participants are provided with URLs where they may record a question or comment to be read to the meeting; these can be found next to the agenda topics, below (the links will be made available shortly before the Public Forum starts and will be closed when the session ends in San José). For transparency, scribe feed is provided both in room and via remote participation in real-time to allow all comments and questions raised during the session viewed by everyone.

Interventions from the room and those from remote participants alternates 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 Steve Crocker calls 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.

Guidelines for Comments and Questions

All comments and questions, both in-person and remote follow the ICANN EXPECTED STANDARDS OF BEHAVIOR. Remote or in-room questions or comments in breach of these guidelines will not be read out and that person will be called to order.