ICANN São Paulo meeting site

(I tried to make some points on the introduction of new gTLDs at yesterday's GNSO public forum, but with time pressure at the mic, the points I were trying to make were necessarily somewhat brief and probably also somewhat confusing. I'll break up my thoughts into general categories and spread them over a few blog posts.)

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One of ICANN

PLAYING THE CATCH UP GAME- AFRICAN STYLE
By Rebecca Wanjiku
Paul Odhiambo is an ICT officer at the Ministry of Education in Kenya. He is used to the technical jargon and all issues relating to the information society.

But attending the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) meeting is not that easy for Odhiambo. In some of the sessions, he finds himself in unfarmiliar territory. Why ? afterall he is a techie !

Because at the meetings, participants discuss about ICT laws and how they can be made responsive to people

By Rebecca Wanjiku,

When Peter Ulanga was invited to visit Brazil, last year, he knew that something was going to change in the management of dot Tz country code Top Level Domain (ccTLD).

Ulanga, and a colleague, Peter Shilla, benefited from training offered by the Brazilian government on management of domain name registries using open source software.

Within two years of the training, Tanzania Communications Regulatory Authority is ready to launch the dot Tz ccTLD registry. The domain has been administered by the University of Dar es Salaam and individuals.

`The training worked well, we have bought necessary equipment and we are ready to launch Tanzania Network Information Centre, TzNIC,` said Ulanga.

This is the script for a weekly insert that I do on a South African radio station called SAfm. The insert is called "Cybersurf", it is normally about three and a half minutes long, and deals with internet related matters.

IDNs at the ICANN conference in Sao Paulo
Broadcast date: 6 December 2006

Hello, Bom dia, and welcome to Cybersurf, coming to you this morning from Sao Paulo in Brazil. I am Steven Lang

This week, the Internet Corporation for Assigned names and Numbers or ICANN is holding it Annual General Meeting in Sao Paulo, the largest commercial hub in South America, where incidentally it has been raining almost continually for the past ten days or so.

At risk of jinxing it, I think that the Internet access (including this web site) are great this meeting. I realize this is a REALLY hard job and usually a thankless task so I wanted to thank all of the people who were involved in setting up and running the infrastructure for this meeting.

Great job!

So I'm Executive Officer and VP Corporate Affairs for ICANN and I'm tasked with improving our communications amongst other things. In another forum Keiren McCarthy says: 'the real test will come in whether the ICANN staff start using it (this remote site). ICANN is still in under-fire mode (although it has started relaxing a little following the JPA) and the staff have a slight bunker mentality. I just hope that they start interacting with the community and in return the community gives them a fair hearing. If the site can solve one problem that wouldn

Hi everyone
I can't be there this time for the first time since I was appointed to ALAC by NomCom last year - my dad was badly injured in a car accident and is in intensive care.
I really wanted to come, as it's the LAC region meeting and also the formation of the LACRALO that I've spent so much time on in the past year. But I have been participating remotely, with the webcasts, and the ALAC has me able to attend meetings via Skype.
It's also way cool that this site exists and I can also participate in the informal discussions that surround the meeting (one of the things that we miss a lot in remote participation)

Paul Twomey, CEO of ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned names and Numbers) opened the 27th edition of the council meeting in Sao Paulo, Brazil with a number of positive developments to talk about. Most important of these was the signing of a Joint Partnership Agreement between ICANN and US Department of Commerce that continues the process of relaxing Washington

So we're here in Sao Paulo.

Today the Board we met in committees during the morning. Most of the Board's committees don't meet between the in-person meetings. I'm hoping to change this for the committees I'm on. This practice means that we have to spend quite a bit of time during the regular ICANN meetings doing committee work.

Then we met as a Board (plus staff) for the afternoon. This was a meeting devoted to listing (but not ranking) priorities for 2007 -- the priorities were things you'd expect, like the new gTLD process, IDNs, and improving transparency.

We also spent some time on internal Board machinations -- who's leading, who's on what committee. There's a steep learning curve for brand new board members and we have two of them who started this week.

Is anyone having difficulty with timezones, their computers and this site?

There is a complex mix of time technology at work. First this site is told it is working four hours in the future because the server it is housed on is in LA. But it was originally built on a server in the UK.

The site also has a small piece of code that reads each individual's computer clock as they log-in and the site then reorganises times on the fly to fit in with the individual.

But I suspect that there may be a clash with this and the hard-wired times of the events. If anyone is having a problem, please comment below giving details. If not then it must all be working fine.