ICANN São Paulo meeting site

Last night - late - we got talking about what clothes we had brought with us. Some had travelled light. Others had more than they could possibly wear. Of particular interest was shoes. At the risk of reinforcing a stereotype, it seemed that in a straw poll of about 9, none of the men had more than 3 pairs and the women had between 5 and 9 (although one person bought 2 pairs here which led to a debate about if they should be included). The person who had 9 - a well known ICANN identity whom we will call Athena (not her real name), turns out to be a symbol, but more of that later.

As this 27th ICANN meeting races to a close, there is no doubt in my mind that we are improving rapidly in the way these meetings run and their usefulness . I am aware that this is a little self-serving as I am an ICANN employee. It's happening because we are responding to excellent suggestions from the community. What's my evidence? This site for one. We did this quickly and placed our trust in Kieren McCarthy and he delivered big time. In addition to improving remote participation, the blogs, the comments and chat rooms have seen ICANN staff appearing on an official ICANN site providing personal perspectives that have at once humanised them, made them more accessible and dare I say it a bit more transparent.

Another was the changing of the timetable so that the public meeting happened first. That subtle change was hugely beneficial and lots of people commented on it.

Then there was the 'meetings meeting' where Susan Crawford got to play Oprah and charged round a big room jamming in as much input as she could in the 90 minutes available.

What else? Well we we still havent got our act together on translations. We still make some obvious mistakes and we must get better. But we acknowledge it.

We are making progress on IDNs. The interest in this topic is understandably strong. Tina Dam from ICANN spent breakfast, lunch, dinner and supper explaining to just about everyone that we were making progress on the technical solution.

We saw the formation of the first Regional At Large Organisation, appropriately in the Latin American and Carribean region. A great step forward for users of the Internet.

Athena is somewhat symbolic therefore: she's leaving with more than she came with.

So as we slip on our shoes to go home (Athena has a big choice and is determined to have even more), it might be easy to be cynical about the pace of change and the frustrations that the multi-stakeholder model brings. And that's fair enough. But it's also important to consider the amount of shoe leather we have worn getting to where we are and how much further we have to walk.

Maybe that's why Athena has all those shoes.