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A Closer Look at ICANN70

29 March 2021
By Nick Tomasso

Thank you to everyone who helped make the ICANN70 Virtual Community Forum a success. More than 1,700 attendees participated from 157 countries and territories.

ICANN70 Statistics

Here is a preview of some of the data, the regional breakdown of participants:

  • Africa – 10%
  • Asia, Australia, and Pacific Islands – 22%
  • Europe – 24%
  • Latin America and the Caribbean – 10%
  • North America – 34%

The full ICANN70 By the Numbers Report, which will include more in-depth statistics, will be released within a few weeks.

Meeting Improvements

In advance of ICANN70, we continued to enhance our participation tools to improve the virtual meeting experience and foster deeper connections between participants. As we wrote about here, we added new tools to bolster networking opportunities, including the ability to schedule individual meetings with other participants on the event website. We expanded the number of sessions livestreamed via YouTube as an alternative for community members who have limited bandwidth to participate via Zoom.

Language support is crucial to encouraging diverse community participation at ICANN Public Meetings. Once again, we offered remote simultaneous interpretation (RSI) in the six United Nations languages (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish) during Prep Week and throughout the Public Meeting for high-interest sessions. Additionally, we were able to integrate the RSI platform into Zoom to offer a more seamless experience for participants using RSI. You can read more about all the language service enhancements at ICANN70 here.

Public Meeting Principles

The ICANN Board has been seeking the community's feedback on the effectiveness of virtual Public Meetings, how to better support the community's work at meetings, and other aspects that should be integrated into ICANN's in-person meeting strategy. ICANN org is actively working with Supporting Organization and Advisory Committee leadership to develop community guidelines for Public Meeting planning. We hope these guidelines will bolster continuity, transparency, and accountability for the decisions made on the community's behalf by the designated representatives that work with ICANN org planning both virtual and in-person Public Meetings.

Thank you

I'd like to take this opportunity to thank our original ICANN70 hosts and regional partners in Latin America and the Caribbean as well as the host committee in Mexico for their support and understanding. We look forward to returning to the region.

Thank you to the community for their continued engagement and tireless efforts during these challenging times. The ICANN Board decided that ICANN71, originally scheduled for The Hague, Netherlands, will also be held virtually. All of us at ICANN org will continue to work diligently to ensure the ICANN71 Virtual Policy Forum will be another productive meeting for the community.

Authors

Nick Tomasso