The largest community turnout in the history of APAC Space was at ICANN60 Annual General Meeting in Abu Dhabi with 100 participants.
Since 2015, APAC Space has steadily grown to become the go-to platform for seasoned ICANN community members and newcomers from the Asia Pacific (APAC) region. We believe that this diversity helps draw people together and spark conversation. APAC Space provides a safe "space" for our community to network and discuss ICANN-related work such as ongoing policy development processes (PDP). In doing so, the platform facilitates increased participation from the APAC community.
Over the past three years, the ICANN APAC team has run 18 APAC Space sessions consisting of face-to-face meetings and web conferences. We now see a steady group of attendees with an average of 30 for web conferences and nearly 50 at face-to-face meetings.
As the APAC community further finds its footing in ICANN's global arena, a key achievement of APAC Space has been to provide more opportunities for our community members to step into leadership roles. The first community facilitator for APAC Space was Edmon Chung, and recently veteran community leaders Holly Raiche and Pam Little have also become community facilitators. We look forward to more community members taking on similar leadership roles for APAC Space.
APAC Space Survey 2018
This year, we ran the second edition of the APAC Space Survey (2018), and received encouraging feedback on our progress so far. In particular, there was a positive response to the rotating interest topics that have kept discussions in APAC Space relevant and community members apprised of ongoing policy developments in ICANN.
We also identified areas for improvement. We will work towards increasing session interactivity by introducing quizzes and allowing more time for quality discussions and questions. We will continue to propose APAC Space topics based on the community's discussion interests as highlighted in the APAC Space Survey. This practice has proven effective as it has allowed us to better plan the appropriate speakers and facilitators in advance. Some top interest areas highlighted by the community include:
- Enhancing multistakeholder cooperation
- DNS industry and market developments
- DNS security, stability, and resiliency
- Ongoing policy development processes (PDP) such as the Expedited PDP on Temporary Specification for gTLD Registration Data and New gTLD Subsequent Procedures PDP.
For more details on the survey results, please read the APAC Space Survey 2018 here. [PDF, 177 KB]
Finally, a big thank you to our members for their participation and discussion contributions. We hope that APAC Space will continue to be the premier "space" for the APAC community to gather and comfortably share their views. We ultimately want APAC Space to be the platform that aids better APAC participation in ICANN policymaking. Looking forward, the ICANN64 Community Forum, which will be held in Kobe, Japan in 2019, will be one of the prime opportunities to leverage APAC Space and generate more community-building activities and discussion.
Subscribe to APAC Space discussions at discuss@apacspace.asia, and find out more about APAC Space through our community wiki page.