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Thank You for a Successful ICANN69

23 October 2020
By Nick Tomasso

Thank you to everyone who helped make the ICANN69 Virtual Annual General Meeting a success. This was our largest Virtual Public Meeting ever, with over 1,616 registered attendees from 157 countries.

ICANN69 Statistics

In the coming weeks, we'll release the ICANN69 By the Numbers Report, which will include more meeting statistics, but I want to provide a preview of some of that data.

Regional Breakdown of Participants:

  • Africa - 10.3%
  • Asia - 15.5%
  • Australia and Pacific Islands - 3.2%
  • Eastern Europe and Central Asia - 3.1%
  • Europe - 25.7%
  • Latin America - 7.5%
  • Middle East - 4.1%
  • North America - 30.6%

Online Engagement:

  • 1,792 Active users on the schedule website

Meeting Improvements

For this 22nd Annual General Meeting, we launched a series of improvements to help create more engaging and inclusive sessions for participants. As we wrote about in this blog, with your feedback, we are consistently evolving your Public Meeting experience to better meet the needs of the community. This is particularly important if we continue to meet virtually as a result of the pandemic.

For the first time, we live-streamed five high-interest sessions on YouTube, including the Welcome Ceremony and Annual General Meeting, to enhance accessibility. We held virtual Fikas to foster more engagement. This was in response to community feedback asking for more opportunities to socialize and network during virtual Public Meetings. Once again, we offered remote simultaneous interpretation (RSI) during Prep Week and throughout the Public Meeting in the six United Nations languages (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish) for selected sessions.

Meeting Strategy

The ICANN Board hosted a session focused on the strengths and potential areas for improvement for Public Meetings. If you missed the session, you can access the recording here. As Göran wrote about in this blog, the ICANN Board is 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. We look forward to seeing the results of the feedback.

Thank you

I'd also like to take this opportunity to thank our original ICANN69 hosts and regional partners (ECO, DENIC, and the City of Hamburg) for their support and understanding. And lastly, I'd like to thank the community for their continued engagement and feedback during these challenging times.

I look forward to participating with you all at the ICANN70 Community Forum in March 2021.

Authors

Nick Tomasso