Meetings Committee Meeting, San Juan Puerto Rico 29 June 2007

Attendance

Susan Crawford, Roberto Gaetano, Demi Getschko, Thomas Narten, Steve Goldstein, David Wodelet, Kurt Pritz, Diane Schroeder, Steve Conte, Kieren McCarthy, Tanzanica King, Paul Levins, Michael Evans

Top priorities for discussion:

1. What we'd like to change about the way our ICANN meetings work.
2. Continue discussion of what the Meetings Committee should be doing generally.

ICANN MEETINGS

Schedule timing

• Agenda to be made available to the community in advance, many participants may have difficulties in justifying the trip. We should aim at 4-6 weeks notice for a complete agenda.
• Consider fixed meal times (including snack/coffee breaks for ALL, with no official meetings scheduled (Private meetings and Board lunches with Constituencies could still take place during this time).
• End all sessions at 19:00 to allow for dinner
• Consider longer lunchtime availability to avoid long queues to eat

- The above facilitates mingling amongst participants, allows everyone to have proper meals, bio breaks, etc., and will help prevent overlapping meetings.

• Explicit tracks as per IETF and other convention programs, with explicit time slots that are scheduled.

- The time slots can be varying lengths, to accommodate different meeting requests. Groups should indicate what conflicts MUST be avoided, but they have to be reasonable and arrange their use of time blocks to facilitate this.

- Discussion took place about additional constraints for example press conferences which account for the long break between the end of the welcome ceremony and the beginning of the first public forum

- Firm deadlines need to be set for agendas, scheduling requests, finalizing the schedule and posting papers that will be discussed. This is needed for planning, and ideally allows people to determine what days they wish to attend.

Materials

For participants: Consider publishing checklist – ‘What you should do at an ICANN meeting’ to provide guide to participation at meetings for first timers.

Corporate-Board procedures:

• 1-week minimum on documents prior to Board meeting
• Definition of Board Meeting vis a vis ICANN meeting (that is, Board members should get documents a week before the start of an ICANN meeting, so major reads during the week-long meeting are kept to minimum or zero)
• Better on-line Board Books and other collaboration tools. PL advised staff was in final stages of considering on-line Board portal support.

Events

Issues: People leaving before the board meeting; overlapping meetings; people unable to speak at public forum

• Make the board meeting / public forum more interactive
• Posting of presentations online and not actually reporting live
• Create a more friendly seating arrangement
• Have smaller groups meeting in various rooms regarding particular topics

*Things to consider: Format and seating changes may cause difficulties for our Scribes and Translators but this has to be tried.

Use of Moderators

• Public forum format does not encourage participation – experiment with a professional moderator and have several microphones for speakers
• Have 2 Microphones; 1 for New Topics and 1 for follow-up on previous topics

THE MEETINGS COMMITTEE ROLE:

Encourage the Board to experiment. For example:

Identify one of the following to try in Los Angeles

- Seating / smaller meetings

- Change the room setup

- Schedule tracks (color-coded calendar for track system)

Constituency day needs to be reformed. Board members should consider ‘pairing’ and attending sessions and reporting back to the whole Board at the end of the day. This would enable greater dialogue and more time and a better discussion of views at Board level. Board members should not attend constituencies that have

Propose possible Board retreat/workshop, maybe with outside consulting, as soon after Los Angeles AGM as possible to examine new leadership roles and ways of working together.