Organization looks to have in-person attendance at meeting for the first time in 2 years.
ICANN is considering having in-person attendance for its upcoming ICANN 72 meeting scheduled for October 23-28 in Seattle. It would be the first meeting to have an in-person component since ICANN 66, held in Montreal in November 2019.
The organization sent a survey to past meeting attendees to gauge interest in a hybrid model with both in-person and online attendance. This model is familiar to ICANN since it has offered an online option for many years.
Among the considerations ICANN has put on the table are vaccine requirements, mask mandates, pre-travel Covid-19 testing, onsite rapid testing, and advanced registration for sessions. It’s also asking the community how it feels about limiting attendance to members of certain committees.
The Board will make a determination about the ICANN 72 meeting in July.
Sounds like they are trying to start up the junkets again.
ICANN it is time to stop the waste! Nothing wrong with Zoom, in fact it is more suitable for people all around the world.
I *want* to agree with you, but that’s simply not true. ICANN is a global community and while traveling to a meeting is difficult it’s impossible to ignore the reality that it’s equally difficult for people distributed throughout the globe to be on calls in the middle of the night from their home time zone.
While I’m on the same time zone as Seattle I’m much less likely to attend hours and hours of Zoom meetings whereas if I were at the event I’d be in those meetings.
That doesn’t even account for the time shift for meetings that take place during hours well outside my regular working hours.
Agree with Kellie. ICANN is running in “degraded mode.” Zoom calls have been an acceptable fallback, but so much of our work is just…stuck.
ICANN’s F2F meetings were typically used as occasions to either wrap up old project or initiate new workstreams. But being remote for 2 years has essentially frozen the existing workload in place.
The vaccines are good, as good as any developed by science. They’re free and widely available in the US, and hopefully elsewhere by the time we get to October. There will never be a “green light” to return to conferences, just dimming shades of yellow. This is as good as it’s going to get for at least the next few years. Let’s go.
Any chance you drop some positivity among any of your comments?
The Covid guideline against social gathering has been lifted? Let’s see if there will be ease of restriction before then anyway…
Yes, among vaccinated people