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Attendance dips for ICANN in Johannesburg

Kevin Murphy, July 25, 2017, 14:14:17 (UTC), Domain Policy

The number of people showing up for ICANN’s latest meeting was down compared to previous meetings, just-released statistics show.
The organization reported today that there were 1,353 attendees at the ICANN 59 meeting in Johannesburg last month, down from 1,436 at the comparable Helsinki meeting a year ago.
It was also down from the 2,089 people attending the Copenhagen meeting in March, but that’s to be expected due to the mid-year meeting having a shorter schedule more tightly focused on policy work.
It also seems to be typical for meetings in Africa to get lower attendance than meetings elsewhere in the world, given the relatively low participation at last year’s Marrakech meeting.
But attendance from the local region spiked again. There were 498 Africans there, 36% of the total. By comparison, just 5% of Copenhagen attendees were African.
This tilted the gender balance towards males, with declared female participation down to 31% from 33% in Copenhagen and 32% in Helsinki.
The number of people attending their first ICANN meeting was 33% of the total. That’s much higher than the 20% reported for Copenhagen. About two thirds of the noobs were from Africa.
These numbers are among the thousands of statistics released in the ICANN 59 roundup today, which for the first time included some eye-opening facts about food and drink consumption at the venue, reproduced here.

If these numbers are correct, there was one waiter or member of service staff for every 2.7 meeting attendees, which strikes me as a weirdly balanced ratio.

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