Nope, no Seattle meeting for ICANN

ICANN’s planned public meeting in Seattle will have no face-to-face component, the board of directors decided yesterday.

In a resolution published last night, the board cited the global vaccine inequity and the ongoing difficulties with international travel and visas during the coronavirus pandemic.

But it added that it plans to go ahead with a hybrid online/in-person meeting for ICANN 73 in San Juan, Puerto Rico next March “if it is feasible to do so”.

The board noted that its last in-person AGM, held in late 2019, saw 68% of its participants come from outside the US, suggesting Seattle would go ahead with a majority of its community members absent.

It added that “it is likely that ICANN72 could be a meeting of in-person attendees from just a couple of regions, which does not serve global participants in ICANN’s multistakeholder model”

While some of the pandemic-related issues may be resolved by October, ICANN had to make the call now to avoid wasting money on a physical meeting it may have had to later cancel.

The results of the board vote have not yet been published. A similar resolution last year saw some directors vote in favor of a return to face-to-face meetings by October 2020.

The resolution states that ICANN org should use the next eight months to ensure the hybrid model planned for San Juan is as effective as possible for those who will still be unable or unwilling to attend in person due to the pandemic.

It adds that smaller regional meetings, where travel restrictions are less irrelevant, could still go ahead this year.

A recent poll showed a majority of community members from all regions were keen to return to in-person meetings for Seattle, but the majority was greater in North America than elsewhere.

A group of participants from the Asia-Pacific region recently wrote to ICANN to state that it was likely that nobody from that region would be able to show up in Seattle.

ICANN 72 will be the sixth consecutive public meeting to be held virtually.

ICANN to hold hybrid meeting in October (not that one)

ICANN said yesterday that is plans to hold a “hybrid” meeting in October with an in-person component.

It’s not the Seattle public meeting ICANN 72 — no decision has been made there yet — but rather the Asia Pacific Internet Governance Academy.

APIGA is basically a set of internet governance training sessions for adult students aged 18 to 35 in the Asia-Pac region, particularly South Korea.

It’s normally held for a week, in-person. But this time it will be spread over a full two months from October 1 with one or two evening sessions held online per week.

At the end, there’ll be a hybrid day, with South Korean participants gathered in person and others Zooming in remotely.

Is this a harbinger of things to come with the Seattle meeting, where there’s already some distress from Asian participants that they probably won’t be able to attend?

I don’t think so. APIGA appears to have been a decision of the ICANN staff, whereas 72 is going to a board vote later this month.

“Diversity” warning over ICANN Seattle

ICANN has been told that it risks disenfranchising community members from outside the US if it goes ahead with a return to in-person meetings at ICANN 72 in Seattle this October.

APAC Space, a group comprising participants from the Asia-Pacific region, reckons there’s almost no chance that any of its members will be able to make it to Seattle, due to pandemic restrictions.

The group wrote (pdf):

Like the rest of the community, the APAC Space members are keen to see a return to face-to-face meetings, but we have serious concerns about continued, longterm disenfranchisement if this return is done in an inequitable way. If a hybrid meeting does go ahead in Seattle, we are reasonably confident that there will be minimal, if any, in-person attendance from the APAC region

APAC Space goes on to note that ICANN 73 next March is also scheduled to take place in the same region, in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

The letter continues:

We are concerned that holding a hybrid meeting in which participants from only some regions can participate in-person is not in line with ICANN’s goal to reflect regional and cultural diversity, and risks further disenfranchising regions that are already under-represented within ICANN’s processes.

A recent ICANN survey found that a majority of community members were keen to return to face-to-face meetings. While this was true everywhere, the majority was stronger among North Americans and Europeans.

ICANN’s board of directors is due to make a decision about Seattle later this month.

This article was updated July 9 to clarify authorship of the letter to ICANN.

There’s really only one question about the return to face-to-face ICANN meetings

The struggles of remote working during unsociable hours and the possibility of a return to partially in-person meetings for Seattle in October were the subject of lots of well-deserved debate at the virtual ICANN 71 public meeting last week, but in reality I think there’s only one question that matters.

The question is posed by Americans to everyone else, and it goes like this: “You guys cool if we go ahead without you?”

Sure, lots of interesting and important questions were raised last week, particularly during the hour-long final session.

If ICANN decides to require proof of vaccination to attend in person, will it accept all brands of vaccine, or will it do a Bruce Springsteen and exclude those who have received the AstraZeneca jab, which is not currently approved in the US?

Is it a problem for overseas travelers that the number of vaccinated Americans currently appears to be plateauing, as ludicrous political divisions see primarily “red state” folks refuse to take their medicine?

What about attendees working for companies that have eliminated their travel budget for the rest of the year?

What if there’s a new flavor of Covid, worse than the current delta variant, in play in October? What if travel corridors into the US are still closed when ICANN 72 comes around? What if attendees have to self-isolate for weeks in expensive hotels upon their return to their home countries? Has ICANN done any research into this?

These are some of the questions that have been raised, and while they’re all very interesting I can’t help but feel that they’re completely irrelevant in the context of an ICANN meeting.

ICANN doesn’t know what the pandemic state of play internationally is going to be four months from now. Nobody does. Not the epidemiologists, not the healthcare leaders, not the governments.

ICANN isn’t a government. It isn’t the United Nations. It’s a technical and policy coordination body that sometimes appears to have a sense of its own importance as inflated as its budget. Its powers to assure an internationally diverse community can gather in literally the same room in October are close to non-existent.

But it’s a pretty safe bet that domestic travel in the US will still be permitted in October (did it ever even really stop?) and therefore it’s a pretty safe bet that community members based in America will be able to bump elbows in Seattle.

The only question remaining therefore is: how much of the rest of the world is ICANN willing to risk excluding to make that happen?

It’s a question its board of directors will answer in July. I don’t envy them the responsibility.

ICANNers itching to get back to face-to-face shindigs

A majority of ICANN community members want a return to in-person meetings as soon as possible, and overwhelmingly don’t care how many pandemic-related restrictions are put in place to get it done.

That’s according to the results of an online survey ICANN carried out, which ultimately had 665 responses, or 514 if you exclude responses from ICANN staff.

The survey found that over half of all respondents were keen to fling open the doors for ICANN 72 in Seattle this October, even if it meant reduced attendance and global diversity due to pandemic restrictions on travel.

There was even greater acceptance of — and indeed demand for — health measures such as social distancing, face masks, proof of vaccination, and on-site testing.

None of these proposed measures attracted less than 72% support, and no more than 11% of respondents objected to any individual measure.

While the majority of the respondents were from North America or Europe — which I think it’s fair to say are broadly considered to be well-vaccinated and in the closing days of their pandemic restrictions — ICANN has helpfully broken down some of the responses by geography.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, North Americans and Europeans were far more likely to approve of vaccination-related attendance rules, at 73% and 66% respectively. But a majority of those from Latin America, Asia and Africa were also tolerant of such restrictions.

North Americans were also much less likely to fear travel restrictions — ICANN 72 will be held on home turf, after all.

While the survey results show a clear inclination for reopening in-person meetings, with an online component for those unable to make it, the decision will be made by the ICANN board of directors next month.

The full survey results can be viewed here (pdf).

How awful would ICANN 72 have to be for you to stay at home?

ICANN is seriously considering holding its ICANN 72 public meeting with a face-to-face component in Seattle this October. But it wants to know what would make you stay at home.

The org is surveying community members to see how they would respond to stuff like temperature checks, rapid testing, compulsory mask wearing, , vaccine certificates, physical distancing and even physical tracking.

Do community members want this stuff to make them feel safe? Or would it make them steer clear of the meeting for the sheer annoyance and intrusion? Is the community made up of bleeding-heart liberal wokesters, or hardline dunderhead deniers?

And if it turned out that the meeting would be predominately populated with vaxxed-up North Americans and Western Europeans, with few attendees from less well-off parts of the world, would that make you stay away in solidarity?

These are among the questions asked in the 10-page survey, sent out in advance of this week’s ICANN 71 public meeting, which had been due to take place in The Hague but instead will be ICANN’s fifth consecutive online-only gathering.

There’s going to be a live discussion about the possibility of a return to hybrid in-person meetings on Thursday.

The ICANN board is due to make a call on the location of 72 at some point in July.

And it’s not just a decision about health and global representation.

While the survey does not cover this, ICANN meetings are not cheap, and to set the ball rolling now with poor visibility into the pandemic situation a few months in advance would incur costs that could not be recouped.

ICANN rules out vaccine passports, kinda, but warns in-person meetings may be a long way off

The odds of a return to in-person ICANN meetings this year is “fifty-fifty”, but the Org has no plans to introduce so-called “vaccine passports” to hasten the process.

That’s what emerged during a session at ICANN 70, the fourth consecutive remote public meeting since the coronavirus pandemic began, yesterday.

ICANN’s mid-year meeting, originally slated for The Hague, was recently confirmed to be online-only this June, and the final meeting of the year, scheduled for October in-person in Seattle, is still far from certain.

Speaking to the Non-Commercial Stakeholders Group, CEO Göran Marby yesterday gave the odds of a Seattle meeting as 50:50, and said in-person meetings will only go ahead when global pandemic restrictions are at a point where people from all parts of the world are able to attend. He said:

We cannot go to a country or a region that sets up too many obstacles for ICANN people to travel there.

…

It could be technically possible for us to have a meeting somewhere with a very limited participation, but then we really have to ask “Should we have that?”, because if we can’t people into the meeting from different parts of the world, we probably shouldn’t do the meeting.

…

Since the beginning of this, we always said that the decisions are made by the people who come to the meetings, and if we can’t have enough participation from different stakeholder groups in different parts of the world, then there’s not going to be an ICANN meeting.

The return to normality will be dictated largely by vaccine roll-out worldwide, he indicated, but benchmarked against the slowest-to-jab nations.

While the US and UK are making rapid progress getting shots in arms, other nations are barely getting started with their programs.

But Marby ruled out the idea of ICANN-specific “vaccine passports”, saying: “It’s not for ICANN to set them up, it’s going to be the governments and the hotels and the airlines to set them up.”

The ICANN board and NCSG also acknowledged a certain degree of volunteer burnout and reduced participation over the last 12 months, which was broadly chalked down to the crippling time-zone problems online meetings entail.

Because ICANN rotates its meetings through broadly speaking three time zones (Americas, Europe, East Asia) with about eight hours between them, at any given meeting roughly two thirds of the community is going to be working well outside of their usual business hours for a week or more, which takes its toll.

NamesCon Europe cancelled — “pandemics suck”

The year’s NamesCon Europe conference has been cancelled.

The organizers said today that the 2021 event, which had been due to take place in Budapest this June, will not go ahead due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic:

Since Hungary still has a high rate of COVID infections and in-person gatherings are not allowed, we cannot produce NamesCon Europe in Budapest in July. Nobody can predict when things will improve and our recent NamesCon survey showed a high reluctance to travel, so planning this intimate in-person gathering didn’t make sense. Pandemics suck.

Unlike ICANN 71, which was last week rescheduled from The Hague to Zoom, NamesCon is not moving to the bespoke online platform it used last year.

Organizers said that they’re not setting a new date yet, but there appears to be the possibility of other online events in future.

Hungary currently ranks 4th-worst in terms of deaths per capita, according to Statista, sandwiched between the UK and Italy, two of the earliest and hardest-hit countries.

It’s currently seeing more daily cases and deaths than the UK in absolute numbers, despite having less than a sixth of the population.

ICANN 71 is online-only, because of course it is

ICANN has called off plans to conduct its 71st public meeting in the Netherlands this June.

Blaming the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, the risk to safety and travel restrictions, ICANN confirmed last week that the venue will again be Zoom, rather than The Hague.

It will be the fifth consecutive meeting to go online-only.

The dates will remain the same — June 14 to June 17 — and the European time zone of course means that folks at ICANN HQ in Los Angeles will once again be working throughout the night.

ICANN 70, relocated from Cancun, begins next Monday.

ICANN 70 has virtual schwag, other new stuff

It may not make up for the lack of sun, sea, sand and sexual abstinence, but the ICANN 70 meeting, taking place this month on Zoom instead of Cancun, Mexico, does have a few new enticements that may tickle your fancy.

It’s also beginning to look like ICANN 70 won’t be the last of ICANN’s public meetings this year to be online-only.

At the trivial end of the spectrum, attendees get a virtual schwag bag containing unsponsored, printable collectibles including: two versions of a do-not-disturb door sign, a name badge, and two types of origami paper airplanes.

Equally trivially, ICANN appears to trying to foster a sense of remote community by encouraging attendees to take photographs of their food and post them to social media with the hashtag #icannchef. Because it’s 2009, apparently.

A bit more substance comes with the promise of private breakout rooms, which ICANN described in a blog post.

Apparently attendees will be able to create their own private rooms, containing multiple parties, whether it’s for social or business or policy-making purposes.

While ICANN 70 Prep Week started this week, that feature doesn’t appear to be live yet, or is so well-hidden that I couldn’t find it.

I can see this being potentially useful for meetings that take longer than the time allotment Zoom gives you for free, but I’m not sure I’d want to hold any super-sensitive meetings on a platform configured by ICANN, given its track record.

Other new features include the ability to listen in to live interpretation in the supported languages during the supported sessions, natively via the Zoom interface.

ICANN’s also turning on Zoom’s often hilarious, automated real-time transcription service, for sessions that don’t receive the usual human-assisted scribe service.

The Org has been adding features to its online platform bit-by-bit since the coronavirus pandemic forced the community into virtual mode a year ago.

It’s unlikely to be the last time ICANN meets in an online-only fashion. The board of directors is to meet tomorrow to consider the fate of ICANN 71, which is currently scheduled to take place in The Hague in June.

While some countries may well be approaching some level of pre-pandemic normality by then, ICANN is an international organization and the maxim “Nobody’s safe until we’re all safe” probably applies here.