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ICANN scraps remote meeting hubs

Kevin Murphy, June 7, 2017, 13:37:39 (UTC), Domain Policy

ICANN is doing away with remote participation hubs for its thrice-yearly public meetings.
The organization said yesterday that the hubs were barely used and often hit technical barriers.
For avoidance of doubt, we’re not talking about remote participation here, we’re just talking about the “hubs” that various community members would set up in their home nations for locals who for whatever reason could not attend meetings in person.
Basically, they were a bunch of guys in a room somewhere in the southern hemisphere, watching the live meeting video stream and occasionally streaming their own wonky video and crackly audio into the primary meeting location in order to say, ask a question.
The first ones I’m aware of were in 2010 for the Nairobi meeting, when some Europeans and North Americans didn’t want to travel due to terrorism concerns, but ICANN formally started financially supporting them a couple years ago.
Two of the meetings since then did not have hubs. The mid-year Policy Forum in Helsinki didn’t have one last year, and the Hyderabad meeting couldn’t have them due to the ship fire that destroyed ICANN kit.
In January this year, ICANN said it would only pay for remote participation if the remote hubs could rustle up more than 25 participants each. There were also technical requirements that had to be met.
That seems to have been a tall order, so it looks like Copenhagen will be the last meeting ICANN will pay for these hubs.
There’s nothing stopping bunches of guys gathering together around Adobe Connect screens and participating that way, of course.

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Comments (2)

  1. Rubens Kuhl says:

    Except that ICANN AC rooms have 2-way audio, not 2-way video, usually.

  2. Richard Funden says:

    Cost cutting at ICANN is overdue

Leave a Reply to Rubens Kuhl