Holy Scheisse! Did you know ICANN 69 starts TOMORROW?
ICANN is starting its ICANN 69 public annual general meeting four days earlier than originally planned, and it appears to have only publicly announced the date change 24 hours in advance.
How’s that for transparency?
Usually, ICANN AGMs kick off formally on the Monday morning and run through the Thursday afternoon, but meetings between community groups start taking place the previous Friday, leading to a seven-day continuous meeting.
For ICANN 69, originally planned for Hamburg but now of course an online-only experience, ICANN has removed the Friday and weekend sessions and split the week in two.
There’ll be three “Community Days” from October 13 (which is tomorrow when I’m posting this but possibly today by the time you read it), three days off, and then four days of “Plenary Sessions”, beginning with the opening ceremony on Monday morning.
The community days include stuff like policy working group meetings, but they also include the top-level interactions between each constituency group, including the Governmental Advisory Committee, and the ICANN board of directors.
These traditional airing of grievances, usually on “constituency day” Tuesday, are where the tensions and hot topics of interest for the whole community are raised, and always worth listening to.
The decision to shake up the schedule appears to have been made some time in September. Last time I checked ICANN’s meetings page, September 2, it still showed the old October 17 start date.
What I find utterly baffling is that ICANN does not seem have made a formal public announcement of the date change, despite having blogged or made announcements about various aspects of the meeting several times.
I genuinely only found out today, reading this blog post that ICANN put out today, just one day before the meeting starts.
It certainly seems that the information has filtered out to the parts of the community that actually need to participate in the various sessions.
But what about the rest of us? Unless you’ve registered and logged in to the ICANN 69 web site since the changes were made, I’m not sure how you were meant to know.
Did you know?
I had plans to get my toenails done tomorrow.
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The ICANN Calendar page still had the old dates on my last visit to it 29/Sept ( the day after the sessions were supposed to be made public )
Today it shows a ‘split’ meeting with 13-15 and 19-22 , the only email I have seen from them aboutvthe event only shows the 19-22 dates.
Wading through the announcements that have appeared on their site, looks like there were various things last week as well
“I had plans to get my toenails done tomorrow.” lol
Nice.