The challenges of the Nairo...

ICANN's 37th international meeting doesn't officially get underway until Monday, but for many attendees work has started already. I got to the meeting venue in Nairobi this morning and I'm happy to report that apart from some truly horrendous traffic, the Kenyan capital looks like being a very pleasant place to be in.

But I won't have much time for sightseeing over the next few days. This meeting promises to be challenging. Not just for me, although it will be that as well. The GNSO Council Chair Chuck Gomes is not making the trip over to Nairobi, so his chairing duties should have been split evenly between me and fellow GNSO Vice Chair Olga Cavalli. However I learned this morning that Olga is also unable to make the trip for personal reasons. I will therefore be chairing all the GNSO meetings, including the open Council meeting on Wednesday and the Council wrap-up on Thursday. Talk about being unexpectedly thrown in at the deep end…

But this meeting will also present several challenges for ICANN itself. First and foremost, will the organisation be able to keep this meeting relevant even though many of the usual suspects have chosen to stay away? The Board has some key topics on its agenda, not least a possible reconsideration of the .XXX application and the need to decide whether to okay the proposed Expressions of Interest for new gTLDs. It is imperative that this work not be slowed or delayed because there are less people physically present than usual. Otherwise the whole rationale for having this meeting could be questioned.

One way to ensure this will be to guarantee a high quality of remote participation for those not physically in Nairobi but who still wish to take part. Remote participation hasn't been a strong point at past ICANN meetings. Most of the time, remote participants have been relegated to the role of silent observers due to the inherent difficulties in making themselves heard in a room full of people onsite. For this meeting, the remote participants will definitely want to speak and be active. A lot of them are regular ICANN attendees and they have no qualms at all about speaking publicly. If their voices can be heard, Nairobi will be a more productive meeting.