[ga] Impressions from the Bucharest GA meeting

[Alexander Svensson <alexander@svensson.de>]

Hello from Bucharest!

Here are some thoughts on the Bucharest GA meeting -- I couldn't
take notes while chairing, but Glen will provide brief official
notes and we will put the presentations online.

First, we had an update from the Whois Task Force: They are
releasing their 88-page final draft report which contains some
interesting findings from the survey. There will also be a
presentation at the ICANN Public Forum. The Whois TF's task
was to identify whether there is a need for a review of the
current Whois policy, so it's only the first stage, but the
report is definitely an interesting starting point. After that,
we had a brief report about the work of the Transfer Task Force.
This one was the more general presentation, more details will
be available at the Names Council meeting starting at 11:00 UTC
(14:00 local time) and the ICANN Public Forum.

The first session was an update on At Large, with Denise Michel,
Izumi Aizu, Vittorio Bertola and Esther Dyson on the panel.
The At Large Organizing Committee (aka at-large.org) has by now
brought together 16 At Large structures representing over half
a million (!) Internet users in 70 countries, and it's focussing
now on getting the work on *issues* started. After that, we had
a very interesting presentation by Bernard Turcotte, President 
of the Canadian ccTLD registry CIRA. [Pronounced cee-rah, as I
have know learned. ;)] They just had user elections for 3 Board 
seats and although the participation level dropped and still
is low (1.000 of 140.000 possible voters), they seem to take it 
as a challenge to get more people to participate rather than a 
reason to give up. The election is done online, which is possible 
because all domain holders have an ID and password; the elections 
are monitored by professional auditors and performed by an 
external returning officer. Interesting: If people called the
customer support of their registrar during the period before
the voting, customer support people told them at the end of
the call that CIRA elections are coming up and that they could
get their ID and PW now if they didn't have it. They also did
mass media outreach and even banner ads, but that didn't seem
to have a major effect. About 100 of the vote(r)s were questioned,
but after investigation, only 15 were disallowed -- which seems
to be an extraordinarily low number to me. The verification
costed about 3000 US$.

After that I tried (/tried/) to start some discussion about the
future General Assembly under the Blueprint proposal. Unfortunately,
there was very little participation from the audience throughout
the whole meeting.

Thanks to the people who bothered to watch the webcast (sometimes
in the middle of the night) -- I received messages from Leah, 
Danny and Thomas. I apologize for the slow start: Someone had
messed around with the cables after the ICANN team had set up
the system, so they had to test and check again to make the
display work. Thanks to them as well! 

As said, I hope we all the presentations online after the meeting.
The next event to be webcast is the NC meeting.

Best regards,
/// Alexander 

PS: Nice to hear from Ken Fockler that the notes from the 
cross-constituency meeting are actually discussed at some
constituency meetings! 

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