Take part in ICANN discussions!

As you are reading these lines, ICANN is holding a meeting in Cairo to discuss a number of issues ranging from logistics of running the organization, to new top level domain names, to issues of internet governance. Apparently,  a while ago ICANN started toying with allowing people direct participation in their debates.

Based on a post on their official blog, one of the options was logging into Adobe Connect at 11:15 Egypt time today.  Too bad I saw this message when the meeting was over.  For some reason, ICANN gave only about 24 hour note before the actual meeting, which I think prevented quite a lot of people from participating.  I wonder why there is no record of the meeting being made public, it could actually help making its content more accessible.

Based on another post on their blog, another session in the current conference (Improving Institutional Confidence session on Thursday 6 November at 2pm Cairo time) is going to be public input using a chat. Moreover, they allow anyone embedding the chat window on their websites to allow broader access. So, I decided to try and here is the chat which you are welcome to use and if you do so, share your impressions:

(if you are reading this post through an RSS aggregator, you may need to visit my site to use the chat room).

I trully hope ICANN will post some reflections about how it was using these channels for public participation.