According to the Board agenda for February 21, Sao Paulo, Brazil has been designated as the location for the 2006 ICANN Annual Meeting. The meeting is tentatively scheduled for the first week of December. Brazil served as host of the March 2003 ICANN meeting.

When Latin America comes up on the rotating schedule again in 2008, Mexico would make a great location for an ICANN meeting.

The 2007 schedule includes meetings in Europe, North America and Asia. My wish list: Barcelona in March, New York in June, and Korea in October.

At the ICANN Annual Meeting in Vancouver, the Government Advisory Committee launched a Public Forum section on the GAC website. To date, there have been only been four comments posted to the Public Forum, all by ALAC members, none by GAC representatives themselves. The last comment was posted on December 17, 2005.

According to the introductory note from GAC Chair Mohamed Sharil Tarmizi, “I encourage the Internet community and the general public, world-wide to make use of their GAC representatives and to work with us, as part of the ICANN process, to facilitate the development of a comprehensive international public-private partnership in this important area of management of the global Internet infrastructure.”

The Wellington meeting is fast approaching. It would be beneficial for all interested parties if GAC representatives and members of the Internet community were making greater use of the GAC Public Forum.

I’m back from a fascinating, eye-opening week in Vancouver for the 2005 ICANN Annual Meeting. It was a long week, but worth the trip. The results of the meeting are better covered on other websites, but I will direct attention to the captioning from Saturday’s Public Forum and the results of yesterday’s Board Meeting.

Here’s another website interested parties should pay much closer attention to:
gac.icann.org. The GAC Vancouver Communique is available here. The GAC also has a new Public Forum for comments on GAC activities.