Friday @ ICANN Wellington 2006

There were 2 events of note taking place today. The first was the ICANN Board Meeting to pass/consider various motions/procedures. This was held in the morning. Items of note from this were that there was no vote on the Triple-X issue. The GAC issued a communique which basically brought up various issues to consider and I assume this will now be researched and re-presented to the Board for a decision at a future meeting. ICANN's 2006-2009 strategic plan was also endorsed by the Board, IDNs (internationalised domain names based on non-Latin character sets) also got a strong mention, paving the way for international domain names in local languages (and more importantly character sets). There are challenges to be faced here though, and various testing procedures will take place before any adoption of IDNs. The Security and Stability Advisory Committee also presented a couple of reports to do with the DDoS and alternate roots and IDNs. Lyman Chapin was also appointed Chairman of the Registry Services Technical Evaluation Panel (and I happened to be the first one to go and congratulate him as he was sitting close to where I was lurking!).

The second event was the Pasifika Day organised by the ever-efficient Don Hollander and his crew. This brought together a whole range of presentations on a whole range of issues from the technical, to the not-so-technical (we even had some emotional family-soap-opera-type-drama-story thrown in for good measure). The long and the short of it all - it was disappointing to note the limited presence of Pacific Islanders at what was supposed to be a Pasifika Day, some presentations ambled on for far too long which resulted in other
presentations being forcibly shortened (in the words of a colleague commenting after my presentation on PICISOC: "that was the fastest presentation I have ever seen - you broke all speed records"), the food was great and the scones with cream and jam were even better, the beer at the after-Bar was cold, all the presenters got a USB Flash Drive courtesy of the organisers and GKP, and all attendees who handed in their survey forms got a USB-powered Coffee Mug warmer courtesy of 2020. All in all, it was not a bad day, but needed more Pacific Islander participation and more control on presentation times. Due thanks to Don, who passionately organised the day, and frowns at the Pacific Islanders who did not attend (or could not be bothered to make the effort) - this was supposed to be your day.

Now I have to go find that USB Flash Drive, and also see how well my coffee gets warmed using USB technology.....