[council] Date for meeting in Washington area - 24/25 Feb 2006

["Bruce Tonkin" <Bruce.Tonkin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello All,

Thanks for all the contributions and suggestions around this meeting.

>From reviewing the dates when people are available or not available, I have 
>selected Friday 24 February and Saturday 25 February 2006.

It seems that several Council members are involved in either the 3GSM World 
Congress (http://www.3gsmworldcongress.com/) from 13-16 Feb in Barcelona, or 
the Internet Governance Forum (http://www.intgovforum.org/) from 16-17 Feb in 
Geneva.
So this event is about a week later allowing time for members to get work done 
between meetings.   The meeting is also being held sufficiently in advance of 
the Wellington ICANN meeting to ensure that we can progress the work.

I will ask Glen de Saint Géry to investigate options for hotels and venues to 
see if we can get a suitable group rate.

With respect to the location chosen in the world.  This is always a hard 
decision.   Both ICANN and the GNSO try to rotate the locations of physical 
meetings around as much as possible.  The GNSO last held a separate meeting in 
Amsterdam in February of 2005, and ICANN held meetings in Mar del Plata, 
Argentina, Luxembourg City, Luxembourg, and Vancouver, Canada during 2005.   We 
will be meeting in the Southern Hemisphere again in Wellington, New Zealand.

On this occasion I have chosen Washington, DC as I will be available on the USA 
East Coast at that time, and there is at least a critical mass of members of 
the GNSO community that are located nearby (ie within a 1000 kilometres or so) 
that are available to assist in organising an event at such short notice.

We have yet to meet in Germany - and Frankfurt certainly sounds like an 
appropriate place for when we next arrange a meeting.   I think when we get 
onto the topic of policy related to internationalised domain names, it would 
certainly be good to pick a location where English is not the dominant language.

While I am sure that with further discussion we can optimise the dates and 
location further, I think it is also important for all parties to be able to 
arrange their travel schedules to lock down a date and location as soon as 
possible.

For those that can't attend in person, we will do out best to arrange for some 
sort of Internet based audio and video feed  - although it is doubtful that it 
will be of the standard of a full ICANN meeting.

Regards,
Bruce Tonkin