[council] Fwd: Relocating ICANN57 - Blog by Akram Atallah

["James M. Bladel" <jbladel@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Councilors, FYI.

Sent via iPhone. Blame Siri.


Begin forwarded message:

From: David Olive <david.olive@xxxxxxxxx<mailto:david.olive@xxxxxxxxx>>
Date: May 17, 2016 at 21:13:35 GMT+2
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Subject: Relocating ICANN57 - Blog by Akram Atallah


Dear Community Leaders:

This blog will be posted to the ICANN website in a few hours.

We are sharing this note with you in advance of the public announcement.

Please do not circulate this information until after it is posted ( 0100 UTC 18 
May /1800 PST, 17 May)

Best regards,

David

—————————————————————-

Relocating ICANN57

By Akram Atallah

 Earlier this year, we announced that ICANN56 was going to be relocated from 
Panama City, Panama, to Helsinki, Finland, due to concerns related to the Zika 
virus. Following a great deal of internal debate and discussion, and taking 
into consideration the continued spread of Zika, we have decided that we will 
be relocating ICANN57 from San Juan, Puerto Rico, to Hyderabad, India. Due to 
highly limited space availabilities, this relocation has necessitated changing 
the date of the meeting from 29 October – 4 November 2016, to 3 – 9 November 
2016.

 We did not arrive at this decision easily. We would much rather remain in 
Puerto Rico – the excellent location we had originally chosen. Moving the 
meeting venue creates a lot of additional work and challenges, and we 
understand and recognize that moving an ICANN meeting affects many groups 
within the community. However, we have come to the conclusion that we must 
postpone going to Puerto Rico after a lengthy discussion with and feedback from 
SO/AC leaders, the Board, and within our management team. This decision was 
based on available research and information and the fact that Puerto Rico has 
declared a state of emergency due to the ongoing Zika virus outbreak. We 
believe that the Zika virus poses a significant enough threat that we need to 
postpone going to Puerto Rico for the health and safety of our community and 
our ICANN team, just as we had to postpone ICANN52 and relocate from Marrakech 
to Singapore due to the Ebola virus outbreak in 2014.

 Choosing a location for an ICANN meeting that meets the needs of the community 
is an incredibly complex task. Few venues in the world are able to satisfy all 
of our requirements<https://meetings.icann.org/en/host>, especially as the 
community continues to grow and more and more sessions are held in parallel. 
San Juan offered outstanding facilities capable of hosting a successful ICANN 
meeting, which is why we originally selected it as the location for ICANN57. In 
choosing an alternate location for ICANN57, we explored options all around the 
globe. A North American venue would have been our preference given our meeting 
rotation schedule, but due to the time of the year, a very busy conference 
season and our extremely demanding requirements, we weren’t presented with any 
ideal options. Fortunately, the Government of India offered to host ICANN57. We 
are very grateful for their proposal and their willingness to meet our 
extensive requirements in such a short amount of time.

 We are therefore pleased to announce that ICANN57 will be held at the 
Hyderabad International Convention Centre<http://www.hicc.com/>, a 
state-of-the-art convention center capable of handling an ICANN meeting’s 
extensive conference space and network infrastructure requirements. Hyderabad 
itself is home to a booming tech sector, earning itself the nickname 
“Cyberabad,” and we’re looking forward to hosting a successful ICANN meeting in 
this wonderful city.

 We fully understand that by relocating ICANN57, regional organizations and 
stakeholders will miss out on an opportunity to meet with their communities, as 
well as a chance to reach out to new community members. We are postponing not 
cancelling this meeting and we will return to the region as soon as possible.

ICANN’s Global Stakeholder Engagement (GSE) team will be working closely with 
the leaders of the different stakeholder groups in the region to try to 
mitigate the impact of this decision. We will be providing our increased 
support to meetings and events scheduled in the region, remote hubs in the 
region’s strategic points during the next two ICANN meetings, read-out 
sessions, capacity building webinars, activities in our Montevideo engagement 
center, support for our community to attend relevant regional and global 
events, and providing as much senior management and Board support on the ground 
as required.

I want to stress again that the decision to relocate ICANN57 was not made 
lightly, and that we feel it is extremely unfortunate the situation required us 
to postpone the meeting in San Juan. We understand how important it is to 
maintain the global rotation of ICANN meetings, as it allows local and regional 
communities to attend and participate, and we are committed to returning to 
Puerto Rico and Panama City as soon as possible, however the welfare of 
community members and staff is our top priority.

We thank you all for understanding this difficult situation and the choice we 
have had to make.
 ———————————————

David A. Olive
Senior Vice President, Policy Development Support
General Manager, ICANN Regional Headquarters –Istanbul
Hakki Yeten Cad. Selenium Plaza No:10/C K:10 34349 Fulya, Besiktas, Istanbul
Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)

Direct Line: +90.212.999.6212
Mobile:       + 1. 202.341.3611
Mobile:       +90.533.341.6550
Email:  david.olive@xxxxxxxxx<mailto:david.olive@xxxxxxxxx>
www.icann.org<http://www.icann.org>