The meeting minutes of the last meeting were approved.
D Thompson noted that template that E Leibovitch drafted for the questionnaire was received by the NARALO with great enthusiasm but no actual commitment to help writing the blurbs.
The Chair asked the Staff to help drafting the blurbs that could go into the template.
The Staff will draft a couple of blurbs about current ICANN topics important to the At-Large community for the questionnaire template. Topics should include Domain Tasting; IDN's and 3-5 others.
There were some discussions about the scheduling of the public session on the Summit in Paris. Please visit the At-Large Paris schedule for the latest version of the At-Large Paris agenda
The questionnaires are still pending. It is an action item from the last meeting that needs to be carried over.
The Staff will make a sliding scale with different ALS participation levels.
The Sponsorship question
V Scartezini said she waited to approach Verisign to see if the Summit WG does in fact want to go forward with her proposal.
The Chair then went on to discuss the question whether or not sponsors should be approached for the At-Large Summit.
S Bachollet was asked to elaborate on his position from the last Summit WG meeting, which seemed to be critical of the idea to have sponsors.
S Bachollet started out by saying that it was tricky to find more sponsors as the ICANN meetings already draw important financial support from sponsors. As the local host of the next ICANN meeting he feels that it was generally very difficult to ask sponsor to contribute more money to the meeting. Apart from the fact that it will be very time-consuming to get sponsors there is also an ethical dimension. S Bachollet noted that every linkage to sponsors has strings attached to it. Even if there is no influence from the sponsors whatsoever there will always be someone to make the point that a particular argument was made because of a certain sponsor.
R Vasnisk seconded S Bachollet suggestion that there should be split of sponsors.
D Thompson noted that she understood S Bachollet’s concern and that there was a risk for that even though personally, she never experienced sponsors that tried to influence meetings herself.
The Chair then suggested approaching local sponsors to fund local ALSes attending the Summit meeting.
S Bachollet expressed his concern with this idea since it might lead to a situation where the ALSes from certain countries are in a more favourable position to receive funding.
D Thompson seconded S Bachollet and noted that there should be a fund for all ALSes.
The Chair raised the question whether sponsorship outside of ICANN should be approached.
The Summit WG decided to go ahead and approach sponsors outside of ICANN.
S Bachollet suggested approaching global companies such as Google to sponsor certain activities at the meeting (eg. a dinner) and approaching local companies to fund the participation of their local ALSes.
The Staff will note that part of the budget for the Summit WG will be covered by sponsorship support.
Presentation Subgroup
R Vasnick, S Leite Herlein will form a subgroup that will be in charge of making a short presentation of the At-Large Summit at the public workshop. Hopefully, others will join.
The flyers should be ready by the meeting and will distributed to other constituencies.
Next meeting
The Staff will put up a Doodle Page for a next summit meeting in the last week of May.
The Staff will put up a Google work sheet with all the action items for this Working Group including who is responsible, due dates and a mechanism by which it is possible to mark the item as done.
