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The meetings were all interesting that we didn’t find much time to explore China, in particular, to visit the Great Wall. To conclude, I am still in awe with the level of knowledge and intelligence and the commitment that ICANN participants, volunteers and staff have that are evident during meeting debates, discussions and the overall organizing.

Joseph Ng, Vice-Chair, ISOC Hong Kong

The ICANN46 held at Beijing is my first ICANN. Being the Vice-Chair of ISOC Hong Kong, I am grateful to ICANN who gave great support and make good arrangement to my trip to Beijing.

Briefed by the former Chair of ISOC HK, Charles Mok, and the current Chair, Mr. S.C. Leung, I was told what I had to do and which meetings or sessions to attend. And to be franked, when I received the meeting schedules for APRALO and At-Large, and the morning fellowship sessions, I was stunned. But at the end of the week, I am glad to report that I have attended all the sessions and enjoyed every moment of it. And I look forward to meeting my newly made friends and colleagues in the next ICANN.

To put some highlight of the meetings and sessions I had attend at ICANN46, first of all, I was totally amazed by the Multistakeholder Model and the organization of ICANN and its Internet Eco-system. Seldom put thoughts on those hierarchical structures on organization governance, the multistakeholder model amazed me to realize that a user driven, user-oriented decision making process and eventually got carried out by the administrator in the operational level might work. And it is a breath of fresh air to me and I will, and in fact, I have introduced this model to my students under the hat of a full professor in a University in Hong Kong.

The morning sessions for the fellowship and newcomers programme is great to guide us through the basic structures of ICANN and on how to get acquainted to the bowl of alphabetical soup – the acronyms used within ICANN.

I am extremely glad to have met the many friends and colleagues during the APRALO, and ALAC meetings, and in no time, I feel that I do can contribute to this community and in fact, to the whole Internet Eco-system. It is during the discussion of the nomination and selection of the representatives that let me see the beauty of how different cultures look at democracy, operationally different and yet demanding the same ideology and representation. And being the Vice-Chair of ISOC HK and the Director of HKIRC (taking care of the .HK domain), I am totally attracted to the big concerns raised by Dr. Hong Xue for the new gTLDs Trademark Clearing House policy especially on the variations of characters in different languages. I am interested and definitely will look into contributing to this front in the future.

Besides attending the meetings, I had the chance to chair the ISOC Chapter Meeting as well. It is a great opportunity to meet our peers, sharing our experience, the best practices and to meet colleagues working for ISOC global.

Last but not least, the public forum is the highlight of ICANN. I stayed almost throughout the whole period and listen to and appreciate different stakeholders’ concerns, observations, and demands on the whole spectrum of problems within the “Internet Eco-system”. And I was most grateful to see youngsters’ participating this event, raising questions and demands of their interests and concerns, a good and fine job for Edmon Chung and colleagues from Dot Asia.

All in all, thank ICANN for sponsoring me to attend ICANN46 at Beijing. Beside the main fact of getting to know more about ICANN, I just met too many friends and very much appreciate their efforts to make things happens. Special thanks to Fadi Chehade, Markus Kummer, Naveed Haq, Duangthip Chomprang, Maureen Hilyard, Heidi Ullrich, Rinalia Abdul Rahim and the many friends that I had met and added to my facebook after the ICANN meeting.