Welcome letter by David Olive, Senior VP, Policy Development Support
Welcome to Reykjavik and thank you for making the considerable time commitment to participate in the fourth Intersessional Meeting of the GNSO Non-Contracted Party House!
This two-day (plus) meeting is bringing together over 40 community leaders. It is a healthy mix of veterans and several new participants who will be enjoying their first ICANN meeting experience. I hope you will find it a productive couple of days.
One of the purposes of the meeting is to create the opportunity—outside of the pressures and schedule strains of an ICANN public meeting—to discuss longer-range substantial community issues, build relationships and collaborate with each other on strategic and operational issues that impact your collective communities. I look forward to your active dialogue and a productive exchange of information and ideas.
This “intersessional” meeting concept started as a byproduct of several different meeting requests made by various communities that could not be granted individually and has evolved over time. It builds on successful 2013, 2015 and 2016 efforts and continues to be a learning experience for us all.
With many different meeting expectations and viewpoints, creating a program agenda has been no small task and we appreciate the goodwill and creative contributions made by several planning volunteers (including Tony Holmes, Chris Wilson, Greg Shatan, Farzaneh Badii, Tapani Tarvainen, Klaus Stoll, Wolf-Ulrich Knoben, Lori Schulman, Vicky Sheckler, Kathy Kleiman, Barbara Wanner, Renata Aquino Ribeiro and Ed Morris) to make this gathering a productive experience for all.
I hope you will be able to join the group at one or both of our evening receptions on Monday and Tuesday evenings here at the Hilton Reykjavik Hotel for further conversation and networking with your fellow delegates and guests. We have included invitations for these two events in your welcome package.
I encourage you to take full advantage of the discussions, networking and learning while you are here. Please have a productive meeting and I look forward to seeing you on Monday evening!
All the joint meeting sessions (that is, all sessions except for individual Constituency meetings that may be scheduled during the agenda "break-out" windows by each group) will have remote participation capability tools (telephone line and Adobe Connect Room). Proceedings will be recorded and transcribed and will be published on this wiki site in the appropriate areas. Individual Constituency meetings will follow the process of their particular community, and meeting minutes, reports or transcripts will be published on their own web and wiki pages as they are typically done.
Remote participation details will be communicated directly to the relevant lists and are published for all sessions except for the break-out sessions for individual Constituencies/Stakeholder Groups.
