Welcome to ICANN60 – our Annual General Meeting. This is our first ICANN meeting in the Gulf Cooperation Council, and it will undoubtedly be a very busy one. It is my first time in Abu Dhabi and I am glad to be here.
So much of our work is done over email, over the phone and in the comfort of our own offices and homes. For those of you here, I hope the sessions and schedule allows you to meet people, put faces to names, and build upon your working relationships.
If you haven’t had the opportunity to do so, please look at the latest Report to the Board, published just recently. This report details what’s going on in the ICANN organization, and will provide you with really good insight into what we’re working on, and our priorities.
We will be holding another open Q&A with the ICANN organization Executive Team this week, so I hope you can attend and ask us any questions you might have. This doesn’t replace the public forums, but is meant to give you another chance for us to talk and answer your questions.
In the spirit of transparency, I hope you have the chance to look at the flow charts and manuals for the Process Documentation Initiative to see how far we’ve come, with your input, this year in mapping out how all of our fairly complicated processes actually work.
I’d also like to encourage you to look at the recently launched Accountability Indicators, an improvement to the Key Performance Indicators (KPI) Dashboard that allows us to present our progress better against ICANN's strategic and operating plans and make the data more accessible.
I hope you have time to think about your day to day business, as well as some of the larger issues we face as part of the Internet Governance community. As many of you know, we are seeing many legislative and policy proposals around the world tackling issues that can and will impact our work. One example is the European Commission’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which will likely effect how WHOIS data is displayed, it could impact our ability to maintain a single global WHOIS system. In turn, this will likely impact either ICANN's agreements or its ability to enforce contractual compliance of its agreements using a single and consistent approach. Data protection and privacy is certainly on the minds of many. I hope you can join the cross-community session this week on GDPR and contribute to discussions that will be occurring during and after our time here in Abu Dhabi.
Together we are working hard in service of ICANN’s mission. My team and I are here to support the community in its important work. I hope to meet with many of you on the ground here in Abu Dhabi, and to have productive conversations. Please let me know if there is anything you need, and stop me in the halls to say hello. Safe travels to those of you on the way here, and to those of you following along from home, I look forward to connecting with you too.
