No Such Weblog

At the October 15 SECSAC meeting, VeriSign had presented results from a survey of end users in the US, the UK, Germany, and China. According to the VeriSign slides, 61% of users surveyed in Germany preferred SiteFinder somewhat or strongly; 76% in China, 81% in the UK, and 84% in the US.

Back on October 15, I asked how many of the respondents to the surveys quoted (which included users from Germany and China) do not speak English, and started wondering what language was used for the survey questions.

I'm now hearing that the survey was conducted in English.

In Carthage, I posted two blog items from the GNSO Council session in which I participated as the ALAC's liaison.

The first one announced that the Council had kicked off three WHOIS Task Forces; the second "covered" subsequent administrative decisions, and the council's work on a resolution regarding the sTLD RFP.

After the session, I had a discussion with several council members who had issues with this, and found my blogging activities inappropriate for various reasons.

There are two main directions from which objections can come. One, blogging should never take priority over participating in the meeting, and it must not distract from focusing on council work. Two, an acting person is taking the journalist's role and reporting about the council session, which is inherently a conflict of interest; also, the quality of the reporting suffers from the priorities an acting person has to set.

With a little bit of distance to the Carthage Council meeting, I believe that the only way for me to take these objections into account is to refrain from blogging Council discussions. In the future, I'll limit any real-time blogging from GNSO Council sessions to giving a terse account of resolutions adopted, to the extent time and attention permit.

Later: I just notice that Amadeu Abril i Abril (who sat next to me on the council) has blogged some thoughts about the same debate.

To begin with, Carthage was an extremely well-organized ICANN meeting. Participants were picked up by the local organizers at the airport and brought to the hotels with buses; wireless was up as early as Friday in the main meeting area (no Internet access was available in the rooms, though).

The social events left room for improvement: It's important that these give meeting participants enough possibility to network and talk to many others who are also at the conference. Gala diners (and similar fixed-place events) with loud music aren't very helpful for that purpose.

Meeting bags are another topic: They should be light, it should be possible to carry them over the shoulder, and they should be useful for carrying a laptop including its power adapter around.