INVITATION TO JOIN ICANN IANA STEWARDSHIP TRANSITION & ENHANCING ICANN ACCOUNTABILITY STAKEHOLDER MEETING IN GHANA

Dear All,

About a year ago National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NITA) of the Department of Commerce, USA tasked ICANN to convene an inclusive and global discussion to determine a process for transitioning the stewardship of IANA functions which it currently performs to the global multistakeholder community. Indeed since that announcement, the global community has worked tirelessly and with great resilience and determination resulting in two parallel processes in response to the 14 March announcement. This has seen the multistakeholder community develop two parallel processes namely:

• IANA Stewardship Transition: Focused on delivering a proposal to transition the stewardship of the IANA functions to the multistakeholder community.
• Enhancing ICANN Accountability: Focused on ensuring that ICANN remains accountable in the absence of its historical contractual relationship with the U.S. Government.

As a neutral convener of the dialogue, ICANN has an important responsibility of raising awareness about the processes as they evolve and to support the community’s engagement. Of great concern is the low level of meaningful participation witnessed so far from Africa. In 2014, ICANN participated in 11 events and 5 webinars / teleconferences to raise awareness on this issue in Africa. But clearly, from the response so far, a lot still needs to be done to stimulate the African community to participate effectively.

It is based on this background and analysis that the ICANN Africa team resolved to launch an IANA Stewardship Transition & Enhancing ICANN Accountability revival month in April 2015. The target is to organize 1-2 hour sessions / webinars / teleconferences or face-to-face meetings in various countries’ in Africa at different times and dates led by local community leaders and stakeholders in the internal ecosystem at the National Level. ICANN staff will be available to support and reinforce the meetings either by contributing on presentations as well as online meeting resources as appropriate. The intention is to end up with formal communiqué from different countries on their perspective on both processes at least from each country where such meetings will be held. Such communiqué could be addressed to the ICG as appropriate.

By the end of this exercise, we hope to have stirred debate and enhanced the understanding and interest of the Internet communities in the countries participating to come up with national positions, Comments or Communiqué to the ICG. Such communiqués will not be limited to governments but other stakeholder groups in the various countries (Such as ISOC chapters, registrar associations etc.) would also be free to express their positions directly to the ICG. ICANN Africa staff would also summarize the month’s activities in a blog post to be published at the end of April.

Ghana has been selected as one of the few countries where face-to-face meeting will be held during the month because of the leadership role Ghana is taking to build its Internet infrastructure.

We will like on behalf of ICANN Africa to invite you to make the Ghana- Accra stakeholder meeting to be held at KOFI ANNAN CENTER OF EXCELLENCE IN IT (KACE-AITI) Ghana, on Wednesday, 29 April, 2015 from 2:00pm to 4:00pm UTC a succes.

DETAILS FOR ONLINE PARTICIPATION AS FOLLOWS:

ICANN LINK:

URL for online participation adobeconnect is as follows:https://icann.adobeconnect.com/gse-Afr/

OPTION II for audio: call from skype +1-877-860-3058

Participant code is 3247098257

ISOC LINK:

Click to Join ISOC WebEx 
https://isoc.webex.com/isoc/j.php…

Meeting number: 920 597 444
Meeting password: IANA_Ghana

Join by phone
1-650-479-3208 Call-in toll number (US/Canada)
Access code: 920 597 444