#ICANN54 in Dublin: My Story

The first thing that comes to my mind when I hear the word ICANN is memories that throw me back to more than 15 years ago when I was registering my first domain names and seeing the logo and name of ICANN on registrar’s website. ICANN wasn’t such a big organization at that time and I used to see its name along with Verisign. Despite I didn’t follow up the ICANN changes through the years after those old days, I always liked the way ICANN exists and manages the domain name system in our world.

A few years ago when I started to study more about Internet Governance I noticed that ICANN has become a much bigger organization now which is playing a key role in global Internet Governance discussions so it was exciting for me that I would learn more about ICANN and its infrastructure again. My next discovery was that ICANN holds three public meetings a year and there is a fellowship program to attend the event. It was amazing to attend such an international big event particularly when I heard the stories of my friends who had already attended the ICANN meeting. So I decided to apply for the fellowship program and the first one I applied for was ICANN 53 in Argentina. I wasn’t selected for that meeting but this rejection was an opportunity for me to talk to my ICANN friends and learn more about the meeting, the fellowship process and etc. to increase my chance to be selected for the upcoming meetings. My first step was attending the Middle East and Adjoining Countries School on Internet Governance (MEAC-SIG 2015) in Tunis, Tunisia which was held by ICANN and Internet Society and I could met some wonderful guys from ICANN again (I first had met some of them during the Arab IGF 2014 in Beirut, Lebanon). Fahd Batayneh and Baher Esmat helped me a lot to have a better perspective and understanding of what ICANN meetings are and what are the best practices to include in the application form to increase my chance to be selected and… it worked!

There wasn’t a better way of starting the day other than receiving this in my email on July 11, 2015 that was informing of my selection for the ICANN 54 Fellowship Program!

It made me full of happiness and energy and the journey began for me to go to Dublin as a proud ICANN Fellow…

• Pre-meeting

I always wonder how Mama J manages to write those long emails to fellows explaining every detail that is required from picking up your jackets to avoid catching cold to check if I need a transit visa when I’m dealing with Joseph to do itinerary stuff. Frankly confessing, I was never afraid of my journey when I was remembering that I have Janice’s emails in my mailbox and can come back and refer to them to know everything! 50 people from all around the world had been selected as fellows to attend the ICANN 54 Meeting and to achieve a better outcome, as an old tradition as I found out, we divided into various groups, each group assigned a mentor to get prepared for the event. I joined a group along with my friends Mona Eliouti, Nahideh Faiaz and Rao Naveed Bin Rais who was our mentor.

We quickly started to get in touch by email and arranged some Skype meetings which helped us a lot to get familiar with each other, talk about our interests and domain of expertise as well as sharing experiences pre-meeting. Unfortunately Nahideh couldn’t make it to Dublin due to Visa issues and three of us flew to Dublin. Let me say some pros and cons of this method of dividing fellows into groups:

• Pros: Smaller groups are absolutely better to gather people and so we could share some information, e.g. solutions to follow up the visa issues, event details and etc. Also this fact that you know some people before the meeting is good when you’re going to an event with thousands of participants.
• Cons: I expected to have this groups during the meeting as well. For example I expected to have a quick 20 minutes wrap up everyday to share that day experience and hear people’s recommendations but other than some quick chats I had with Naveed there wasn’t any “Group Activity” during the event and I think there is a good potential in these groups to engage to each other during the event. Also another negative point was that there wasn’t any relation between “Groups”; definitely all groups of fellows are different in many aspects but I never witnessed any collaboration between groups or even group mentors to exchange ideas, experiences and solutions. I may missed something in this criticism but that was my personal feeling.

All in all, Naveed helped us a lot during the days and weeks before our flight to Dublin to learn more about ICANN through the ICANN Learn website and other resources, picking sessions which are more suitable and relevant, based on our personal interests and plan everything to attend the meeting. Thanks to his help I had all the sessions I wanted to attend added to my calendar and knew my schedule from the very first minutes after my arrival in Dublin.

I flew to Istanbul to go to Dublin on Oct. 7 along with my friends Mehrzad who was another fellow from Iran and Ata who was traveling to attend the meeting representing the advisor of deputy ICT Minister of Iran.

• Arrival In Dublin

I arrived in Dublin Airport around 4 PM in the afternoon and I wondered how much quite it is; and what I told Elsa Saade (another fellow from Lebanon whom I know for more than a year and we found each other during layover in Istanbul Airport) was “how much colorful and nice this airport is!” and I felt the “Rush Hour” from the very first seconds I checked in at the hotel when I had to quickly change my dresses and get ready to to to the cocktail reception at the CCD. I met some old friends during the cocktail party and talked to some new friends as well. It was kind of warm up for tomorrow; the first day of ICANN 54!

• One time fellow, forever fellow!

Fellowship is an important part of every ICANN meeting as Janice and ICANN CEO, Fadi Chehade, emphasize in their words. This is famous that “One time fellow, forever fellow!” and the first thing was the feeling I had as a fellow and it was something different than being a newbie! It was something like “selected” and “special” and I could feel it during the sessions and when talking to ICANN staff in meetings.

Waking up at around 6am every day to get ready to be at the fellows session by 7:15am was hard but very useful to make people focus at least for a week and remind them of some school-like days to do everything on-time. Fellows sessions had some special opportunities because you could meet and listen to some community leaders who may not easily be found in other sessions and it was the magic that happened thanks to Mama J!

Yes! Mama J or Janice Douma Lange was our kind Mama before, during and after the session, with an everlasting smile on her lips which never disappears even in very tough moments. Officially she is the one who leads the fellowship program at ICANN and accustomed to hear a lot of thank you whenever and wherever she is and of course she deserve all these appreciations!

• Day by day journey
• Day 1 Like other days, the first day started with fellows session at 7:15am in which we met Janice and other fellows. Janice talked to us about the “journey” and waned us to “explore our passion” in the coming days. We were given all the required information and schedule to follow the meeting during the next five days and after that each of our fellow friends introduced him or herself to others (which wasn’t enough in my opinion and I still wonder why many people didn’t share information about themselves on online documents and networks we had for the ICANN 54 Fellows!) Day 1 fellows session continued by “Newcomers Sunday” session in which fellows were provided with a lot of invaluable information about ICANN and its infrastructure as well as the Internet Governance concept in general, various stakeholders and the role of ICANN in this community.
• Day 2 Allen Greenburg who is the At-Large Chair and Rafik Dammak (former NCSG Chair) talked to us during the morning fellows session and answered questions. These are those meetings I say was exclusive to fellows and we could talk to community leaders and ask them and even challenge them; something that can hardly done during other sessions! Day 2 was the official inauguration of ICANN 54 with the opening ceremony in which Siranush Verdayan awarded by the ICANN and the interesting point was that Siranush was a fellow. It was also interesting to hear that there is a fellow in ICANN board at present. The opening ceremony followed by Fadi’s report to the public. I had this chance to attend the “Updates on the Middle East Strategy” session on this day as well which had a lot of useful information for me as someone living in the MENA region. Everything we learnt about the IPC, ccNSO, … during the evening fellows session was very good too.
• Day 3 I’m a technical guy, but before coming to Dublin I had decided to attend some non-technical sessions at the ICANN meeting to observe the opportunities to collaborate with them and trying to do something that I call it “building a bridge between technical and non-technical communities and working groups.” It was the reason I attended the NCUC and NCSG meetings on Day 3 and it led to joining the NCSG and NCUC which I’m currently contributing to them but in a tortoise-like way because there are a lot of things to know and learn! The ALAC-Board meeting on this day was also useful for me because we’re trying to form an Internet Governance community in Iran and we’ve decided to apply At-Large structure to our community so At-Large and ALAC related events were on my radar during ICANN meeting to keep an eye on and learn from.
• Day 4 Things we talked about during the morning session on Day 4 was exciting! SSAC, RSSAC, … I also attended the DNSSEC Workshop on this day which I expected to get more our of it because of its technical nature but I couldn’t and I should find the reason. What I felt during the meeting was that I couldn’t engage enough with the technical working groups and maybe I hadn’t selected appropriate sessions to attend and this is the thing I will consider in my upcoming ICANN meeting. Thanks to Fahd Batayneh and Baher Esmat from ICANN we had a roundtable on this day to talk about middle east issues a little bit in which I tried to address some key points of regional and national (Iran) issues to reflect to ICANN. One of these key issues which is even effective regionally is the post-sanction Iran. We recently had the historical Iran Deal with the European countries and the United States which will open the doors of world toward Iran and vice versa. The Iranian Internet community was under the heaviest pressures during the sanctions which has led to the least level of participation of this community in the international events like ICANN meetings. I talked about the need to give more opportunities to this community to bring it back to the world; something that I believe will enhance and improve the Internet Governance in the region and in the world.

• Day 5 The last day! We started the day with fellows session as always in which ICANN CEO, Fadi Chehade, joined us and talked for the fellows. I remember one magical phrase from Fadi’s mouth from this meeting where he said “Internet is the engine of the world” and I believe this is the best explanation of the Internet. This man was amazing and I could see the passion in his eyes when he was telling us his own story from those days immigrating from Lebanon and started his life journey. It’s required for world-makers men (and women) to live their life and try to make the world a better place to live for everybody. The last day followed by the public forum and public board meeting and the ICANN 54 came to and end after 5 productive days! I could talk to Fadi in person for a few minutes in the last cocktail reception and shared my thoughts with him in a very friendly atmosphere.

• Dublin! Will miss you! Despite we didn’t have much time to explore the city I liked the city of Dublin and Ireland in general. People were kind and friendly. Local staff of CCD were very helpful and in my opinion INEX and CCD were good hosts for the event. Gala party and That Night In Dublin, dance and music in Ferryman House and quick hangouts I had with my Iranian and non-Iranian friends in Dublin made very good memories from my first visit to Europe.

• What’s next? When I got the email of my selection for the ICANN 54 Meeting I started to talk to some of my friends who had already participated in the event and used their experiences. So as I predicted it was a little confusing and overwhelming for me despite I had a pre-defined schedule to attend various sessions. Now that the dust of ICANN 54 is settled and I’m looking back I feel that I need another ICANN meeting to explore the other parts of ICANN which I couldn’t asses during the ICANN 54 and then in my 3rd I can say I know what to do and help others as well.

One time fellow, forever fellow ;-)