57th ICANN meeting that took place in Indian city of Hyderabad became the most representative in history: it was attended by 3182 people. Previous record (3115 participants) was set two years ago at a meeting in London. This was reported in a detailed (53 pages) technical report published on the ICANN's webpage.
There are two reasons for such interest. First of all, 57th ICANN meeting was the first one after the historic transfer of IANA functions from the US government to the Internet community took place. Moreover, the meeting caused stirred huge interest in India. This is easily confirmed when you look at the numbers. According to the report, 2306 participants (more than 72 percent) represented Asian-Pacific region. The report doesn't mention the exact nationalities, however, it's highly probable that the majority of Asia-Pacific representatives were Indian.
Another interesting peculiarity about the meeting was that the majority of the participants were newbies: 68 percent had never attended an ICANN event before or 2180 people, in absolute terms. For example, on the previous ICANN meeting that took place in Helsinki in June there were only 344 noobs.
It's also interesting that the 57th ICANN meeting was not typical when it came to gender representation either. Usually the ratio of male to female participants is approximately 2 to 1. This time (probably because of the specificity of India where Internet and domain business issues are mostly studied by men) the “stronger sex” represented 74% of the attendees; only 20 percent were women. The remaining 6 percent didn’t indicate their gender in the documents for various reasons.
