ICANN published a statistical report on its 58th meeting that took place on March 11-16 in the capital f Denmark, Copenhagen. The document states that 2089 people took part in the meeting. This is 8% less than on the meeting last year in Marrakesh where 2273 participants were present. ICANN meetings take part three times in a year and each of them has a specific format, this is why 58th meeting was compared to 55th (both of them were organized using the same community forum format).
The high level of attendance of African representatives could explain the difference at the Morocco meeting. African region usually is not very well represented on the ICANN meetings; however, it seems that conducting the 55th meeting in Africa contributed to the activity growth of the local participants – there were over 950 people from Africa in Marrakesh. In Copenhagen, using the same “geographic logic”, almost a half of the participants (1012 people) were from Europe.
It’s interesting that the decrease of presence at the Copenhagen meeting was balanced out by online presence. 4428 unique users were registered to participate in the meeting remotely, last year in Marrakesh there were 3458 registrations.
