Statistical report on the 59th corporation’s meeting that tool place in Johannesburg (South Africa) in June has been published on ICANN’s official page. 1353 people attended it. Last year's similar meeting that took place in Helsinki was attended by 1436 participants. The attendance was also lower than on the last ICANN's meeting in March in Copenhagen, in which 2089 people participated. However, the last comparison is not entirely reasonable. The meeting in Johannesburg was the second out of three annual ICANN meetings and according to corporation's regulations it's the shortest and is dedicated primarily to internal issues that do not particularly interest the general public.
However, we could say that it's a tendency that meetings in Africa have less number of participants that anywhere else. For example, last year's meeting in Marrakesh (the first out of three annual) attracted smaller audience than any other similar meeting in the last years. On the other hand, holding forums in Africa attracts representatives of African countries that not always have an opportunity to attend the meeting when it takes place on another continent. For instance, 36% of all participants in Johannesburg represented the African region. For comparison – the share of African representatives on the meeting in Copenhagen was only 5%.
We should pay tribute to the authors of the report; they tried to fill the document with a variety of sometimes funny information. For example, it was reported that the technical staff worked 12-hour shifts. Moreover, during this time the employee would on average climb 15 flights of stairs and walk as much as 9.74 kilometers. The information on the technical equipment delivered by ICANN to Johannesburg to ensure the work was presented very clearly (with full consideration for local specifics). Total weight of the equipment was 9755 kilograms, which, according to the report, is approximately the weight of 8 adult giraffe males.
