While I would like to agree with you, I doubt that pure online meetings would be as nearly as productive as a group of people physically sitting in the same place and discussing. However, I am absolutely unsatisfied with the present "public forum" and online attendance mechanism; I think that ICANN should make an effort to make all open meetings webcast and remotely accessibile; and I am quite worried about the decreasing amount of public general discussion about important issues (which, practically, is the reason why the public forum ended even earlier than scheduled). Finally, I don't get your point about "places". These are global meetings and a place that is handy for you is very uncomfortable for me. If what you are suggesting is that ICANN meetings should all be hold in developed countries, or even in the U.S. only, then we couldn't disagree more. --vb. (Vittorio Bertola)