NEXTGEN@ICANN55

I am finally trying to reflect on the meeting and to put all my experience into a few words. The start was simple. It all began with an acceptance email and that felt like a milestone crossed. However, finally arriving at the meeting and being awash with anxiety about the several multiple meetings taking place at once, quickly took over. It was a shocker to take in all the activities. I was a little bit lost and confused on the first day, like most other newcomers were.

Tactfully, newcomer day was scheduled for the first day and we got into learning. I guess that was when I realized how much information overload I was going to suffer throughout the week. Being the knowledge junkie I like to think of myself as, I said to myself, ‘bring it on, the challenge, let me surprise myself with how much I can learn in these few short days.’ And on the second and third day I went for as many meetings as I could, sitting in some for as few as 10 minutes and running off to another one after realizing how much I couldn’t take in. As someone from a legal background, I thought to myself that must be only because these are every technical matters, I need to do this again when I am fresh.

ICANNWIKI Edit-a-thon and Some NextGenners at the ICANNWIKI booth

The thing about ICANNN is that learning never stops. In that one week, I thought I would get bored by the end of the week and totally lose interest. I mean think about it, a meeting for 7 days about ICANN, that kind of monotony should be very boring. But ICANN is broad. It is wide. And so the amount of information especially for a newcomer can never get boring. It may get overwhelming but certainly not boring.

In one of the NextGen sessions, I was asked what I thought about ICANN when I first heard about it and I said that I thought it was a big, distant organization. My neighbor said she thought of it as a big play ground for the nerds. I think she captured the idea of distant, the curtain that made it so far removed from my reach. So sitting in the sessions throughout the week and meeting policy makers, lawyers, human rights activists and reviewers couldn’t have made me feel more at home. I knew that I was finally going to find my niche and that would take some time but what was important was realizing that there’s room for me.

We soon had our presentation day, I had worried so much about getting it right and doing it well. And worried that a non-tech savvy presentation would not fit into ICANN but like I said, there’s room for all. And as the 20+ something of us presented I realized that all this knowledge must come together for a global organization like ICANN to work. We need the tech geeks and the policy geeks, the lawyers and the analysts too. I realized that my focus shouldn’t be on learning everything but on focusing on a constituency within ICANN that I can grow into and find my place in this big organization. One benefit about the presentations is the incredible opportunities people start to share once they’ve had a peek into your mind.

Fadi giving a speech during the NextGen presentations session

Of course there was that galvanizing moment when Fadi Chehade (the out-going CEO ICANN) walked into the Meeting room midway the presentations and gave one of his mind numbing, inspirational speeches and all I could think to myself was how lucky I was that I had already finished my presentation, because honestly I have no idea how the next people carried on after that!

 

I am psyched about having been part of a historical moment. On the farewell speech day, Mr. Steve Crocker kept saying how he rarely used words like historical and momentous but that day was nothing short of the weight of such words and indeed he too acknowledged that indeed ICANN55 was a historical moment. In the week after the meeting I kept reading up on the IANA transition report and its presentation to the US government and I remember writing to one of the NextGenners and saying, ‘In retrospect there is so much that went down at ICANN55 and I am only now beginning to comprehend it.’ And even now, I know that it will take a while longer before I get everything.

And there are things about ICANN meetings that I can’t fully enumerate but here is a list;

1. The magic of the newcomer tag
2. The multiple networking opportunities
3. The unbelievably helpful people (I mean right from the weeks leading up to the meeting and thereafter)
4. The patient stakeholders
5. The gospel of ‘multistakeholderism’

And so that is what I find most exciting about ICANN, the fact that I get to go to one meeting and it grows into inconceivable opportunities. The fact that I am welcome back for another meeting – that maybe this year or another year – but yes that motivation and impetus to attend another meeting.

Gala Dinner hosted by ANRT

 

~Gloria Kembabazi