At about noon today I'll head out of Keene, NH, towards Boston's Logan airport to start what will be about 23 hours of travel bringing me to Marrakech, Morocco. I land tomorrow (Friday, 4 March) around 4:00pm local time and then after getting settled in that evening will dive directly into the Africa DNS Forum at 8:30am Saturday morning.
It's going to be a crazy week!
I wrote about all the activities I'll be part of in this post:
I will be giving five different presentations during the week, all of which will be live streamed and recorded. Naturally I'll be participating in a good number of other sessions.
These are all part of a larger set of meetings that we at the Internet Society will be engaged in during the week at both ICANN 55 and the Africa DNS Forum. There are some very large "Internet governance" issues that will be at play this week, as my colleague Konstantinos Komaitis wrote about:
Tuesday, March 8th, is also International Women’s Day, and we’ll be publishing content around the excellent work of women in the world of technology.
We have a significant amount of communication being planned around all of these different events, sessions and announcements.
Being part of the Internet Society Communications team, I will be heavily involved in creating a good bit of our content and distributing it out over our social channels. All of that will be visible publicly here:
- Internet Society blog posts related to ICANN 55 on the main ISOC blog and on the Deploy360 blog.
- Twitter: @InternetSociety, @ISOCPolicy and @Deploy360
- Facebook: Internet Society Page
- Google+: Internet Society Page
and of course on my own personal social network channels.
It’s going to be a busy time. One question people have asked me is:
Will you get to see anything of Marrakech?
The answer, sadly, is... probably NOT.
As typically happens at events like this, I'm going to land at the airport in Marrakech and be transported by a driver to a "hotel compound" outside of Marrakech. The Palmeraie Conference Center is a big place with multiple hotels and all sorts of restaurants... a golf course, pools, etc.
The sad reality is that I will probably spend my entire week there within the compound in the conference rooms until I leave for my flight home on the afternoon of Thursday, March 10. I understand there is some kind of "gala" social event.. but again it may be in the same compound.
We'll see... some of the photos online seem amazing... hopefully I'll get a chance somewhere in there.
I'm excited about the events that will be happening at the meetings at Marrakech and looking forward to meeting many of the people there.
If you are going to be there in Marrakech for either ICANN 55 or the Africa DNS Forum, please do say hello!
And if you are not, but are interested in what is going on at the events, please see our event pages to find the live streams to participate remotely:
So here I go... on the road to Marrakech....
Image credit: Sofiane BELGHALI on Flickr CC BY NC
