[council] Meeting preparations

[Bruce Tonkin]

Hello Philip,
 
Actually I found personally that I didn't have any down time for the
whole time.
 
As for "informational" workshops, I think we need to distinguish
between:
- tutorials 
- working meetings
 
I think we need both, but the tutorials could certainly be held before
the main event as is common with technical conferences.
 
With respect to working meetings (and I consider the IDN workshop in
that category) it needs to be clear what the objectives of the meeting
are, and the presentations should address that objective (e.g new TLDs).
The outcome should either be a new document, or an updated document.
 
The difficulty with both IDNs and DNSSEC is that there is a need for
both tutorials and working meetings, but often these are either combined
into one workshop, or the objective of the workshop is unclear.
 
In any case, I think the program committee needs to carefully plan for
both types of activity in the meeting plan.
 
Part of ICANN's problem right now is that there are too few people
spread across multiple activities.  This makes having these activities
in parallel difficult.
 
Regards,
Bruce