APTLD82 Communique

APTLD82 Members Meeting was held in Muscat, Sultanate of Oman, on 26-27 October 2022. Hosted by TRA of Oman, the Meeting heralded the comeback to the “pre-Covid normal” and as such has proved to be the first full-fledged Members Meeting in more than 2.5 years, albeit with some Covid-related features introduced during the pandemic years.

For the first time in APTLD’s history, the agenda was developed by a Members Standing Meeting Program Committee, thus signaling the Association’s commitment to the bottom-up, community-driven processes. The collective vision and consensual effort underpinned the event’s overall success.

The Meeting was conducted in cooperation with RIPE NCC and co-sponsored by the Government of Oman, OmanTel, as well as CentralNic and GoDaddy Registry.

The on-site format enabled APTLD to arrange 6 Fellowships, of which two have been outstanding from 2020, so the community could see that the Association always strives to stand by its mandate and commitments.

APTLD82 also featured traditional pre-meeting training, which were held online to enable a meaningful participation in them; however, both sessions displayed a certain degree of Members’ fatigue from the online format and the turnout was lower than expected.

With over 180 registrations, the Meeting gathered 93 on-site participants, including both APTLD Membership and associates, and guests. Meanwhile, for the second time in APTLD’s history the event was streamed live onto a dedicated Virtual Event Platform, thereby giving an opportunity for remote participants to join the Meeting with the use of unique personalized e-tickets. The number of online attendees was well over 30 on average.

The Meeting was conducted in the traditional 2-track mode, which allowed the community to discuss both non-technical (policy, administrative, marketing matters, among others) and technical ones. It should be specifically noted that quite a number of sessions were held in a panel discussion format, which leveraged an intense dialogue and interaction with the audience.

During the Meeting, the attendees were offered a number of blitz surveys, as well as an online competition in the form of a unique online old-school-looking game developed by GoDaddy Registry and named “DNS Defender”, and winners were awarded valuable prizes.

For the first time in APTLD’s history, the Members Meeting featured a public forum during which the community met the 6 Fellows and had a discussion with the APTLD Board on a number of important corporate governance and administrative matters.

The Members Meeting format was also reinstated in full in terms of opportunities for the community to engage an interact in an informal environment. Specifically, a traditional Members Dinner on the first day of the event enabled Members to take a sneak peak in the Omani culture and arts, while an equally traditional post-Meeting Networking Tour took them to a journey through the country’s history.

At the closure of the Meeting, a new destination for the next Meeting in February 2023- Vientiane, LAO P.D.R. -was unveiled. The Meeting will be hosted by LANIC and the Government of Laos.