Last March the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) held its first meeting of the year in Accra, Ghana.

The conference, the second of its kind in Africa, was hosted by Network Computer Systems (NCS) in Ghana. Two University of Oregon network specialists--Steve Huter of the Network Startup Resource Center and the Computing Center's Joel Jaeggli--were invited to help with the technical setup for the meeting. In addition to working with NCS staff to assemble the network infrastructure for the event, they also assisted in broadcasting conference sessions live on the Internet and archiving the broadcast files for future viewing.

The agenda included a variety of technical meetings for Internet service providers, domain name registrars, government advisory committees, and noncommercial constituents.

A full day was devoted to a public forum that included a discussion of ICANN President M. Stuart Lynn's proposal for a major restructuring of the organization (see "Major ICANN Restructuring Proposed").

ICANN is a nonprofit organization created in 1998 to coordinate the technical management of the Internet's domain names, IP address space allocation, protocol parameters, and root server system.