Since 2015, InterCommunity has been bringing us all together online and in-person for robust conversations about the issues that matter most to the Internet. During InterCommunity 2018, we started to reshape the future of this event to make it more community-centric, and so we can have even more influence.

From the survey we conducted, we heard that you want more ways to engage with other parts of the community, to share views and to exchange information. We also heard that you are interested in finding more avenues for talking about Internet related issues. Based on your feedback, InterCommunity is now evolving to be more of an online engagement platform and a programme of events designed to run across the year. Rather than hosting one single, global event, for the remainder of 2019 we will host a series of quick-fire virtual roundtable webinars. One of the defining characteristics of this model is that it provides more scope for you to put forward the topics and issues that you would like to cover.

This new format will provide more touch-points, and will be more inclusive. It will create opportunities for more regular engagement and advocacy, and allow for a broader range of meaningful topics to be covered. Running more events in a simpler format also enables us to introduce greater variety and allows us to have a regional focus too. The content and timing of the first event in 2019 is a good example in that it is designed primarily for those in Asia-Pacific and Europe. Future events will be geared more towards other regions, while some will still be global. In these cases, we’ll run at least two sessions to cover the different timezones.