 Buenos días a todos. Estamos encantados de estar aquí en San Juan. Welcome to the ICAN 79 Community Forum. It is wonderful to be back in San Juan and I would like to thank along with Tripty our generous sponsors and hosts who once again welcome us to this wonderful place. I was here at our last meeting and I have very happy memories of it. Particularly I remember despite the fact that we had only just recovered, you had only just recovered from Hurricane Maria, we were sharing this beautiful venue with a rather wonderful chocolate convention which made arriving in the morning even more interesting. But despite the damage you had suffered which was extreme you welcomed us so warmly. We had a wonderful meeting and you have done so much since then. All these beautiful new buildings. It's quite extraordinary and I also wanted to join in Nayela's thanks to our wider and tripties to our wider community participants in Puerto Rico. You have stood by our side and we cannot thank you enough for what you do now and you will do tomorrow. And on that point as Nayela said I'm pleased to say that this week we're getting to know the next generation of Puerto Rico ICANNers. In partnership with EDP University and .PR we have just completed a two-day event for about 60 local high school students interested in a career in technology here in San Juan. The students learned about ICANN, the domain name system, how the internet infrastructure is built and run and how routers are configured. Each student had a chance to configure an ISP in a virtual lab during the hands-on portion of the training so you have all of that to look forward to. I've been at ICANN more than a decade and I really thought I understood our mission, what we do, why we do it, how we do it and importantly who we do it for. But during this past year when I have also had the privilege of serving as ICANN's interim president and CEO I have come to truly appreciate the power of what ICANN's mission can do. We're made up of people from different sectors, different cultures, different generations and different opinions. We may and sometimes do disagree about a lot of things but the mission is the reason everybody in this room, everybody in our community is here today. Our mission is not merely a statement, it is a guiding force that transcends disagreement and unites us in a shared purpose. I believe it's our superpower and I've been amazed at what we can achieve by harnessing that power. We are guided by our shared belief in the criticality of one global internet and despite all the facts and figures and data that we use in the end we make decisions based on that belief. Our shared belief in that mission takes us through why we are struggling to reach consensus and it's what brings us together. We don't always know how to explain it but I see it every day with individual staff, community members amongst the board in working groups and meetings. I recognize it when I hear the phrase we must do the right thing. This superpower is what has allowed ICANN to succeed and thrive through the past 25 years. Even though as Tripti said the environment around us is constantly changing we have used that to preserve the essence of ICANN to continue to fulfill our mission. It gives us focus and purpose. However it can be a double-edged sword. Our unwavering commitment to our mission is a source of strength but it can make it hard to take risks, to innovate. It often feels safer to stick to what we know, to stay inside our tried and tested rules and protocols. But the world is rapidly changing and the internet is both causing that change and being affected by it. So we must constantly challenge ourselves. How can we stay true to our core principles and continue to keep the internet sustainable, safe and secure whilst navigating the distracting whirl of global challenges? As Tripti said it can feel intimidating but I believe we are stronger than we have ever been and we are more than ready. We're a rapidly maturing organization and I know from talking to you that you are as excited and as hopeful as I am that we are strengthening that superpower by experimenting with new ideas to find new solutions. We're getting much better at trusting each other to take more risks to allow us to address issues effectively. When we last met in Hamburg I talked about trust and the critical role it plays in our work and as I said we trust each other to prioritize our mission, we trust the processes we have created and the multi-stakeholder model we have built and we're using that to tackle these tough challenges such as DNS abuse. The determination to find solutions is what brought the contracted parties has an ICANN staff to the negotiating table last year. Together they devised amendments to the registry and registrar agreements to combat DNS abuse. These received overwhelming support from the contracted parties have been approved by the board and are now going into implementation marking a major victory in the fight against DNS abuse and digital inclusion. The world is united in the recognition that we must all do our part to bring the two and a half billion people in the world who are not on the internet online. Many are blocked because they use non-Latin scripts and languages. Our commitment to do our part created the close collaboration between the ICANN community, the board and the staff to do the hard work to get us to the launch of the next round of new GTLDs and I hope everyone here will attend the next round community consultation session in this room right after this session. But if email and technology platforms can't accept those scripts we're limiting progress and the ongoing universal acceptance program with its focus on creating a more multilingual and accessible internet reflects the changing needs of internet users and ICANN's commitment to the global public interest. The inaugural UA day last year marked the first time a diverse set of technical and language communities companies governments and DNS industry stakeholders mobilized across the world to champion UA and the pursuit of a multilingual internet on a global scale. Building on this success since we last met we have been busy with the community organizing this year's UA day which will take place at the end of March. Do please attend the working session on Wednesday and I want to take this opportunity to thank the hundreds of community members around the world who have supported this work. Now many of those two and a half billion are in Africa. Africans are coming online fast but there is still a gap. ICANN's community in Africa has been active of course for many years and I'm pleased to say we have many of our African stakeholders with us here online and with us in Puerto Rico. But we wanted to do more to use our convening power to embrace other organizations who are also trying to support internet expansion in Africa so in 2022 we created the Coalition for Digital Africa. We invited partners with existing capacity building programs to work with us and each other to make more of our collective resources. It was a brand new idea for ICANN and honestly it was a bit of a risk. We didn't really know how many other organizations would be interested but it's been more successful than I could have imagined with activities now in 26 African countries and I've just come from the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona where we met with many African stakeholders and IGOs and I'm happy to say they are all focused on speeding up digital inclusion with a common focus on scripts and languages as a key enabler and strengthening all our efforts to build skills and knowledge including with our CTLD partners to open up the internet to a new generation of users. A different kind of challenge has been addressing who is data. After years of work the community agreed we needed to find a way to address accessing who is data and experiment with a simpler system to see what works. After thousands of hours of work we concluded the only way we could do this was to find out more about the demand for the data from whom and for what so we agreed on an experiment that we would put all our efforts for two years and to try and to build that picture. The registration data request service which was publicly launched in November is another example of a creative solution something new balancing the need for access to registration data with the imperative to protect privacy and security. It's an innovative and brave approach and like many new ideas it's not always easy to explain to everyone but we've given each other so much support and we're making excellent progress and I want to thank everyone who has taken part and encourage others to participate with us in this important experiment. Launching the grant program posed a completely different kind of challenge. Recently launched this program will allocate millions of dollars to support projects aimed at fostering a unified open and globally interoperable internet. Applications for the first 10 million dollars of grants will be accepted in a two month window from March the 25th 2024 and we will have sessions on that at this meeting. As Tripti mentioned internet governance and digital cooperation are the topic of many important discussions that are happening as we speak. To prepare for these processes including the upcoming WSIS review we have developed a strategy to identify and mitigate any issues that have the potential to impact our mission to raise awareness of our work and to maintain the multi-stakeholder model of internet governance and the role of the technical community. We look forward to sharing that strategy and how you can get involved at the geopolitical legislative and regulatory development update session on Thursday. Before I conclude I'd like to acknowledge the dedication of the entire organization's staff. ICANN is built on the passion and commitment of individuals who work tirelessly to uphold our mission and in particular I would like to thank David Olive our head of policy support. As most of you already know after 14 years of tireless service to ICANN David is retiring at the end of May and so this will be his last ICANN meeting. I know so many of you have benefited from his expertise advice and support over the years and his finest legacy to ICANN is his team who embodies so many of the skills he has to continue to help the community to deliver ICANN's mission. Please join me in thanking David for his work for ICANN. Thank you so much David. The year ahead will be characterized by further evolution and change yet our commitment to our mission, our trust in one another and the spirit of collaboration that defines us will remain steadfast. We are stronger together. Thank you.