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Nominating Committee | Advice from the ICANN Board on Board Skills 2012

Preamble:

The Board acknowledges that it is DESIRABLE that Directors appointed by the Nominating Committee are independent of the industry with respect to being Directors, major shareholders, or employees of generic Top Level Domains (gTLD) registrars and registries, country code Top Level Domain ccTLD registries and Regional Internet Registries (RIRs). It is expected that the Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO), country code Names Supporting Organization (ccNSO), and the Address Supporting Organization (ASO) will appoint Directors with specific expertise in the management, operation and policies of gTLDs, ccTLDs, and RIRs.

Advice:

The Board recommends that the Nominating Committee use the guidance below with respect to selecting directors for the Board:

As per ICANN Bylaws (Article VI, section 3) the Board is seeking:

  1. Accomplished persons of integrity, objectivity, and intelligence, with reputations for sound judgment and open minds, and a demonstrated capacity for thoughtful group decision-making;
  2. Persons with an understanding of ICANN's mission and the potential impact of ICANN decisions on the global Internet community, and committed to the success of ICANN;
  3. Persons who will produce the broadest cultural and geographic diversity on the Board consistent with meeting the other criteria set forth in this Section;
  4. Persons who, in the aggregate, have personal familiarity with the operation of gTLD registries and registrars; with ccTLD registries; with IP address registries; with Internet technical standards and protocols; with policy-development procedures, legal traditions, and the public interest; and with the broad range of business, individual, academic, and non-commercial users of the Internet;
  5. Persons who are willing to serve as volunteers, without compensation other than the reimbursement of certain expenses; and
  6. Persons who are able to work and communicate in written and spoken English.

In addition to the above a Director should have:

  • board governance or equivalent experience with a MEDIUM-SIZED 1 organization that has an established board whose directors are independent and are appointed without participation of the CEO.
  • board governance or equivalent experience with non-profit organizations.
  • experience working effectively in meetings that are handled with Board members distributed in locations and time-zones around the world with a group size of 20 or more. The Board makes extensive use of teleconferences, and Internet tools such as instant messaging and web conferencing.

With respect to specific skill sets in the current Board, there is strong experience in the operation of gTLD registries and registrars; with ccTLD registries; with IP address registries; with Internet technical standards and protocols; with ICANN policy-development procedures, legal traditions, and the public interest. There are also strong existing skills in strategic planning, budgeting, public outreach, and international relations.

There is a lower level of skills in executive management in an organization of the size of ICANN, in regulatory and compliance frameworks, and in audit procedures. Note the Board is not specifically looking for practicing competition lawyers or auditors, as ICANN hires staff and external firms with this expertise, but the Board does seek people that have experience in these issues from a Board Governance perspective.

 

1 For the purpose of this requirement, Medium-sized organisation refers to an organisation comprising more than 100 people, more than $ 10 Million budget, spread across multiple locations. Ideally the locations will be in multiple countries.

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Domain Name System
Internationalized Domain Name ,IDN,"IDNs are domain names that include characters used in the local representation of languages that are not written with the twenty-six letters of the basic Latin alphabet ""a-z"". An IDN can contain Latin letters with diacritical marks, as required by many European languages, or may consist of characters from non-Latin scripts such as Arabic or Chinese. Many languages also use other types of digits than the European ""0-9"". The basic Latin alphabet together with the European-Arabic digits are, for the purpose of domain names, termed ""ASCII characters"" (ASCII = American Standard Code for Information Interchange). These are also included in the broader range of ""Unicode characters"" that provides the basis for IDNs. The ""hostname rule"" requires that all domain names of the type under consideration here are stored in the DNS using only the ASCII characters listed above, with the one further addition of the hyphen ""-"". The Unicode form of an IDN therefore requires special encoding before it is entered into the DNS. The following terminology is used when distinguishing between these forms: A domain name consists of a series of ""labels"" (separated by ""dots""). The ASCII form of an IDN label is termed an ""A-label"". All operations defined in the DNS protocol use A-labels exclusively. The Unicode form, which a user expects to be displayed, is termed a ""U-label"". The difference may be illustrated with the Hindi word for ""test"" — परीका — appearing here as a U-label would (in the Devanagari script). A special form of ""ASCII compatible encoding"" (abbreviated ACE) is applied to this to produce the corresponding A-label: xn--11b5bs1di. A domain name that only includes ASCII letters, digits, and hyphens is termed an ""LDH label"". Although the definitions of A-labels and LDH-labels overlap, a name consisting exclusively of LDH labels, such as""icann.org"" is not an IDN."