Workshop:  Independent Review of the ICANN Nominating Committee

 Wednesday, 31 October 2007

 ICANN Meeting - Los Angeles

 

 >>LYMAN CHAPIN:   It's already on?  Good.

 The previous session ran over just a little bit.  They were suffering 
from a fairly serious excess of time that was used by the session 
before them.

 So we're going to try to get started and finish on time, because we're 
going to start coming up against things that are more important to 
people, like dinner.

 In this workshop, we're going to present the results of an independent 
review of the ICANN Nominating Committee that was commissioned in 
accordance with the ICANN bylaws that call for a periodic review of 
each of the ICANN structures.

 This is the second such review.  Earlier in this meeting, earlier this 
week, you've heard some of the results of the GNSO review, which was 
the first one.

 This is the second one.  And we are the group of people who conducted 
the review for ICANN.  The review was conducted by Interisle Consulting 
Group.  The three people on the stage today, myself, Lyman Chapin, my 
colleagues, Chris Owens and Deborah Slobodnik.  We're going to start 
with a relatively brief slide presentation to go over the results of 
the review that are presented in the report, and then we're going to 
leave the bulk of the workshop time available for questions, questions 
and answers, and discussion of those results.

 So, Chris, if you would start the slideshow.

 >>CHRIS OWENS:   Thank you very much.

 As Lyman said, this is intended to be a brief presentation that, by 
necessity, cannot cover all the content of the report.  And I would 
encourage people who have an interest in this area to read the report, 
which is available on the Web site.  And I believe there's a link to it 
also in the slides today.

 It's intended that we will use most of the time here for question and 
answer.

 What I want to do today is talk about the background and justification 
for the dependent review, for those of you who weren't intimately aware 
of it.  Briefly review the NomCom today.  Talk about the findings that 
we had.  Talk about the recommendations we came to as a result of those 
findings.  Discuss next steps.  And then the bulk of the time on 
questions and answers.

 But before I start, I would like to thank a couple of people who 
besides the three of us on the stage participated in the preparation of 
the report.  And those were Colin Strutt and Chuck Wade.  But more 
importantly, I would like to thank the 47 people who we interviewed.

 This project was actually a lot of fun.  And one of the things that 
was fun about it was to hear absolutely across the board, despite the 
fascinating variety of opinions we heard, a real faith in the process 
and a real respect for what's going on here.

 And I was personally very moved by that and found that to be an 
interesting experience to just have a chance to talk to these people.  
So thanks to all of you as well for your contribution to the report.

 In addition to the people we interviewed, we also took advantage of a 
number of blogs and published articles and other pieces of journalistic 
and scholarly work and then our own background experience and 
knowledge, of course.

 The justification or the reason behind the independent review is 
simply that the bylaws say we have to.  It's --  The bylaws call for 
periodic review of all the ICANN structures.  And in this particular 
case, the terms of reference, which we followed in conducting the 
review, asked two questions.  One of them is, should NomCom have a 
continuing purpose in the ICANN structure?

 And the other is whether or not any change in structure or operations 
is desirable to improve its effectiveness.

 We started in March with the publication of the terms of reference.  
Over the period of July to October, my colleagues and I conducted the 
review.  The report was published on the 24th of October, and now we're 
in the comment period.  And I will point out that the comments are 
still open and you are encouraged to visit the Web site and enter your 
own comments.  They are being read and taken seriously.

 Personally, I like this slide, because I can use it to explain to my 
mother's friends what it is I actually do for a living.

 It's full of acronyms that should be familiar to everyone in the room 
but certainly not to most other people.  So I'm just briefly going to 
cover what happens in the creation of the NomCom.

 This is the NomCom today.  This should be utterly uncontroversial.  
What you see is that the organization shown in purple across the top of 
the slide appoint voting delegates to the Nominating Committee.  The 
organizations shown in green across the bottom of the slide appoint 
nonvoting liaisons to the committee.

 And the yellow process diagram such as it is in the middle shows the 
board of directors appointing a NomCom chair who, in turn, selects an 
associate chair.  And the two of them plus the past chair become ex 
officio nonvoting members of the NomCom.  This is just the -- how the 
NomCom comes to pass each year.

 And what it does.  Again, this should be utterly uncontroversial to 
everyone here.  The NomCom does a recruiting process, starting from 
scratch annually.  Establishes a pool of candidates, examines the 
candidates' statements of interest and references and other materials, 
performs a selection and appoints people to the board of directors, to 
the ccNSO, the GNSO, and the ALAC.

 The board of directors is a little bit larger on this slide, because 
we heard a consistent message that that consumes the bulk of the time 
and the process.

 And then very important to remember is that at the end of the cycle, a 
great deal, per the bylaws, in keeping with the confidentiality, in 
keeping with giving a fresh start every year, is thrown away.  The 
information is confidential.  It's destroyed.  The deliberations record 
is destroyed.  And one of the questions that will be addressed is 
whether there are things that could be built on rather than destroyed 
as we go from one year to the next.

 Our findings are structured in four areas that largely derive from the 
terms and reference.  The role and purpose of the NomCom, the structure 
of the NomCom, the structure of the NomCom, and the outcomes.  And in 
each of those areas, again, I'm only going to touch a few high spots 
here in this presentation.  For the full detail, you would need to 
visit the report.

 The purpose is that -- to find genuinely unaffiliated board and 
council members and ALAC members.  There has been some challenges to 
that, of course.  And that is that the purpose of the NomCom seems to 
be inconsistently understood.  There are some interesting differences 
of precise opinion as to within that larger umbrella of what's going on 
in terms of the purpose of the NomCom, and the purpose of ICANN, 
frankly, although it should be a surprise to everyone here, the purpose 
of ICANN is not widely and universally understood and is not 
consistently understood across the board.  Those are two fundamental 
challenges to establishing a sense of purpose for the NomCom itself.

 It's also apparent that the role of the NomCom is very broad, indeed.  
The board appointments are all about governance, trusteeship, 
stewardship.

 The ALAC and SO appointments are in many ways about those things, but 
also about expertise.  They're very different processes involved in 
making those kinds of appointments in some cases.

 Additionally, recruiting, which is going out and finding the people, 
beating the bushes, convincing people to submit their names for 
consideration, convincing people that becoming an active volunteer and 
doing this work is a good thing to do, is completely different in terms 
of the personality and mindset required and the skills that are used 
from sitting in judgment and making selections and deciding who to 
place on what board.  And those are -- those have been combined very 
effectively in NomComs.  But we just want to acknowledge in the 
findings from what we heard, read, and saw, that they're quite 
different.

 But the overall conclusion in this area is that the fundamental 
purpose is quite sound.  The NomCom does its job, it finds genuinely 
unaffiliated board, council, and ALAC members.  And we also felt -- 
there's a little more detail in the report -- that it is, in fact -- a 
NomCom approach is superior in the ways that we could understand to the 
alternatives.

 There's a great deal of time spent in the people we talked to on the 
structure of the NomCom itself, how it's actually put together.  The 
NomCom is agreed that it has -- people agree across the board that it 
has accomplished its mission of being broadly representative.  But 
there is this tradeoff, a very interesting tradeoff that comes into 
play when you have a structure in which other entities place people on 
the NomCom.  And that's the tension -- and it's a natural structural 
tension that's built in, it's not a weakness of the people involved in 
any given year.  It's a natural, structural tension between 
representing the constituency that placed you on the NomCom, being a 
good, faithful representative, versus being an independent NomCom 
member who's focused only on the best overall interests of ICANN.  
Those are both entirely legitimate goals.  They don't exactly coexist 
smoothly and easily without some structure to arrange the way in which 
they coexist.  And that seemed to be a common observation by many 
people.

 It's also the case that there is an uneven degree of preparation and 
participation by NomCom members over the years.  It is a huge amount of 
work.  It is a staggering number of pages to read, a staggering number 
of cases to consider.  Some people carry an enormous amount of work, 
and some, for various reasons, have not been able to.  Some people are 
better prepared with an understanding of what they have been doing, 
than others have been.

 Another structural observation we found is that there's a good balance 
between continuity and turnover.  We're very dependent upon a good 
chair.  And there is, again, for structural reasons, rather than for 
reasons of ignorance or bad behavior, some lack of clarity concerning 
the role of staff.

 The question is, to what degree staff participate in information-
gathering, discussion, deliberation, any of the process.

 It's again a lack of clarity in some cases rather than an accusation 
that someone has done something inappropriate.

 When we actually looked --  In addition to looking at how the NomCom 
was built and how it was put together, we looked at the operation 
itself.  And there were a couple of things that came to the surface 
there.  One is that the communication function is very, very important 
on a number of fronts.  Communication with potential candidates, 
communication with people in the broader community of ICANN followers 
about what's going on, communication to people who have never heard 
about ICANN.

 One of the observations was that people who are aware of the NomCom 
and become aware of what it's doing that it tends to increase their 
perception of ICANN.  And it contributes to a very positive perception 
of ICANN as a serious organization.  

 It is not well-known outside of ICANN.  So making it better known, it 
would follow from that that making it better known would be a good 
thing.

 In the task of going out and finding people, people talked about a 
push versus a pull model.

 Are we going to take a set of requirements that are handed to us and 
go out hunting for people like that?  Are we going to make up the 
requirements ourselves and go out hunting for people like that?  But 
there have been suggestions that it would be easier to do the job if we 
had a spec sheet.  If we knew the sort of person we were looking for, 
that would call for a tighter degree of communication between the 
NomCom and the people, the organizations to whom it appoints people.

 It comes up again when you talk about operation, that the skills and 
the tasks for recruiting and operation are different.

 And then the interaction with the candidates.  And this actually has 
improved quite a bit over the past couple of years, but in some years 
candidates felt like they were completely in the dark.  They had not 
been given a clear roadmap of what to expect and when to expect it.

 It was very hard to figure out what was going on in some cases.

 Now turning inward and looking at the operation itself as to how the 
deliberation, the voting and the selection proceeded.

 The general sense there was that people who have been through it 
before felt it worked really well and knew how to do it and it went 
smoothly.

 People who were new felt they didn't know which end was up, the 
process wasn't documented, and it took them a while to get acclimated 
so they were less effective than they might have been early on.

 One of the more controversial issues in the report has been the 
commentary about secrecy and confidentiality and transparency.  And 
this is a case in which excessive secrecy -- and I use the word 
"excessive" carefully here -- damages credibility.

 It's pretty well-known sociology that faced with not enough people 
will think the worst and some positing conspiracy theories.  That is an 
issue.  On the other hand absolute confidentiality is necessary when 
one is considering the cases of sensitive -- sensitive cases of people 
who are very prominent who do not want it to be known that they are 
applying for a position that they are not sure to get.  There is a 
tremendous amount of sensitivity and discretion there.

 The story we got across the board was that with the exception of some 
minor leaks the secrecy and confidentiality was excellent.

 But there was this sense that only -- the process could be made more 
transparent.

 We'll talk about that a little bit in the recommendation section.

 And then looking at, as per the terms of reference, looking at the 
conflict-of-interest situation, there were no reported problems.

 As for outcomes, the good news is that the appointments have been 
good.  People think the NomCom puts good people onto the board and the 
ALAC and the SOs.

 There is another observation that people -- that the process tends to 
favor -- it's very easy for anything controversial to get lopped off in 
a consensus process.  There was kind of a tension of models between 
people who felt that there ought to be a lot of ferment and discussion 
and back and forth and the truth will emerge from an adversarial 
environment versus people who felt a consensus process was most 
important.  And the consensus process by necessity, almost everybody 
offends somebody.  So it's a very high hurdle to get over in terms of 
not having offended anybody on the NomCom with any position.

 That's an observation that came from several people we talked to about 
the internal processes of it.  And the other observation was because 
the NomCom goes away at the end of its process you can't come back to 
it and say here is how you did.  Here is how the people you put on the 
board have been doing.  What do you think about that?  Are you going to 
be smarter next time or get more like them if they were good?  Because 
there's just no one to go to and have that follow through.

 To kind of sum up the observations that I put up here today, the ones 
that we think most drive the recommendations we make, one is that the 
NomCom is expected to fill a lot of roles.  Another is that the annual 
NomCom cycle is inefficient.

 We throw away a lot every year.  Now, this is a nuanced issue because 
we understand that you have to throw away the private stuff, so the 
question is can you divide things -- it's like the overall secrecy 
versus transparency issue.  Can you divide things so you can separate 
those that genuinely need to be tossed out from one year to the next 
from that which would actually become a foundation and basis for 
accreting and building a body of knowledge and technique and contacts 
that are useful.

 Consider the fact that the same candidate pool is being touched 
repeatedly by successive NomComs which means you are going to 
repeatedly touch some people and skip some others that you want to 
cover if you are on an annual cycle as opposed to a more continuous 
basis.

 Also, something that tends to drive our recommendations is that the 
NomCom composition itself introduces that tension we were talking about 
earlier, that inherent contradiction between the job of representing 
and the job of being an independent member of the NomCom.  And it's a 
constituency advocacy is the buzz phrase we have used for that.

 And finally, not to harp on it but it did come up a lot that the broad 
secrecy is an overly blunt instrument with which to accomplish the goal 
of confidentiality.

 To kind of take a step back from the observations and analyze them, 
the concept of the NomCom is sound.  Some changes in the structure and 
its operation would improve its effectiveness.  This is directly 
answering the questions that are asked in the terms of reference.

 But very importantly, the problems that we observed are systemic.  You 
can't -- they are not a result of bad behavior and they are not a 
result of minor problems and glitches and roughness in the process, 
although we did encounter some of those, and which are perhaps more 
easily fixed than some of the systemic things.

 So that's not to say these are bad people, you should go get, quote, 
"better people," unquote to serve on the NomCom.  And this is not about 
making minor adjustments to the process itself.

 And so with that background and driven from those observations and the 
analysis of the observations, we make recommendations.  Again, in the 
same areas that are laid out for us by the terms of reference.

 We have some recommendations about the role, particularly about how 
outreach and recruitment are done.  And selection and appointment.

 We have some observations about the structure of the NomCom, some 
observations about how it operates.  And those are the closest to 
things that are process improvement type recommendations.

 And a few things about how to track, measure, and improve continuously 
upon the outcomes.

 In the case of outreach and recruitment, what are we actually doing 
here?  We're looking for people who are able, qualified, interested, 
and motivated to help ICANN.

 There are other ways to do that besides sitting on the board.

 It is our recommendation that the recruiting mission be broadened into 
beyond something that is just an annual search for directors; that is a 
key part of ICANN's outreach to draw people into the ICANN arena and 
build a bench.

 This is about establishing and maintaining relationships with people 
out there.  It's about maintaining a pool of volunteers, and we say do 
it continuously.  Don't throw it away every year.

 Obviously there are still some things that need to be thrown away 
every year.  But if you have a year-round process that is going out 
there and finding the best people who can be found who are interested 
in one capacity or another of helping ICANN that creates a tremendous 
asset.

 And we believe that this job should be done with some support.

 We believe there should be administrative support.  Again, we've got 
some questions and comments about this section of the report.  This is 
a permanent, full-time director, administrative director who would be 
reporting to the NomCom as opposed to being a miscellaneous ICANN staff 
function.  It's a very important separation of powers issue going on 
there, that the staff will support this function but this needs to be 
someone who reports into the NomCom itself.

 And this process actually doesn't need NomCom involvement formally.

 This process is not about nominating.  It's about recruiting and 
outreach and finding people.

 The minute we got here -- actually, before we got here, we realized 
that we had made a bit of a drafting error in the report, in that there 
were some comments in there about a policy board versus a fiduciary 
board.

 It's not our brief to tell the board how to organize itself.

 We kind of tripped over our own love of abstraction there.

 We were talking about the functions and roles on the board rather than 
distinct bodies on the board.  And we just allowed the abstraction to 
become a little too concrete in our writing.

 But I think the underlying point needs to be made that there are at 
least three -- I am showing three on this chart here -- there are at 
least three reasons why you would want to put someone on the ICANN 
board.  And there are perhaps three different paths for getting someone 
onto the board in keeping with those three reasons.

 So in purple across the top of this slide, there are the criteria that 
you need someone for the SOs and the councils that are familiar and 
have a lot of detailed knowledge about the specific realm involved, 
because that needs to be represented on the board.

 There is also a very strong and sound reason to reach out to the 
broadest possible constituency around the world and find independent 
directors to come out of the board.

 And there is a very strong need to have people with absolutely top-
notch world class corporate governance skills on the board.

 And so our recommendation is that those people get onto the board 
through three different processes.  Appointments from the SOs and the 
ALAC, a Nominating Committee process that is a departure from the 
current one, which I will discuss in a moment, and a number of board 
members appointed by the board itself based on the board's diagnosis or 
understanding of what it needs.

 This also is a controversial point, and the policy issue that 
motivates it is that who but the board is better equipped to identify 
what it needs in terms of the soft skills?

 We need a peacemaker next year.  We need someone who is a strong 
advocate for this point of view.

 We need someone who can deal with so-and-so.

 Those are legitimate.  You can't write those down on a spec sheet and 
hand it off to the Nominating Committee very easily.

 Obviously there's a case where if a board is totally dysfunctional and 
it gets to reappoint some of its own members there's a potential for a 
self-perpetuating problem there, but we think that avenue is worth 
exploring.

 The SOs can -- are mature organizations, and rather than have the 
NomCom place candidates on them, they could draw from the same 
volunteer pool itself.  Now, they might actually delegate this task to 
the NomCom.  They might say the NomCom is very effective at 
understanding requirements and looking at candidacies and understanding 
what's going on, or they might not.

 But the policy justification here is that these are entirely capable 
because they are expertise-based organizations, they are entirely 
capable of dealing with a self-nominating, self-perpetuating 
reappointments.  And the ALAC is an interesting case because the ALAC 
has matured so significantly.  The ALAC no longer has the word 
"interim" in its title.  It's a mature organization.  It is now 
entirely capable of recruiting and selecting its own members without a 
NomCom doing the job.

 It might need its own NomCom-like process, but it is fundamentally 
different than the Board of Directors.

 Within the NomCom itself, and this is where we had fun talking to 
people about our representations, within the NomCom itself we are 
suggesting that a way of dealing with a known problem -- and the known 
problem is issue advocacy and the role it plays in the politics of the 
NomCom -- is to select NomCom members by lottery from a pool of 
volunteers.

 Now, obviously, that system can be gained.  You don't want the people 
who want to get a certain candidacy on the board to stuff the NomCom 
pool with candidates.

 So there needs to be a respectably high barrier for doing this.

 In the case of the IETF, it's a criterion that you have to have 
attended M out of the last N meetings.  It demonstrates you have some 
commitment to what's going on and you can't just find 5,000 names from 
one of these casting extra companies and stuff them into the volunteer 
pool.

 But if you have this random lottery that creates the NomCom and that 
would be run by the NomCom administrative director, and then the board 
would be able to appoint a volunteer chair within that NomCom who would 
serve a one-year term, and you would also appoint a chair elect one 
year in advance, so that chair elect would serve a nonvoting, kind of 
an apprenticeship, that's a funny term to use for a senior position but 
this chair elect would become part of the continuity and learning cycle 
of the NomCom and then discontinue the associate chair position, that 
could be taken over by the administrative director, and again it would 
be sort of a continuing process.

 So to kind of put all these pieces together, we have a chart that lays 
out the various elements.  And what is important to me, at least, on 
this chart, is that you have some organizations on the left that can 
actually pull directly from the ICANN volunteer pool.  These are the 
mature organizations, they are selecting their own members from among 
the volunteer pool.

 You also have a Nominating Committee which filters the candidates.  
Again, there is a first level of objective filtering that can be done 
by the administrative function and then the Nominating Committee itself 
can appoint directors to the board.

 There are NomCom administrative functions.  The NomCom administrative 
director, and the outreach and recruiting function, which would include 
both staff and outsourced recruiting.  This is the annual cycle.  This 
is the stuff that's not destroyed from one year to the next.  This is 
the constant feeding of volunteers.  This is the building of the bench 
for the organization.

 And then the role of the staff and the liaisons remains largely as it 
is right now.

 When you put that organizational -- and I will put that back up for 
the question and answer period.

 When you put the organizational structure to work what are you going 
to do in terms of changing the way in which it operates.

 The big recommendation we make there is twofold.  One of them is to 
take a more nuanced look at confidentiality and secrecy.  And find out 
what truly needs to be secret.  And then publicize the heck out of 
everything else.

 Make it very clear what's going on, when it's going on, how the 
process works.

 Talk to the candidates themselves.  Talk to the outside world.  Talk 
to the membership.  Make the process as transparent as possible in 
keeping with the need to keep it free from outside influence and 
confidential in the case of specific candidacies.

 And the other major recommendation is to create a library of 
processes.

 It's an old management trick when you are trying to document what the 
department does, is you assign it to the new employee.

 You might take an outsider or ask an outsider to look at the 
organization and try and find the things that the outsider doesn't 
inherently know how to do and document how it is that the NomCom does 
them.

 This creates a blueprint, a manual, and a valuable source of cultural 
knowledge that actually allows a new NomCom to come up to speed much 
more quickly.

 There's some kind of interesting questions about holding the NomCom to 
a high standard of performance.  You want to look at continuous 
improvement, you want to look at measuring the process.

 It's hard to measure the process if it's all secret.

 So how do you -- How do you do this?

 One of the things you want to do is to look at the appointees that the 
NomCom has placed and assess their performance objectively.

 Did you put someone on the board that goes to every meeting and just 
goes to the beach?

 Did this person serve the board admirably and do an enormous amount of 
work?

 Is there any way to communicate that kind of information not back to 
the same people, because the NomCom itself has disbanded but back to 
the institution so it learns something from one iteration to the next.

 There ought to be an opportunity to be able to recall and recall and 
replace NomCom appointees.  Again, using a formalized unimpeachable 
process.

 And then when we say audit the NomCom process, we don't mean to bring 
in an outside auditor and go over the books.

 This really means measure something.

 We were -- If you were accused of appointing only people who were 
friends of so-and-so, well, you ought to be able to show some 
statistics about the candidate pool and how that happened.  Or if you 
are accused of rejecting too many candidacies from people who come from 
this geographic region, again it would be nice to look at a statistical 
breakdown of the candidate pool.

 How did the process work?  How many people were called in for second 
interviews?  How did the follow-up part work?

 What was -- Who got eliminated or had their candidacy boost at what 
stage along the process?

 Just an abstract statistical and narrative about how the process 
worked any given year would be an important tool for the successors of 
the NomCom.

 So what happens next?  That is, again, merely a summary of the points 
that most caught our attention.

 It is highly recommended, if you have an interest, to read the report 
itself, to find the public comment information on the ICANN Web site.

 And I'll read just the comments.

 It's HTTP, it's forum.icann.org/lists/nomcom-review.  And I am just 
saying that to get it into the transcript if anyone is reading the 
transcript.

 So people are encouraged to read and contribute to the comments that 
are going on there.

 And then the BGC will review the report, public comments, and will 
develop the proposed actions for what happens next.

 And with that, I'm going to sit down and let us take questions.

 Thank you.

 >>VINT CERF:   Hi.  It's Vint Cerf.  I wondered, looking at this 
diagram, of course my first reactions are all diagrams about ICANN tend 
to look like that.  It reminds me of the Department of Homeland 
Security structure.

 Is it possible, do you think, that your suggestions could be applied 
even if you did not split things into a policy board and a fiduciary 
board?  It sounded to me like the number of recommendations might be 
applicable independent of that particular feature.  Is that a 
reasonable understanding?

 >>LYMAN CHAPIN:   Very much so.  And in fact, the recommendation is 
not that the board should divide itself in a literal sense into a 
separate policy board and fiduciary board.

 We're looking at this again from the standpoint not of how the board 
operates, which is the subject of a different review, but how you find 
people with the right set of skills to populate the bodies for which 
NomCom is responsible.  So you are absolutely right.

 >>VINT CERF:   Okay.  So this really is -- the board is constituted of 
people drawn from two different profiles, in effect.  And the policy 
board profiles are from our Supporting Organizations with special 
knowledge of their requirements and the fiduciary board drawn from 
another category who perhaps are more oriented towards the business 
side or perhaps more generally towards -- I don't know what to say?  
The general needs of ICANN and the Internet.

 >>LYMAN CHAPIN:   That's exactly right.

 >>VINT CERF:   Okay.

 Thank you.

 >>CHRIS OWENS:   I would also like to make a point that I failed to 
make when I was up at the podium, and that is it is not an ironclad 
distinction.  It's not like one candidate is a person with corporate 
governance skills and another is a policy expert.

 Past NomComs have done a superb job of finding people with both set of 
skills.

 >>VINT CERF:   There's a whole bunch so I will sit down and if I have 
more questions, I will come back.

 >>WOLFGANG KLEINW?CHTER:   Thank you.  My name is Wolfgang 
Kleinw?chter.  I was a member of the NomCom the last two years.  And I 
want to make some brief comments.

 I find a lot of useful ideas and innovative approaches in the report.  
So I think it's a good one.

 Three or four points are, in particular, good and forward-thinking.  I 
think the recommendations for the relationship between transparency and 
confidentiality are very useful.  My position here is is be as 
transparent as possible with regard to procedural issues and be as 
confident as possible with regard to the personal data.

 And I think it's also helpful if we -- if the NomCom gets a more 
concrete -- something like a drop description from the councils and the 
board itself, so it would help them, you know, to have a more precise 
knowledge about, you know, what is needed at this special moment.  This 
changes from year to year, because the composition is changing within 
the different councils.  And so there are new gaps that are appearing.  
So it means the general criteria which are laid down in the bylaws, you 
know, could then be complemented by the specific criteria, you know, 
coming from the council in a given year.

 I think that's also a good idea.

 And I think also the idea with the pool of candidates is a good one, 
you know, to ask high-level persons every year, you know, to reapply, 
you know, make not sense if you are rejected for the first year or for 
the second year, but, you know, to ask somebody to be available for a 
period of three years, and then to have a pool.  I think this would 
make sense.  And I also have a lot of sympathy with the recommendation 
to change the status of the At-Large Advisory Committee to at-large 
supporting organization and to enable this supporting organization to 
vote directors to the board directly.  You know, I think this would be 
for the whole composition of the board probably one step forward in the 
right direction for a truly multistakeholder organization or model of a 
multistakeholder organization as it's one of the ten points in the 
annex to the joint partnership agreement.

 Two points I have strong reservations.

 One point is the question -- is, you know, the lottery for the 
composition of the nomination committee.

 I think the composition, the different constituencies can send 
different people to the NomCom, was the result of a very careful 
discussion process within the reform process.  And it also -- you have 
to put this into the historical context.  The nomination committee was 
invented because the election of the five at-large directors were 
abolished.  So that means if you go to a lottery, then you destroy this 
careful balance.  And being a member of the NomCom for two years, it's 
true there is some advocacy.  But because it's balanced, the 
composition was balanced, such individual efforts are counterbalanced.  
And by counter arguments from other constituencies.  So it really does 
not affect in a negative way the outcome of the result of the NomCom.

 And the second point where I have strong reservations is with the 
administrative director.  It's true that's a lot of workload.  And Adam 
Peake made great work and spent a lot of time, voluntary work, to make 
this happen.  So that means the associate chair is really the person 
who has to work hard.

 But, you know, if you change this into the position of a full, paid 
administrative director, full paid by ICANN, and this director becomes 
more or less directly or indirectly part of the staff, then you feed a 
new conspiracy theory that the staff selects the directors.  And I 
think this would be disastrous.  So that means there has to be a clear-
cut -- so probably you can find a way, you know, with a contractor or 
consultant or -- to make this work a little bit more stable in the 
interest of continuity.

 But if you, you know, create such a new position in the ICANN staff, 
then this would be disastrous.  And you would have much more to explain 
to the public.  This would be a step backwards.

 Thank you.

 >>HARTMUT GLASER:   My name is Hartmut Glaser.  I was a member for two 
years.  And I am here appointed for the next year.

 I'd like to know the criteria that was used to select the 47 that you 
interviewed.  How many members we have in the total the last five years 
working for the NomCom, and the criteria that was used for the 
selection of 47.

 Can you answer this, please?

 >>LYMAN CHAPIN:   You mean how did we select the 47 people that we 
actually interviewed?

 >>HARTMUT GLASER:   Your information was that you have interview with 
47.

 >>LYMAN CHAPIN:   Yes, right.

 >>HARTMUT GLASER:   This was a criteria to select this 47.  I'd like 
to know the criteria.

 >>CHRIS OWENS:   There were several criteria.  One, there was a fairly 
broad call for people who were interested in being interviewed.

 >>HARTMUT GLASER:   This call for public for everyone?

 >>CHRIS OWENS:   It was pretty widely distributed.

 >>HARTMUT GLASER:   I never received any request, any call.  I was a 
member for two years.  So please, continue.

 >>CHRIS OWENS:   Thank you.  That's good information.  And I apologize 
that I didn't.

 The next -- the criteria were to get some broad coverage of different 
classes of people.

 So people who had certainly served on NomComs.  Then we had people who 
had been candidates who were successful had been appointed by NomComs.  
And then there was a tricky case, because candidates who were 
considered by NomComs who weren't successful, obviously, we didn't have 
their names, because the information about people who were considered 
and not selected is secret.

 So we used kind of a double-blind process with some cooperation from 
ICANN NomCom supporting staff to get the word out to some of those 
people and ask them if they would be willing to step forward and be 
interviewed.

 And we got a good number of those as well.

 And, then, finally there were some relatively well-known -- I'm sorry, 
there were board members, past and present, and there were relatively 
well-known people who have public blogs and other opinions about ICANN 
that are well out there.

 And I probably have missed a category.  If I could turn to my 
colleagues.

 So there was not a formal statistical process.  And because of that, 
we did not use any kind of formal statistical analysis of how many 
people said "X."  We sort of looked and saw if there were a big pile of 
scraps of paper on comment "X," we dug into it and looked carefully.

 >>HARTMUT GLASER:   Do you have the number how many members we have in 
the last five years working in NomCom?  The total?

 >>LYMAN CHAPIN:   The total number of people that we talked to?

 >>HARTMUT GLASER:   No.  How many members we have working in the 
NomComs for the five years that we have the NomCom.

 >>LYMAN CHAPIN:   I don't know the total, no.

 >>HARTMUT GLASER:   Probably must be 80, 90?

 >>LYMAN CHAPIN:   I think it's at least that large a number, yeah.  
The scope of the project that we laid out for ICANN was not even close 
to being large enough for us to talk to all of those people.

 So we had to select for interviews a subset of the people who had 
served on NomComs.

 And I think we talked to about 20 people who had served on NomComs for 
either one or, in some cases, more than one year over the past five 
years, starting with 2003.

 >>HARTMUT GLASER:   My concern is related to, let's say, diversity or 
to interview different points of view.

 If you don't have a criteria, the danger is that we only ask pro or 
contra, and then at the end, you have not the complete picture.

 I saw many of good ideas reflected that I like to write down, but, 
okay, there.  But on the other side, if you have only 20 or 25, that 
probably, let's say, are only from one region or are from one side, we 
can have a wrong picture.  And this is the question that I would like 
to know if we need to elaborate a criteria and take care to avoid any 
tendency in our review.

 If we are working to improve the system, we need to have a broad 
information coming from all positions and from, if possible, the 
highest number of possible former members.

 I am not happy that I don't receive any request, and I like to put 
this exactly on the memory to show that the process is not transparent.

 Thank you.

 >>CHRIS OWENS:   Thank you.

 >>STEVE METALITZ:   I'm Steve Metalitz, with the intellectual property 
constituency.

 And unlike, I think, all the previous speakers, I've never served on 
the Nominating Committee.  I have been an officer of the IPC throughout 
the life of this institution of the Nominating Committee, and the 
officers of our constituency, under our bylaws, choose the person that 
we send to the Nominating Committee.  I don't call that person our 
representative.  I'm not quite sure what to call that person.

 But -- so I've been involved in choosing, and I would say also 
recruiting, members of the Nominating Committee for five years, and 
then spending the rest of the year wondering what they were doing on 
the Nominating Committee.

 I think -- I want to compliment you on the report.  I think it's very 
well done, and it presents your recommendations very clearly.  And I 
certainly agree with many of your recommendations, particularly 
separating the recruitment and selection functions, which I think 
you've hit it on the head, those are very different jobs.

 And I certainly also support the proposal for less secrecy in the 
process.

 In some ways, you had a very -- very easy assignment, because you made 
some conclusions that are impossible for us to verify or critique.  So, 
for example, when you say that the process favors uncontroversial 
candidates, there's absolutely no way for anyone who hasn't served on 
the Nominating Committee to know whether that's true or not, since all 
we know is who was selected.

 When you say that there's been constituency advocacy within the 
Nominating Committee, again, no way for us to know that.  And I wonder 
whether  the people we sent there were good advocates, bad advocates or 
maybe they weren't advocating at all.

 And you also reached a conclusion that the Nominating Committee has 
made good selections.  And the natural question there is, compared to 
what?

 The -- I would contrast it with the selection process for some of the 
other board members.  The selection process in the GNSO is, in some 
ways, the opposite of the Nominating Committee.  It is extremely 
transparent, it's extremely accountable.  And it has some of the 
shortcomings that come along with that.  And I've seen that in practice 
as people are elected, people who lose elections don't take it very 
well sometimes.  It's not a very pretty process.

 But I don't have a sense of whether we get better outcomes from that 
or worse outcomes from that than we have from the process of the 
Nominating Committee, which, fundamentally, strikes me as very hard to 
reconcile this Nominating Committee process with an organization that 
says it strives to be accountable and transparent, because it simply 
has no accountability and no transparency.

 I think you've made some recommendations that will help improve that, 
and I compliment you for those.

 But I would just close with three observations.

 First, I think we should consider becoming less reliant on this 
process to choose our leadership.  You recommend that, actually, 
because you take the Nominating Committee out of selecting GNSO and  
ccNSO Council members and so forth.

 So maybe we should consider moving a little further in that direction 
and reducing the number of board members that are selected in that form 
as well.

 The second point, which has already been mentioned, is the selection -
- use of a lottery to select Nominating Committee members.  That, to 
me, was in some ways the most striking recommendation that you made.  
And I'm not very comfortable with that.  And perhaps we might think 
about a blended system in which some members are selected by lottery, 
but others come from, you know, within the organization by a method 
that's similar to what we have now.

 And I guess my last recommendation -- and this is probably outside the 
scope of your remit, anyway -- was that we should probably change the 
name of the Nominating Committee.  It doesn't nominate.  It makes 
selections.  And as I was casting about for similar institutions that 
we might look to for the proper name, the best I could come up with is 
maybe we should call this the ICANN college of Cardinals.

 Thank you.

 [ Laughter ]

 >>VINT CERF:   (inaudible).

 >>VITTORIO BERTOLA:   Thank you.

 Vittorio Bertola speaking personally.

 I think I will take a couple of minutes to start from the single most 
contentious and most political difficult process, nominating process 
that we have in Italy, which is the process for nominating the referees 
for the soccer matches every Sunday.  It is, actually, if you think of 
the soccer industry, it's much bigger than the global registration 
industry in terms of turnaround.  And it is an important process, 
because the referee can significantly change the result of the game if 
he's not perfectly independent.  And, in fact, every referee, in fact, 
comes from a certain town or maybe a certain part of the town who are 
more supporters of one team or the other.  So maybe if you go against 
one team, you will find 50 people in front of your door.

 And so -- yeah.

 So, in practice, there's a lot of bargaining and political power 
around this process.

 And so you might say, okay, we are just going to draw from a lottery 
and go by chance.  But then you realize that it's not really maybe the 
right way to draw, because different referees have different skills.  
There are more experienced ones, less experienced ones.

 And so you might want to have a process through which you have some 
wise people that make some assignments based on the curriculum of the 
referees.  And, actually, that's what happens.  So in the end, they 
came up with a very elaborate process in which you have the teams that 
more or less form some constituencies because, of course, they're not 
formalized, but the smaller teams work together and the bigger and rich 
teams are opposite interests and stay together.  And they elect a 
league council.  And the league council appoints a board of one, two, 
three, four people which are the experts.  And then they are the 
independent experts, they appoint the referees and appoint them to each 
and every match.

 My experience in the last 30 years is that this was the most common 
method, but there was one single year in which they didn't do this, and 
they just had a lottery.  And all the assignments of referees were 
completely random.  And maybe that's a coincidence, but that's the one 
and only year in which the football championship was won by one of the 
teams that were not in the top five or, I mean, political power and not 
the usual suspects.

 So, I don't know, maybe that's just a coincidence.  But then the year 
after, they disbanded the mechanism and they came up with this 
elaborate mechanism based on skills.  And for the following 15 years, I 
think, in 13 of the following 15 years, the championship was won by two 
teams only.  So what's the point?

 I think, actually, when you think of these kind of selections, you're 
very tempted to say we have to be representative and we have to examine 
the skills of the people.  And it's true.  But then, I mean, we are all 
in a small community.  We know each other.  So the people that select 
members of the board and of the councils will go out to dinner with the 
people they select.  And it's impossible to be unbiased.

 So, actually, I think that I I would like to recommend if we go to the 
lottery system, we give it a try, we may not discover that it's 
perfect.  Certainly it will have shortcomings.  But I think that in the 
end, it will be more fair.

 Thank you.

 >>GEORGE SADOWSKY:   I'm George Sadowsky.  I have been the chair of 
the Nominating Committee for three of its five years of existence.  
And, fortunately, I will not be the chair this year.  Hagen Hultzsch is 
taking over.

 I'd like to make a few comments about the report.

 First of all, I think that the report as it was done is thoroughly 
professional and represents a great deal of insight and a great deal of 
work.  And I thank you very much for that.

 It ranges, on the one hand, from the very profound and useful, to the 
very off the wall and perhaps not so useful, in my mind.  And I don't 
want to go into details on it, because I really want to reflect on it 
and make my comments in writing in the public review Web page.

 There are a number of suggestions that you make that are directly 
applicable to the current operation of the NomCom.  They're not 
structural; they're good suggestions.  And I can tell you that in the 
initial discussions of the 2008 Nominating Committee, of which I'm a 
member because I'm the past chair, they've been looked on very 
positively.  And we expect to make those changes.  And if Hagen were 
here, I think he would say exactly that.

 The structural issues, of course, are more complex and depend upon 
getting community agreement as well as getting bylaw changes.  So we're 
not going to be able to address them, at least not in the next -- in 
the current cycle.

 I'd like to comment on two issues only.  One is the issue of open 
elections as nonconfidential elections, as Steve Metalitz was 
commenting on earlier in the line.

 The NomCom in 2007 was interested in exploring the possibility of 
making the process transparent through this -- including the selection 
-- sorry, including the application, the statements of interest, of the 
people, the people's names, all the way through.  And we devoted some 
amount of time to looking at the question.  We decided to query the 
NomCom members that we had put on the board.  And I was able to do this 
because I had been chair for three years.

 So I queried all of them, and I said, "How would you feel about it if 
your name were to be made public without your -- without question, you 
couldn't say whether it would be or wouldn't be, it just would be?  Or, 
alternatively, if your name were made public at your request, but not 
everybody would necessarily allow that to happen, so you'd have a 
partial list of candidates, you'd be in the closet looking out, and 
other people would have declared themselves?"

 And what we got -- by the way, we did this as a result of two people 
essentially publishing their SOIs in the year 2006, saying, "I'm an 
applicant for one of the literature positions, and here's my SOI, or 
here are parts of my SOI, because I believe the process should be 
transparent all the way through."

 Well, what we got was a relatively even distribution of people who 
said, "I don't care.  Publish my name."  Or -- and in the middle, 
"Well, you know, I feel kind of queasy about it, but if I had to, I 
might go along with this."  And then at the far end, the other side of 
the spectrum, "No, I would not have applied, I would not have 
participated in the process."

 Well, that's not really helpful.

 So -- and this is something that, really, you can't verify.  I looked 
at the -- what I thought was the performance of these various people in 
their various roles on the councils, the board, and the ALAC, and it 
turned out -- and this is very rough and very subjective, I admit -- 
that the more competent and more contributory the nomination, the more 
they didn't want their name published, and that they wanted to keep the 
process confidential.

 So on that basis, we made no change this year.  But I think it's an 
interesting data point, for what it's worth regarding the value of 
confidentiality to getting good candidates.

 The last point I'd like to raise is your suggestion regarding what I 
would call the volunteer database and the administrative director.

 I think that, by and large, with some modifications, this is an 
absolutely superb idea.

 Every year, we have been forced to select less candidates than are 
really good in the pool.  We have had to turn down people.  And we've 
turned them down in the past with no good explanation to them except to 
say, "Well, you know, the chances were 10% to begin with and we really 
value your interest" and all that, "And apply next year."  But we have 
not made a differentiation between those people we would really like to 
encourage to reapply, and the reapplication, of course, is an issue, 
and those people whom we feel probably wouldn't make it in the next 
year anyway.  We've done this because we felt, first of all, if we had 
to differentiate between those pools, that would take up time and a 
fair amount of energy.  And, second, it would be pretty clear to the 
community pretty soon that we were writing at least two kinds of 
letters, and the word would get around as to who got which kind of 
letter.  We felt that was not very good.

 But the absence of what I would call, for lack of a better phrase, a 
career letter, or a career path, or a way of getting involved with 
ICANN has bothered me ever since I took over the chair and we made our 
first selections.

 There should be a place to go for people who want to contribute on a 
one-time basis or perhaps an occasional basis or whatever.  And this 
database is exactly, I think, the way to do it.

 Now, the question of whether the administrative director should make 
the subsetting for the Nominating Committee or not, that's another 
matter.  One thing you didn't mention, by the way, in the report, the 
administrative director reports to the board, not to the -- and is not 
part of the staff.  And that provides some separation.  And I know that 
there's some controversy about whether staff of any kind should report 
to the board and how effective that is.

 My sense is that it would work.

 The other function that you give the administrative director is 
perhaps the more important one, besides supporting the NomCom.  And you 
could even think of it as two functions, and you could put it into two 
people or spread it in a variety of ways.

 The notion of recruiting that database.  

 This is a global organization.  There are 200-some countries in the 
world.  The Nominating Committee in the past has been fortunate to have 
a fairly good distribution, geographic distribution, of people on it so 
that if we want to recruit, for example, in China, last year we had 
Christopher Tow who lives in Hong Kong on the committee.

 But we had no coverage of large numbers of countries in regions of the 
world. 

 Recruiting for the NomCom on a part-time basis by a staff person 
probably is a little too much to ask.  However, recruiting for a broad 
group of volunteers to help ICANN in multiple dimensions is potentially 
a full-time job that is very valuable to do, especially as away enter 
into an area where ICANN is recognized as a global entity and we want 
to make sure that recognition is strong and positive.

 Thank you.

 >>CHRIS OWENS:   George, I had one follow-up to one of your comments, 
a question to ask you.  And that is that when you canvassed the people 
about their willingness to have their name publicized, we had been told 
to expect a significant regional or natural cultural dimension along 
which that would vary.  That there were areas of the world in which 
people were entirely familiar and comfortable withstanding publicly for 
election and there were others in which appointment to a board was done 
by a very discreet invitation.

 We don't have enough data to be able to say one thing or another about 
that but I was curious if you noticed any significant effect.

 >>GEORGE SADOWSKY:   I didn't even look for it but it certainly is the 
conventional wisdom that in certain areas of the world that publicizing 
a candidates name would mean death for the candidate to apply.

 I think there are enough areas of the world based on my own 
observations that if that's not true, probable.

 >>MARILYN CADE:   My name is Marilyn Cade.  I appreciate the 
opportunity to speak to you in this public outreach session.

 I want to say, and I'm sure others before me have said this as well, 
thank you for being willing to take this job on because it is, as all 
of the review jobs, a daunting task.  And just because we like to make 
sure that everyone shares everyone else's pain, we try to make it as 
challenging as possible.

 So that's part of the public process of taking comments here, and 
thank you for doing this.

 I want -- before I go into my other comments I want to just say that 
one of the things that has long daunted me, and really been a major 
problem to me in my attitude about the Nominating Committee process is 
that people are -- We have somehow created an idea that it's really 
good to want to lead but it's really not essential to want to 
participate.

 And let me explain what I mean by that.

 People are -- There's outreach going on to reach broadly into the 
community, which I applaud, and to identify people who are not familiar 
with ICANN and to encourage them to lead in ICANN.

 But there's really no expectation that after you lead -- and by the 
way, you get your travel paid, and for many people who struggle to 
attend the ICANN meetings and to participate in the ICANN meetings and 
fund it themselves or struggle with their -- if their governments 
struggle with their government budget or struggle with their company 
budget or NGO budget or personal budget, you know that there's this 
idea that you can be tacked.  And mystically you are converted into a 
leader.

 But you are not expected in any way to continue to participate after 
you fulfill that opportunity to lead.

 I have a problem with that.  It kind of doesn't fit my expectation 
that once ICANN touches you, they own you forever, and you have to keep 
participating.  But that's a personal joke about this.

 But I want to say I did like the idea that there's a mechanism to 
continue to encourage people who have been -- they have agreed to put 
their name forward to be considered to lead.  I would like to find a 
way, non-invasively, to encourage them to consider participating, even 
if they are not appointed to a leadership position.

 I actually probably have a unique characteristic, as far as I know, 
over other participants who were members of the Nominating Committee in 
that I resigned in my second year for personal reasons.

 So I had about a year and four months, I think, or something like 
that, experience on the Nominating Committee.

 I saw the evolution of the administrative processes in the time that I 
was there, and contributed to helping to define and develop some of 
those.  And I think that, in fact, the creation of an administrative 
director -- and I'm not sure you have got the name right, but I think 
the creation of that function is incredibly important and I fully 
support it.

 I'm just going to say that because of the complete lack of 
transparency of our processes, and I object strongly to how 
nontransparent our work today is in the Nominating Committee, I think 
we meant well, but didn't quite get it right.  And I think we need to 
look at making as much of the work transparent as we can while figuring 
out the bits, what exactly the bits are that aren't transparent.

 And if a -- if we're not at the point yet that candidates expect to 
have their candidacy known, then we need to keep thinking about how we 
reach the point where you are honored to be considered a candidate for 
selection, you are proud of it, and you, in fact, want it to be known.

 So perhaps that's a growth issue for all of us, including as we 
educate participants.

 I would support fully the idea, as I said, of the administrative 
director, that is in addition to basic administrative staff support.

 And I say that because you know nontransparent voluntary processes are 
subject to capture.  And people forget that.

 And they think that it's only paid staff who might go native or 
whatever the concern is.

 So transparency is important, and I think stable administrative 
support, documented procedures, a socialization process for the 
appointees who come in to quickly help them get up to speed and become 
able to focus on the quality aspect of their -- of the decisions they 
are going to make, I support the idea of separating the functions.  I 
think that's an excellent idea.

 I don't support the idea of the lottery selection.  I heard something 
by someone else who spoke that perhaps might moderate my thinking.

 I'm concerned about improving the characteristics and expertise of the 
people who are appointed to the Nominating Committee to make the 
decisions.  I'm not satisfied with the process that we in the 
constituencies or the community undertake today to get the right 
maturity and experience and expertise in place, even as the 
participants of the Nominating Committee.

 And I think we need to think more about improving the job description 
so that the parties who appoint someone have in their mind clear 
expectations of the capability of the person that they appoint.

 I think the scope of the work given to the Nominating Committee is too 
broad.  I do not see the rationale any longer for the Nominating 
Committee to appoint people to either one -- either the ccNSO or the 
GNSO.

 I could see -- I now read in not only the GNSO review but also in the 
strategic plan the importance of increasing the interaction between the 
SOs.  I could easily see the replacement of the Nominating Committee 
appointees with elected members from the other two SOs, and an elected 
member from the ALAC to replace the Nominating Committee selection of 
outside parties.

 If that process remains for the Nominating Committee to continue to 
select what I have often referred to -- and let me just pause and say I 
have huge respect for the parties who have been chosen, but the reality 
is, it is the mystical, magical, mysterious job that we assign to those 
three parties who we appoint to those SOs.  Very, very difficult.

 And so if we're going to continue to do it this way, we better clarify 
the job description and the expectations so parties who come into the 
council understand they are not there to advocate.  We have an 
expectation they are an expert.

 If we want them to be an expert, perhaps we didn't write the job 
description right when we gave the assignment to the Nominating 
Committee.

 I think I have made any relevant points that I need to make tonight, 
and I will submit written comments.

 Thank you.

 >>CHRIS OWENS:   Thank you.

 >>MARCUS FAURE:   Hello, my name is Marcus Faure, and I went through 
the NomCom process as a candidate two times, and so I hereby am waiving 
a bit of the privacy that was granted to me.

 I actually wanted to share with you a complete overview of the 
communication between the NomCom and the candidate.

 In the first year it was one e-mail asking for the statements of 
support from the reference I put into the statement.

 The second year, this process has improved a lot.  I also received 
another e-mail which informed me which candidates have finally been 
selected.

 So the bottom line is as a candidate, you are completely in the dark 
regarding the NomCom process.  And we have heard George before who 
indicated that he would feel uncomfortable with sending two kinds of 
letters to the candidates, which could give them an indication if it 
makes sense for them to reapply.

 My opinion on that is, other than in a job interview, you don't get 
any sense of indication if you are the right man for the job.  And I 
think this creates a lot of problems, both for the Nominating Committee 
who have to review statements which might not be worth reviewing, and 
also for the candidate who potentially reserves a lot of time for a 
potential future position in ICANN.

 So I would really encourage you to follow some of the recommendations 
and improve the communication between NomCom and the candidate.

 All in all, I felt rather overprotected.

 Thanks.

 >>WENDY SELTZER:   Thanks.  Wendy Seltzer.  Not a Nominating Committee 
member nor a Nominating Committee applicant.  Only one who has 
commented on my blog that I would support those candidates who publicly 
announced their candidacy.

 I do think in places that the process can be made more visible to 
outside participants.

 But I think there's a lot of good material in here discussing 
particularly the difficulty of the task of finding and retaining those 
good people who have given their indications of interest.  The At-Large 
Advisory Committee would love to be able to reach out to people who had 
told the Nominating Committee that they were interested in 
participating in ICANN, but weren't selected.  And maintaining an open 
channel by which they could get requests or an indirect channel by 
which people could be asked, "Are you willing to volunteer to assist in 
development of policy statements" or collection of information around 
points of interest, I think would be helpful.

 And I was -- And then I was concerned by some of the discussion on 
accountability of the NomCom appointed members, and tied into that, the 
discussion of the role of NomCom as replacing the elections, because I 
do remember back to the initial New Co bylaws that stated that half the 
members of the board would be selected from among the at-large 
community, and after election of five people, that was dropped and 
whittled to the NomCom process.

 The quality of -- I'm not saying anything about the quality of people 
selected but the quality of reputation provided to the at-large public 
and the degree of representativeness that the process has is 
diminished.

 And then so then when I see in the report for discussion and I look 
forward to submitting written comments that describe it more 
thoroughly, see sort of reference that the NomCom shouldn't be serving 
those representation functions, obviously there are trade-offs between 
actually getting people to reach consensus and having representative 
participation.

 But I think we need to focus harder on how we can get representation 
into the process.  Perhaps that's out of scope of the report here.  But 
either it is a substitute or it isn't.  And that needs to be clarified, 
I think.

 On the accountability side, I'd be concerned about the added strings 
that would be put in if people would be recalled by a body.  Does that 
mean that their loyalties are now to a Nominating Committee body rather 
than in fiduciary duties to the board.

 Again, I think that's an advantage to an election.  Someone has to run 
for reelection at the end of a term, and that is an accountability to 
the public that elected then.  And since that public is one of the 
chief constituents of the organization, that kind of accountability 
goes hand in hand with the fiduciary roles.

 So thanks very much.

 >>LYMAN CHAPIN:   Wendy, if I could ask you just to clarify.  When you 
were referring to representation or representativeness, did you mean 
the way in which people are chosen for a Nominating Committee?  Or were 
you referring to the representation of, for instance, an at-large 
viewpoint or perspective on one of the bodies like the board?

 >>WENDY SELTZER:   I was referring to on the board.

 >>LYMAN CHAPIN:   Okay.

 >>WENDY SELTZER:   And part of representation or representativeness 
seems to have sort of two facets, at least two facets.  One in how 
closely the views reflect those that the public wants to see reflected 
and the other is how much say the public has had in who is up there.

 And it's that second one that I think --

 >>LYMAN CHAPIN:   Okay.  Thank you very much.

 >>KIEREN McCARTHY:   Hello.  I'm Kieren McCarthy.  And I have a wealth 
of conflict of interest with this.  Either that or an overview of the 
process, depending on which way you want to look at it.

 I applied to be on the ICANN board, and then went public and I was 
pretty critical of the whole process, quite publicly.  And I -- also, I 
was interviewed by yourselves, I was one of the magic 47.

 And I now work for ICANN staff.  So trying to get all of that out of 
the way.

 I thought it was a very good --

 >>VINT CERF:   This is your punishment.

 >>KIEREN McCARTHY:   Yes.  I thought it was a very good report.  It's 
a very difficult subject.  I don't agree with all of it.  But then what 
I recognize is you've found a balance between quite strong views with a 
range of different people.

 I think the main points which you had, which I think everyone pretty 
much agrees with, is the process needs to be more transparent.  That 
this is how we do it, this is how we decide, this is when we're 
meeting.  I think that will remove a huge amount of the problems that 
people have with the process.

 I disagree with the secrecy of applicants thing.  And that's no secret 
to anyone.

 I think that, you know, ICANN is an open organization.  You can't hide 
from anything.  And so I think if people -- people should be proud and 
people should be grateful, you know, to apply.  I'm apply for this 
role.  And if you get chosen, you can't hide anywhere, especially if 
you're a board member.  So the sort of people that -- the sort of 
people that you want on the board are not going to be the sort of 
people that get offended if their name is put up and they don't get it.  
That sort of person I don't think would be particularly good 
particularly on the board.  Maybe on the supporting organization, 
because it's not quite so in the public eye.  But I think the sort of 
people that are happy to apply and not get it are exactly the sort of 
people that we want in this process.  They're willing to put themselves 
out there and say, "These are my skills.  Do you want them?  No.  Okay.  
That's fine, I'll still keep contributing."  That's the sort of people 
we want.  So that's my particular bias.

 I just go through -- I think most of your points were great.  Treat 
candidates more respectfully, yes.  I had the one e-mail to confirm I 
applied and the one e-mail to confirm I didn't have a place.  That's 
dreadful.  I had a lot of fun trying to find out who else had applied.  
And I contacted a few of them and I tried to persuade them to go public 
to say, "I have applied."  And two did.  And four people that I spoke 
to said, "I'd rather not.  I think it will counteract my chances of 
being chosen."  So that's another one of my biases there.

 So I like the lottery idea.  I think we should give it a whirl.  I 
don't know whether it will work.  But I think it will take a lot of the 
politicking out of it.

 Just, you know, people put themselves in and you choose someone.  Why 
not?

 Because there's a lot of wrangling and sometimes people put themselves 
forward or just to remove them, having a lottery I think is worth a go.  
It's not like we're going to end up with a bunch of people who know 
nothing about ICANN.  You would never apply if you knew nothing about 
what the organization was about.  So it's definitely worth trying, 
although I know there's a lot of views otherwise.

 I think the key thing is the ALAC question, the whole point of the 
Nominating Committee and a lot of the frustration and anger has been 
from these at-large elections.

 And I was -- I have been thinking about, in my new role as a public 
participation general manager, of writing something which covered that.  
I think it's long enough ago to be able to cover it in a fairly 
objective way.  But I still think because I work for ICANN, it could 
still create trouble.  I'd like to see you, you know, sort of take on 
the task of explaining why it was that the NomCom was created, why it 
was that those elections didn't really work.  Because there are two 
sides.  And there's been too much shouting.  I think people should calm 
down and look at what happened and try and learn from it rather than 
get angry about it all the time, which is all we tend to hear, 
angriness on one side, defensiveness on the other.  And it's not 
helping.  And I think if we got that out in the open, we would probably 
learn a lesson that would be very useful in this review.

 And boosting awareness, yes, I agree.  One thing I did do is I agreed, 
we needed people, especially when -- very few people that applied for 
the last round, and so I interviewed Vint.  And Vint spoke about, "I'm 
leaving and, you know, these are the sort of people I would hope would 
apply."  And that had a pretty big impact, I think.  So that was one 
way of boosting awareness.  And I think it demonstrated that people are 
interested.  There were a lot of people that didn't even realize this 
process was going on.

 So I hope in my role I can at least do what I can.  And I hope you 
will put some suggestions in as to how ICANN could boost awareness.  
And I will follow them to the tee and try and get more people aware of 
it and involved in it.

 >>LYMAN CHAPIN:   Thank you.

 >>ADAM PEAKE:   Hi, Adam Peake.  I was the associate chair for two 
years and a member for two years, a voting member for two years.

 A lot of comments which I'll send on paper.

 I think it's a good report and I hope it will be very helpful to this 
year's Nominating Committee, in particular, and I think it has -- 
there's a lot in there that will be helpful.

 A few sort of quite simple points, really.

 I actually disagree with parts of it.  And one part that kind of 
bothered me was the -- a suggestion that you say that people 
represented the -- their constituencies within the process, Nominating 
Committee members represented the constituencies rather than acting as 
individuals.

 And I don't think that was the case.  And had it been the case, I 
wouldn't have participated, to be quite honest.

 Of course, as somebody who comes from a noncommercial background and 
sort of civil society, I bring that experience and those biases.  And I 
think someone like Marilyn, who's gone away somewhere, would bring the 
interests and biases of someone from business.

 But I don't think either of us advocated for either the noncommercial 
users' constituency or for the business constituency of ICANN.  I think 
we did represent individuals.

 And that, actually, has implications for further recommendations you 
make, such as the pool of Nominating Committee candidates and so on.

 So I think that's quite important.  People do act as individuals.  
They're good, honest people.  And so that's something that kind of 
bothered me as a recommendation.

 About retaining information, remember that this is a new process.  I 
think last year was the fourth year.  So the statement of interest 
process, that form has actually been developing over a period of time.

 And it's only this year, or 2007, that the committee has considered 
that it is a stable form.  

 So the questions that it asked, the information that it solicited from 
candidates previously was changing each year.

 So it couldn't be carried over.

 You couldn't carry a statement of interest over from one year to the 
next because the information was changing.

 It's now stable, and George sent out an e-mail to all of the 
candidates who were not selected this year saying that if they wished 
to have their statement of interest and references from 2007 carried 
over to 2008, then they could do so.  They simply tell him, and he will 
forward those to the 2008 committee.

 So information is no longer being lost, and the reason it was being 
lost was actually because it wasn't consistent.

 You couldn't consider informing year on.  It simply wasn't matching.

 So it wouldn't have been a successful activity.

 So that is something.  This is an evolving process and it's actually 
addressing one of your concerns.

 So I think that's quite good.

 A couple of things.  I think you should have addressed what I have 
found to be the major problem that the Nominating Committee actually 
faces, and that is the amount of work that we ask of these people.  The 
people who are selected are looking at if you are on the board or the 
GNSO in particular, this is 20 hours a week, and that is the main 
challenge of the Nominating Committee when it comes to recruitment, is 
finding people of quality willing to devote that amount of time.

 The example I have used is this is more than directors of Fortune 500 
companies will do.

 This is an incredible commitment.  And it colors the whole process.

 If it was a day a week, you would find, I think, a completely 
different candidate pool.  So that's one issue there.

 Excuse me a second.

 I think the other is look around this room.  You are looking at nearly 
an empty room.

 You are talking about a process that selects at least more than half 
of the board of this organization, and the level of interest that your 
review is gaining is this empty room.

 Now, imagine the Nominating Committees facing the same thing.

 The constituency parts, the community is not contributing as it should 
do to what is one of the core elements of the whole of ICANN.

 Look.  I mean, the greatest respect.  Everybody in the room.  Thank 
God you are here, really.

 >>CHRIS OWENS:   I am going to blame it at the on the free beer that 
someone must be serving out there because there can't possibly be 
disinterest in our report.

 >>ADAM PEAKE:   I looked at our agenda and there is nothing else going 
on.  So it is worrying.  And it is the same thing we faced when we held 
workshops in previous meetings.  I think, Vint, you kept the workshop 
going in San Juan.  There were so few people there, and we are trying 
to give information, trying to be transparent and we are not seeing a 
level of commitment back from community to -- which this is a very 
essential process.

 So that's one of the things that I hope that what you are doing will 
actually engender is people will realize how important this is.

 So if the community doesn't contribute, you are going to get the 
candidate -- this is the problems we are facing and they are not really 
contributing.

 About -- And I think this should probably be my last comment is about 
the administrative director and the role of that person.  And I think 
it's probably -- I think it's a good idea.  It's an interesting idea to 
try and look at that.

 You made a comment that you thought the chair and the associate chair 
probably had too much information on the process.

 Well, imagine how much influence on the process that administrative 
director is going to have if they are channeling or encouraging 
recruitment.

 That person is going to color the whole pool simply because of their 
network of people that they outreach to.

 So I think there's a risk in that position and one that you should be 
a little bit -- we should be careful of.

 Last couple of points.  Kieren, I guess, in particular -- actually, 
Kieren and some other people who went public with their SOIs encouraged 
the Nominating Committee to say if you wish to go public that you are 
submitting an SOI that it will not affect, adversely affect, your 
candidacy.  And that was in the 2000 and intra- -- I will start that 
again, 2007 statement of interest and procedures.

 So actually, going public about it won't affect negatively a 
candidacy.

 But I think we have to be concerned about the impossible impact of 
lobbying.

 If you know people are out there, you are going to have a Nominating 
Committee being lobbied:  Support this person.

 You are going to get all kinds of things that really the Nominating 
Committee isn't very well able to cope with.

 So this openness has to be, well, considered carefully, anyway.

 And thank you very much.  And thank you very much for the report.

 >>LYMAN CHAPIN:   Thank you, Adam.

 >>OLE JACOBSEN:   Ole Jacobsen.  I guess this microphone is a little 
bit too low for me.  So I will pull it up like this.  How's that?

 I am a member of the IETF NomCom, which means that I was selected by 
the magic algorithmic lottery that was mentioned before.  Notice that 
the lottery is used to select members of the NomCom and not for the 
board.  That's a clarification for Kieren if he is around and hears me.  
There has never been a suggestion that we select members by lottery, 
but the members of the NomCom are selected by a strange predictable 
algorithmic lottery.

 And I wanted to highlight a couple of similarities and differences 
between the two types of NomComs.

 Oh, I should also say I am on the 2008 ICANN NomCom which I guess gets 
constituted this Friday.

 One similarity is that we face the same amount of workload on the 
candidates that we ask to do this job, and it's very difficult to find 
people who can devote the time and effort it takes to serve in any of 
these positions in both communities.  And I think that's a challenge 
for both communities to try to find a solution to, whether we do that 
by splitting up the work or reorganizing the work in some way.  I'm not 
exactly sure.

 So that's a similarity.

 And the difference, I guess I just mentioned in terms of the 
mechanism.

 So with that, I'll sit down.

 >>LYMAN CHAPIN:   Thank you.

 Would anyone else like to make a comment at this point or ask a 
question.

 I'd like to encourage everyone to submit comments to the public 
comment e-mail address.

 One reason for doing that, in addition to making sure that you have an 
opportunity to phrase your comment exactly in the way in which you 
would like to to be incorporated into the process that is going to 
ultimately result in a set of recommendations from the Board Governance 
Committee on actions to take in response to this report and also the 
public comments, but the other reason is to ensure that it gets to the 
right ears, because our role as independent evaluators is essentially 
over with the submission of our report.

 And it will be -- it will be a function of the community led by, in 
this case, the Board Governance Committee to actually incorporate both 
our report and any public comments into a set of actions.

 So we will not be involved in that process.  And I wanted to be sure 
that everyone who has a comment to make will submit it to the public 
comment site as well.

 Sebastien.

 >>SEBASTIEN BACHOLLET:   Thank you.

 I am going to speak French.

 Can you hear me everybody, in English?

 I just wanted to know that the comments you are trying to obtain will 
be accepted in several languages or not?

 >>LYMAN CHAPIN: MERCI.

 >>CHRIS OWENS:   I'm not sure we can answer that question right now, 
but I believe that they can be submitted in -- I can't answer that 
question right now.

 >>LYMAN CHAPIN:   The process that ICANN manages for public comments, 
public comments have, in the past, in fact, been submitted in languages 
other than English, and they have been accepted, and they are certainly 
welcome as part of the process.

 There's ample precedent for that in other public comment periods, and 
I think certainly given the initiatives that ICANN has taken, 
particularly at this meeting with making it possible for people to 
participate using the language of their choice rather than the language 
that is insisted upon in most of the discussions that we have in 
Internet affairs, I think it is something that it will certainly find 
expression not just in the translation that's gone on in this meeting 
but also in the ability to accept comments, for example, in other 
languages and to deal with them.

 >>VINT CERF: Lyman, I think that's essentially correct although it 
would be wise for ICANN to state clearly which languages it's prepared 
to receive.

 >>LYMAN CHAPIN:   Yes.  And as far as I know, they have not done that.

 >>VINT CERF:   I understand.  That's why I think we should -- don't 
accidentally create an open process that we are unable to fulfill.

 >>LYMAN CHAPIN:   Right.

 >>VINT CERF:   But specifically with regard to French, I'm pretty sure 
that will not be a problem.

 >>LYMAN CHAPIN:   Right.

 Okay.  If there are no other comments then we can adjourn this 
session.

 I thank you all of you for attending and for your patience in staying 
through to the end.

 And appreciate your attention to the report and also your support for 
ICANN.

 Thank you very much.

 [ Applause ]