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CEO Search Committee

On 16 August 2011, Rod Beckstrom announced that he will continue to fulfill his term as ICANN's President and CEO, which will be completed on 1 July 2012. The ICANN Board discussed CEO Succession planning at the Board meeting on 17 September 2011, where they directed Board Governance Committee to recommend a slate of Board members to comprise a CEO Search Process Management Work Committee. At the meeting on 11 October 2011, the BGC proposed a slate of members, which the board approved: http://www.icann.org/en/groups/board/documents/resolutions-11oct11-en.htm#2

The members of the committee are: George Sadowsky (chair), Steve Crocker, Bertrand de La Chapelle, Erika Mann, Chris Disspain, Cherine Chalaby, Ray Plzak and R. Ramaraj.

At the ICANN Meeting in Dakar, the ICANN Board held an open consultation on the process and criteria being used to select the next CEO for ICANN In particular the Board is seeks the community's views on the criteria, and prioritization of that criteria, for the CEO to implement ICANN's strategy for 1 July 2012 and beyond. The slides used by George Sadowsky for this session are posted here (http://dakar42.icann.org/meetings/dakar2011/presentation-ceo-search-committee-24oct11-en.pdf [PDF, 73 KB]) - the transcript of the session is found at: http://dakar42.icann.org/node/26851

As stated in the announcement of 28 October 2011, the CEO Search Committee has set up the following email address – ceosearch2012@icann.org to receive inputs on the characteristics that the new CEO should have. Given the limited time for the entire search and hiring process, the committee set a deadline for comments of 15 November 2011. At that time, all input received will be used to create a job and requirements description that will be used for the actual search. This input, requested by the committee, will be most helpful if the ideas expressed are succinct, positive, and oriented to describing what is desired.

Community members are also encouraged to identify this opportunity to others who they believe would be excellent candidates for the position. The committee hopes to provide specific instructions for interested candidates in early December.

CEO Search Committee Progress & CEO Candidate Profile

An update on the progress of the search for ICANN's next CEO has been posted on the announcement page. The CEO Candidate Profile is available here [PDF, 576 KB].

Further Progress & Job Description

A note on Further Progress by the CEO Search Committee has been posted on the announcement page. The job description for the President & CEO is available here [PDF, 145 KB]. All suggestions, recommendations, and expressions of interest should be sent directly to: CEO-icann@odgersberndtson.be

To ensure full consideration, candidates for the CEO position should submit their application to CEO-icann@odgersberndtson.be by February 17, 2012. Thank you.

CEO Search Update – 21 February 2012

The CEO Search Committee has been actively working to identify top candidates for ICANN's CEO/President position, to commence 1 July 2012.

The window for candidate applications closed on Friday, 17 February. Our partner in the search process, Odgers Berndtson, has collected well over 100 candidates for the position. Candidates have come from community referrals, our ad in the Economist, and the firm's outreach efforts. Odgers Berndtson interviewed and submitted 27 promising candidates to the committee, and the committee has chosen and interviewed 16 of them by teleconference.

The committee is now selecting a subset of this group for a second round of interviews, face to face. On the basis of this second round, it expects to choose yet another subset for presentation to the ICANN Board for intensive interviewing, followed by a decision to be made by the Board. The target for completion is mid-April.

On 22 June 2012, Fadi Chehadé was announced as ICANN's next President & CEO. http://www.icann.org/en/news/press/releases/release-22jun12-en. The Board formally thanked the CEO Search Committee for the substantial time and effort put into selection of the next President & CEO. http://www.icann.org/en/groups/board/documents/resolutions-23jun12-en.htm#1.8

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."