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ICANN's Nominating Committee | Public Technical Identifiers (PTI) Open Board Positions 2017

ICANN's Nominating Committee (NomCom) selects candidates to fill various leadership positions within ICANN and PTI that will make a valuable public service contribution towards the continued function and evolution of an essential global resource, the Internet. Those candidates will work with accomplished colleagues from around the globe, address the Internet's intriguing technical coordination issues and related policy development matters within diverse functional, cultural and geographic dimensions, and gain valuable insights and experience from working across boundaries of knowledge, responsibility and perspective.

About PTI

PTI was formed in 2016 and is a not-for-profit public benefit corporation that operates exclusively to carry out the purposes of ICANN by performing the IANA functions on behalf of ICANN. It shall operate to the maximum extent feasible in an open and transparent manner and consistent with procedures designed to ensure fairness. PTI shall treat the IANA functions with equal priority and make decisions by applying documented policies consistently, neutrally, objectively, and fairly, without singling out any particular customer for discriminatory treatment. It shall respect the diversity of customers of the IANA functions and shall provide service to its customers in conformance with technical norms and in support of the global security, stability and resilience of the Domain Name Systems (DNS). (See https://pti.icann.org/bylaws#article3) PTI performs the IANA functions pursuant to a series of contracts with ICANN.

PTI Director Positions, Terms and Criteria

The NomCom welcomes and encourages Applications from all members of the global Internet community. Although candidates should be able to both work and communicate well in English, there is no requirement that English be the candidate's first language.

Candidates for PTI Board positions should be women and men with a high level of qualifications and experience with an international outlook including some familiarity with the Internet.

Positions

The NomCom shall nominate two persons not employed by either ICANN or PTI as Directors to the PTI Board pursuant to and in accordance with Article 8, Section 8.1 of the ICANN Bylaws and must not be "interested persons". An "interested person" is:

  • any person compensated by ICANN or PTI for services rendered to ICANN or PTI within the previous 12 months (other than any reasonable compensation paid to a Director as a Director), whether as a full- or part-time employee, independent contractor, or otherwise or
  • any brother, sister, ancestor, descendant, spouse, brother-in-law, sister-in-law, son-in-law, daughter-in-law, mother-in-law or father-in-law of such person.

The two persons nominated by the NomCom will serve alongside three PTI Board members selected by ICANN.

Terms

Those persons selected by the NomCom will fill Seat 1 and Seat 2 on the PTI Board for the following terms per the PTI Bylaws in Article 5, Section 5.5.1.1 and 5.5.1.2.

  • One NomCom PTI Director shall sit in Seat 1 – two year term. The initial term for this Director shall begin upon the election of Directors at the ICANN annual meeting in 2017 and end at the conclusion of the ICANN annual meeting in 2019 and every third year thereafter.
  • One NomCom PTI Director shall sit in Seat 2 – three year term. The initial term for this Director shall begin upon the election of Directors at the ICANN annual meeting in 2017 and end at the conclusion of the ICANN annual meeting in 2020 and every third year thereafter.

Criteria

The NomCom will use the criteria for selection of the two PTI Directors contained in Article 5, Section 5.2.3 of the PTI Bylaws. These criteria are:

  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 PTI's purposes and the potential impact of the PTI's decisions on the global Internet community, and committed to the success of PTI;
  3. Persons who, collectively, have executive management, operational, technical, financial and corporate governance experience;
  4. Persons who, in the aggregate, have personal familiarity with the operation of generic top-level domain name registries and registrars; with country code top-level domain name registries; with IP address registries; with Internet technical standards and protocols; with policy-development procedures; and
  5. Persons who are able to work and communicate in written and spoken English.

Additional Qualifications

The NomCom will also use the following qualifications for the selection of PTI Directors.

  • No official of a national government or a multinational entity established by treaty or other agreement between national governments may serve as a Director. The term "official" means a person who (a) holds an elective governmental office or (b) is employed by such government or multinational entity and whose primary function with such government or entity is to develop or influence governmental or public policies.
  • No person who serves in any capacity (including as a liaison) on any Supporting Organization Council (as used in the ICANN Bylaws) or Advisory Committee (as used in the ICANN Bylaws) shall simultaneously serve as a Director of the Corporation.
  • No person who serves on the Nominating Committee in any capacity shall be eligible for nomination by any means to any position on the Board.
  • No person who serves on the EC Administration (as used in the ICANN Bylaws) while serving in that capacity shall be considered for nomination or election to the Board, nor serve simultaneously on the EC Administration and as a Director.
  • The Nominating Committee Directors must not be, and for at least the previous three years, must not have been, (a) an employee of ICANN or the Corporation, (b) a director of ICANN, or (c) an external consultant or advisor retained by ICANN (either directly in his or her individual capacity or indirectly as an employee of an organization retained by ICANN).
  • In carrying out its responsibility to nominate the Nominating Committee Directors for election by the Member, the Nominating Committee shall seek to ensure that the Board is composed of Directors who, in the aggregate, display diversity in geography, culture, skills, experience and perspective, by applying the criteria set forth in the PTI Bylaws Article 5, Section 5.2 and Section 5.3.

Pursuant to the current Bylaws, PTI Directors will not be compensated for services rendered to PTI as Directors, except that Directors shall be reimbursed for reasonable expenses (including travel) incurred solely in connection with their work on the Board. (See Article 5, Section 5.16).

In filling these positions, the NomCom will be seeking to provide PTI with members of the Board who reflect the global diversity of the Internet community and the wide range of technical, commercial and public interest, activities that are impacted by the Domain Name System.

Time Commitments

The basic responsibilities of a PTI Director requires a commitment of time which when averaged out over the year, could reach 10-15 hours each month. The time spent in these basic responsibilities is preparing for and participating in telephonic Board meetings throughout the year. There is a regular flow of information requiring attention on a fairly consistent basis. Directors may also spend additional time in connection with their work on Board Committees, of which there is a currently one (Audit), a commitment that could vary in relation to their role as Chair or Member of the Committee. Based on current workflow, the 10-15 hour/month commitment is inclusive of Committee participation.

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."