[At-Large] ICANN Board Nomination

Thomas Narten narten at us.ibm.com
Fri Sep 3 12:03:15 UTC 2010


"John R. Levine" <johnl at iecc.com> writes:

> > No, there is no such rule, but California has a minimum wage (which is a 
> > bit above US federal minimum wage), ...

> I wouldn't see that as a useful way to set an adequate level of 
> compensation for board members.  As it currently stands, to be on the 
> ICANN board, one either needs to have an employer who is willing to pay 
> for the time spent on board work, or else be independently wealthy enough 
> (or I suppose have a spouse with enough income) to subsidize oneself.

> If ICANN wants to expand the pool of board members to include people 
> outside those two categories, it either needs to drastically slash the 
> amount of time it asks of board members (not unreasonable, no other 
> non-profit I know asks a fraction of what ICANN does), or else pay them 
> enough to make up for the lost income.

This is the crux of discussion the board has had many times.

And most would agree reducing the workload of the board is highly
desirable. The difficulty is, we haven't figured out how to do
that (yet).

The reality though is that ICANN is simply not like "other boards" or
"other non-profits", so many of the superficial comparisons don't
really apply.

If you look at what comes to the board for action, there is lot of
policy stuff they have to oversee (and that the community *demands*
they oversee). This doesn't happen with most other boards (who deal
primarily with finacial stuff).

And if the board pushes more decision making back to staff, it is not
uncommon for the community to gripe about that and demand that the
board have the last say.

My overall point is that yes, it would be nice if the board could
reduce the amount of work it does and the mount of time needed to be a
board member, and most board members would probably agree. But we
haven't yet figured out how to implement that in practice, given all
that ICANN is doing these days. It's not that people don't want to get
there, its that it is pretty hard in practice to do so.

Thomas



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