[At-Large] ICANN Board Nomination

Karl Auerbach karl at cavebear.com
Fri Aug 27 09:17:50 UTC 2010


On 08/26/2010 09:43 PM, John R. Levine wrote:

> 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

The best way to do that would be for ICANN to reconsider its role as 
regulatory body over economic and social matters and pick up its 
self-described role as a mere coordinator of matters reasonably relevant 
to technical stability of DNS name resolution.

When I was on the board (2003 time frame) a couple of us chatted about 
how much it cost to be on the board.  The rough number was that we were 
losing roughly $300,000 per year in terms of lost direct income and lost 
opportunity income.  The ratio of direct/opportunity loss varied 
significantly by individual.

The computed cost was roughly proportional to the degree of engagement - 
passive members who were mainly "goers" (i.e. did little more than 
attend meetings) had lower costs.  More active members ("doers") had 
significantly higher costs.

It's been my observation that ICANN needs more "doer" directors than 
"goer" directors.

One method of compensating directors would not be to pay them directly 
but, rather, for ICANN to provide a fund for each director that could be 
drawn upon to cover certain well defined (and limited) costs - such as 
clerical support or some coverage of independent legal or accounting advice.

	--karl--





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