[council] FW: Candidate sought for GNSO representatives to ICANN Geographic Regions WG.

[Glen de Saint Géry]

Forwarded on behalf of Eric Brunner-Williams

I am in broad agreement with the principles expressed by the Council
last August, that diversity of participation is a net good, and if
selected to the ICANN Geographic Regions WG I will advocate for each of
the 12 positions. However, I would like to take this opportunity to
convey to the Council my thoughts on the 4th position, which I have
previously shared with the Registrar Constituency.

Our goal in December of 1997 in creating a regional requirement in the
IAHC was to ensure equitable international participation. The principle
of equitable international participation is subsumed in the ICANN goals
of diversity, opportunity, and the pragmatic limits of simplicity.
Equity is not best found by selecting "people like us". We are early
adopters, and quite privileged in our accumulation of network resources,
in particular, our individual and collective comprehension of, and
control over, internet identifiers and the uses to which these are
enjoyed or exploited. We must look for "people unlike us" if we are to
best implement our policy of equity, or its cognates, diversity,
opportunity and simplicity.

The "unlikeness" we need to find is not unlike citizenships, as we could
satisfy that requirement within area code 408 (San Jose and environs),
and never leave the metaphoric "machine room at cisco", or the median
income for OECD countries. We need to find "unlikeness" that is
substantive, not formal, and residency is a better indicator of a
candidate's awareness of local network cost, availability, and "hot
spots", than standing to vote.

I hope that the Council will substitute "residency" for "citizenship",
or sufficiently nuance "citizenship" to replace a formal measure with a
substantive measure of diversity. I would be very surprised if we could
not meet our diversity goal for "a person from X", and not find a person
who is a citizen of some state within X, but I can think of examples
where I've no idea of the citizenship of a person from X who's input to
ICANN at any level easily meets the requirement for equitable
international participation.

Thank you for your collective attention,
Eric Brunner-Williams
CTO, CORE

Glen de Saint Géry
GNSO Secretariat
gnso.secretariat at gnso.icann.org
http://gnso.icann.org