[wg-d] NC Elections. Was: ga] DNSO General Assembly - Revised Agenda

["Bret A. Fausett" <baf@fausett.com>]

Elisabeth PORTENEUVE wrote:
>Bret, some legal advice is necessary for that.
>ICANN Bylaws (ARTICLE VI-B, Section 2) states:
>      (e) The NC shall forward to the Board, from among those 
>          persons nominated by the GA, its selection(s) for the 
>          Director(s) to fill any open Board position(s) reserved 
>          for the DNSO.... etc
>I learned that we need to have legal-legal-legal explanations
>to "nomination by GA".
>My non-lawyer reading is: anybody from GA can nominate anybody,
>and no supporters needed. I may not like it, but the text is here.

My reading is that the GA is empowered to nominate Board members, and I 
read into the quoted section "by whatever nomination mechanism it 
selects." I reached this conclusion because the language says "nominated 
by the GA," and not "nominated by a member of the GA." It's a nomination 
by the body, not its parts. (I try not to read too much "intent" into the 
DNSO bylaws though; they were drafted by ICANN staff to do justice to a 
consensus position, and they did not always capture that consensus 
perfectly.)

In my post to ga, I was simply recommending one possible nomination 
procedure. For those who didn't see it, I recommended a nomination, 
second, and then some sort of nominal support (the support of say, 5-10 
GA members).

Great authority is given to the NC to elect the ICANN Board members. 
(Personally, I would have reversed it -- nomination by NC, election by GA 
-- but we're past that.) In order to give some balance to the process 
though, the GA nomination process should be meaningful. In my opinion, 
it's not meaningful if members of the NC, acting as GA members (they 
belong, too, after all), can nominate in the GA and then elect in the NC. 
This routes around the GA in a way that, I believe, would ultimately 
undermine the GA's confidence in the process.

That's one of the reasons I proposed the "minimal support" requirement. 
It would also serve the purpose of narrowing down the number of potential 
nominees to a point where the NC could more efficiently act on the 
nominations. 

Another idea might be

But all of this assumes that the GA has a mechanism for deciding what the 
nomination mechanism will be. Perhaps that is something we could take up 
here.

     - Bret