Subject: Letter to the ICANN Board on CEO/President Selection Process
From: "Avri Doria" <[email-masked]>
To: <[email-masked]>, "Peter Dengate Thrush" <[email-masked]>
Cc: "Kieren McCarthy" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 5 Jun 2009 07:05:31 +1000

To the Members of the Board and Interested Commuity Participants

I am writing this note to express a concern with the current process
for selecting a new CEO/President.    I am writing this note as an
ICANN participant in my personal capacity:  in no way should this note
be attributed to the SO I serve in.  I am writing this as a concerned
volunteer who has invested much of her life for the past 5 years
working for an organization that I believe is an important guiding
light in the world of Internet governance for its open, bottom up and
transparent multistakeholder processes.  My primary concern, which I
will explain below, concerns the opacity of this process and a risk
incurred by that opacity.

Several people have already commented, both in public and private, on
some of the conditions that are allegedly being applied by either the
Board's Search Committee or by the Executive search firm hired for
this process.  The comments I have head include, inter alia,

- The search firm is only to consider executives who have experience
in the running of corporations with a profit and loss of over 100 MUSD.

- The search firm is not to submit any applications from ICANN
participants, either staff or volunteer.

- Other Board members have limited knowledge of what is occurring in
the search committee or of what decisions they may have made about
search constraints.

- When someone questions the activities of the search committee they
are told that all of the complaints are merely the ranting of
disgruntled applicants.

Except for the last claim of which I have personal knowledge, I have
to admit that all of my knowledge on these is hearsay, I am not now
nor have I ever been an applicant or considered being an applicant.  I
have, however, spoken confidentially to applicants whose paper was
rejected and have spoken confidentially to some who decided not to
apply because they were informed of the situation in advance.   I have
also spoken to a variety of community members including some Board
members. I have not seen a great deal of physical evidence for any of
these points, then again it is not my role to investigate the comments.

The lack of open information is what worries me most and is what
breeds rumor and discontent.  While I would personally disagree with
some of the alleged constraints, if they were publicly announced
decisions made by the Board or its search committee, I would probably
eventually accept them because doing the search is the job of the
search committee and it is their responsibility to determine the
conditions of that search after an analysis of public comment on the
process to be used.

By keeping the ICANN community in the dark we have avoided one of
ICANN's major strengths, its commitment to transparency and openness.
As a community when we hear the alleged claims, we have no way of
knowing the truth of the situation.  This process opacity leaves the
community in a state of ignorance that will make it hard to accept any
selection as being fair and open.  Assuming the worse, this could
leave a new CEO/President in the position of starting the job under a
cloud of suspicion.  A cloud that might only be dissipated by an
external review of the process to find if the constraints listed above
were actually the case, and if so, whether they were imposed by the
Board's Search Committee or by the Executive Search firm itself.  The
fact of such an external investigation and its results would not be
helpful to ICANN, especially in this time of JPA review, or to the
efficiency of the new CEO/President.

I strongly encourage the Board to bring this process into the light
and to clarify the conditions under which applications were accepted,
solicited, reviewed and sent to the Board for consideration. I further
encourage the Board to do this before making any decision on a short
list and encourage them to solicit community comment on the process
being followed.

Thank You

Avri Doria
Adjunct Professor
Luleå University of Technology

Note: This is being sent to [email-masked] for forwarding to the
ICANN Board, to Chair of the Board, selected board members, the
director of public participation and others.  As I could not find an
open place for comments on general ongoing Board activities, I am
copying the people should feel free to treat this as if it had been
openly contributed to such a public comment area.

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