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@gnso.icann.org http://gnso.icann.org