Hello, By now I hope you'll all be aware of the fact that the At-Large Community is, for the first time ever, selecting a Director for the ICANN Board. The election for this is happening very soon. Under the current voting scheme, there are four voters from each region -- the ALAC members and the RALO Chair. In NARALO, that means the eligible voters would be Alan, Beau, Gareth and myself. However, since Alan is a candidate, he cannot vote. Because there are only 20 voters, each vote is important, so I have asked the Nominating Committee to substitute NARALO Secretariat Darlene Thompson as a replacement voter for our region. Apparently the NomComm is debating this issue and I have been invited to participate; I will let you know how this progresses. As agreed in the last NARALO meeting, I made a commitment to hear the views of NARALO members regarding the three candidates. There has been a community conference call held with the candidates; a recording of that meeting can be found at http://audio.icann.org/atlarge/Community-Call-Director-13-11-2010-EN.mp3 In addition to that (two-hour) call, many of the regions submitted questions of the candidates, some weeks back I solicited questions from NARALO members which were presented to all candidates on your behalf. A full list of initial statements from the candidates, as well as their written answers to the questions from NARALO and other regions, can be found here: https://community.icann.org/display/DirCan/At-Large+Director+Candidate-Commu... I invite all NARALO participants -- whether ALSs representatives, non-representative ALS members, or unaffiliated individual NARALO members, to contact me regarding their own preferences. While you are welcome to make your interest publicly known, I will treat all correspondence of this kind as confidential. I can be reached by email or Skype; if you prefer some other method of communication let me know. - Evan