*** Disclosure: The following is the output resulting from transcribing an audio file into a word/text document. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages and grammatical corrections. It is posted as an aid to the original audio file, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.*** SO/AC Chair Reports Friday, 28 October 2011 ICANN Meeting - Dakar >>STEVE CROCKER: I think we're ready to begin, and I can report that we have just completed an exercise in global organization. All of the SO and AC chairs have figured out how to sit in alphabetical order here. So without further ado, let me turn things over to Olivier for a report from the ALAC and then we'll proceed briskly. >>OLIVIER CREPIN-LEBLOND: Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and here is our report. And, yes, we did think today that we would put a little bit of shape to our presentations, if only for the picture. Okay. I don't have the dongle. Is that the one? >>STEVE CROCKER: Oh, this is it. Sorry. >>OLIVIER CREPIN-LEBLOND: Ah. Fantastic. All right. So this is the report of the At-Large Advisory Committee, and so I'll start -- well, I'm just going to go through all of our activities that we've had here in Dakar and between the last meeting and the one in Dakar. So during the 42nd ICANN meeting, the at-large community was represented by a total of 59 members from 5 at-large regions, and these representatives included members of the At-Large Advisory Committee, officers of the five regional at-large organizations, as well as representatives of at-large structures, at-large liaisons, at- large delegates to the nominating committee, at-large representatives on the WHOIS and SSR of the DNS review teams, and representatives of the at-large community. We conducted quite a few meetings, and those of note, of particular note, are those of the at-large meeting with the GAC, at-large meeting with the ICANN board -- and we had a lunch, too, with the ICANN board -- an ALAC meeting with the ICANN compliance staff which was very productive, a NARALO monthly meeting, a LACRALO monthly meeting, and an APRALO monthly meeting, as well, that took place, an at-large regional secretariat's meeting which was also particularly productive, and a meeting of the future challenges working group. For the first time, the ALAC and at-large regional representatives in Dakar welcomed 17 representatives from African ALSs taking part in the AFRALO Dakar events. The AFRALO Dakar events meeting, made possible in part through the agreement of several RALOs to pool their financial year '12 meeting support for General Assemblies, has been two years in the planning. It is hoped that the AFRALO Dakar events will be a model for future RALO activities. One of the highlights of the AFRALO Dakar events was an AFRALO showcase which was very well attended, and that included a keynote address by Moustapha Guirassy, Minister of Telecommunication and Information and Communication Technologies, a spokesperson for the Government of Senegal. The AFRALO showcase gave a taste of the vibrant and diverse membership of AFRALO as well as the sights and the sounds of Africa. And we also had a series of capacity-building sessions whose main objective was to build capacity and raise awareness of ICANN policies, organization, and activities to increase the effectiveness of the participation of the African end user representatives in ICANN's policy development process. Those meetings took place at 7:00 every morning and they were fully attended by all 17 of our ALSs, without fail. It was quite impressive, because at 7:00 p.m., they were still in the room, so it's 12- to 14-hour days and I think you might have seen the looks on some of our faces what 12- to 14-hour days do. And I gather a lot of other people did that as well, but it's of particular importance that everyone was there. So the AFRALO General Assembly that took place, as well, was very helpful. It's the first one that happened since March 2009, and it provided an opportunity for AFRALO to discuss issues of fundamental importance to their RALOs, and it's important that they do that face- to-face. There was also an AFRALO AfrICANN meeting, as per previous meetings that took place, and the meeting consisted of a gathering of the African ICANN community to discuss and endorse a statement on the issue of cybercrime in Africa. Following the incorporation of additional comments, the statement of the African community on cybercrime will be distributed to African national governments, CERTs, and also media. At-large played a key role in the organization and running of three cross-constituency meetings: The forum on DNS abuse; the joint DNS/security and stability analysis working group, the DSSA; and the developing regions and new gTLD program, the joint applicant support, which, of course, was one of the big subjects here in Dakar. The at-large members participated in the 42nd -- in the current meeting. They actively took part in non-at-large meetings as well. And there are reports -- and I'm prompted to move the -- that's the one -- the -- so, yes, they participated in many, many other meetings outside of the -- you know, the at-large room itself, and they actually filed reports which can be found online, so I point the board to be able to look through those. Just a few highlights of what went on, if I can move to the next -- I think I've jumped a slide here. >>STEVE CROCKER: There you go. You're fine. >>OLIVIER CREPIN-LEBLOND: That's the one. So among the many policy and process-related issues discussed during our meetings, we created four new task forces and working groups. One was an ad hoc working group to develop an ICANN -- an at-large ICANN academy, and we'll be hearing more about this in the future. The next one is the ad hoc rules of procedure working group. They are due for a review, and that working group will be chaired by Cheryl Langdon-Orr. Next one is the working group to establish a set of metrics for members of the ALAC, and this working group will establish metrics to be designed and evaluate performance of ALAC members, and that goes in line with the metrics that are being introduced at ICANN as well. And the at-large improvement project task force will actually be speaking a little bit about the at-large improvements later on, and that task force will take the work that was performed by the at-large improvements working teams, which Ray very kindly thanked a bit earlier for their report, and will take this over to the next level. Further progress was made in transforming ALAC from being reactive to being forward-looking, and that follows on the exchange of letters that we've had with you, Chair. And basically the idea is for the at-large to identify and analyze developments which will have potential to impact the at-large community of users, privacy concerns, financial consequences, legal implications, et cetera, and also examining the process by which the ACs and SOs contribute to the overall task of ICANN, whether proactive or reactive. So the future challenges working group has just been set up for this purpose and started its work and has held its first meeting here. We've had a lot of changes in people leaving, people arriving. We had eight members that left. I won't go through the full list of them. They are in the report. I think we may be running out of time if I go through the whole list. >>STEVE CROCKER: Indeed so. >>OLIVIER CREPIN-LEBLOND: And then we've had seven new representatives join us, and they are also provided in the report. Just a few more -- just a few more minutes to just tell you about the at-large activities between the 41st and 42nd ICANN meeting. There were a total of eight policy statements that were -- that were issued, and one resolution was passed. And the list of those is actually also given in our report. I move to the next -- Okay. And finally, the at-large improvements project status and next steps. So Ray Plzak has spoken just a little bit earlier about those. 13 recommendations were made by external consultants more than a year ago. Four teams of at-large members, including regional members -- so very few ALAC people, but actually members from the ALSs -- worked to refine those and made a very large number of recommendations from there. Now we are moving into implementation. That's the next stage. And so those teams have finished their job. A new team will be formed to take this further to the next level and to completion, of course. So I'll shift through those because I can see people falling asleep and we'll finish, I think, with just the fact that the bylaw amendments that we -- that came from that group were passed -- were approved last time, during our last meeting, and now we're just closing off all of the parts which still need to be finished. Now, some of these amendments, some of these -- this work doesn't need to be done anymore because at-large has actually -- has continued to evolve by itself without resorting to having to look at the amendments and the improvements report. So the report is found online and you can download it and spend a few hours studying it or you can just spend a few minutes to browse through it. Just a note of thanks, to finish off. We'd like to express our most, you know, sincere thanks, appreciation, recognition for the at-large staff who has been working extremely hard with us: Heidi Ullrich, Seth Greene, Matt Ashtiani, Gisella Gruber, and Marilyn Vernon. They've provided 24/7 support, and not just by relaying each one but I think that each one of them was providing 24/7 support, so I'm really sorry for calling you at 3:00, 4:00, 5:00, 6:00 in the morning or whatever, but -- [ Applause ] >>OLIVIER CREPIN-LEBLOND: And that -- oh, well, okay, I'll take you up on that. [ Laughter ] >>OLIVIER CREPIN-LEBLOND: And that's it. That concludes the report from at-large, and sorry for the amount of time it's taken but I see a few unfamiliar faces. Well, just a few. Most of the others are familiar. Thank you. >>STEVE CROCKER: Thank you very much, Olivier. [ Applause ] >>STEVE CROCKER: I think everybody is quite impressed with the enormous progress that ALAC has made, and most particularly, as you noted, the transition from reactive to forward-looking I think is just one of the most helpful and really powerful changes that we've seen recently. I also note that -- as you did, that there's now a voting member from ALAC on the ICANN board. Sebastien Bachollet is now completing his first year as a voting member on the board, and it's been a pleasure to have him. Next is a report -- yeah? >>OLIVIER CREPIN-LEBLOND: Thank you very much, and actually, as he steps into the room, the two co-chairs of the future challenges working group, which will be looking at being more proactive are actually Evan Leibovitch and Jean-Jacques Subrenat who, of course, is a household name, so... [ Applause ] >>STEVE CROCKER: Thank you. I neglected to ask if there were questions. All right. Thank you. So we'll move on to the address supporting organization and the numbers resource organization is what's here. John Curran. >>JOHN CURRAN: Thank you. Thank you very much. I'm John Curran. I'm the president and CEO of ARIN. I also serve as the secretary for the Number Resource Organization. You'll hear us say "Number Resource Organization" and "ASO," and we use the terms somewhat interchangeably. Now, at the top level, they are interchangeable. The Number Resource Organization fulfills the role, the responsibilities, and the functions of the ASO within the ICANN framework. There is a little detail that one of them has a number council and the other has an address council, which are actually the same thing, so sometimes when we get more specific, it gets confusing, but for all practical purposes, the NRO serves as the ASO. The NRO is the vehicle for RIR research, RIR cooperation, and representation. We were formed for the purposes of making sure that we protect the Internet number resource pool, as a way of protecting the policy process, and as a focal point for input into the RIR system as a whole. The current officeholders -- they rotate every year -- is Raul Echeberria, who cannot be here today. He's chairman this year, and he would normally be giving this presentation. I am secretary this year, and Paul Wilson, the executive director of APNIC, is the treasurer this year. We have coordination groups underneath which handle responsibilities of coordinating between the RIRs. We want to make sure that we have services that are compatible, that we don't have wildly disjointed policies with respect to one another, so those are handled through engineering coordination group, public affairs coordination, registration services, communications coordination. We have -- with respect to policy coordination, we have a body that's very important and actually is the one that does the heavy lifting. It is you're ASO address council and it's made up of representatives from all of the regions, three representatives from every region. Two of them are elected in general, one is appointed by the RIR organizationally, as opposed to by the membership at large, and they have a couple of duties. One of them is to oversee the global number policy resource work. Now, in ICANN, you folks are used to having a fairly large schedule with a lot of meetings on it. In the RIRs, we actually do our work outside of ICANN. We do it in regional meetings that take place all over the globe, and it's the ASO AC's job to know what's going on, and take policies that need to be globally coordinated or policies that actually are global and affect how the IANA does its job and make sure that those policies have the right level of communications between the regions. We also have -- that body is responsible for making the appointment of two directors to the ICANN board, as that's a function that the ASO serves, and we use that body to liaison with all the other ACs and supporting organizations that are within ICANN. And of course to the extent that we're asked for advice on other matters, we use that body often to provide that advice. Here are the members of the ASO address council this year. I'll just point out the ones with an asterisk by their name actually have been here this week, and we try to make sure that we have these folks here to interface with you. There's not a huge level of coordination that has to take place between the number policy and the name policy, but there's enough that we want to make sure we're available to you, that you know you can find these people. The NRO has expenses that we use in this coordination. Those expenses are allocated among the five RIRs according to the number resources, the addresses that are in each region, that are registered within each region. So the allocation tends to be disproportionate to those larger RIRs, as opposed to the more developing areas. The NRO contribution to ICANN, we've been a faithful supporter of ICANN. We give a contribution every year. We're also actively involved in ICANN, so at every ICANN meeting we give a number of presentations, and the presentations vary but one that happens every year is the ASO -- or every meeting has been the ASO AC update to the community. And I'm not going to cover the policies that are going on in the number resource area. Those policies are covered in this session. It occurs in almost every meeting. You can attend and hear the update -- it's also available online, if you want to read it -- and hear what policies are going on, which ones are being coordinated, what issues we've found, and so I don't mean to -- I don't want to repeat all that work in my update at this meeting. In terms of other reports, we sometimes advise the GAC. We sometimes present to the ICANN board. It all depends on what we're asked for. This week, we happened to have the ASO AC workshop on IPv6 addressing activities, which is a tutorial format. We had an ASO AC/NRO/EC meeting with the ICANN board. And we gave update presentations in this particular meeting to the SSAC, the GNSO, and the ccNSO. Internet Governance Forum. The RIRs have been very active since the beginning. We've been funding that since the beginning. We have representation on some of the bodies that help set the agenda there. And we were very active in the IGF in Nairobi, making sure that people understood the role of the RIRs in terms of managing critical resources. We also made sure that people knew we're very committed to that organization. With respect to other international cooperation, we work with the ITU on occasion. A number of us are ITU members in usually ITU-D, for the developing area, and the fact is that we work with them to the extent that they work on number resource policy issues. They've been active in the past with an IPv6 working group, though right now there's not a lot of activity there. We work with the OECD, when requested, as well, in terms of international cooperation. The other activities we're doing this year, the NRO, serving as the ASO, operationally takes care of a number of things like we're all rolling out resource certification. Sort of your equivalent to DNSSEC in the number resource field is what we call resource certification or RPKI. It's a lot of work to coordinate that. We often meet with our counterparts, not just within this body but also between ICANN and ISOC and the IETF. We had a very successful workshop that we met with all of these organizations in Miami. That was actually in the 3rd of February at the same time that we announced that the central free pool of IPv4 addresses had effectively run out. We had a very successful meeting where we just made sure we were all working from the same page. And we potentially will be having another meeting in the future. Agreements from the last one that we had at our retreat include a forming of the NRO public affairs coordination group, review and discussion of our RPKI plans. Mostly these are future plans for technical coordination. Our communities have not yet all said, "We want resource certification." There are implications, just like DNSSEC, on how we manage the number system when we roll out RPKI. Ongoing ASO review initiative, working according to the board directive to review all the organizations. We have an independent assessment going on of the functioning of the ASO. And inter-regional coordination on legacy space. Records that have been assigned for decades and need to be cleaned up and accurate. Correspondence. Everything we do generates correspondence. All of our correspondence is on the ASO Web site or NRO -- sorry, NRO Web site. You can go look there. I won't go through all of these, but to the extent that we're busy communicating, you can go see that, if you have any interest in it. This actually concludes my report of activities. I'll take any questions. Ray. >>STEVE CROCKER: Good morning. Ray? >>RAY PLZAK: Not really a question, John, but a note. >>STEVE CROCKER: Excuse me. For the record -- >>RAY PLZAK: Ray Plzak, member, ICANN board. As I said, just a comment, a matter of note that this week -- and I personally want to thank Louie Lee for his efforts here -- is that as an outgrowth of the report that was given in Singapore, there's been an increased involvement or coordination, if you will, between the address council, representing the ASO, and a couple of the other organizations, notably the GNSO and the ccNSO and the SSAC. This is part of the awareness process of making sure that everyone is aware of what is actually going on. John mentioned the number of policies that were being discussed regionally and so forth. I will encourage the ALAC to get involved in that because you have persons all over the world, and I know that some of them do participate in regional registry meeting policy discussions. If the ALAC wishes to influence policy development in that area, that's where it's done, and we would be glad to see that happen, but when the -- when we all come to town to have the meeting here, it's also good for you guys to get together. So thank you very much, Louie. >>JOHN CURRAN: Thank you, Ray. And I see Louie in the back. Louie, excellent effort. [ Applause ] >>JOHN CURRAN: Louie is the chair of our ASO AC and took the burden on of handling these presentations. Thank you. >>STEVE CROCKER: Thank you very much. Next presentation is from recent Lee Cowley, on behalf of the ccNSO. >>LESLEY COWLEY: Thank you, Steve. Good morning, everyone. I have a title slide but I -- it doesn't seem to be going, so... I'm Lesley Cowley. I'm the CEO of Nominet, and I'm here to present the ccNSO meeting report as chair of the ccNSO. Like all of the community, we've had a large number of meetings this week. I'm not going to cover all of them, you'll be pleased to know, but I am going to draw out some pointers on finances, IDN ccTLD strings, the ccNSO board member, ccNSO membership, and the framework of interpretation working group. So on ICANN finances, during the meeting the community who were present in Dakar have held extensive discussions relating to the ICANN expenses on ccTLDs and the financial contributions that we might make. The discussions were held with the ICANN board at the ccNSO meeting and also as part of our finance working group meetings. Firstly, we'd like to welcome Xavier Calvez as ICANN's CFO, and we're very encouraged by the conversations that have taken place with him so far. We look forward to working with Xavier and his team. Secondly, the community present had an initial discussion on possible models to structure the financial contribution of country codes to ICANN. At the same time, we wish to explore and understand, at the appropriate level of detail, ccTLD-related costs. And in order to move forward meaningfully, the two processes are running in parallel. The community is aware and appreciates that with a new CFO only recently joining ICANN and the new finance system being implemented, it will take some time to provide the relevant information. And finally, on finance, the ccNSO expressed its intention and willingness to continue the constructive and informed dialogue on this topic with the ICANN board of directors. It's noted and appreciated that the board itself needs more information on ICANN's expenditure in due course. Next, on confusing similarity of IDN ccTLD strings with two-letter ASCII ccTLDs -- that's a long title -- at its meeting in San Francisco, the council adopted a resolution to request a subgroup of the IDN ccTLD ccPDP Working Group 1 to develop, as soon as possible, guidelines within the framework of the existing rules for the fast track to improve the predictability of the evaluation process relating to string confusion as defined in the IDNC working group final report and the implementation plan as adopted by the ICANN board in November 2009. One of the items identified by the sub-working group was that in some cases the requested IDN ccTLD string, which is a meaningful representation of the name of the territory, is only confusingly similar with the two-letter A to zed -- or A to Z, as some of you say -- country codes that is associated with the same territory. The proposal of the sub-working group was discussed at the meeting this week and the ccNSO council requested the ICANN board of directors to instruct staff to amend the relevant sections of the IDN ccTLD implementation plan to deal with this specific issue. Next, on the ccNSO appointed board member, this council has elected Mike Silber as the ccNSO appointed board member for Seat Number 12. Mike was nominated and seconded as a candidate by the members to serve on the ICANN board of directors for a term of three years, which starts at the end of the ICANN meeting in June 2012. Mike has accepted his nominations and the secretary of the board will be informed. Next, on ccNSO membership, we've welcomed this week our 121st member, The ccTLD manager of Burkina Faso, dot bf. And finally, on the framework of interpretation working group, the ccTLD community and the GAC members present were updated by the working group on its latest activities and on the public consultation process on obtaining and documenting consent for the delegation and redelegation of country codes. It was also noted that the board has a great deal of interest, understandably, in the progress of the FOI working group and that we hope that it will be considered a major step forward to sort out the issues going forward. To close, our meeting in Dakar was attended by 130 delegates from 45 country code managers. We wish to thank the local hosts for their kind hospitality and assistance, and once more, the ccNSO Secretariat for their continued high-quality professional support. Thank you. >>STEVE CROCKER: Thank you very much, Lesley. Any questions? Thank you. We move to the report from the GAC. [ Applause ] >>STEVE CROCKER: Yes indeed. Thank you. We move to our report from the Governmental Advisory Committee. Heather Dryden is chair. Heather? >>HEATHER DRYDEN: Thank you very much. So, as is the practice, I will read from the communique for Dakar. The Governmental Advisory Committee of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers met in Dakar, Senegal, during the week of October 22nd through 27th, 2011. 49 governments participated in the meeting, 46 present and three by remote participation and six observers. The GAC suppresses warm thanks to the local hosts, the Ministry of Communication, Telecommunications and Information Technology, and the Regulatory Authority for Telecommunications and Post for their hospitality in organizing the meeting and ICANN for supporting the GAC during the meeting. Regarding new gTLDs: The GAC further discussed and decided on the formulation for GAC advice for inclusion in module 3 of the applicant guidebook. During the discussion, ICANN staff underlined their understanding that advice regarding the definition of geographic names should be adopted by the GAC. The GAC congratulates the JAS working group on the final report and recommendations, which are consistent with GAC advice. The GAC looks forward to the board providing clear timelines for implementation of the recommendations to enable needy applicants to join in fully and meaningfully in the first round. The GAC raised concern of the unpredictability of the actual number of applications the governments would have to digest to proceed after the end of the application period. The GAC made clear that, if the number of applications published by ICANN significantly exceeds 500, GAC members might not be able to process a very large number of applications in the very short early warning procedure and in the limited time for issuing GAC advice on all these strings. Further, the GAC asks for -- asked ICANN for clarification about its intention to process these applications in batches of 500, in the case that there are more than 500 applications. The GAC urges ICANN to clarify the procedures and implications for applicants being processed in different batches as this might have implications for competition and applicant's business models. Following presentations by the ICANN staff and the security and stability advisory committee, the GAC took note of the SSAC consideration of the combined impact of new gTLDs and other changes such as the introduction of IPv6, DNSSEC, and IDNs to the root. The GAC welcomes the confirmation of the commitment by the ICANN board to provide a full report with a complete analysis, including all underlined data, of the root system scalability well before the opening of the new gTLDs application round. The GAC further welcomes the confirmation of the commitment by the board to evaluate the impact on the system after the first round with the understanding that the launch of a second round is contingent on the outcome of this evaluation, in particular, the absence of negative effects on the root system. The GAC believes that, in order for this evaluation to be effective, an appropriate and trustable monitoring system needs to be in place. In its discussions with the board regarding the communication plan for new gTLDs, the GAC emphasized the importance of promoting the gTLD's application round in all countries, including developing countries. The GAC suggested that levels of awareness be continually assessed and reviewed and priorities and target areas under the plan be adjusted accordingly in the runup to the launch of the round. The GAC welcomed the assurances received from the board and staff that the evaluation of applications will ensure a level playing field for applicants and that any conflicts of interest will be identified and avoided accordingly. Regarding law enforcement recommendations: In recent years the Internet has grown to have over two billion users and be a significant contributor to the global economy. Cybercrime is a growing threat to the security and stability of the Internet with fraud and direct public policy impacts. Recent estimates suggest that the direct financial impact of cybercrime is extremely significant. Law enforcement agencies have identified a series of specific problems which are limiting their ability to address this growing problem. As part of this, law enforcement agencies have identified -- as part of this law enforcement agencies have identified specific areas of concern in the ICANN context relating to contractual weaknesses and a lack of necessary due diligence. To address these urgent problems, in 2009 law enforcement agencies made 12 concrete recommendations to reduce the risk of criminal abuse of the domain name system. These recommendations were informally socialized with the registrar community, the GAC, and with ICANN compliance staff over the course of several months before the GAC advised the board in its Brussels communique that it formally endorsed the recommendations. Direct communications between law enforcement agencies and registrars continued in December 2010 in Washington, D.C.; in February 2011 in Brussels; and during the March and June 2011 ICANN meetings. As a complement to the June exchanges in Singapore, the GAC urged the board to support actions necessary to implement those recommendations as a matter of urgency. To date, none of the recommendations have been implemented and the risks remain. The GAC, therefore, urges the ICANN board to take the necessary steps to ensure that ICANN's multistakeholder process effectively addresses these GAC-endorsed proposals as a matter of extreme urgency. Regarding the accountability and transparency review team recommendations: The GAC welcomes the update provided by ICANN staff on the recommendations progress and the suggestions presented with regard to the implementation of recommendations 9-14 on the GAC role effectiveness and interaction with the board. The GAC looks forward to an expedited implementation of the joint working group and ATRT recommendations and is keen to continue working with the board on the recommendations related to the GAC. Regarding conflicts of interest: The GAC expresses extreme concern about the inadequacy of the existing rules of ethics and conflicts of interest in the light of recent events and, therefore, welcomes the approval of the motion by the board governance committee on the 15th of September concerning ethics and conflicts of interests. The GAC looks forward with implementation of a timeline with clear and effective actions as a conclusion of the Dakar meeting, or shortly thereafter. In order to ensure the legitimacy and sustainability model as enshrined in ICANN, the GAC underlines the extreme urgency of putting in place effective and enforceable rules on conflicts of interest. The GAC will keep this important issue under review and may come forward with further advice before the Costa Rica GAC meetings. Regarding the meeting with the GNSO: The GAC and the GNSO exchanged views on a number of issues beginning with an overview by ICANN staff of the GNSO policy development process. Consistent with the recommendations of the accountability and transparency review team and the related GAC-board joint working group, the GAC stressed its interest in ensuring that GAC views are provided and taken into account in early stages of the policy development process. The meeting also discussed the implementation of the law enforcement agency recommendations to mitigate domain name system abuse which were endorsed by the GAC in June 2010. The GAC expressed its disappointment that registrars were only able to report on the consideration of three of the 12 LEA recommendations. Further, the reported progress fell substantially short of what GAC members believed had been achieved during its meetings with registrars in Singapore in June 2011. The GAC also expressed concern that there was no clarity on how the other nine recommendations were being progressed despite the registrar's agreement at the Singapore meeting to provide regular status reports. The GAC informed the GNSO Council of its intention to request the ICANN board to take prompt and concrete action to implement the GAC LEA recommendations. The meeting also addressed the GAC's proposal to the GNSO on the protection mechanism for the International Olympic Committee and Red Cross, Red Crescent names at the top and second levels. The GAC requests feedback from the GNSO as a proposal as a first step for collaborating on advice for the ICANN board in this regard, consistent with the ICANN board resolution in Singapore. The GAC looks forward to further engagement with the GNSO to work more effectively within the ICANN processes and reinforce the stability of the multistakeholder model. Regarding the meeting we had with the at-large advisory committee: The GAC met with the ALAC to discuss conflict of interest issues within the ICANN board and staff. The GAC agrees that this is a critical matter that needs to be addressed as a high priority within the community. The GAC and ALAC also discussed the joint applicant support working group as well as the ALAC and GAC joint statement. The GAC expects a decision to be taken for implementation in time for the opening of the first new gTLD round. In light of the common interest of advancing improvements in the ICANN model, the GAC and ALAC also discussed the ongoing work of the accountability and transparency review team. The GAC shared the areas identified as a priority in the framework of the ATRT and joint working group recommendations looking forward to an expedited implementation. Regarding the GAC operating principles: The GAC amended principle 47 of its operating principles clarifying its understanding of consensus. A definition now introduced derives from the United Nations practice and understands consensus as adopting decisions by general agreement in the absence of formal objections. The GAC noted that, according to U.N. practice, individual members may make reservations, declarations, statements of interpretation and/or statements of position regarding a consensus decision, provided such texts do not represent an objection to the consensus. Regarding the joint session with the country code names supporting organization: The GAC met with the ccNSO to discuss the progress and ongoing work of the framework and interpretation cross community working group on delegation and redelegation and the mechanisms for the GAC to provide feedback and contribute to this work within a timeline that the ccNSO has provided. In addition, the ccNSO shared an update of its current work areas and organizational structure. The GAC is eager to further engage with the ccNSO to provide timely inputs on the different stages of the FOI work. Regarding the meeting that we had with the security and stability advisory committee: The GAC thanks the SSAC for providing an update on its work, including blocking and reputation systems, WHOIS matters, and single label domain names. Further, the GAC thanks the SSAC chair for discussions on root zone scaling and resource public key infrastructure. The GAC looks forward to receiving further updates on DNS blocking matters and other relevant security and stability-related matters. Regarding the meeting we had with the Nominating Committee: The GAC met with the Nominating Committee and discussed the skill sets needed of an ICANN director as outlined in the accountability and transparency review team recommendations to improve the selection process. The NomCom invited individual GAC members to provide further inputs. Regarding the election of vice chairs: The GAC has re-elected the current vice chairs -- Choon-Sai Lim from Singapore, Maria Hall from Sweden, and Alice Munyua from Kenya to continue their mandate for another year. The GAC thanks all those among the ICANN community who contributed to the dialogue with the GAC in Dakar. The GAC will meet during the period of the 43rd meeting in San Jose, Costa Rica. Before I conclude, I would just like to thank ICANN for providing interpretation to the GAC for the first time. And I really think this is something to celebrate. It has made a considerable impact on our ability to welcome those whose language, first language, is not English and to contribute to the work of the GAC and to develop what I think is a really strong communique for these meetings. So I want to thank ICANN for that. It has made a difference. [Applause] >>STEVE CROCKER: Heather, thanks for an extensive and meaty communique. I know firsthand how intense some of these interactions are. And -- but it's been quite enjoyable working with you and working with the entire GAC. Are there any questions? Thank you. Move on to presentation on the GNSO. Stephane? >>STEPHANE VAN GELDER: Thank you, Steve. And it's my pleasure to be up bright and early and give the GNSO Dakar report to you all. Thank you for being here also bright and early with us to share these reports. So, as usual, the GNSO's working week started with the weekend prior to the actual ICANN meeting. Am I supposed to be working the slides myself? All right. Thank you. And the working week started on Saturday with eight sessions. We usually work throughout the day, so we have working lunches on both Saturdays and Sundays to prepare generally for our joint meetings with the groups that we will be meeting with during the weekend and the week. We have continued to attack with a great deal of effort the problem that is the council's heavy workload and to try and deal with that. On Sunday we had eight sessions as well, including joint discussions with the board and the GAC and a joint session on Monday with the country code name supporting organization. Our week then continued on Tuesday where the stakeholder groups and the constituencies which form the GNSO community all had their meetings throughout the day. And on Wednesday the GNSO Council met for its public council meeting. And a follow-up wrap-up session on the Thursday. During the week there was -- there was also a number of workshops from groups currently undertaking work for -- on behalf of the GNSO community. And that included work on WHOIS, on best practices, and on consumer trust and consumer choice. What was accomplished during this time? One of the things I'm very, very happy to be able to report is that the GNSO community has now all but completed a significant effort that has really taken up a lot of resources over the last few years. And that is the GNSO improvements. That is now completed with a motion that was passed on Wednesday during the open council meeting to revise the policy development process and that has now been sent for final approval to the board by the GNSO Council. So that's a very important step for us. And it is my duty to thank both the community and the staff for a significant effort in carrying out these GNSO improvements. We have also been having discussions on the registrar accreditation agreement, as I'm sure you all know, and the outreach task force charter. We discussed those two items during the open council meeting as well. And we are currently working on board-requested issues, which include protection of Olympic Committee and Red Cross names as part of the new gTLD program and measuring consumer trust, consumer choice, and competition in the domain name system. More ongoing work being handled by the -- by working groups and drafting teams, work on WHOIS service requirements. And the working group there is targeting March 2012 to submit a draft survey to the council to have the council review that and a final report later on in the year in October. There's a drafting team on cross community working groups, which is an important team for the GNSO Council. Work is ongoing there with meetings having taken place ahead of the Dakar meeting and here as well. We are also reviewing the format of our open council meetings to ensure that they are as interesting and as efficient as possible, efficient for the council but also for the community and, as interactive as they can be -- and we did try out a number of new things during the open council on Wednesday. And there is a group working within the GNSO Council to attempt to continue, if not improving at least, asking the question of how we can improve those meetings. We also have a drafting team on the outreach task force, which I mentioned earlier. And a motion is to be considered at the next council meeting on approving the task, the outreach task force draft charter. We also are -- beginning to work on the IRTP part C charter. The IRTP is the inter-registrar transfer policy. This is a 5-part policy development process. And, as you can see a little bit below on this slide in red, the previous part of this PDP, the IRTP part B recommendations have now been approved. So work has been on IRTP part C. We also have a drafting team on fake renewal notices. This is something that came out of the registration abuse policy working group. The group provided a recommendation number 2, and there is work going on there with the registrars to try and gather more information on this type of possible abuse. There is -- the council is still looking at the issue of a possible UDRP review and considering the possible next steps on that following the issue report that was submitted by staff and community input. So that is under council consideration. And, as I mentioned earlier, I did want to draw the community's attention to these two items that have been completed, both the IRTP part B and the PEDNR, which is the post expiration domain name recovery working group. We do love our acronyms. And those two are now completed. Or approved. I also wanted to report on some administrative matters that were carried out during this Dakar week. And they are of importance because they do reflect the effort that the community, the GNSO community puts into this work. A new council has now been seated. That is a new set of volunteers. Some of the councillors are ongoing councillors. But we do have new councillors that have joined the GNSO Council. And I want to show my appreciation of volunteers that are willing to join the council and continue to work on these issues. That is something that is very much appreciated. The council held some elections and chose new leadership. I want to thank Mary Wong, who is the outgoing non-contracted parties house vice chair. Mary has been an exceptional vice chair in this role over the past year. And she has now passed that torch on to Wolf-Ulrich Knoben, who will be serving as NCPH's vice chair for the coming term. Jeff Neuman has been renewed as contracting parties vice chair. And I was re-elected as the council chair. [Applause] >>STEPHANE VAN GELDER: Thank you. I mentioned that we have a spate of new councillors. I did want to mention the new councillors by name and, once again, highlight their commitment to serving the community. We have, from the NomCom as a NomCom appointee, Lanre Ajayi. We have from the non-commercial stakeholder group, Wolfgang Kleinwachter and Joy Liddicoat. We have from the intellectual property constituency, Brian Winterfeldt. We have from the Internet service providers constituency, Osvaldo Novoa. From the NomCom once again Thomas Rickert. And from the registers, Mason Cole and Yoav Keren. And these people, these volunteers also deserve your applause. [Applause] I also wanted to name the outgoing councillors, some of which have dedicated years of service to the GNSO community. And we are sad to see them go, and it has been a pleasure for us to serve with them and alongside them. I did want to mention these people by name. Olga Cavalli, who is a NomCom appointee; Rosemary Sinclair from the NCSG; Debbie Hughes from the NCSG -- that's the non-commercial stakeholder group -- Kristina Rosette from the IPC, the intellectual property constituency; Jaime Wagner from the ISPs; Andrei Kolesnikov selected by the NomCom; and from the registrars, Adrian Kinderis and Tim Ruiz. Please show your appreciation for them. [Applause] Lastly, I just wanted to, on behalf of the GNSO Council, thank the hosts here at the Dakar meeting and the meeting planning team for what is, as usual, an excellent meeting week. And I know it's a lot of work for both the host and the meeting planning team. So thanks to you all for that. [Applause] Thank you very much. That concludes my report, chair. >>STEVE CROCKER: Thank you very much. Enormous amount of work. And just a thrill to see all of the coordination and tackling of all the challenges that you have within your group. Next report is on the root server system advisory committee. Suzanne Woolf. >>SUZANNE WOOLF: Sure. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. As I was thinking about doing this report and doing this meeting, I realized probably the best way to describe RSSAC's role and current activities is -- the root server advisory committee exists to do infrastructure and to be a place for root server operators and other concerned technical experts to discuss issues and interact with the rest of the ICANN community. And also, within ICANN itself, the function is infrastructure also. We work with a lot of other groups. We -- as ourselves as our own body, though, we tend to keep a pretty low profile. So I have a couple of quick notes regarding recent activity. The activities of RSSAC in Dakar have been in keeping with this infrastructure focus. We've mostly been as participants in other groups and programs discussed here. But there is actually -- I had to stop and think about it, and there's actually been quite a lot. RSSAC members participate in work of the ICANN board. My role as liaison. Including I work closely with the other technical group liaisons from the IETF and SSAC and TLG and support ICANN board relations interactions with the GAC. We work with the NomCom. Closely with the SSAC. We have a member on the SSR review team. And many informal discussions of current and future issues, particularly root scaling and assurance of the stability of the root server system as the new gTLD program moves forward. The primary work item for RSSAC, currently, is pursuit of a set of shared metrics for providing a consistent view across the root servers with basic operational data. Everybody does a great deal of monitoring and operational management across root servers, across constellations of any cast. But we're also working in the interest, principally, of transparency in being able to share a unified view of how things fit together in the overall system. That work is expected to advance at the next RSSAC meeting in Taipei at the IETF in mid-November. Basically, the status on that is that there's an initial design document and the design team is working on refining that and working towards the implementation issues of getting support from the people who would actually -- getting support and buy-in from the folks that will have to do the work to make that real. As also kind of a personal observation, I want to say that being in Dakar has been very, very educational and fascinating. I want to thank the local folks for a good meeting and for the insights that we've been able to get here on access and infrastructure issues. Congratulations to the L-Root team on the new L-Root node here. [ Applause ] >>SUZANNE WOOLF: And I also want to note I had to go look to make sure I was up-to-date, but there are a number of -- there are actually a number of root server instances all over Africa, from north to south and east to west, and what I noted was that -- in conversations here also, was that there are more coming as the connectivity to support them improves. You know, we've heard a great deal this week not only about access issues, but about recent success and progress in enabling more fiber, more exchange points, more access generally, and that's where root server instances start to be really useful is in that next stage once you have fiber, once you have basic connectivity, and so it's been really good to see increasing activity as people invest in infrastructure to improve general access around the region. So that's been very gratifying, and thanks to our hosts and with that, I think, Mr. Chairman, I can go back to working quietly in the background. >>STEVE CROCKER: Thank you, Suzanne. The last report is from Patrik Faltstrom, chair of the Security and Stability Advisory Committee -- Oh, I'm sorry, we're going to have -- that's the last of the SO and AC reports. We'll also have records from the ombudsman and the nominating committee. Patrik? >>PATRIK FALTSTROM: Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Am I too far down? >> It just takes a moment to switch, please. Thank you. >>PATRIK FALTSTROM: Oh, so I probably now pressed 300 times, so we see what's happening. >> It's technical. >>PATRIK FALTSTROM: Oh, technical! [ Laughter ] >>PATRIK FALTSTROM: We have to do something with reliability and stability of this slide. We have to redo that, maybe. Anyways, back to order. The Security and Stability Advisory Committee has met here at this ICANN meeting just like we are doing at all the others. This week we have had internal meetings in the various work parties that we have. At the moment, we have newly created and old work parties regarding dotless domain names, which implies the use of just the top-level domain in various application protocols and client software. Review of the WHOIS, various things related to WHOIS. Non-U.S.-centric DNS filtering and blocking and repudiation systems. And the work that we're doing as a result of the review, which is to come up with a mechanism on how to measure how effective our work is. We also had full committee meetings regarding the fiscal year '12 work plan and we have been starting work on fiscal year '13 budget. We also have had public meeting briefings regarding the SSAC mission and work plan for 2012, SAC51, WHOIS taxonomy report. That is on the nonconsent agenda for ICANN board today. We have also presented the SSAC membership annual review process, and out of that one, I can say that -- just to give you a short information on the -- how SSAC is constituted today, we have 34 members. We, in 2010, changed our appointment length to three years, and in 2010 we therefore appointed SSAC members one-third to one year, one-third to two years, and one-third to three years. So this year, we -- in approximately July, we did a review of one- third of our members, the ones that were appointed on one year in 2010. In 2010, we had five new members and five members departing, and in 2011 we have so far four new members and four members departing, out of 34. So that is approximately the rotation of the membership of SSAC, for your information. And then we also, at the public meeting, went through the -- how to measure outcomes, and we got quite a lot of input on that, which we really, really would like to thank the whole community for helping us. That was a very good meeting. We also participated in -- we also participate in work with the security and stability review team and we had a meeting with the Address Supporting Organization for the first time, and I have heard personally good feedback from ASO and from SSAC. We would like really to thank ASO for coming. We very quickly saw that the 30 minutes we had together was not enough. A very effective meeting, but we probably should have had an hour, and we're already planning that for the next ICANN meeting, so thank you very much. We also had a briefing on the internationalized registration data working group. It actually had a separate session. And the IRD working group do have its report out on open consultation and I encourage everyone interested in the topic to have a look at that and come back with comments. We also participate in the DNS security and stability analysis -- DSSA -- working group meetings, and we had the nowadays traditional Wednesday morning DNSSEC workshop and beginners sessions. Or rather, we actually had a DNSSEC session on Wednesday and then a beginners session on Monday, if I remember correctly. So on top of this, as chair of SSAC, I also had meetings with and reported on SSAC activities with GAC and also for the first time with ICANN board, and I would like to thank also Steve and Ram -- Ram Mohan, as the vice chair -- for helping in setting up that communication channel to meet with the board, which we in SSAC find is extremely important and we would like to continue to have those quick briefings on the current state of, from our point, security and robustness of the Internet and everything else that we're looking at. Maybe not slide-rotating software because that's probably more my problem than anything else. And I would like to -- with that, I would like to thank my vice chair, Jim Galvin, that is also chair of the membership committee and is doing -- has been doing a very hard job this summer with the first real review of the membership, and also Ram Mohan, as I said, which is our liaison to the board. Thank you very much. [ Applause ] >>PATRIK FALTSTROM: I also would like to thank our extremely good ICANN staff that is helping us, Julie Hedlund, Steve Sheng and Dave Piscitello, and this time I also would like to -- just like we heard in Olivier's presentation the staff that ALAC has, and I specifically would like to point out Gisella for the work that she did with rescheduling my schedule to be able to actually accept me when I could be present. Thank you very much. [ Applause ] >>PATRIK FALTSTROM: And with that, over to you, Mr. Chair. >>STEVE CROCKER: Thank you, Patrik. Well, you know I have a very fond spot in my heart for all of SSAC. Stellar job. We move on to the -- First of all, are there any questions? No? We move on to the office of the ombudsman. We have a new ombudsman in place, Chris LaHatte. Please proceed. >>CHRIS LaHATTE: Thank you, Steve. I'll start off by addressing you in the indigenous language of New Zealand. I think you already understand the New Zealand version of English. Tena koe, tena koe tena koutou katoa, haere mai ki te kaitiaki mana tangata. Greetings to all from the ombudsman. And I open by addressing you in the language of the indigenous people in New Zealand because our constitution has developed a partnership -- if you like, a dual stakeholder model -- with the Maori and European settlers. A partnership is like a multistakeholder model because it involves a relationship between the parties which goes deeper than something like a contract or an ordinary company constitution. This is because at the end, it involves the people, and in Maori, we would say, He aha te mea nui o te ao? He tangata, he tangata, he tangata. What is the most important thing in the world? It is people, it is people, it is people. So my role as the ombudsman is to help preserve those relationships because the very nature of my job is to look at damaged or broken relationships, and in some respects the role is therapeutic rather than policing, which is my -- consistent with my approach to be inclusive and welcoming. A partnership still requires nurturing and care. The ICANN staff provide the nurturing and care to the multistakeholder model, and the ombudsman is there when the family has an argument. I should tell you something about what has happened since I've been appointed, which is only three months. In the following slides, you can see the complaints in the period from when Dr. Fowlie finished his term and Herb Waye was warming the seat. I've also included a slide just to tell you who I am and what I do, but the numbers to the appointment, as you can see, have been very small, and I've got it as a pie chart. And then since appointment -- and I should tell you that, in fact, that statistic is already out of date because in October I think I can add three more to that. And again, a pie chart showing that there's been a steady increase in work. It's entirely possible that the introduction of the new gTLDs will add to this workload, although I also think that the care that's been spent on the application process may well avoid this. This meeting in Dakar, Senegal, is my first ICANN meeting and I've tried to meet as many of you as possible, and quite a few have managed to find me in my office and called in just to say hello. Some issues have also arisen, which is not surprising with so many people all anxious to have their voices heard, and with the consequence of something like the family reunion where old family disputes are raised. I was fortunate in achieving a handover with Dr. Fowlie, who has, of course, deep experience with both ICANN and the profession of ombudsmanship. However, I intend setting my own mark on this office, and you may have seen some changes in the appearance of my Web site, my publicity literature, and the banners outside my office. The curved green symbols are a Koru, which is developed from the Maori word for the New Zealand tree fern, an important symbol in New Zealand. A fern is an important part of the forest ecosystem, and I hope this acts as a symbol for the important part that the ombudsman plays in the ICANN ecosystem. Another analogy for the office of the ombudsman is that of the referee, which gives me an opportunity to mention that the All Blacks, the New Zealand rugby team, have just won the Rugby World Cup. [ Cheers and applause ] >>CHRIS LaHATTE: I'm sure my French colleagues will not mind if I bring this up. [ Laughter ] >>CHRIS LaHATTE: They lost with honor. It is important to remember, however, that the referee is not always popular when he has to make a decision which affects the result of the game, and sometimes an ombudsman has to make a recommendation which is unpopular, but like the sports referee, somebody has to do this. And we hope that on reflection and passage of time, the decisions are seen for what they are. The meeting at Dakar has been incredibly important for me. It is meeting the people, mostly unpaid volunteers who have an awesome commitment to the goals of ICANN: One world, one Internet. I have been overwhelmed by the passion, the deep knowledge, and the constant reevaluation of what we do. I am learning that many in the community know that the office of the ombudsman exists, but perhaps what I can do for you is not as well known as it should be. I intend reaching out, however, by all possible means to ensure that my office is better known and available to everyone, and that you feel free to contact me at any time. I conclude by giving my thanks to the ICANN staff who have been very patient with my ignorance, and to the ICANN community who have welcomed me without reservation, and I also want to acknowledge the friendly staff in our conference center and hotel who have provided delicious food, superior pillows, and professional service to all of us. So thank you. [ Applause ] >>STEVE CROCKER: Thank you very much, Chris. Any questions? Good. And I believe we have Adam from the nominating committee with the last report in this series. >>ADAM PEAKE: Thank you very much, Steve. I realize I don't have very much time, so I will try to go through as quickly as possible. The first slide you see before you is the membership of the 2011 nominating committee. I had the pleasure to serve as chair. I won't list out the names, but this was an outstanding group of people and wonderful to work with, so thank you to all of them. It's difficult, when having just said something like that, to then say something that sounds like criticism. You will probably notice that there are only three women on that list, and a majority of people from North America and from Europe. So going forward, I would ask people and ask the groups that select for this important committee to think about diversity. Having said that, this has been my best experience within the ICANN process, and I thank this group very much. They were superb. And I will also take the opportunity to thank Joette and Olof, staff support. Again, outstanding, and we would not have been able to do our work without you. Moving right along, this is what we do. We -- two things. "Nominating committee" is not really the correct title for this group. We begin by making a recruitment effort which lasts about four months, and the result of our recruitment was 88 candidates. 56 were men and 23 were women. 23 is the highest number of women applicants that the nominating has managed over its various years, so that's a record number and we're very pleased that that has happened. We saw a good regional balance, as you'll see. From all of the five regions, we got a good number of candidates, and at the same time, there was a good mix of people interested in all of the positions. There was a preponderance of people interested in the director positions, but we had hard choices -- well, good choices, a good pool of candidates for all of the positions we were selecting for, and that was the challenge that we wanted. Moving along, this was our task for the year. We had to select two members of the board of directors, two members of the GNSO Council, three members of the at-large, and one member of the ccNSO. And this was the result of our work. And again, extremely pleased that the quality of applicants was really outstanding. Thank you to all of you, and these were the people we selected. Steve and Judith, welcome to the board. Steve, I notice you didn't have a newcomers badge. I don't know why that's the case, but... [ Laughter ] >>ADAM PEAKE: Lanre and Thomas. Lanre, I didn't know very well. We study people as closely as we can. We interview. We talk to third parties about them. Lanre arrived and was jumping right in and onto an important panel on his first day here. I think it's good that people have -- you know, they walk right in the door and start contributing. Titi, Rinalia, Carlton. Titi has been around the U.N. system for many years, advising up to the level of Secretary-General. Rinalia used to run an organization that was capable to ICANN in its stature as a multistakeholder organization. Carlton Samuels has been volunteering for this organization for many years. And I think Hong Xue is well known, bringing expertise in IDN. So we were extremely pleased with the candidates we were able to bring into the organization. This is a quick run-through of the work we did. It's a year-long process. We began meeting after the AGM in Cartagena, and this is an opportunity to thank all of the three hosts that we worked with. So Cartagena, Singapore, and Dakar, thank you very much. It's been -- you've provided services we needed and a very enjoyable time. We met 10 times by teleconference between January and June. Most of that took place in the May/June period when we were holding weekly calls discussing candidates two and a half hours at a time, and it's a quite interesting and important process. This is a time to mention that we do have very strict confidentiality agreements. You will find a code of conduct which all members of the committee sign on our Web site. We also publish our procedures, which are our operating principles, and that's a bylaws requirement. So you'll find the procedures for the 2011 NomCom on the nominating committee Web site. The first phase of our work is about recruitment, and we hold various events for that. We met in Geneva and Brussels. I personally went to the APRICOT meeting in Hong Kong, in San Francisco, and various meetings around the world. And of course using personal networks. That's really how we outreach. We think about who we know, who are the people we can bring into ICANN, and we ask you to do the same. And that really is the important thing. Once a constituency has sent a delegate to the NomCom, that's not the end of your job. Please help those people find the best possible people to bring into ICANN. If you know somebody who you think should be on the board of directors, tell Vanda Scartezini, the incoming 2012 chair, and she will try to get them into that pool of candidates. We also did something new this year. It was a recommendation that the nominating committee does experiment a little bit. We used a professional recruitment firm to help us. We thought and they thought that they may be able to bring us some candidates from their sort of executive-level international Rolodex. It didn't work very well. In fact, we got one candidate through that method. But we experiment. We have to learn and we have to try these things, and perhaps in a few years' time, the situation will be different and it can be tried again but this year it didn't work. So moving along, we use an online database, a secure database, as an evaluation tool. It has polling functions. It has all the information about candidates. It has a way that the committee members can make notes about candidates, share information, and this is how we begin our initial sift-through of candidates and start to rate and rank them. And the next task was we identified 25 people, director candidates, who we asked to be interviewed by a professional assessment firm. And anybody who has been interviewed by this group, it takes about an hour, an hour and a half, two hours sometimes, and they provide a summary form of interview back to us, and that becomes part of the information we use when we're making our selections. So what you're beginning to see, and I think it's worth noting, is that this is becoming an increasingly professional process. It's not one where at any point during the process I felt that I could write to candidates and say, "I'm sorry, you're no longer being considered." However, there is the process of winnowing down, as you might do in any job application process. One reason for not being able to say that people are no longer being considered is because that never happens. We actually consider every SOI during the recruitment process and they can be brought back into the process at any time for consideration. And I think that's important. It's the respect that's due of people who are volunteering to contribute to this organization. We introduced parallel review processes in the assessment of people's references. We sought third-party information for the at-large and the GNSO and the ccNSO. We broke up into small, what are called "deep dive teams" who were again identifying the top candidates, trying to seek more and more information. And then in Singapore we began an interview process. And this is, again, becoming more formal. People who were not already in Singapore but were on our final list of 11 candidates, we paid for airfare for some of them to come. Some of them used their own money to come. And we held eight face-to-face meetings and three videoconferences. Face-to-face meetings are more valuable than videoconferences, but we're doing our best. And I think this is a process that will continue, so we can expect that to happen in June in Prague. The final stage was the selection meeting in Singapore. You might have noticed, some of you, that we escaped off to a little resort to find some private time away to think and consider, and it was two days, two and a half days, of really hard thinking about who the best candidates were. We then, once having decided the candidates, immediately sent the names off so that due diligence could begin, and as I mentioned during the public forum yesterday, the nominating committee is beginning to question the need for due diligence for the supporting organization and AC candidates. When I say "the nominating committee," I mean the 2011 nominating committee. How future committees believe will be up to them. They're independent committees forming anew. But we would like this process to be considered generally within the community. Or we suggest that this process be considered generally within the community. Definitely due diligence for the director candidates, but we wonder -- we think a discussion should happen about the fairness of conducting due diligence on only one section of people coming in to serve ICANN in the supporting organizations. We made our announcement on August the 5th, which was about a month earlier than previous years. We're trying to make sure that people who have been candidates are told as soon as possible whether they were successful or not. And then the successful candidates are going to take their seats, well, in a couple of hours' time when the sort of immaculate transition between one set of -- at the AGM occurs. We also had a midterm vacancy for the North American at-large. This was a -- one of the members who was assigned by the NomCom resigned, so we began a new process. It was quite rapid. We received 16 statements of interest, and very, very pleased to bring in Ganesh Kumar and thank Ganesh for joining the at-large for a one-year term and helping out in an important way, and thanks to all of the candidates who joined that process. And again, thanks to the nominating committee for a bit of extra work. It was a surprise over the summer months. Well, summer months in the northern hemisphere. The 2012 nominating committee chair is Vanda Scartezini. Her committee will begin their work this afternoon, and I think I can speak for Vanda and say: Please help her find the best possible candidates for the positions that she and her team will have to fill. She picks from the candidate pool available. Help make that candidate pool full of valuable and strong people who can serve ICANN. Thank you very much. That's the nominating committee Web site. Again, thank you to the committee members. You were great. And thank you to Joette and thank you to Olof. Thanks. [ Applause ] >>STEVE CROCKER: Thank you very much. Any questions? Yes. Jean-Jacques. >>JEAN-JACQUES SUBRENAT: Thank you, Steve. I'd just like to support Adam's call for consistency in the due process for two reasons. One is that there is, I think, a certain pattern of people within the ICANN community moving from one role to another, from one AC or SO to another, but also to the board. So it's important from that point of view of consistency that the process be the same in all cases. The other aspect is, of course, fairness, as underlined by Adam. I think it's very important that not only the reality, but also the perception that there is not one part of the community which is suspected, perhaps, or in any case submitted to a different set of rules from another. Thank you. >>STEVE CROCKER: Thank you very much. Any other questions? I want to thank you, Adam, for the enormous amount of work. It's quite evident from your report how hard the NomCom committee works and how arduous the process is. You made a passing reference to my being a non-newcomer/newcomer, but I did go through the nominations process this time and I can tell you firsthand that I certainly didn't take it casually and I could tell that there was a very extensive amount of probing and background research. It was a highly respectable process. I also want to thank you for the speed-up in the announcement process. One of the things that I've been attentive to from the board point of view is trying to integrate new board members smoothly and rapidly. We typically hold a workshop a month or two before the ICANN meeting, before the annual general meeting, and it's very helpful to have new members integrated in at that point. This process has gotten smoother year by year, and it was particularly smooth this year. Vanda has a tough act to follow because Adam not only chaired the committee this year but has been intimately involved with the nominating committee process for a number of years, so let me thank you, Adam, for not only this year's work but for all of the years of service on this. [ Applause ] >>STEVE CROCKER: This brings us to the end of these reports. The next scheduled event is the formal board meeting. It's scheduled to start right now, at 10:30. I'd like to put in a 10-minute pause. Stretch, hit the restrooms, whatever. We'll begin at 10:40.