Hi everyone,

While ICANN takes public comments on their top down Accountability plan, the 
plan itself moves forward. To their credit, the Public Experts Group will be 
announcing in the next day or so that the deadline for nominations of  
“experts” for the ICANN Accountability & Governance Coordination Group 
will be extended from tomorrow to at least the end of the month, if not a 
few days longer.

As a reminder, the Call for Candidates can be found here:

https://www.icann.org/news/announcement-2014-08-28-en

In a top down process that largely is horrid this Call is an opportunity for 
those of us on the bottom of the bottom up process to be heard. I’ve been 
reaching out to people, collecting c.v.’s and trying to put together some 
candidates that would reflect the views of the noncommercial community. 
You’ll be surprised at how many respected professionals have no idea what 
ICANN is or that there even is a field of knowledge called internet 
governance. I’m finding that once educated, though, people are generally 
willing to consider serving.

A special call out to NCSG members in Asia, Latin America and Africa. The 
members of the Public Experts Group are all from the United States and 
northern Europe. It would be particularly useful if you could come up with 
potential “experts” in the delineated categories from your regions and 
submit those names to ICANN.  It would be great to have a bit more 
geographic diversity in the candidate pool.

Thanks for considering.

Ed