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