Greetings all,
I wanted to pull out a comment from an email that Marília sent to the list yesterday:
Having consulted staff, I was informed that ICANN considers that someone's region is: a) the country of your citizenship; b) the country where you pay your taxes. For me, neither of these parameters have changed. My citizenship is the same and I will pay my taxes in Brazil. Others with more experience could confirm if this is correct and consistent with previous NCSG practice. I believe that a discussion about criteria among us would be useful and I am ok with any decision we made as a group, which should be consistently applied.
This is an interesting discussion to be had, and I think it is one which we as a community need to have because at the community level, we are able to flexibly apply geographic diversity principles. ICANN's Geographic Regions Framework only sets in stone the scenario Marília described (citizenship requirement and country of domicile) for Board members.
I may be mistaken but I do not
believe this same definition applies to all other ICANN sub-structures. Rather,
community participation in the SO-ACs is encouraged and supported, but there is
an understanding that individual communities are in the best
position to craft unique operational solutions that honour the central goal of fostering
diversity within their operations and individual leadership teams. So I'm presuming our elections require the election of people from different regions because we've set this out in the NCSG charter or NCUC/NPOC bylaws?
This flexibility is an idea I have wrestled with but have come to support, because while a
strict adherence to certain, arbitrarily-set standards might be a good outcome
for some SO-AC structures, I doubt the inflexibility of such a requirement
would be in our best interest.
I am
firmly in support of diversity. It is something that should be fostered and
encouraged at all levels. I also am strongly in support of ICANN’s efforts to internationalise.
Where I disagree, however, is with the idea that we can rely on one’s citizenship or country of residence to produce diversity. It is something which should be considered, but human
diversity is far too complex to be narrowed down to just this metric.
To draw on
my own personal experience – and I feel this is an issue not isolated to only a
handful of instances – my citizenship is Australian, but I live in the UK and
have previously lived in Canada, Indonesia, and Argentina, among a few other
places. The idea, however, that if I was in a leadership role that I could
represent my ‘home region’ when I am not a long-term resident of a country in Asia-Pacific
strikes me as a little disingenuous. Checking off a passport might be an easy
way of measuring diversity but I don’t think it genuinely achieves diversity.
Likewise, I don’t consider measuring one's residency in a country to necessarily be a better
path forward. An expat living abroad, with no understanding of that region’s
culture, people, and/or languages has no legitimacy, in my eyes, to represent
that region.
I am NOT
insinuating that this is the case for any of our past or current elected representatives;
I just want to flag this as a conversation we might want to have at some point
in time, because to measure the diversity of those in our leadership roles on
the basis of their citizenship or residency in a country alone could place our
diversity goals in danger.
Does anyone have any ideas as to what could be a better path forward?
Best wishes,
Ayden