[NCSG-EC] Gender and regional balance rules

[Tapani Tarvainen]

Dear Farzaneh and EC members,

As several people have asked me about this issue, perhaps it's useful
if I summarize what happened.

The confusion is of course my fault: EC decisions then were not
recorded in any easily findable way. (One of the things I'd planned
but failed to do was building archive/records pages for NCSG.) I did
try to post important decisions to ncsg-discuss, however, and did so
in this case as well.

So, a brief history:

After 2016 elections there was a lot of dicussion about election
procedures in ncsg-discuss. Eventually a separate election-reform
mailing list was formed to deal with them, with all ncsg members
invited to join. Many things are still open, some left to a future
charter change, but two issues were at least temporarily resolved.

In particular, the gender and regional balance procedure was first
posted to the election list on July 9, 2017 and then to EC list as
part of EC meeting agenda. It was approved on EC call on 28 July and
that decision, along with the procedure text, was sent to ncsg-discuss
on August 1, and it (point 6) was used to resolve who who got 1-year
term in council. Thus it's rather clear it was the rule that was in
effect last year.

For reference:

The final announcement message in ncsg-discuss can be found here:

https://listserv.syr.edu/scripts/wa.exe?A2=ind1708&L=NCSG-DISCUSS&P=6532

Transcript of the EC call on 28 July 2017 can be found here:

https://community.icann.org/download/attachments/52891517/transcript_ncsgec_280717.pdf?version=1&modificationDate=1501663417000&api=v2

and chat here:

https://community.icann.org/download/attachments/52891517/acchat_ncsgec_280717.pdf?version=1&modificationDate=1501663432000&api=v2

and election-reform list text here:

https://lists.ncsg.is/pipermail/election-reform/2017-July/000022.html

If you read those you'll see there wasn't actually much discussion
even though there was a fair amount of time for it, but I assume
that's simply because there's nothing particularly controversial about
it: it mostly follows straight from the Charter, just clarifying some
borderline cases and writing it out as a procedure that can be easily
followed.

Much more contentious was the None-of-the-Above issue, where I ended
up calling ICANN legal for opinion and it was decided to follow it for
time being but consider revising it in charter reform later.
(It was basically to do ballots the way Robin did when she was chair
in 2012, i.e., no explicit NotA but allow abstentions.)

EC discussed it in the same call (see above linked transcript/chat)
and election-reform list thread about it begins here:

https://lists.ncsg.is/pipermail/election-reform/2017-July/000023.html

Hope this helps,

-- 
Tapani Tarvainen