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New ICANN director appointed

Kevin Murphy, August 8, 2011, Domain Policy

Filipino businesswomen Judith Duavit Vazquez has been selected to join ICANN’s board of directors.
She will take the seat being vacated by Gambian development consultant Katim Touray at the end of the ICANN meeting in Dakar October 28.
Vazquez has a pretty impressive resume covering senior roles at major telecommunications, internet and media organizations in the Philippines.
Her corporate board experience includes 20 years at GMA Network, a major player in Filipino TV and radio, and time at a few non-profits.
Board work has included seats on compensation, audit and risk management committees – useful skills given ICANN’s ongoing accountability and transparency reform work.
In terms of involvement with internet addresses, Vasquez has worked with APNIC, the Asia-Pacific regional internet registry, according to her bio.
She’s also a woman, which will have counted in her favor.
ICANN’s Nominating Committee, which selects eight of ICANN’s directors, had made no secret of the fact that it wants the board to resemble less of a sausage-fest.
German politician Erika Mann is currently the only female voting director, following the departure of lawyer Rita Rodin Johnston in Singapore.
I speculated in June that NomCom’s selection “will almost certainly be a woman from a region currently under-represented on the board. My guess is Russia.”
I was obviously wrong about Russia, and while the Asia-Pac region has hardly been under-represented in the past, Vasquez is the first ICANN director to hail from South-East Asia.
NomCom also extended recently installed chairman Steve Crocker’s term on the board, which was due to expire in October, for another three years, as was expected.
For the full list of NomCom committee appointees, see the ICANN announcement.

ICANN replaces three directors

Kevin Murphy, September 8, 2010, Domain Policy

ICANN has named Cherine Chalaby, Bertrand de La Chapelle and Erika Mann as the new members of its board of directors.
The three will replace current vice-chair Dennis Jennings, along with Harald Tveit Alvestrand and Jean-Jacques Subrenat, whose terms expire next month.
Under ICANN bylaws, Jennings, Alvestrand and Subrenat could have served two additional three-year terms, but I do not know whether any of them applied to do so.
The ICANN Nominating Committee, which was responsible for selecting the new directors, highlighted the fact that the board is getting its first Arabic-speaking member.
That’s Egyptian Cherine Chalaby. I must confess I’d never heard of him either. Google tells me he has a tech/consulting background, and works for a UK-based investment bank.
ICANN has had a couple of minor run-ins with Arabic members of the community recently, such as over the the delegation of Arabic-script ccTLDs, which came in for criticism.
There was also a small flare-up over the random inclusion of an anti-terrorism clause in the new gTLD application process, which led to (in my view overblown) accusations of insensitivity.
NomCom chair Wolfgang Kleinwaechter said the appointment of Chalaby “underlines the importance of further internationalization of ICANN.”
The appointment of Bertrand de La Chapelle, who becomes the first second person to leave the ICANN Governmental Advisory Committee to join the board, is also particularly interesting.
De La Chapelle is France’s GAC representative, and one of the most vocal members of the committee.
In my view, he’s currently the GAC rep doing the most to build bridges with the rest of the community over the tricky “morality and public order” policy process. The board’s gain is the GAC’s loss.
Clearly serious about his new role, de La Chapelle said he will quit his job as “Thematic Ambassador and Special Envoy for the Information Society in the French Foreign and European Affairs Ministry” and look for other sources of funding.
German Erika Mann joins the board after a 15-year stint as a Member of the European Parliament, sitting in the Socialist group. She speaks four languages and once ran her own IT consultancy.
According to her CV, she was an expert in ICANN matters between 1985 and 1994, which is almost supernaturally impressive.