Skip to main content
Resources

ICANN Nominating Committee Participation Agreement

  1. Introduction

    The purpose of this document is to provide NomCom delegates with important information about the duties and responsibilities of the committee, and to affirm each delegate's commitment to faithfully carry out his or her individual duties as a delegate to the committee in accordance with this Code of Conduct statement set forth below.

  2. Background

    1. Rationale for Nominating Committee

      The central rationale for using a nominating committee to select a portion of ICANN leadership bodies is to balance those who can represent particular areas of knowledge and interests with those who place the broad public interest of the global Internet community ahead of any particular interests. NomCom's role is to select individuals of the highest integrity and capability who place the broad public interest of the global Internet community ahead of any particular interests, and who are nevertheless knowledgeable about ICANN's mission and environment.

      To achieve this broad public-interest orientation, NomCom delegates are drawn from across the ICANN and global Internet communities. They act only on behalf of the interests of the global Internet community within the scope of the ICANN mission and the responsibilities assigned to NomCom by ICANN Bylaws. They act as individuals and are not beholden to their appointing constituencies as they work by consensus to derive the NomCom slates of selected nominees for these leadership bodies.

      The NomCom functions independently from the ICANN Board, Supporting Organizations, and Advisory Committees. The NomCom selections are final; no further approval or ratification is needed.

    2. Significant Bylaw Articles Affecting Nominating Committee

      The authority, responsibilities, and administration of the Nominating Committee are contained in Article 8 of the ICANN Bylaws. To read all of the Bylaws excerpts related to the NomCom, click here.

  3. Nominating Committee Code of Conduct

    Because of its highly visible and independent role in selecting ICANN Directors and other key Council members, the Nominating Committee receives special scrutiny from the ICANN community as it does its work. This is especially the case since much of its work requires a high degree of confidentiality. Therefore, the expectation is that the committee will act with the highest standard of personal integrity and ethical conduct. The following guidance, set forth here as the NomCom Code of Conduct, includes specific ICANN policies as well as Nominating Committee policies that have been developed in the course of its history.

    Each Nominating Committee delegate must sign a Participation Agreement to acknowledge the following information. Click here to see an example of the most recent Participation Agreement.

    1. Conflicts of Interest Policy (adopted 6 May 2012)

      The ICANN Board adopted a Conflicts of Interest Policy that applies to Officers, Directors, Board Liaisons, and key ICANN employees.

      The Policy further states: ICANN will encourage ICANN Supporting Organizations and Advisory Committees and other ICANN bodies, as appropriate, to consider implementing the principles and practices of this COI Policy as relevant.

      NomCom delegates are expected to observe the principles and intent of the ICANN Conflicts of Interest Policy. NomCom delegates must disclose promptly to the NomCom Chair any financial or other relations that might affect (or might reasonably be seen to affect) his or her performance on the Committee, including any financial connections to any candidate or employer of any candidate and/or personal non-monetary advantages to any individual under consideration by the NomCom, and must recuse himself or herself from subsequent deliberations on the individual(s) concerned. The Chair, in consultation with the NomCom Subcommittee on Conflict of Interest, shall counsel the delegate as to any additional steps to be taken to resolve the conflict.

    2. Nominating Committee Standards of Conduct

      • Each NomCom delegate is expected to pursue the responsibilities of the Committee, to comply with the rules and procedures established by the Committee, and to support the decisions the Committee makes.
      • NomCom delegates are expected to actively recruit highly qualified candidates for consideration by the committee, and to encourage those individuals to serve.
      • NomCom delegates may not attribute any confidential statements, positions, or other communications.
      • NomCom delegates must not have any pre-existing commitments concerning the nomination of any particular candidates or potential candidates.
      • NomCom delegates must avoid behavior that would bring the Committee into disrepute or undermine or interfere with deliberations or the integrity of the process by which the Committee makes its selections or decisions.
      • NomCom delegates will safeguard all internal NomCom communications concerning the candidates and treat them as private, confidential, and for the use of immediate Committee delegates and ICANN org staff that supports the NomCom (NomCom Support) only, without exception.
      • NomCom delegates will not disclose outside of the Committee any of the discussions, deliberations, communications, records, and notes about the candidates. Further, NomCom delegates will not disclose outside of the Committee the identities of the candidates under consideration by NomCom, unless NomCom as a whole has decided to do so and the explicit consent of the candidate(s) in question has been obtained.
      • When using electronic means for origination, transmission, and storage of committee materials, NomCom delegates will take special security steps to safeguard the confidentiality and data integrity of such materials. These include but are not limited to: (a) maintaining personal control over all computers used in connection with NomCom work, (b) notifying the NomCom Chair in the event of any compromise or suspected compromise of committee materials, or if the compromise or suspected compromise relates to the NomCom Chair, notifying such person as may be designated by the NomCom to receive such notification, (c) complying with national law provisions affecting Personal Data.
      • NomCom delegates shall destroy all confidential materials related to the work of the Committee, when the work of the Committee has ended or when no longer serving on the NomCom.
      • Notwithstanding the foregoing paragraph, the NomCom acknowledges that individual NomCom delegates may utilize their own individual or their employer's email account while conducting duties pertaining to the NomCom, which may have backups or archives enabled. NomCom delegates shall only be obligated to destroy confidential materials that have been backed up or archived to the extent it is reasonably feasible for them to do so, without placing undue burden on the NomCom delegates, their employers, or any technical service provider involved in the handling of email backups or archives.

A note about our terms of service:

We have updated our electronic terms of service to provide greater transparency and align with laws applicable to us. Learn more.

This site uses cookies to deliver an efficient user experience and to help us see how the site is used. Learn more.OK

Domain Name System
Internationalized Domain Name ,IDN,"IDNs are domain names that include characters used in the local representation of languages that are not written with the twenty-six letters of the basic Latin alphabet ""a-z"". An IDN can contain Latin letters with diacritical marks, as required by many European languages, or may consist of characters from non-Latin scripts such as Arabic or Chinese. Many languages also use other types of digits than the European ""0-9"". The basic Latin alphabet together with the European-Arabic digits are, for the purpose of domain names, termed ""ASCII characters"" (ASCII = American Standard Code for Information Interchange). These are also included in the broader range of ""Unicode characters"" that provides the basis for IDNs. The ""hostname rule"" requires that all domain names of the type under consideration here are stored in the DNS using only the ASCII characters listed above, with the one further addition of the hyphen ""-"". The Unicode form of an IDN therefore requires special encoding before it is entered into the DNS. The following terminology is used when distinguishing between these forms: A domain name consists of a series of ""labels"" (separated by ""dots""). The ASCII form of an IDN label is termed an ""A-label"". All operations defined in the DNS protocol use A-labels exclusively. The Unicode form, which a user expects to be displayed, is termed a ""U-label"". The difference may be illustrated with the Hindi word for ""test"" — परीका — appearing here as a U-label would (in the Devanagari script). A special form of ""ASCII compatible encoding"" (abbreviated ACE) is applied to this to produce the corresponding A-label: xn--11b5bs1di. A domain name that only includes ASCII letters, digits, and hyphens is termed an ""LDH label"". Although the definitions of A-labels and LDH-labels overlap, a name consisting exclusively of LDH labels, such as""icann.org"" is not an IDN."