I’m delighted to see that another person had made their application to the [tag]ICANN[/tag] Board public. [tag]Wendy Grossman[/tag] is a well-known IT journalist, she’s American but lives in the UK and she appears to have the same philosophy as I do about what ICANN has to do and why there is a need for someone that believes in openness and, crucially, has extensive experience in *how* to be open, on the Board.
Wendy has used her weekly net.wars column to outline her perspective on ICANN and the reason she is standing. A very brief snippet that gives a feeling for her basic point is: “As a policy-making body ICANN has the endemic structural problem of lacking the checks and balances that constrain a democratic government’s behavior…”
Another: “It would be a betrayal of every principle on which the Internet was founded for the Internet’s most important single point of failure to be completely controlled by a self-selecting body whose inner deliberations and functioning remain obscure.”
The same point has been made by countless other individuals, official bodies and even national governments. By standing for the Board, Wendy is making clear that she is prepared to get her hands dirty and by making her standing and statement public she is adding to the criticism of the current system of nominating Board members which is entirely secretive and does not outline who has applied or what they have said, or disclose any of its procedures or decision-making processes, or to say why it has chosen someone or not chosen someone.
