Academia Representation on NomCom

[Roberto Gaetano <roberto_gaetano@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

First of all, I would like to remind that the reason for assigning a seat on 
the NomCom to the research and scientific academia community was to balance the 
representation of the different stakeholders. In the current situation, it is 
of grat importance to have the contribution from academia, bringing a voice 
that is different from other parts of the internet community, and the 
elimination of this seat could produce a NomCom that misses an important voice.
My understanding is that the main reason for the elimination of this seat is 
the observation that over time no body has been created or appointed to take 
care of this representation, and therefore the Board, via the Board Governance 
Committee (BGC), has taken the task of making the selection. I have to say 
that, having chaired the BGC, the selection of the representative of the 
academia has been indeed time consuming, but never an impossible task, and that 
I have received always good feedback from some NomCom members about the quality 
of the representatives chosen.
This said, I agree that the BGC cannot take forever this task: a committee of 
the Board cannot have permanently the power to influence a decision of the 
NomCom.
However, with the review of the GNSO a couple of years ago, and with the 
definition of a new structure based on stakeholder groups, that can favour the 
creation of new constituencies, I believe that there is the possibility to give 
a chance to the scientific and research academia to create a constituency, and 
it would be worthed to suspend the decision of eliminating this seat at least 
for one or two years, to see whether such a constituency will be formed.
I see that the charter of the Non-Contractual Non-Commercial Stakeholder Group 
is also going through the public comment period. I see that in that charter the 
formation of constituencies is defined by a specific process, and it is my 
understanding that the creation of new constituencies will eventually take 
place. So, considering that we have now a mechanism and the real possibility 
for having an organized presence of the academic and scientific research 
community in the internet policy making process, I wonder why at this very 
moment we eliminate the possibility for this community to perform the task that 
was assigned to it by the ICANN reform process.
Best regards,
Roberto Gaetano