After wading through the various IANA Notice of Inquiry (NOI) submissions I thought I would take a break and do a secondary review of the recently concluded ICANN regional meeting in San Francisco. In doing this review there were three things that kind of jumped out at me as still missing in action:

Annual Report

The still missing and now seven month past due annual report. The continued delay of this report is really unfortunate as one of the important sections I usually turn to provides key information regarding senior staff compensation. However, given the pending release of ICANN’s 990 next month most of this information should be made available. Unlike the annual report, failure to timely produce an organization’s tax return does have some real consequences.

Rod Beckstrom’s Statement on Abstaining on .XXX

Rod Beckstrom was one of four directors to abstain on the ICM Registry contract. During the Friday Board meeting Rod stated that he would “submit written remarks for the record on my abstention.” Under the ICANN bylaws this statement is not required until the minutes for this meeting are formalized which likely will not be until 21 April 2011. Given that other volunteer directors provided their abstentions on the record, it is unfortunate that the community has to wait for Rod’s statement.

In light of ICANN’s IANA NOI submission calling for increased openness and transparency in connection with IANA services, one would hope that ICANN would consider amending its bylaws to require more timely abstention statements from directors. In fact my reading of the current bylaws do not even require a director that abstains because of a conflict to state the reason why. Again it is hard to reconcile these bylaw provisions with ICANN’s IANA NOI submission.

Another reason for the more timely production of these statements is that under Article IV Section 2.5 of the ICANN bylaws Reconsideration Requests can only be filed within 30 days after Board or staff action/inaction. It is not inconceivable where an ICANN director’s recusal/non-recusal could constitute an actionable event.

One other potential future ICANN trivia question which is still being verified. What was the first ICANN new gTLD registry contract NOT to be signed by ICANN’s then acting President and CEO. Who is Rod Beckstrom. However, given the specific wording of the ICANN Board resolution on ICM authorizing the General Counsel to sign the agreement, this was not exactly a surprise.

Singapore Meeting Information

While I understand that Singapore was only recently selected to host the 41st ICANN regional meeting, there still appears no information on the ICANN website regarding hotels, venue etc. Considering that this meeting is scheduled to start in approximately ten weeks, hopefully ICANN will begin providing some information sooner as oppose to later. Especially for all those people that want to join in the June 20th “party.”