A "Special Meeting of the Board" was held on the morning (California time) of June 13, 2002. The term "special" generally means that the meeting was held by telephone, as was the case here. This note was originally penned on that same date.
This meeting was called rather suddenly - the next regularly scheduled meeting being a mere two weeks away. If one looks at the agenda - approving minutes of past meetings and the appointment of a new person to the Conflicts Committee - one might get the impression that ICANN's management was getting rather nervous about me being the only member of the conflicts committee. More on that later.
As for the resolutions:
I voted "yes" on the minutes of May 13. I abstained on the minutes of February 12 and April 22 because I had missed those meetings and have no independent knowledge about the correctness of the minutes of those meetings.
I voted "yes" on this resolution.
The Conflicts committee of ICANN's Board of Directors nominally consists of three Directors. However, one director who was on the committee has resigned from the Board. Over the last month or so I had suggested in several e-mails that the board ought to fill the vacancy.
However, certain additional information is illuminating.
There is the question of why it was deemed so important to hold a telephone meeting of the board to fill this vacancy when in two weeks there would be a regularly scheduled meeting of the board. Worldwide telephone bridges are expensive and so is the cumulative time spent by people to participate in the meeting. My own opinion is that this had something to do with me being the only non-disqualified member of the conflicts committee on a particular matter and because I had begun to gather information on that matter.
Under ICANN's Conflicts of Interest Policy Directors are required to make disclosures of material conflicts and also to make a yearly statement to the Conflicts committee itself (note, this disclosure is to the committee itself, not to ICANN management.) These disclosures have, in fact, been requested of all Directors and the request document stated quite clearly on its face that the disclosures were to be distributed to the members of the Conflicts Committee.
However, these yearly statements were delivered to management and have never been provided to this Director despite the clear language of the Conflicts policy.
On May 19, 2002 I sent a written request to ICANN management for these statements. However, my request has gone unacknowledged, much less answered. I do not think that I would be exceeding the bounds of reason were I to come to the opinion that ICANN's management is intentionally obstructing this Director in the performance of his duties on ICANN's Conflicts of Interest committee.