Summary

  • ICANN opened nominations on 2 November for its Community Excellence Award. The deadline is 8 January 2027 at 23:59 UTC; the recipient is due to be named at ICANN88 in March.
  • A nominee needs a record of long service and work across ICANN bodies. Self-nominations are excluded. Supporting Organization and Advisory Committee chairs appoint the community-member panel that uses a merit-based point system.

The door is open; the scoring table has a seating plan

ICANN wants the community to name its own standouts. That sounds pleasantly democratic until one asks who decides what excellence looks like. The 2 November call invites nominations until 8 January, then hands the files to a panel of community members appointed by the chairs of its Supporting Organizations and Advisory Committees. The nominators propose names. The chairs choose the evaluators. The evaluators award points.

The published ideal has a shape: at least five years in the ICANN community, service on multiple working groups or committees, and significant collaboration with more than one Supporting Organization or Advisory Committee. The scoring criteria go further than attendance. The panel looks for consensus-building across groups, fair and collegial dialogue with unfamiliar stakeholders, and sustained volunteer work for the multistakeholder model. A nomination must explain the candidate's case in detail. A candidate cannot nominate themselves.

That design rewards the person who does the slow work between meeting rooms. It also makes the sponsor consequential. A capable volunteer who has crossed those rooms still needs someone else to make the case, and the case then passes through a jury appointed by the leaders of those same institutional rooms. The chain is visible in ICANN's announcement; the list of panel members and their individual scores are absent from that announcement. The first concrete public test of this cycle will be the panel's composition and the explanation attached to the eventual choice.

The frame is familiar. ICANN's 10 November 2025 call for the previous award used the same five-year, cross-body and no-self-nomination requirements, with chairs appointing the panel. The rules are familiar; the 2027 nomination window is new. The 2027 award is scheduled for ICANN88 in Lisbon in March. Before then, the question is who gets nominated by others and who gets to score them.