Summary

  • ICANN’s 2026 NomCom received 223 applications, up from 106 in 2025, with an application window 11 days shorter.
  • The chair says the background and skills research between anonymous review and interviews is the stage most vulnerable when application volume grows faster than the calendar.

The next committee is expected to fill nine positions across ICANN’s Board, ALAC, ccNSO and GNSO. For applicants, the process is a route into those roles; for volunteer delegates, each additional file adds work before they can recommend candidates.

The committee’s report says every application first received an anonymous read with personal details redacted. The heavier judgment came next: delegates checked backgrounds, compared skills with the descriptions supplied by the bodies seeking candidates, and prepared questions for interviews. The chair calls this “soft-dive” research the point where delegate judgment does its real work, and the first stage squeezed when applications grow faster than the calendar.

That warning has a measure. The 2026 application period closed on 18 February, leaving 17 working days before the 7 March ICANN85 Community Forum, by which time prescreening and soft dives were due to be finished. In 2025, the March forum arrived while applications were still open. The earlier 2026 schedule created a review runway, but a short one for a pool more than twice as large. The report records 47 deep-dive interviews, 20 people carried to the final stage, 11 final interviews at ICANN86 and six short lists. It does not report that any application was skipped or that a selection was compromised.

The committee attributes much of the increase to segmented outreach by open position, conducted by delegates and ICANN Communications. It also moved the application window earlier and added a workshop before the assessment stage. Yet the applicant mix sets another task for the next committee: women made up 22.4% of applicants, while three of seven 2026 selectees were women. Chair Tom Barrett identifies recruitment, rather than assessment, as the clearest challenge being handed to 2027. Those figures describe a small final group and do not, by themselves, establish whether the process was representative.

ICANN’s announcement says the next NomCom will recruit for nine positions across the Board, ALAC, ccNSO and GNSO, with applications expected to open in late December. The 2026 report therefore offers a practical baseline: a larger pool is possible, but the work required to compare candidates grows with it. The record shows a time constraint to manage, not proof that the committee failed to do so.

Sources: 2026 NomCom report; ICANN announcement on the 2027 positions