ARIN Governance Working Group Consultation Series

Posted: Wednesday, 01 December 2021

ARIN’s Board of Trustees established a Governance Working Group (GWG) in January 2020 to assess the structure and operation of ARIN’s Board. To complete this work, the GWG will be presenting a series of four consultations, with the first one starting today, to gather community input on proposed improvements to ARIN governance.

An article about the formation and work of the GWG is available on the ARIN Blog to provide background on the work that led to this series of recommendations. Each of these consultations will be held over a period of two business weeks and the resulting feedback will be factored into implementation of any subsequent changes to ARIN’s Bylaws.

The topics of the four consultations are as follows:

  • Term Limits for the Board of Trustees — Proposing to impose term limits to balance continuity with healthy turnover, introduce differing views and fresh perspectives, and increase opportunities for participation on the Board.
  • Changing the ARIN Election Process from “First to the Post” Voting to a “Single Transferable Vote” Balloting Process – Proposing a new balloting process to provide greater voting choice and allow ranking candidates in order of preference to achieve more proportional election results with no wasted votes.
  • Improvements to the Nomination Committee Process and Procedure – Proposing changes that will support greater Board independence, transparency, and impartiality.
  • Increasing the Board Size – We recognize that this has been discussed before, but the evolving complexities of ARIN’s governance have stretched the capacity and skills of the Board with increased workload. We are reopening this discussion with the community to propose changes to strengthen specific areas of expertise on the Board, including corporate governance, finance, cybersecurity, and risk management.

We hope that by breaking these consultations out separately and conducting them successively that the community will be able to focus of the merits of each proposed change independently. During these consultations the GWG will be available to answer questions to provide clarity on the elements of the proposed improvements, and we will be using the feedback of the community to advise the Board on the final decision regarding each consultation. We look forward to robust community discussion as each consultation is conducted over the coming weeks.

Regards,

ARIN’s Board of Trustees, Governance Working Group
Nancy Carter, Peter Harrison, and Catherine Middleton