Consultation on Increasing the Size of the ARIN Board of Trustees

Posted: Tuesday, 01 March 2022

The Board of Trustees maintains authority over the scope, mission, and along with the President and Chief Executive Officer establishes ARIN’s strategic direction and fiscal oversight. The Board also has oversight authority of the nomination, appointment, and election of individuals to Board committees and similar roles.

Over the past two years, as part of its fiduciary duties, the ARIN Board of Trustees (“Board”) has undertaken a review of ARIN’s governance structures, including the size of the Board. As part of this effort, an independent, outside consultant was engaged to review ARIN’s governance structures and provide recommendations.

One recommendation from this governance review is to increase the size of the Board to strengthen its capacity to provide strategic and fiscal oversight of ARIN. Increasing the Board size will:

  1. Increase the range and depth of overlapping skills and governance experience on the Board to augment its capability. Specific areas for strengthening include cybersecurity, risk management, finance, legal, technology and strategic oversight. This will require more than 6 elected seats at the board table to provide this experience.
  2. Increase diversity of thought on issues impacting the community, limit the possibility of board capture, and balance the time commitment required of our community volunteers.
  3. Ensure sufficient board capacity to engage in more focused, efficient governance activities, including participation in these additional valuable committees (e.g. Governance, Risk & Cybersecurity, and Strategy & Foresight) to manage the work and oversight duties of the Board, and to take on work that is requested by, and important to, the community as it evolves.

The budgetary impact will not be material, as the only increased costs would be for travel costs involved in attending in-person Board meetings. The number of Board members traveling to any RIR meeting would not change.

Board Proposal

ARIN will increase the number of elected voting seats of the Board from six to nine. The currently available appointed voting seat would be removed.

The additional Board seats would be added in a staggered format with one additional seat for election in each of the upcoming election cycles starting with the 2022 election period.

ARIN seeks community feedback on this proposed increase to the size of the Board. This consultation will remain open for 15 days.

Please provide comments to arin-consult@arin.net. You can subscribe to this mailing list at: http://lists.arin.net/mailman/listinfo/arin-consult.

Discussion on arin-consult@arin.net will close on 15 March 2022.

Regards,

John Curran
President and CEO
American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN)