auDA has given notice of an Extraordinary Meeting on August 13 to
consider constitutional amendments to forbid a "supply related person"
from being elected a director of demand class; and preventing multiple
divisions within the same corporate group from having multiple
memberships.

Presumably this is a measure to try and guard against the possibility
of unfairly unbalancing auDA's board by stacking it full of supply-side
representatives, however is the mechanism the right one? It seems to
disenfranchise legitimate community members who may be indirectly
connected with the domain name retailing business from participating as
users.

To take a personal example, when I started participating in auDA --
which I did out of personal interest -- my employer at the time was
an ISP where I worked in systems development. In this role I didn't
touch domain retailing services (back then as a reseller of M-IT) for
customers. Today under these rules presumably I would be banned from
being on the auDA Board. Is that fair or appropriate?

If you look at other kinds of organisations it is possible to serve in a
personal capacity, as well as have an organisation participate also.
Taking ISOC-AU as an example, I'd imagine a number of employees of their
corporate members are members in their own right.

Perhaps we need to reconsider different models of demand membership
of auDA if the risk of capture is that great. I don't know what the
current update of demand membership is like, but it might benefit from
some elements of the new CIRA model (see
http://www.cira.ca/en/membership/about.html) where any domain holder
can have free annual enrollment as a member.

kim