ページ履歴

The Board Candidate Evaluation Committee (BCEC) has determined that the candidates on the electoral slate are all qualified and experienced to serve the role of an ICANN Board director as per the criteria of the selection process.  Each of the candidates brings different strengths and skills based on his or her set of experiences.  All are interested in addressing the public interest deficit in the decisions of the board and to strengthen the voice and views of the Internet end user in the board’s decision-making.

I believe that I am the candidate that brings the strongest diversity to the ICANN Board, not just in terms of geography and culture, but also in terms of uniqueness of experiences and achievements.  I also have a special ability to reach out and connect with people, particularly those from the developing world.  This will help the Board tremendously in ICANN’s globalization effort, which is meant to enhance the organization’s legitimacy and acceptance among stakeholders around the world.

My priorities if selected as the At-Large Board Director:

(1) Ensure a strong strategic position for ICANN by strengthening its legitimacy

Ensuring a strong strategic position for ICANN can be achieved by strengthening its legitimacy.  ICANN’s legitimacy can be strengthened by ensuring that ICANN: (a) implements the recommendations of the Accountability and Transparency Review Team 2; (b) incorporates a strong end-user orientation in its decision-making; and (c) develops measures to address risks related to the possible take-over of its role with options that instill the greatest confidence across global Internet users, particularly end users.

(2) Ensure globalization of ICANN with emphasis on strengthening non-financial stakeholder participation that will enhance the multistakeholder model of engagement 

The global Internet community does not have equal access and opportunity to participate in ICANN.  There are clear imbalances of representation in decision-making structures as well as policy-making activities.  Despite the openness of ICANN, high participation barriers exist for stakeholders with no financial stakes, particularly those from developing countries.  In the urgency to globalize ICANN, which is another means of enhancing legitimacy, focus is required on ensuring the meaningful participation of stakeholders with no financial stakes from all parts of the world.  In particular, attention is needed to ensure that those from developing regions can participate meaningfully in ICANN’s governance and policy-development activities.  This would necessitate (among others) ensuring that ICANN has effective outreach, engagement and capacity-building of stakeholders with appropriate language support as well as ensuring that policy development processes have a balanced representation of stakeholders before proceeding.  All of this will serve to strengthen ICANN’s multistakeholder model of engagement.

(3) Advocate for a review of the new gTLD program and support continued efforts to enable Internationalized Domain Names and their universal acceptance. 

Before contemplating new gTLD program expansion or future rounds of applications, a thorough review of the program is needed to address and correct aspects that the At-Large community and other communities with no financial stakes feel have under-served the public-interest.  In addition, efforts to make Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) and their variants available and usable for Internet users worldwide must be supported to serve the majority of the global population, who do not use the Latin script.

The At-Large Board member cannot "represent" the ALAC or At-Large. Once appointed, the director is there purely on his/her own. However, At-Large was given a voting seat on the Board to allow the issues relevant to users to be factored into the debates. To do that, a person must be selected who can best represent those interests.

ICANN background:

• 8 years as a volunteer to At-Large, 6 years of which as a NomCom appointee to the ALAC, ALAC Liaison to the GNSO for all 8 years. I have also held several ALAC leadership roles.
• Principal author of countless statements issues by the ALAC over the last 8 years demonstrating my understanding of the issues important to At-Large.
• In depth knowledge of ICANN policy issues including the new gTLD program (and strong critic when it has not served the public interest).      
• Good working relationships with people in many diverse areas of ICANN.

Professional background:

• Technical as well as management experience.
• One of a handful of people that introduced the Internet to Canada.
• Volunteer in technology-related organizations for decades, including serving on the Internet Society Board of Trustees.
• 6 years as a volunteer to the Internet Society working with and then running Network Training Workshops for people from developing countries. We trained people from over 140 countries who were instrumental in bringing the Internet to their countries. Alumni include government ministers, ICANN Board members and ICANN employees.
• Much of my career has focused on technology usability and recently authored a chapter of a book on web usability issues related to using the Web to enhance developing economies.
• After my retirement from McGill, I became a consultant on the use of technology in developing economies (ICT4D), and worked in Africa, South Asia and Central America. A paper on using technology to alleviate poverty was one of the first on the topic (http://www.eldis.org/fulltext/sidaictpoverty.pdf).

Strengths related to the Board position:

• Very strong understanding of ICANN and its various components, of At-Large, and of the needs of Internet users.
• Proven ability to work with others, and to influence outcomes. I am generally viewed as a thoughtful and articulate person, and I am in a very strong position to enter the Board and immediately be effective. Three of my references for my Expression of Interest for this Board position were current or former ICANN Board members, and their endorsements speak well to my ability to quickly become an effective Board member.
• My background with both the ISOC training workshops and my ICT4D consulting has made me acutely aware of and focus on the issues that are important in the developing world.
• I am free of any relationship with those who stand to make money off of ICANN's decisions, and will not have any conflicts in carrying out my mandate.
• My track record of dedication (in both time and effort) to ICANN and At-Large is well known, and I will put the same energy into presenting the needs of users on the Board.

In short, I do not believe that any other candidate can match all of my qualifications and I will not only be a good Board member, but an outstanding At-Large Board member.

If I am selected, I can make a number of commitments:

• I will not disappear, but commit to staying in touch with the ALAC, At-Large and RALOs, through both face-to-face meetings and teleconferences. That is the only way to ensure that I am aware of issues important to At-Large.
• You will regularly hear from me about Board activities and my participation, and raising issues that I believe that At-Large may want to focus on.
• I will work to make sure that the bottom-up nature of ICANN is preserved in fact and not only in words. This is key to ICANN's ability to continue to exist and meet its obligations.
• I will work on ensuring that there is strong representation in ICANN from all parts of the Internet ecosystem, and that lack of funding and lack of English are not impassable road-blocks
• Aside from ensuring that issues related to users are considered in all Board deliberations, I will work to improve the Board’s and ICANN’s transparency and continually ensure that public interest issues are paramount.

My Expression of Interest has far more detail for those who are interested.

In endorsing me, Avri Doria called me the most “positively disruptive” candidate. Internet end-users need an assertive voice, awareness of issues, willingness to speak truth to power, and ability to forge consensus. I bring to the role:

Vision:

 I have consistently demonstrated a grasp of end-user needs and championed them throughout ICANN, participating in all activities related to user rights and trust. I remain skeptical about public benefit from the gTLD expansion and ICANN’s ability to enforce its own rules. “Public Interest Commitments” are useless. And Fadi’s call for multi-EQUAL-stakeholderism must be realized if ICANN is to be sustainable.

 Collaborative Innovation:

 Putting vision into action sometimes requires unique approaches. I played a primary role in many such advancements, including ALAC’s first Summit, first White Paper, its Applicant Support effort, and the current cross-community Internet Governance group. I’ve demonstrated capability for creative thinking that produces results. 

Clarity:

Progressive ideas go nowhere if not expressed clearly and persuasively. The  numerous ALAC statements, white papers, communiques and other works of which I was primary author are known for precision, substance, and lack of clutter. Such style is necessary to inform and persuade -- inside the closed ICANN boardroom and beyond.

I encourage readers to view my original candidate statement for more detail.

I consider all of my interventions that are well received by the At-Large and the ICANN community as a whole as important achievements.   Nevertheless, in terms of greatest impact, I would say that my advocacy on Internationalized Domain Names, including my contributions to the Root Zone Label Generation Rules project that bridged the concerns of the technical community with the needs of language communities worldwide, to be the most important as it will have the widest impact on the global population.

I have taken part in far too many activities to try to rate them in priority order. Certainly among those that come to mind are the two GNSO PDPs that I initiated related to successfully abolishing domain tasting (the ability to sample MILLIONS of domains for monetization at no cost), and protecting registrants whose domain accidentally expire. In both cases, the problems had been around for years, and talked about endlessly, but no one had taken any steps to stop them until I acted.

These come to mind if only due to the immense amount of work required to address them. However, I have been involved with dozens (or perhaps hundreds) of other issues where the combination of knowledge and my willingness to put time and effort into an issue have allowed At-Large to make a forceful statement or take other action, and in many cases, this has resulted in real change that may not have happened in my absence.

However, I believe that my most important achievement is one that is harder to quantify. At the time I entered At-Large, it was considered a joke within much of ICANN. Although the efforts of a number of people were crucial, I believe that my presence, my actions and my words within the ALAC, the GNSO and ICANN in general can be credited with much of the turn-around where we are now viewed by most as a legitimate and important part of ICANN.

I have had many achievements within my ICANN history in which I may find pride: however, for the most important I would have to indicate my service as Co-Chair of the first At-Large Summit in 2009, Co-author of the Summit Communiqué, and part of the core organizing group that fought – against significant opposition – for the first Summit to ever happen.

This was most important because the Summit was a turning point and major milestone for the At-Large Community. It gave a new voice to At-Large, and completed the transition of ALAC from an appointed body to one that was representative of a broad and globally-diverse community of end-users. Activity started at the Summit served as a catalyst for deeper At-Large involvement in ICANN policy, which eventually led to:

• Cross-community work on Applicant Support in the field of new gTLDs (involving the first-ever direct GAC/ALAC collaboration)
• Direct At-Large participation in the gTLD objection process
• Greater and more frequent direct contact between the ALAC and the GNSO, GAC and ICANN Board
• Greater awareness within ICANN of global and multilingual issues
• Significant growth in the number of ALSs
• Transition on the ICANN Board from ALAC liaison to At-Large-elected Director

There is still far to go and much to be done, but I believed that the first Summit, in its creation and its execution, created inspiration which remains to this day.

Three other important accomplishment that deserve mention are:

1. From my time as the first Chair of NARALO, In a legacy that continues to this day, the North American Region welcomes individual members of the public who are not ALS members, and strives to make decisions via collaboration and consensus rather than confrontation and voting.
2. Co-creating (along with Jean-Jacques) the Future Challenges Working Group, an innovative "think tank" designed to engage in longer-term policy analysis and enable At-Large to play a part in setting ICANN priorities rather than simply respond to the priorities of the domain industry. The first output of that group was the "R3" White Paper, which I initiated and served as lead writer in collaboration with others.
3. Acting as champion and initiator of the Cross Community Working Group to provide an ICANN-wide response to the external challenges to ICANN's legitimacy, and specifically to provide a defense of multi-stakeholderism to the Netmundial meeting.

During my service on the ICANN Board, and on its President's Strategy Committee, I had an active role in drafting the "Improving Institutional Confidence" document, some recommendations of which later found their way into the Affirmation of Commitments, but are also reflected in the CEO's recent statement about ICANN's need to further "internationalize" (F. Chéhadé announced a new ICANN legal entity to be set up in Geneva). Also on the Board, I helped set up the Public Participation Committee, of which I was the first Chair (significant improvements in remote participation, in the Public Forum, and in linguistic services). And for more than 2 years, I constantly pleaded for Board oversight on the international and institutional dimensions of ICANN, which at the time were taken care of by the CEO and a handful of senior Staff: my suggestion was finally accepted, resulting in the creation of the Global Relationships Committee. I was also active in a number of Review Working Groups: chair of the ccNSO Review; member of the ALAC Review which recommended 2 voting members to be nominated by At-Large (this resulted in the creation of "Seat 15"). On the Board, I often made the point that it was time to consider the ALAC not as some "junior partner", but as an essential element of ICANN's very legitimacy. I also strongly supported funding for the first At-Large Summit.

During my service on the ALAC, I introduced the notion that, in parallel with the usual work of this Advisory Committee (responding to calls for comments, drafting statements, consulting with other ACs and SOs), it would be in the interest of the user community for the ALAC to take a more autonomous and longer-term view of challenges to the Internet and to ICANN. Acting upon my suggestion, the ALAC created the "Future challenges working group" (FCWG), of which Evan Leibovitch and I were appointed co-Chairs. The FCWG produced a document, "Making ICANN Relevant, Responsive and Respected" (R3), unanimously accepted by the ALAC as its first White Paper, and which has enjoyed quite a wide distribution.

During ICANN-49 in Singapore, the FCWG will be hosting a public session on its new work, "The Internet as a space of freedom: the user perspective". It is hoped and expected that the result of this work may contribute, in a significant way, to the current debate on the need to place the user at the centre of Internet preoccupations and processes. Without this user dimension, the multi-equal-stakeholder model would be unrepresentative of the evolving Internet.

Although this is a very small contribution, I am also pleased that the over-arching theme chosen by my colleagues for the Atlas-2 Summit (London, June 2014) is the one I suggested, "The global Internet: the user perspective".

ICANN Bylaws

The ICANN Bylaws Article XI needs to be changed so that the ICANN Board is required to respond to formal advice from all Advisory Committees in a timely matter, explaining what action it took, and the rationale for doing so.  Currently, the ICANN Board is only required to respond in this particular way to the Governmental Advisory Committee.  Changing the Bylaws will ensure that formal advice from the end-user community is given weight and careful consideration.  In addition, the same standard applied to formal advice from Advisory Committees related to Security and Stability will ensure that the ICANN Board does not make decisions without factoring the security and stability considerations of the Domain Name System, which affect all Internet users.

Rules governing the new gTLD Program

The new gTLD Program needs to be reviewed to address aspects of public interest deficits that became apparent since the program implementation began in 2012.  The ALAC has flagged several issues of concern related to the program.  These issues need to be addressed (before proceeding with future rounds of applications) and will affect the rules that govern the program.  Some of the issues include: poor outreach and uptake in developing regions, a problematic objections process, a priority evaluation process for community applications that evades providing evidence that it has sufficient community expertise in the evaluation panel, the approval of IDN Top Level Domains without factoring variants, the limitation that parties not directly harmed by a registry violation of public interest commitment cannot file a compliance report/complaint, etc.

It would be presumptuous to say that *I* will make changes in Board procedures. But I will certainly work hard to see that done. Targets include:

• Although we have improved a lot in recent years, the Board is still opaque and not transparent. That needs to improve.
• ALAC statements are often not given the review that they deserve. I will work to fix that. The (Accountability and Transparency Review Team 2 (ATRT2). Has recommended that the Board must formally respond to such statements, but we need to go a step further and make sure they are properly considered.

To me, two issues require priority attention:

• "Accountability and Transparency" within ICANN must be more than a committee, it must become a credo. The Board should, as a minimum, accept and implement the recommendations of the Accountability and Transparency Review Team 2" (ATRT2) as well as heed its observations.
• I have seen first-hand, a number of times, the ill effects of community input not being properly or accurately presented to the Board, resulting in poor decisions. Anyone providing policy input to the Board must have a manner to review staff representations to ensure accuracy and lack of bias. 

If chosen for Seat 15, I would want to make sure that the Board holds itself to the same high standards that are required of the community, its ACs and SOs (for instance, how are Board Committee Chairs appointed?). With an open mind, I would demand full information about a number of items crucial to the future of the Internet and of ICANN: the IANA function and contract; objectives, methods and calendar for the further internationalization of ICANN; the upcoming consultations between i-organizations (Sao Paolo and beyond); the need to promote "default settings" that respect privacy and fundamental rights of Internet users; encouraging efforts currently under way at IETF for technical solutions to user rights (encryption); taking stock of the New gTLD programme; helping ICANN migrate from the silo mentality to a more fluid community involvement.

As I have indicated in a previous question, I believe that I am the candidate that brings the strongest diversity to the ICANN Board, not just in terms of geography and culture, but also in terms of uniqueness of experiences and achievements.  I have a special ability to reach out and connect with people, particularly those from the developing world.  This will help the Board tremendously in ICANN’s globalization effort, which is meant to enhance the organization’s legitimacy and acceptance among stakeholders around the world.

I bring a number of things to the Board:

I would be one of the rare Board members who had recently served as a non-management volunteer in ICANN. That give me perspective that is VERY different from long-serving Board members, those from outside with no ICANN experience, and those who had spent years as Chairs within other parts of ICANN. At the same time, I have a strong understanding of the requirements and constraints on a Board member.

I have broad technical and administrative skills, and can very quickly assimilate new knowledge when needed. This “quick study” ability will allow me to approach the diverse range of subjects that come before the Board, and enter into intelligent debate even if it is an area with which I have little past experience.

Moreover, I believe that the Board lacks such generalist members. Knowledge in a tightly focused area, the type of skills often listed as being needed by the Board, is not sufficient to address the wide range of topics that come before them.

Another strength is that I am viewed as being balanced and thoughtful. I do not have a reputation of being a radical or being “over the top”. That combined with my existing good working relationship with a number of Board members puts me in a very strong position to influence and change opinion.

The existing Board already includes a diverse set of highly skilled individuals. My addition is one of vision and approach, as described in question #1 above.

I come as a candidate deeply rooted in the needs of end users around the world, with a career focused on social action, entrepreneurship, and a demonstrable passion for an open, accessible and trusted Internet. What I would bring to the Board – that it most lacks now – is a clear articulation of the global public interest necessary to inform, convince and effect real end-user-focused change throughout its decisions.

As some members of the Board have pointed out over the years, the notion of a "skills set" for the Board must be treated with caution, if only because terms served by Directors partly overlap, in what amounts to "a permanently unstable equation". With respect, rather than answering the question "without you the Board will lack what skills", I offer the view that, whatever the composition of the Board at any given moment, I could contribute in the following ways:

• heightened awareness of, and attention to the global public interest, by emphasising the Internet users' perspective (fundamental rights, basic principles of good governance, "default settings" in software and applications so as to protect privacy, fair representation) ;
• the ability to place Internet and ICANN challenges in the wider context of social, geopolitical and economic transformation;
• a high-level experience in international affairs, both in conceptual and in practical terms;
• familiarity with high-level cooperation in diverse professional contexts, with colleagues from various cultures and walks of life;
• an operational balance between careful listening, independent thinking, clear analysis of challenges, and problem-solving;
• gravitas and humor in equal measure, where required.