Serving on the NCUC EC will help me engage more with ICANN and utilize my experience in areas that I care about such as freedom of expression, privacy, and access. It is also a good time for me to be in the EC since I have earned my PhD and have more time to spare compared to last year. I must admit that I had little time to spare for NCUC in 2014 because of my doctoral research and so I am confident that I'll have more time to use for EC duties in 2015.

Provide a brief biography of recent experience, associations, and affiliations relevant to serving on the Executive Committee.
Describe the relevance of your personal and professional experience to serve on the NCUC Executive Committee,
and identify any conflicts of interests you might have.

I am a Yemeni national currently residing in Sweden where I teach mostly master students in the area of global journalism and new media at Örebro University. Much of my experience is in the area of freedom of expression online and digital journalism particularly in the Middle East. I have a degree in computer engineering so I do software development and understand various technical aspects of networks. Professionally, I started as a journalist, was the editor-in-chief of Yemen's national English-language newspaper Yemen Times during 1999-2005 and have written for The Wall Street Journal and Gulf News. Since 2006, I started focusing more on policy and social aspects of internet governance and access and did research around internet censorship and circumvention.

In 2006, I created a news aggregator and search engine for news called Yemen Portal and when it got censored by the Yemeni authorities, I did started my activism in 2009 throughAlkasir, software I created to map and circumvent censorship around the world and which awarded me TED fellowships and the Orebro University's 2010 Democracy award. My work was featured on many media including CNN, The Guardian, Voice of America, WIRED, The Fast Company, Huffington Post, Columbia Journalism Review, TEDxUU, and most recently, Fusion TV. I am still relatively new to ICANN as I have been an ICANN Fellow twice (my ICANN journey started with ICANN 46). Since then, I co-founded and currently chair ISOC-Yemen, which was recognized as an ICANN ALAC structure this year.

The EC performs several functional responsibilities for the Constituency.  
What level of time commitment can you bring to your EC role on a weekly and overall basis?  

I am able to give at least one hour per week and more when needed to carry out EC tasks and will do so to the best of my ability. I am currently working at the university as a lecturer and am a consultant in areas related to internet governance and freedom of expression with a focus on the Arab world. I traveled frequently with an average of three trips per month and have ongoing university classes, projects and other commitments. So if I am to attend EC and ICANN Meetings, I'll need to plan well in advance to ensure that I make it in person. Otherwise, I will strive to participate remotely and through mailing lists.

Considering that my candidacy is for the Asia and Pacific region, I wish to emphasize that I am not based in Yemen right now. I am based in Sweden but travel frequently to the region. I also should say that most of my strong contacts are in south west Asia. I have contacts in Iran, Pakistan, China, Indonesia, but not much beyond that.

I strongly believe in the need to engage current members and one thing that I personally am motivated to do is initiate a wiki that could help map out NCUC and how it works including the various working groups, initiatives, and meetings. Having an online wiki would be immensely useful for members, newcomers and potential members to find information that is up-to-date and easy to navigate (I wrote more on that in a separate email). Members could be updated by email with a link to the wiki's relevant page(s) for any new update would be extremely helpful as access to a particular part of the wiki could have back links to other parts that provide a thorough background. This is important because otherwise new members may get lost or be unable to understand what is going on. While useful to engage in live discussions, it is extremely difficult to sift through archived public mailing list messages.

I am also keen to initiate a light online form for newcomers to fill when applying for membership of NCUC so they could at least tell the existing members what they could contribute with, their interests, their backgrounds and other useful information.  The form could also be filled by those who are already members and want to know if they could have a place in NCUC.