Position: Chair
I am Stephanie Perrin, resident of Pakenham, in the Ottawa Valley, Ontario, Canada. I am honoured to be nominated for the position of Chair of the NCSG. I am a privacy and information policy consultant, retired from a 30 year career in the federal public service of Canada, where I worked for most of that time on privacy and information policy issues in the department responsible for telecommunications. I retired in 2013 and completed my doctorate in Information studies at the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto, Toronto Canada in 2018. My dissertation was on the contention between ICANN and the data commissioners of the world, over the WHOIS directory. I have been engaged with civil society for many years, and am on the Advisory Board of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC).
I was recruited to come and volunteer as a privacy expert on the Experts Working Group on a new directory service for gTLD registration data by Kathy Kleiman of NCUC in 2013, and the privacy struggle here was so interesting that I became hooked. The committee I was on worked very hard for a year and a half, and I joined the NCSG in 2014 and ran successfully for the GNSO Council shortly thereafter. (I also changed the topic of my dissertation to the WHOIS struggle.) I have worked in a great many policy development processes since then, including the WHOIS conflicts with law implementation advisory group, the cross community working group on policy and implementation, the privacy/proxy services working group, and the RDS PDP which has worked strenuously for two years on the WHOIS policy and is now suspended.
I don’t believe that I have any conflicts of interest at the moment. I am not actively seeking business in my consulting practice, and will avoid any potential work which might conflict with NCSG and ICANN. I am working with my University on a research project on the utility of standards in managing third party access to personal registration data, which of course is central to the WHOIS struggle, but I have no economic or professional interest in the results of that research. I believe that I have been very active since arriving at ICANN, and have the necessary background in its policies and procedures to play a useful role as the Chair. As an executive in a large government, I have had the benefit of quite a bit of training in administrative procedures, finance, metrics and program evaluation, human resources management, and in risk management. I hope some of that background can be useful to our organization, and it helps me analyze some of the puzzles we face at ICANN. Since I worked in the Department of Communications for most of my career, and was working closely with US and European counterparts during the formation of ICANN, I am quite familiar with its history, and the policy driving its creation.
I have observed the hard work of previous Chairs of NCSG, and of its two constituencies, since I arrived at ICANN. I am grateful that a lot of terrific work has been done recently, in stabilizing our Charter and some of our policies. I would like to see further development in our ability to train and develop people to take positions of leadership, and to contribute meaningfully to the PDPs and cross community working groups. This is a difficult problem; we have had a burnout issue since I arrived at ICANN, and the job of participating appears not to be getting any easier, as there seems to be more to learn every year. I came to ICANN with quite a deep background, and it still took me over a year to figure out what is happening. We need to work with ICANN to help our members who are interested in participating, to develop skills and knowledge. I plan to make this a priority.
I also think that we spend more time than is necessary in fractious debate amongst ourselves and between our constituencies. We pride ourselves in speaking our minds, and I support that 100%, but we can stand to work on our diplomatic and empathic skills, in my opinion. Most of us have feelings, and when we volunteer our time we prefer to work with a feeling of respect and solidarity towards each other. I will try to speak plainly about what I think, but with respect to all. I will actively encourage others to do the same. You may call me Grandma if you like, that is what I am. (I believe that disclosure should cover my requirement in this candidate’s statement to tell you my gender.)
I believe in a consultative approach….first of all, I don’t plan to do all the work and that includes the thinking! I would like to know what the members think about issues. If you have ideas about those two priorities I just listed, the burnout and development problem, and the solidarity and respect issue, please let me know. My third priority will be to continue the excellent progress that has been made on our contributions to the GNSO policy process, and make sure that our approach to staffing the policy development processes and preparing comments is as good as it can be, and that we are doing what we can to support our folks who are doing the work.
A major part of the NCSG job is administrative, working closely with the leaders in NPOC and NCUC. I hope to build on the ongoing work of developing transparent procedures, and furthering the growing harmony between the constituencies. Our outreach efforts must be focused on having a meaningful presence, not just scooping up new members who remain bewildered about who we are and what we do. We need people to be engaged in the real work of ICANN, managing the DNS, which sadly can be boring and tedious at times, not to mention rather technical. We need to ask ourselves and our members why they stay members, or why they leave. There is a growing gulf between the handful of members who are actively working as volunteers in the policy processes, and those who may well be interested but have no time to take an active role. For those people, what do they need to stay engaged enough to read our email list? Do they care what the EPDP is?
I believe I have enough time to do this job. As indicated, I am retired and not particularly busy as a consultant. I am on the EPDP and the WHOIS Review team, both of which will demand some of my time. We have a great team on the EPDP, so I am confident that this will not take as much of my time as the previous RDS working group did. I propose to find a replacement for myself on the Auction Proceeds CCWG, and the PPSAI IRT, where I have been participating during the past year. I will of course be following the GNSO Council meetings closely, but without the homework I had to do as a Councilor.
Please do not hesitate to ask me any questions, or to contact me by email.
Stephanie Perrin
