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Region of residence: Dublin, Ireland
Gender: Male
Employment: Independent Cyber Security and Privacy Expert
Having spent my early years of employment working deep in the technical world, playing with bits and bytes and designing complex and secure networks for a living I have gradually built up a varied and cross functional background.
Having followed the work at ICANN for a number of years, I got fully involved in policy development at ICANN during the IANA Stewardship process. I intended to be a voice of Security and Privacy on the working group, making sure that the decisions that were taken were in line with best practises. Working on the CWG I quickly realised that the NCSG was to be my home in ICANN as we agreed on so many positions and I had built up close working relationships with a number of NCSG members.
Since I have joined NCSG I have been a strong voice for your interests, even when they disagreed with some of my own personal positions I have strived to ensure that the voice of NCSG in the working groups and the discussions that I have taken part is has been loud and clear. I would hope to bring that voice to the role of the NCSG Chair, ensuring that we are given the recognition that we deserve and that we continue to be the voice of noncommercial at ICANN.
I would try to be a neutral and representative Chair, working on behalf of the over 500 members that NCSG now has, helping every one of our members to become engaged in our critical work at ICANN.
Among my goals would indeed be expanding our regional representation on working groups, reaching out to our underrepresented regions to find ways to engage our membership in Working Groups and policy discussions. I have been working on my own internal region, attempting to bring more Irish members into ICANN, working with our national government and academia we will be holding a number of civil society outreach and engagement events including bringing ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade to Trinity College Dublin to meet with academic students before ICANN 54 in October.
Qualifications for the position:
I have spent the last number of years working at a small cyber security policy firm called Cyber Invasion, where I led the security and privacy practice for the company. I pride myself on being an advocate for those who are not able to speak out for themselves, even in my day job I have insisted on working probono for the
most part in ensuring that the internet is kept as a resource for all, and that we do our part to ensure that access is equal and unhindered.
I have been working extensively on the IANA transition within ICANN from Day 1, making sure that security of the root is core to any of the work that has been done by the group, and advising the group on the technical impacts of some of the decisions, including the incorporation of a strong business continuity requirement. On the CCWG I have worked closely with Robin our appointed member and many of the other NCSG members to ensure that the new, ore accountable, ICANN that is being envisioned meets the needs of the GNSO and in particular our NCSG members. Working on constructing the Independent Review Panel, ensuring that our review teams have access to the information they require, and helping to guide our independent legal counsel have been some of the core concerns that I have been working on, including working at the face to face meetings in Istanbul, Buenos Aires and most recently in Paris as we came to the final days of the second draft proposal.
As we now move into the implementation of the work of the CWG post ICANN 53 in Buenos Aires, and hopefully the work of the CCWG post ICANN 54 in Dublin, my home town, I will be ensuring that we stick to the plan and that we succeed in transitioning this critical component of the internet’s structure in a safe and secure manner.
I have also been working on privacy matters, working with Stephanie Perrin, Kathy Kleinman and many other NCSG members on the Privacy and Proxy Services Accreditation Issues PDP working group, attempting to ensure that semianonymous registrations are possible for atrisk registrants and keeping that ability in the face of overwhelming opposition from some stakeholders has been a battle to this day.
As the role of NCSG Chair also requires a great deal of operational and administration expertise I feel that I bring a lot of experience in this area also. I have over 10 years experience working as a project and program manager and have extensive experience in leading large groups of diverse teams to a common set of goals. I believe this experience will be valuable to NCSG as we navigate our way through the implementation of the IANA transition and ensure that we place ourselves at the forefront of the new ICANN, maintaining our role as the voice of Civil Society in policy development. I hope to work with both NCSG members and ICANN staff to examine the issue of volunteer burnout within policy development and try and find innovative ways to ensure that our workload is manageable and that everyone has a strong voice in ICANN.
Statement of availability for the time the position requires:
As required I will scale back my day job to part time in order to meet the challenges of being NCSG Chair. I am lucky to have such flexibility in my current situation that I will have the ability to dedicate as much time to this role as it requires.
I have reached out to both our current and former chairs to ensure that I am going into this engagement with a full breadth of knowledge as to the time requirements and am willing to step up to the needs of the position.
Additional information:
Outside of the ICANN world I am active in advising various groups and governments on their approaches to cyber security issues, submitting extensive comments to many public comment periods and engaging with regulators, politicians and civil servants to ensure that policy making in Europe and abroad is well informed and is based on sound technical principles. Most recently I am working with an adhoc group of security researchers and legal professionals to submit comments to the US Department of Commerce on their proposed implementation of the Wassenaar Arrangement, a step which I and many others believe will negatively impact the security of the US and by extension the greater internet ecosphere.
Over the past number of years I have always worked on policy and advocacy in addition to my core career goals. And I think it’s time for that to change. I am willing to set aside part of my career and to dedicate the time necessary to take on the role of NCSG chair.
My core goals of my term would be broadly:
The elevation of privacy rights to a core standard in the work of the GNSO and more broadly in ICANN. We see day in day out the rights of trademark holders and others being treated as a core metric by which our policies are measured, I would fight to have privacy rights added on an equal footing.
Operational improvements. I would look to build upon the work that Rafik has started to bring a greater level of operational excellence into the work of NCSG. I would endeavour to seek out tools and processes that allow our members to focus on the work of policy development and have to worry less about the administration of such matters.
Oversight of the WHOIS review and replacement process. We have a huge amount of work coming over the next 24 years in assessing and hopefully replacing the current WHOIS, I would look to work very closely with our members to ensure that we have a consistent approach over all of the working groups and that the voice of NCSG is heard loudly, clearly and with power and authority in representing noncommercial interests in this critical period of ICANN’s evolution.
Bridge building. Recently we have found common ground with other constituencies in ICANN, with a prime example being the collaboration between NCSG members and RrSG members on the Privacy Proxy Services Accreditation Issues working group. I think that finding common goals and aspirations that we share with other constituencies is important and that we become a powerful voice when we speak together. I would hope to work to find those common goals and to build
relationships where appropriate with both the CSG and the contracted parties where appropriate to facilitate the goals of NCSG’s policy agenda.
I hope that I can count on your support for this critical position and I encourage anyone who wants more details to reach out to me at j ames@cyberinvasion.net or to send an email to the NCSG list and I will endeavour to answer to the best of my ability.
Name, declared region of residence, gender and employment:
Tapani Tarvainen, Europe, male, chief engineer at Jyväskylä University, Finland.
Any conflicts of interest: None.
Reasons for willingness to take on the tasks of the particular position:
I have been fighting for freedom of expression and privacy almost all my life, looking for positions where I could make a difference. The Internet has become the major battlefield in that war, ICANN a key participant and NCSG a natural home for my distinctly non-commercial viewpoint.
Given my experience and skillset, I think I would be most useful in an administrative position that also requires technical knowledge.
So, while I was surprised and indeed humbled when asked to run for Chair, I think it is a position where I could be effective and useful.
My vision of an Executive Committee, which the Chair leads, is something like a well-oiled machine, virtual train engine if you like, that does its job in the background and carries the people who do the greater part of policy work to where they need to go without getting in their way.
We have been lucky to have strong, extremely hard-working Chairs like Rafik Dammak and Robin Gross, who somehow managed to do an amazing amount of policy work alongside the administrative stuff. But we really should not depend on having such exceptional people working for us: we need a self-supporting structure so to speak, an organization that doesn't depend upon a specific individual so much. Rafik clearly realized this when he set out to improve the operational aspects of NCSG. I would like to continue his work there.
More concretely, here are a few things I'd like to do:
Improve and document administrative task execution to minimize overhead, to ensure continuity when people come and go and to make everything more transparent so that members can easier follow what's going on and participate without having to hunt all over for deadlines or references to what's been done before.
Push for more transparency in everything ICANN does. This is especially important with the transition going on: the more decisions are made and prepared in secret, the more power will slip away from formally democratic organs and elected representatives, and poorly-funded non-commercial interests will be the first to suffer.
Improve and automate membership management in such a way as to help constituencies as well, enabling members to easily review and update their own data. We need to avoid error-prone processes like having address changes done in three different places by staff.
Activate the NCSG Finance Committee and apply for grants to enable NCSG to do more things on its own as well as by giving money to constituencies to do their own projects.
Set up an independent website for NCSG, one not under ICANN control, to improve our visibility as well as to collect all our archives, mailing list and other resources to one place where they're easily found. It should also include a collaborative platform usable by all members, including those in countries where Google Docs and the like can't be used – which has been a problem even for NCUC EC, as Zuan Zhang (Peter Green) has pointed out.
Push for more travel support, in particular to improve diversity of participation: even though NCSG is more diverse than most stakeholder groups or constituencies, there is still lot of room for improvement, let alone in ICANN as a whole. I would like to work with other SG Chairs here,including finding a consistent way of reporting member's geographical and gender distribution.
Facilitate more joint NCUC-NPOC activities when both want to and there's a common interest, as there is in many cases. Coordinate meetingswith constituency chairs prior every ICANN meeting to ensure we have NCSG presence whenever possible.
Choose a Vice-Chair for the NCSG Executive Committee to better reflect the diversity of our stakeholder group and to ensure there will always be someone able speak for us despite vacations, illnesses etc.
Make better use of monthly policy calls, e.g., by adding a councillor-only part or separate call (others allowed as listeners) to allow them to talk amongst themselves about the upcoming agenda, inviting guest speakers (senior staff, Chairs of other SGs, leaders of our organizational members, etc).
Improve collaboration with our academic members, perhaps setting up some kind of student research/internship program to produce independent research our community can use, like Arun Sukumar's students have already done.
Facilitate the production of more accessible documentation on who we are and what we do in NCSG, including briefs on our key issues.
Qualifications for the position:
My job at Jyväskylä University has, as the result of a series of organizational changes over the years, become a mixture of legal and specialized technical support for researchers, sort of Special Circumstances department called upon for things regular IT support can't handle, with occasional teaching thrown in the mix.
While I'm not trained as a lawyer, in both my work at the university and in Electronic Frontier Finland I have had to learn enough to claim someexpertise in certain areas of Finnish and European law, in particular those concerning freedom of expression, privacy, data protection and copyright. I have served as a deputy member in the Finnish Data Protection Board since 2012. I was also appointed to the Finnish government's Advisory Board on Copyright Affairs at the beginning of 2015.
I served in the NCUC executive committee in 2012−2013 and this past year I was selected by the NCUC to replace long-standing member Milton Mueller on the NCSG executive committee, so I have a good understanding on how these committees work and function.
I have extensive experience with other civil society organizations, in particular Electronic Frontier Finland (Effi), where I was President for five years and Vice President for a total of ten years (still serving in the latter role). Until July 2015 Effi has been 100% volunteer-driven organization with no paid staff, and I've been doing all kinds of tasks there, from building and managing member database to writing analyses on proposed legislation and presenting them to parliamentary committees and discussing them in national television.
I have been active in the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) since its foundation in 2006, and amongs other things I'm presently serving in the Steering Committee of Internet Rights and Principles coalition. I have also been a regular speaker in the Finnish Internet Forum since its founding in 2010.
I am used to working with people of widely varying cultural backgrounds in Effi, in my present job at the university, where I regularly interact with foreign students and researchers, and in my previous job with Lucent Technologies in Saudi Arabia, where I trained system administrators for Saudi Telecom's mobile network management systems.
I also have a solid technical understanding of the Domain Name System and its underpinning technologies.
Statement of availability for the time the position requires:
Yes: I have agreed with my employer, Jyväskylä university, to be able to use working hours to Chair the NCSG. Combined with personal time and my ability to decrease my activity in Effi with the hiring of our new Executive Director I've made sure I will have enough time to properly Chair our stakeholder group.
Name: Marília Maciel
Gender: female
Region: Brazil, Latin America
Employment: researcher and coordinator of the Center for Technology and Society of Getulio Vargas Foundation Law School (CTS/FGV)
Qualifications for the position
I am an academic and Internet policy analyst with almost ten years of experience in the field of Internet Governance and Internet regulation. On the national level, I have been intensively involved with the process of developing the main laws about the Internet, such as the Civil Rights Framework for the Internet in Brazil (Marco Civil), the ongoing discussions about the privacy and data protection bill and the proposal for reforming the Brazilian copyright law.
On the international level I have closely followed the main UN fora and conferences related to Internet Governance, such as the Internet Governance Forum, the WSIS process and the Commission on Science and Technology for Development. From 2011 to 2012 I was a member of the Working Group on IGF improvements, created under the auspices of CSTD. In 2014 I have been selected by civil society to be a member of the Executive Multistakeholder Committee, which played a key role in organizing NETmundial, especially on the drafting of the outcome document. These experiences helped me develop the skills to negotiate positions in a multistakeholder environment. I am also a member and co-chair of the NETmundial Initiative and I am a member of the working group on digital development and openness of the Freedom Online Coalition.
In 2013 I became involved in ICANN through its fellowship program. To this day, I continue to work with the coordinators of the program and of the NextGen to ensure that more newcomers become involved in the work of the Organization, paying special attention to those with a non-commercial background.
In 2014 I joined the NCSG policy committee, which allowed me to have a broad view of the issues that were under discussion in the GNSO and to have a good understanding of the positions of non-commercial actors. I also became involved with the cross-community working group on Internet Governance. Moreover, I have been invited to speak in several meetings and webinars, such as the At-Large ATLAS summit (ICANN 50), in the session on the Transition of NTIA´s Stewardship of the IANA functions (ICANN 50), the public session of the CCWG IG (ICANN 53) and in NCUC meeting on ICANN and global Internet Governance: the road to São Paulo and beyond (ICANN 49).
I have been actively involved in the discussion about how to incorporate human rights concerns into ICANN’s policies and procedures. I participated in the group that drafted the charter of the CCWP on ICANN and human rights and worked in the organization of public sessions on the topic. I am also part of the WP4 of the CCWG-Accountability dedicated to propose language to incorporate a clear commitment to human rights into ICANN’s bylaws.
I had the honor to serve in the GNSO representing non-commercial interests over the past year. During this period, I have been focused on following policy discussions that relate to human rights and to development. I have joined the working group on Curative Rights Protection for IGOs and INGOs as an observer and followed the discussions of the Non-PDP Discussion Group on New gTLD Subsequent Procedures. I have advocated for the full implementation of JAS recommendations in upcoming phases of the new gTLD program. Being a newcomer to the GNSO, I have frequently consulted with more experienced colleagues in case of doubt. I took advantage of their guidance throughout my learning process, and for that I am extremely grateful.
Reasons for willingness to take on the tasks of the particular position
Development and human rights – two topics I have followed closely in the past year – tend to be increasingly important discussions at the GNSO.
One of the main topics that the Council will need to tackle is the next round of the new gTLD program. It is important to ensure that more attention is given to foster the development of the domain market in developing regions of the world. Differential fees, financial and non-financial support are all important measures to mitigate the current state of concentration of the domain name industry in developed regions. These points need to be introduced as early as possible, since the comment period of the preliminary issues report on the new gTLD subsequent procedure. Community applications also need to be more carefully assessed and the incomes generated by auctions need to be applied in areas that need further resources, such as addressing developmental concerns.
Another topic of importance that the Council will need to discuss is the interplay between human rights and policies. The CCWP on human rights has raised the debate on what should be the appropriate mechanisms to ensure that human rights concerns are taken into account throughout the policy development process. The GNSO will probably need to evaluate how to introduce human rights impact assessments in its PDPs, and I believe I can contribute to this discussion.
One of my commitments when I put my name forward to the GNSO council one year ago was to reach out to developing regions of the world in order to raise awareness about the topics being discussed in the Organization. Prior to ICANN meetings, I have reached out to civil society mailing lists – specially those composed by members from Latin America and Brazil – to invite them to take part in events and sessions that were of particular interest to non-commercial stakeholders. Moreover, I am currently organizing an event about ICANN and the future of Internet governance in Rio de Janeiro, which will discuss the key issues that are on the agenda of the Organization, such as IANA transition, Accountability, Human Rights and the way to foster the DNS industry in the developing world. This will be the first event of this kind in recent years. In spite of these efforts, I believe that more outreach should be done, and I hope to continue being dedicated to that if I am elected to the GNSO Council.
Any conflicts of interest
I declare that I do not have any conflicts of interest.
Statement of availability for the time the position requires
I have a good record of attendance in GNSO calls and other calls of interest, such as the CCWG on Internet Governance and the CCWP on ICANN and Human Rights. I declare that I can commit the time needed to perform this function.
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