As announced before, below please find another presentation from Rinalia Abdul Rahim, Board Seat 15 candidate, for your attention. Best, Wolf Rinalia Abdul Rahim wrote Sun, 9 Mar 2014:
Dear Wolf,
Thank you for the opportunity to present myself to the EURALO community. It is indeed a privilege to be considered for the At-Large Board Director position.
My full Expression of Interest (EOI) can be found here https://community.icann.org/display/ABMS/2014+At-Large+Board+Candidate+-+Rin...
Below I present some highlights about myself, my priorities should I be selected as the At-Large Board Director, and past end-user advocacy work that I have done in ICANN for the region's consideration.
*Highlights about myself:*
- Citizen of Malaysia and the sole Board candidate from the developing world
- Long-standing commitment to serve the public interest, both national and global
- More than 15 years of experience dealing with ICT-related policies that include the Internet
- More than a decade of international leadership and advocacy experience
- Strong understanding of how ICT and the Internet support development efforts worldwide
- Strong awareness and sensitivity to the needs of a broad and diverse range of Internet users, particularly those in developing regions
- Augmented understanding of Internet end user needs and concerns through experience on the At-Large Advisory Committee
- Experienced with multistakeholder engagement and collaboration
- 12 years of board level experience (8 years with a global multistakeholder board).
- Multilingual fluency in Malay, English and Chinese and user of multiple writing systems (Latin, Arabic and Han Chinese scripts).
--- Early part of career focused on public policy, working to formulate ICT strategies and policies for my country, which served as a benchmark for other developing countries
--- Later part of career focused on international development, leading the world's first global multistakeholder network of organizations that promoted the use of 'ICT for Development' worldwide for 8 years & co-led the organization of the 'ICT for Development Platform' at WSIS 2003
--- Worked with communities and organizations in every region of the world, engaging governments (in both developed and developing countries), inter-governmental organizations (including 8 specialized UN agencies), regional development banks, businesses (MNCs and SMEs), NGOs and community-based organizations that provide services to the grassroots, academia and the media
--- Established regional multistakeholder networks for sharing knowledge and building partnerships that leverage on ICT to improve lives, reduce poverty and empower people in Africa, Europe, Middle East and North Africa, Asia South, Asia East, Latin America and the Caribbean, North America and Oceania.
*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.
*Highlights of past end-user advocacy work in ICANN:*
- Co-authored the At-Large White Paper on Future Challenges: Making ICANN Relevant, Responsive and Respected.
- Raised awareness regarding the weaknesses of ICANN's accountability and transparency mechanisms as well as concerns and constraints faced by At-Large volunteers that affect the organization's accountability and transparency via a comprehensive written submission to the Accountability and Transparency Review Team 2.
- Enhanced the At-Large community's understanding regarding a wide range of new gTLD program-related consumer and public interest concerns by convening Multistakeholder Policy Roundtables during ICANN 46 (Beijing) and ICANN 47 (Durban). The concerns include consumer safety and trust, multilingual access to gTLDs via internationalized scripts, rights issues related to the protection of trademarks, non-registered marks and geographic names, barriers to program participation for stakeholders in the developing world, and compliance issues. The multistakeholder policy discussion approach has since then been taken up by ICANN staff in organizing cross-community discussion sessions at ICANN meetings and the ALAC continues with the practice of organizing the At-Large Policy Roundtables.
- Participated in the Development of the Procedure to Develop and Maintain Label Generation Rules for the Root Zone, which will benefit all internationalized script users worldwide.
- Organized a ground-breaking workshop that involved a collaboration between ICANN and APRALO at the Internet Governance Forum in 2013 focusing on "Next in IDNs: Linguistic Diversity in the Internet Root", which featured an important discussion between representatives of language communities and the Internet's technical community.
- Led the development of 18 ALAC policy statements (4 designated as ALAC Formal Advice to the ICANN Board) on a range of issues of concern to end users that include:
(a) Advocacy for enhancing the Internet's multilingualism and prioritizing work on IDN variants and Universal Acceptance of IDN TLDs to serve the needs of the majority of the world's population that do not use Latin script.
(b) Advocacy for the Trademark Clearinghouse to address IDN variants to correct a critical gap in its design that would allow for cybersquatting and to express the principle that, while the At-Large community does not support over-extensive trademark protection measures, it firmly believes that ICANN's Rights Protection Measures should treat trademarks in any language or character set equally so that Internet users in any language community can be equally protected against confusion.
(c) Advocacy to urge the ICANN board to ensure that the questions posed in the GAC Safeguard Advice for new gTLDs are addressed urgently and that clarification on the enforceability of the Public Interest Commitments be relayed clearly and comprehensively to the ICANN community.
(d) Advocacy to emphasize that *clarity on ccTLD revocation parameters and a clear and transparent process on the part of the IANA operator are crucial to ensure that any act of revocation is carried out with transparency, understanding, sensitivity and care, and does not in any way disrupt the continued name resolution for Internet users.*
(e) Advocacy for ICANN to prioritize community applications in string contention with other types of new gTLD program applications and to ensure that there is sufficient community expertise in the panel that conducts the evaluation on community applications. The At-Large community also provided comprehensive input on the community priority evaluation guidelines.
Thank you for the consideration.
Best regards,
Rinalia
EuroDIG Secretariat http://www.eurodig.org/ mobile +41 79 204 83 87 Skype: Wolf-Ludwig EURALO - ICANN's Regional At-Large Organisation http://euralo.org Profile on LinkedIn http://ch.linkedin.com/in/wolfludwig