I've been traveling between islands in the last 24 hours and was literally stranded without Internet access util now so I'm joining at the tail end. I acknowledge Carlos' indicative that is the prerogative of the ALAC to elect the Board Liaison. I also take the advice of Staff that the Board Liaison election is due and must proceed. All this aside, it would be imprudent not to consider the elected Board Liaison as the favoured candidate for the eventual Board seat. So the implications for this election has a greater strategic importance than would normally be considered. It is my view that the community should consider the candidates for Board Liaison as eventual At-Large selectee to the ICANN Board. This means that the talents and skills of the nominees should be debated in this context. This said, all declared candidates possess the knowledge, skills and work ethic required of a Board Liaison and have a record of contribution to the At-Large agenda to pronounce them acceptable At-Large selectee to the ICANN Board. Vanda is undoubtedly the most experienced of us in ICANN-related work derived from her history of engagement from the GAC thru the ICANN Board and now ALAC. Most would not know this but she has been a resourceful collaborator and guide in crafting some of the most significant LACRALO responses to ALAC issues for which we are indebted. Alan's strengths are compelling; more knowledgeable than most about the current issues of interest to the At-Large and perhaps the single most responsible individual for the most impactful At-Large policy intervention in recent times, the initiative to control domain tasting. He's a natural diplomat, with an ability to disagree agreeably that leaves all of us with the will to do battle the next day without rancour. Wendy has demonstrated as the incumbent that she owns all the skills and knowledge for compelling advocacy of the At-Large agenda to the ICANN Board and has executed creditably. Much can be further accomplished simply by her being seasoned in the job. My sense is that GNSO-related issues shall dominate the At-Large agenda for the next few years. Attention to detail and an ability to build consensus will be of heightened importance to the At-Large. I do not envy the members of the ALAC the anguish it will bring to have to decide from the field of well-qualified candidates. My view is that given the objective, our ALAC representatives should be allowed the latitude to decide as their sense of the room dictates. In other words, this must be a "free" vote. In this context therefore I interpret Jacqueline's idea to report both Vanda and Alan as qualified as a very useful indicator of LACRALO's development of a more global view of the At-Large agenda, a kind of coming-of-age. Carlton =================================================================================================== On Thu, Sep 3, 2009 at 5:35 AM, Jacqueline A. Morris < jam@jacquelinemorris.com> wrote:
Dear all
Alan Greenberg has been nominated for the Board position by the NARALO. I would like to propose that the LACRALO also endorse his nomination.
Alan was a stalwart member of the ALAC, appointed in 2006, working tirelessly in the gNSO to promote the interests of the end users. He initiated and shepherded the first Issues request from the ALAC, on the matter of domain tasting, and as we know, that turned out very successfully.
I'd like LACRALO to support Alan's nomination because: 1) He is intimately knowledgeable on the issues that face the Board 2) He is a very diplomatic person and is excellent at consensus building (as evidenced by his work in the gNSO) 3) In the time I have known him, he has NEVER put his own opinions out as liaison, before those expressed by ALAC, even when he didn't agree. He has always worked for the team. 4) In the interest of getting "new" blood into the ICANN structure, Alan has been involved directly in ALAC for 3 years, and has shown in that time that he has new and innovative ideas to improve the end-user experience and work for end users. 5) Although he does hail from North America, he lives in Quebec, and has significant experience working with and in many countries and cultures.
I think that Alan would be an excellent addition to the Board. I am aware that Vanda has also thrown her hat into the ring, but LACRALO can endorse more than one candidate for the ALAC to consider and vote upon.
For those who don't know Alan well, I include below some biographical information (a revised extract from his 2008 NomCom application)."
Education: B.Sc. (Major Physics), McGill University (1967) M.Sc. (Computer Science), McGill University (1973) Thesis: An early low-cost, low overhead virtual computer implementation I have spent much of my professional career at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada holding a variety of technical and managerial positions. For the period from 1987 to 1999, I held the position of Director of Computing and Telecommunications. In that role, I was responsible for the institution’s communications and computing infrastructure, technology policy advice and formulation, personal computer sales and support, and a very profitable commercial software subsidiary. My responsibilities included a staff of about 100 full-time people and budgets totaling about $18m. Universities are challenging places to work, where technical and managerial skills must be melded with the ability to work collegially and yet still make crucial decisions in a timely manner. During 1980-81 I was on leave from McGill holding the position of Visiting Scientist at IBM’s Watson Research laboratory. Since taking early retirement from McGill, I have been working as an independent consultant focusing on the use of information and communications technologies (ICT) in developing countries. I have worked for a number of European governments with a variety of assignments including: - post-project evaluations of projects in African, Latin American and Asian countries - national ICT surveys identifying a country’s strength and weaknesses, and what needs to be done to better use technology; - a study investigating how technology can be used effectively to address poverty issues, and what must be done to ensure such successful use; - studies related to the effectiveness of donor support of ICT including recommendations on whether such support should continue, and if so, strategy formulation of how such support should be structured in the future. - a draft national position paper on the used of ICT for Development for Germany. - a post-WSIS "report card" for the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and the UN Commission on Science and Technology for Development (CSTD) (B.3) Describe any current and past volunteer positions, roles and accomplishments. We are particularly interested in board or similar directorship and committee experience.
Much of my past volunteer experience has been Internet-related, and will be described more fully in Section C.2. My volunteer activities date back to the early 1970s when I started working with an IBM mainframe user group (SHARE), an activity that continued in various forms for over 20 years. I was an elected member of their Board of Directors from 1983-87. I have been a member of the Board (or similar) of organizations responsible for research and education networking in Canada and Quebec starting in the mid-1980s as well as a not-for-profit foundation responsible for funding innovative Internet projects. I was an elected member of the Internet Society Board of Trustees for 2001-2004. I was vice-president and a board member of a for-profit subsidiary of my university, responsible for developing and marketing software. I am vice-president and a member of the executive committee of a local genealogy society. Within ICANN, I am a member of the ALAC and the ALAC’s Liaison to the GNSO and have been extremely active in both roles. I have effectively worked on and chaired committees of varying sizes and compositions for several decades.
(C.2) Describe current and past involvement in, contributions to, and leadership roles in activities and organizations involved in the development and operation of the Internet, its naming and addressing infrastructure and/or its security and stability.
I was part of the group that started NetNorth, the first Canadian national research and education network in the early 1980s. My department ran the Quebec hub of the network, and I have the distinction of being NetNorth’s Executive Secretary overseeing its demise when the first Canadian national IP network (CA*net) replaced it. I was a charter member of the CA*net Board (and was also the designer of CA*net’s cost-effective but redundant dual-ring topology). I was a charter member of CANARIE, the organization that (among other things) functionally replaced CA*net a few years later. Following the replacement of CA*net, I sat on the board of the not-for-profit Foundation chartered with awarding the remaining CA*net funds (plus matching funds raised commercially) to innovative network-related development projects.
In Quebec, I was one of the instigators and the founding Chair of the Quebec regional network RISQ (currently Réseau d’informations scientifiques du Québec, although like many long-lived acronyms, its meaning has varied over the years). For the first years, at my initiative, McGill physically ran RISQ. I remained active in RISQ management until my retirement from McGill.
In 1995 I started working with the Internet Society’s (ISOC) Developing Country Workshops. Over their nine year lifetime (1993-2001) these network training workshops taught over 1,000 students from 150 developing countries how to build, support, manage and use the first networking and Internet facilities in their countries. In 1996 I was responsible for the local arrangements of workshop held in Montreal in conjunction with the ISOC’s INET meeting and a concurrent IETF meeting. I co-managed the 1997 workshop in Malaysia, and managed the next workshops from 1998 to 2001 in Switzerland, USA, Japan and Sweden. Unlike some volunteer activities, managing the workshops required a massive time commitment. To a large extent, every country that connected to the Internet after 1993 did so with the help of people trained at these or spin-off workshops (Francophone, Latin-American and later African).
From 2001 to 2004, I was an elected member of the Internet Society Board of Trustees.
In 2006, the ICANN NomCom appointed me to the then Interim ALAC (now the ALAC proper despite the wording of Question A.2 of this form). At my first meeting, I was elected to be the ALAC Liaison to the GNSO. Since that time, I have served in both roles. This was a tumultuous year for the ALAC, with all five Regional At Large Organizations (RALOs) being formed and selecting ALAC members to replace those on the Interim ALAC. Much of the ALAC’s efforts in 2007 have focused on process, adjusting to its new membership and constituents. I have played an active role in this process. Moreover, partially in an attempt to help the ALAC shed its sometime image of a less-than-productive organization and focus more on policy issues, I took responsibility for the domain tasting issue, resulting in the ALAC-requested Issues Report a GNSO PDP, and an ICANN policy that has effectively eliminated Domain Tasting. I am currently leading a similar effort related to ensuring that registrants do not lose their gTLD registrations in error at expiration time.
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