Dear NPOC member, 2014 was the year ICANN was confronted for the first time with itself. The NTIA decision turned ICANN upside down and most of the constituencies got overloaded with extra meetings and discussions. For NPOC the past 12 months have also been very intensive. We organized several events under the topic Pathfinder, a program creating awareness for NGO’s to participate in the Internet governance. During my first year as chair of NPOC I’ve essentially focused on how to put NPOC in a different perspective. We all know NGO’s don’t get the appropriate attention in the DNS and Internet governance space. As NPOC get’s maturity, still only a few years young, it gets more recognition and has been accepted inside the GNSO world. While policy development in GNSO is priority number one, I would like to highlight the fact we need some specific objectives allowing NGO’s to raise their critical issues inside the DNS. My second term objectives will get NPOC deeper inside the GTLD world, querying for more openness, more participation power. Almost one year long, focus was, and still is, on the IANA transition. What’s in it for the NGO’s is very unclear. Most of the NGO’s using .org domain extension have no clue on what the IANA transition would mean to them. The knowledge about the DNS is quite limited and as such a goal to achieve for us is to get NGO’s understanding the value of a domain name. NPOC will also engage with the .ngo/.ong registry to elaborate specific actions enabling more NGO’s getting their domain name. Along the road of policy development I think it would be good if we could elaborate an action plan enabling NGO’s to use the domain name space to their benefit. Many NGO’s engaged in the social media, not really understanding they are providing interesting content to the profit world, while they could obtain even more through the use of their own domain name and website. With the team, as is actual proposed in the election slate, I’m confident we will bring NPOC to another level of engagement and will be able to get to the next milestone : NGO’s been recognised as a real multistakeholder in ICANN with voting power. I hope I've illustrated my full commitment and really hope we may be recognized as an unavoidable partner in the policy discussions to the benefit of NGO’s, our members. Kind regards, Rudi Vansnick rudi.vansnick@npoc.org Tel : +32 (0)9 329 39 16 Mobile : +32 (0)475 28 16 32