The ICANN 2018 Nominating Committee announced its selections for eight leadership positions within ICANN.

For the ICANN Board of Directors this includes Rafael "Lito" Ibarra from Latin America/Caribbean Islands, Lousewies van der Laan from Europe and Tripti Sinha from North America.

Tripti Sinha is Assistant Vice President and Chief Technology Officer within the Division of Information Technology for the University of Maryland. She is also Executive Director of the Mid-Atlantic Crossroads (MAX), a GigaPoP. She has more than 25 years of technology leadership experience in areas ranging from software engineering to advanced cyber infrastructure.

Tripti Sinha

New At-Large Advisory Committee (ALAC) members include Joanna Kulesza from Europe and NARALO's own Javier Rúa-Jovet from North America.

New Council of the Country Code Names Supporting Organization (ccNSO) members include Laura Margolis from Latin America / Caribbean Islands and Ajay Data from Asia / Australia / Pacific Islands. Finally, Erika Mann from Europe was selected for the Council of the Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO).  

Those selected will take up their positions after the end of ICANN's Annual General Meeting, during ICANN63, scheduled for 20 October - 25 October 2018 in Barcelona, Spain.

The Nominating Committee is charged with recruiting and selecting a portion of ICANN's leadership and is mandated to ensure that ICANN's overall leadership is diverse in geography, culture, skills, experience, and perspective. Thanks to them for all their work!  

Dear NARALO members, thank you for electing me as your next representative on the ALAC council starting after ICANN63 in Barcelona.

Perhaps this is a good opportunity for a brief introduction. I live in Ottawa, Canada but was born in Germany. I carry a Canadian passport but also consider myself very much a citizen of the world. I speak French, German and a bit of Dutch as well as English. In addition to my role as Telecommunities Canada representative for NARALO, I am a member of the Board of Directors of the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) which manages the .ca domain name.

I have been an internet policy junkie from the moment I sent my first e-mail in 1993 and very active domestically in keeping the public interest on the radar as the internet rapidly became an essential feature in our personal, social and economic lives. Together with other researchers, I have edited and produced a number of collections of essays on internet policy issues -- including net neutrality, privacy, security, and calls for a digital policy strategy. More information on these publications can be found here.

In the early days, when locally established freenets, and community networks jumped onboard to offer public access to e-mail, newsgroups and community discussion lists, there was a real feeling of magic in the air. Now, much more sophisticated applications have become part of our everyday lives. But it is still crucial that we continue to demand public input to communications policy making. I am here to keep fighting for end-user input into the evolution of the most important communications innovation in recent history. Through its multistakeholder system, ICANN offers an opportunity to do that.

Over the next two years, I will be communicating with NARALO members regularly - through this newsletter, at meetings, on-line and in person, and through discussion on the lists. I will be listening to your ideas and looking for ways to reflect your opinions in upcoming policy work.

- Marita Moll, Incoming NARALO ALAC Member

George has been following ICANN policymaking for more than 15 years, and joined the At-Large NARALO this past month.

He's the president of Leap of Faith Financial Services Inc., a company based in Toronto, Canada that owns and develops a number of domain names and websites used by millions of users from all over the world every year including math.com and school.com. His personal background is in economics and finance.

Welcome George!

Organized a day before the recent Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) meeting, panelists included Paul Mockapetris, who invented the DNS 30 years ago.  In that time we have evolved from the early experimentation and implementation of the formative domain name standards to a distributed name resolution system with millions of name servers that process billions of queries daily.

The event was very informative on the history and the inner workings of the DNS. Special note to the excellent afternoon session by Warren Kumari and Suzanne Woolf.

You can view most of the slides and speaker pictures here.

Recordings available here.

Thanks to ICANN and support from the RALO discretionary fund to permit me the opportunity to attend this event.

On July 27th, IGF-USA was held in Washington DC. Hosted by the Center for International and Strategic Studies, it featured panels on the future of work, privacy frameworks, connectivity, competition, smart cities, platform content moderation, extra-territorality of court ruling and fake news.

A number of NARALO members attended. To find out more, search for the  #IGFUSA hashtag on Twitter or check out their videos here.

Glenn McKnight, NARALO Secretariat took some photos, available here.

The ALAC has elected Maureen Hilyard as ALAC Chair for the period of one year, beginning at the end of the ICANN63 Annual General Meeting.

Hilyard is a project manager and consultant for development projects in the Cook Islands. She has a Master of Management although her former career was in education.

She founded an NGO -  the Cook Islands Internet Action Group (CIIAG)which advocates for internet development focusing on accessibility and affordability and which became an ALS in 2011. She is a member of the Telecommunications Advisory Committee that advises the Minister.

Maureen joined the  Pacific Islands Chapter of the Internet Society (PICISOC) in 2006 after meeting Vint Cerf at a PacINET held in Samoa. She ran PacINET in 2008 and joined the Board in 2009. She was Board Chair from 2011 until 2014, and was Secretary in 2015. Her interest in internet governance was spurred by a  Diplo Course on IG in 2008 after which she was awarded a fellowship to attend her first IGF in Hyderabad. The following year she was an ISOC Ambassador at the Sharm el Sheikh IGF.

In 2010 Maureen was awarded an ICANN Fellowship to attend her first ICANN meeting in Cartegena and was soon captured by ALAC and a working group reviewing the regions. The Pacific became more integrated into the ICANN system as before attending her next ICANN meeting in 2012 in Costa Rica, she maintained contact through APRALO and ALAC meetings as well as joining into other working groups.

Maureen has now attended more than 12 ICANN meetings, is involved in a number of working groups, and has been penholder for a number of ALAC policy statements.

At the end of July, ICANN published their By the Numbers Report for ICANN62 in Panama City, Panama. It includes technical, demographic, and attendance statistics and summarizes the findings from ICANN's third Policy Forum of the current meeting strategy . The report is part of ICANN's commitment to transparency.

Highlights included:

Read the full report here.

The agenda and call details can be found here.