[lac-discuss-en] VANDA SCARTEZINI = liaison ALAC-BOARD

[Jacqueline A. Morris]

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.