During the 2012 OARC Annual General Meeting we will be electing two seats on the OARC Board of Directors. The candidates and their election platforms are given below.
If you won't be able to attend the Annual General Meeting in person, please
submit a proxy form to
Suzanne Woolf.
We will be using the Single Transferrable Vote (STV) "Scottish Method" for the election this year. On your ballot you will rank the candidates from 1 to 4. You should give "1" to your highest-ranked candidate and "4" to your lowest-ranked candidate.
Nominees
As we see the role of DNS and the number of attacks on DNS increasing, an organization like DNS-0ARC is an important platform to develop insight, tools, coordination and mitigation strategies that help us run our DNS infrastructure better. It is important that we can share our thoughts, incidents and concerns, and at the same time be open and transparent about our conclusions, successful measures we jointly take, or tools we develop and make available.
It's important for DNS-OARC to be an independent organization everyone can trust for this to succeed. To gain that trust, DNS-OARC needs to produce results that it can actually deliver what it promises to be on paper. We have seen good examples of coordination and sharing of delicate data in the past, as well as interesting analysis of data gathering.
But as the DNS evolves, our monitoring tools and analysis of new traffic needs to evolve too. Our knowledge about things like operational experience of DNSSEC, DANE, Botnet mitigation and increasing DNS traffic needs to evolve too. DNS gains more interest of people that used to take DNS for granted, and now want to learn how to bring their operation of DNS services to a higher level. So our community grows, and we may need to help those entering this arena to keep DNS in a healthy state.
I currently work as a technical policy advisor at SIDN, the registry for .nl, mainly doing R&D. .nl is the 3th largest ccTLD, and has the most absolute number of DNSSEC delegations in it's zone. I was involved with the development of OpenDNSSEC, have a seat in the BIND10 steering committee, sponsored PowerDNSSEC and fund NLNETLabs projects to get the DNSSEC train moving. Always moving in the front line of DNS development, we realize that sharing our operational experience is as important to others as it is to us. That's why SIDN has been a DNS-OARC member from the beginning and we hosted the 2009 workshop in Amsterdam.
Before I worked for SIDN, I had several positions at ISP and hosting companies for a dozen of years, giving me operational experience from the recursor, 2ND level and a registrar's point of view as well as a large TLD's view of the world.
I'm open to all concerns you may have for DNS-OARC, and I'm willing to listen and discuss all ideas you may have. What I bring to DNS-OARC is my experience in development of vision and policy, and my persistence in completing smaller goals to get there. My strategy is clearly aimed to market DNS-OARC as independent research organization that actually produces tools and does research it's members can use.
I would like to see DNS-OARC to take more lead in coordinating development of tools like DSC or independent DNS software benchmarking methods so it can serve a broader community. It will help the visibility of DNS-OARC to members of the DNS community it currently doesn't reach. We need those new members for our credibility and to expand our budget so we can hire good staff to get this work done.
As complexity and scale of DNS increases, I see more interest of 2ND level and recursive DNS operators in topics related to DNS-OARC. DNS-OARC needs to discuss how an increasing and more diverse membership can go hand in hand with delicate data and incident sharing without losing these potential new members. DNS-OARC needs to schedule it's meetings more timely, so people can participate and prepare better, which will increase it's output quality.
OARC is a unique organization, the only worldwide one bringing together people involved in management of authoritative name servers and (at least in theory) of recursive name servers. It is (and should continue to be) focused on operational matters and independent of any other organization.
OARC is a very important tool for its members and should continue to develop as an independent body, sufficiently funded to be able to perform "heavy" functions such as archiving and processing important amounts of data. The priority must stay on these functions, not on "Internet governance" issues, for which there are already many organizations and meetings.
Among the things to enhance are the voluntary participation of members to incident reporting and information sharing, the outreach to recursive name servers operators (such as ISP), underrepresented at this time and a widening of participation to people from anywhere in the world. Successful information sharing requires serious consideration given to privacy issues.
Our vision of OARC is that of an organisation able to act when sudden events require monitoring and action, for instance when a new worm starts to use the DNS and there is a need to do something. We believe that this sort of events would be better handled by OARC rather than by an ad hoc informal group, unknown to most of its contacts.
AFNIC, registry of ".fr" , is a member of OARC since the beginning and sees a lot of value in being involved with such an international organization. Being an OARC member is nice, but being able to help OARC go forward as a Board member is even better.
I am currently R&D engineer at AFNIC. For those who do not visualize me, I am the one who presented the Zonecheck tool at the Seattle meeting, the DNSwitness tool in Atlanta and network issues with DNSSEC in Denver.
First of all I would like to thank the members for the opportunity to serve as a board member for last two years. This period helped me a lot to get into the picture and I would like to use such experience for another term.
I have been involved in networking and Internet since 1992. I have served in several executive and non-executive positions at ISP and IXP and I have been working at CZ.NIC (administrator of .cz domain) since 2004.
CZ.NIC is a very active DNS-OARC member contributing to every meeting which we were able to attend as well having hosted the 2010 meeting in Prague. CZ.NIC is one of the strongest supporters of DNS-OARC contributing to projects like DSCng (presented at OARC meeting in London this year) and DNS Benchmarking (an effort to reliably measure DNS performance by an independent entity).
I believe that if re-elected I could contribute DNS-OARC by making use of my business and technical background:
- First of all I am not focused only on technology, but I also have more general business experience and education. I hold MSc degree from Charles University, Prague, and I also got my MBA degree from the University of Pittsburgh, PA, USA. I combine both backgrounds during my career. E.g. I am a co-founder and programmer of routing daemon BIRD and I also work as CEO of CZ.NIC and I have served the community as a MAG member at the Internet Governance Forum.
- Secondly - I have much broader focus than just DNS. E.g. I am serving as board member at Euro-IX – association of Internet eXchangePoints, which is very successful in increasing membership base including non-European members.
If re-elected I would like to help with the following issues:
- increasing the number of members
- developing benefits and services that generate value for members and also community
- strengthening DNS-OARC's position as the leader for DNS related issues
- becoming a trusted and independent organization
Internet systems and services is what I live and breath at Comcast, and the DNS protocol is one of the primary responsibilities that I oversee there. As the Director for High-Speed Internet Engineering at Comcast, my teams focus over the last few years has been to launch advanced services like DNSSEC and IPv6, and to share our findings from those deployments on the largest ISP network in the United States. We view our involvement in organizations like OARC as critical to information sharing and learning, and are proud to be a member of this community.
If I were to become a member of the board of directors of OARC, I would like to focus on engaging new membership, as well as increased participating from existing members. Security incidents and best practices should also take an increased focus, and I believe OARC provides a great forum to do this work. Finally I would like to see the board take a more active approach in getting feedback from its membership on a regular basis to better focus on meeting the needs of its membership, and I feel i could help provide focus in this area.
If you would like to know more about what I do at Comcast, or my experience, please see my Linkedin page:
http://www.linkedin.com/in/ctg1701
Thank you for your consideration.
