Dear all
I am hereby submitting my candidacy to represent our stakeholder group on the GNSO Council. The statement below is in fulfillment of the candidacy requirements for the NCSG elections.
All the best, Stefania

*Name*: Stefania Milan
*Gender*: Female
*Region of residence*: Netherlands, Europe
*Employment*: Assnt. Professor of New Media and Digital Culture, University of Amsterdam

*Qualifications*
I have served on the NCUC Executive Committee (EC) over the last two years (2013-2014). I have used this time to serve our constituency on the background, while learning as much as I could about the complex ICANN ecosystem. I have contributed to outreach, delivering several guest lectures on the ICANN and NCUC work, and bringing several new members (including organizational members) to NCUC. More recently, I have contributed to the analysis and revision of the so-called Westlake Report (part of the GNSO review), which some of us believed misrepresented the non-commercial efforts within ICANN. I see myself as someone who builds bridges and “translates” our complex world to the benefit of those who haven’t been “converted” yet--also thanks to my background in journalism and activism.

An Italian national, I have worked and lived in several European countries and beyond, including Canada and Brazil. I am primarily a researcher and an educator, employed as assistant professor at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

I have always been interested in what people, and non-experts in particular, do with technology, and how they engage in both technical practice and policy advocacy. I am a scholar of social movements; over the years I have conducted extensive fieldwork on hackers and grassroots tech groups, and investigated civil society engagement in communications governance.

I have always been looking for ways to bridge research with policy and action. Alongside my scholarly work, I have been a media activist and engaged in grassroots work in a variety of fields, including community radio. In 2003-2005 I covered civic society engagement in the World Summit on the Information Society for the news agency Inter Press Service, giving voice also to the alternatives and the excluded. Since 2012, I co-chair the Communications Policy Task Force of the International Association of Media and Communication Research (IAMCR), and in this capacity I coordinate the engagement of IAMCR members, mostly academics, in a variety of policy arenas. In 2012 I was selected to serve as an advisor on digital issues in the framework of the short-lived Monti government. I contributed to key legislation on, among others, internet literacy, digital citizenship and crowdfunding, and kick-started the process towards an internet bill of rights. (For the record, the charter never saw the light; the process I started bore fruit only a couple of governments later). For a short while, I also represented Italy in the ICANN GAC. Paradoxically, this is how I came across NCUC. On occasion of the ICANN meeting in Toronto (October 2012) I was invited to speak at the policy conference, in order to share my experience writing up the Italian internet bill of rights. I joined NCUC right after.

I continue my policy engagement also beyond ICANN. Currently, I am a member of the working group “An Internet free and secure” of the Freedom Online Coalition, alongside with a few other NCUC members; we advocate for an approach to cybersecurity that is human rights-minded by design. In May 2015 I was elected to serve on the Board of ISOC Italy, which I accepted to do although living abroad in order to “rejuvenate” and renew the (semi-dormant) organization, in a country that still has very low broadband penetration and even lower internet literacy, and where citizens’ engagement with policy advocacy is near null.

I would like to take this opportunity to apologize for some failures on my side. I had been asked by Avri Doria to join the GNSO Standing Committee on Improvements Implementation (SCI, working to improve the GNSO operating procedures), which I saw as a great opportunity to learn the nitty-gritty of the policy work. However, for work-related problems I incurred in, I have failed to do so over the last year and a half. My work situation has now radically changed, since I have obtained some very competitive funding to set up a research team working for the coming five years on the politics of massive data collection and big data (incidentally, the team includes a couple of NCUC members). I expect to be able to dedicate more time and energies to serve the non-commercial interests within ICANN.

I am aware the learning curve will be steep, but I also know I can count on the experience and willingness to share of the colleagues who preceded me on Council. After two years on the NCUC EC, I would be honored to serve the non-commercial interests on the GNSO Council, should the members support my candidacy.

You can find out more about me on my website: stefaniamilan.net

* Conflicts of interest and availability*
I am now aware of any conflicts of interest that would prevent me from serving on the GNSO Council. I am generally responsive to emails and calls. From September onwards and for the coming five years, I will dedicate most of my time to research, with the flexibility that such a research position allows. I expect to be able to travel and attend calls.


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Stefania Milan, PhD
University of Amsterdam || mediastudies.nl ||
Data J Lab || datajlab.nl ||
Internet Policy Observatory || Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania || globalnetpolicy.org ||
Center for Media and Communication Studies, Central European University || www.cmcs.ceu.hu ||
International Association for Media and Communication Research - International Council member and Co-Chair, Communication Policy Task Force || www.iamcr.org ||
Executive Committee, Non-Commercial User Constituency, ICANN
mobile: [31] 62 7875 425 (NL) || [1] 647 - 973 - 6533 (CA) || [+39] 333 - 2309945 (I)
stefaniamilan.net || @annliffey

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