Hello,

as someone who worked and lived in Finland, I would like to support what Ed says about civil society in that country, and about EFFI. Although I don't know Tapani personally, I am satisfied, from what I know OF him, that he has the qualifications and personality to be a very good Chair of NCSG.

Jean-Jacques.







----- Mail original -----
De: "Edward Morris" <[log in to unmask]>
À: [log in to unmask]
Envoyé: Lundi 24 Août 2015 01:00:11
Objet: Re: Nomination of Tapani Tarvainen for NCSG Chair



Hello everybody, 


A year ago you, the Members of the NCSG, did me the great honour of selecting me to represent you on the GNSO Council. I’ve done my best to honour you by working as hard as I could, both on Council and in the CCWG Accountability group, to represent the interests of the non-commercial community. I won’t lie: it’s come at some personal cost. Two months ago I had to beat an eviction and two weeks ago I lost my broadband, since restored, because I could not pay the bill. At times I’ve ignored other areas of my life, like paid work, to do the job you selected me to do. I have no regrets. We are making great progress in many areas, progress that will guarantee a free, open and stable internet not only for ourselves but for our children and for generations to come. It’s been worth it. 

I look forward to spending more time on Council work in the coming year. There are many issues that have been stuck in the pipeline waiting for transition and accountability work to be completed. The launch of the next round of gTLD’s, the long awaited review of the UDRP, the WHOIS re-do: all on the calendar for launch and debate this year. I want to represent you on Council as strongly, professionally and successfully as I can. To do that, I need your help. 

It wasn’t until you elected me to Council that I realized that much of what we all see at Council meetings is predetermined. As an NCSG Councillor I’m able to vote my conscious. Councillors from the other groups can’t. They have to vote as directed by their Constituency, usually by their Chair’s. The most important debates on Council are not just what we all see at the meetings, it is also those conversations conducted amongst Chairs prior to meetings that set the agenda. We have been blessed to have had Rafik Danmark in this role the past two years. He has been a true champion for non-commercial causes. I already miss him, and he is still here. :) For me, and our other Councillors, to be effective for you in the coming year we need to have as NCSG Chair an experienced, effective, competent advocate who will have our backs in the coming debates. Chair cannot and should not be a trainee position. It is just too important a job. 

We have two candidates for this position that are asking us for our support. I know and like both of them very much. 

James Gannon and I are both Irish citizens. I lived part of the past year in the Sandymount section of Dublin, the same city he has called home. James is a new member of the NCSG and his early contributions were very impressive, so much so that I was instrumental in having him flown to Istanbul to help at a CCWG meeting when Robin Gross had flight problems and needed to be substituted for. His contributions to our efforts there and elsewhere are respected and valued. 

Tapani Tarvainen is a citizen of Finland. I lived in Finland for a dozen years and, although no longer my home, it is a country and a culture that I have great knowledge about and affection for. I worked with Tapani for a year on the NCUC Executive Committee and know of no person, other than Bill Drake, who has made a more effective, positive and consistent contribution to the revitalization and stabilization of this constituent component of the NCSG. 

We have two good people offering to serve us as Chair. I’ve worked with both of them and have ties to the localities and countries from which they come. I understand the responsibilities of the job to which they both aspire. Although I should perhaps be more diplomatic, and really do appreciate the fact that we have two exceptional people willing to stand for this time consuming volunteer position, the decision as to whom to support in this election is an easy one for me: as the next Chair of the NCSG we need the intellect, compassion, experience, technical skills and maturity that only Tapani Tarvainen can bring to this job. While having a great deal of respect for James Gannon, he really is a talented young man, I respectfully request that full consideration and support be given by all to Tapani’s candidacy for the position of NCSG Chair. 

I’ll be the first to admit that Tapani is not a great candidate f or this job. He will do a fantastic job, if elected, but as a candidate he is, well, he’s a Finn. Us Irish are happy to tell you how great we are. We put our pubs in all of your cities so we’d have a place to do just that! An Irishman knows two words of French and he’ll tell you he’s fluent in the language. A Finn knows all but two words of a language and he’ll tell you he knows just a little bit. It’s the culture. Finns have no trouble advocating positions or ideas but personal modesty is an essential component of Finnishness. 

That worries me as it might prevent those who don’t know Tapani well from understanding what an accomplished professional and policy advocate he really is. I thought it might help others if this Irish guy tells you a little about why I think Tapani Tarvainen would make an exceptional Chair, just in case his cultural modesty causes him not to self promote to the degree expected by those from other cultures. We can start with the fact that as a Finn he actually doesn’t like to talk about himself and is often willing to let others take credit for accomplishments, even for those he himself might be responsible for. That’s always a great attribute in a leader and is very much what Tapani is all about. It is also a trait our current Chair possesses in great quantity. 

Leadership ability is something the next Chair of the NCSG needs to have. I’m not talking about long or numerous e-mails or speeches but rather the experience of leading and knowing how to corral people to get things done. As someone who was five times elected as President of Electronic Frontier Foundation Finland (Effi) Tapani has the experience of leading a prominent civil society group dedicated to online free speech and expression. This is no small group either: Effi has 1,500 dues paying members, three times the size of the NCSG, with a membership spread throughout the 8 th largest country in Europe, while conducting business in the two official languages of the country (Finnish and Swedish), as well as in English. There is no question Tapani has the skills and experience to lead our diverse organization. He’s already successfully done something very similar, and with a much larger organisation. 

The job of NCSG Chair is a multifaceted one consisting of a mixture of administration, advocacy and that of being the public face of non-commercial users in the ICANN community and beyond. It requires a unique skill set few possess. We are fortunate that Tapani not only has this skill set but that he has been able to arrange with his civil society employer to give him the time he needs on the job to apply his skills on our behalf. Not every employer will do that and our thanks must go to the University of Jyväskylä, where Tapani works as chief engineer, for offering this in-kind support to the NCSG. 

Let there be no doubt that Tapani Tarvainen is up to the challenge of running the administrative side of this organisation. In fact, the better question is whether we could continue to function administratively in his absence. Tapani personally built the database the NCUC uses to manage and track its membership and I know he would like to modernise the NCSG one as well. Currently the NCSG relies largely upon manual labour with some ICANN support to run its elections: not an ideal situation for the year 2015. The Chair should have better things to do than spending his or her time manually checking people in for elections, and I’m confident that should you select him as Chair Tapani will engineer a system to make that happen. When Maryam has a problem with the technical side of our operations it is Tapani she calls first. It’s been that way for a while now. No one knows the underbelly of the NCSG as well as Tapani and no one is more capable of modernizing and fixing it than he. 

A Chair does not have to be expert on every detail of every working group. In fact, I’d be a bit worried if he or she spent much time obtaining that expertise because that is not the essence of the job. A Chair needs to populate the working groups with our volunteers who then work with our Councillors and the Policy Committee to coordinate the important work that we are here to do. A Chair should, though, be expert and have experience as an advocate for those core values that represent who we are as a community. Tapani has both the requisite experience and expertise in the two areas that most define us: that as being fierce advocates for free expression and that as being zealous protectors of privacy in the domain name space. 

Currently Vice President of the organisation, Tapani has served as a Board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation Finland since 2004. He was President of the group, the leading NGO promoting online free speech in Finland, between 2006 and 2010. Tapani has also been a key defender of privacy rights in Finland. For the past 3 years Tapani has been a Deputy of the Finnish Data Protection Board, an independent authority affiliated with the Finnish Ministry of Justice that is the most important decision making agency on personal data matters in the country. We would be hard pressed to find someone with greater expertise at a higher level of competence in both of these areas of concern than that possessed by Mr. Tarvainen. 

Tapani is also very well versed in areas of intertnet governance. A regular participant and panellist at the European Dialogue on Internet Governance, Tapani has been very active in the Internet Governance Forum, having attended and participated in every I.G.F. since the Forum was founded at the 2005 W.S.I.S. He knows the major players in the field and they know him. He also knows us: Tapani served on the NCUC Executive Committee in 2012-2013 and currently is serving us as a member of the NCSG Executive Committee. The NCSG Chair position would be a natural progression for a man who has been a member of the NCSG since 2009. He is not a newcomer to our community; rather he is someone who has volunteered his time and talents to us for 6 plus years. 

ICANN is entering a new era with a much higher profile. More than ever before, the Chair of the NCSG will be required to be the public face of the non-commercial community. Tapani is well prepared for that role. 

Long before I met Tapani here in the NCSG I knew of him by reputation as a result of his high profile in Finland on issues like free expression and privacy. He testifies regularly before the Eduskunta, the Finnish Parliament, on these issues and on broader civil liberties concerns. I would have no hesitation placing Tapani before the U.S. Congress to testify on the transition should such a need arise. He is very experienced in this type of situation. In addition, Tapani features prominently in the Finnish media. Those who only know him as the person who maintains the NCSG infrastructure might be surprised at this facet of the man, so I’ve edited one of Tapani’s appearances earlier this year on Aamu-TV (the top rated morning Finnish television program, broadcast nationally on state broadcaster YLE, it is the equivalent of Today in the United States) for your viewing. You can find it here: 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6jgl1UibSY 


For those who don’t speak Finnish, in this video Tapani appears as part of a discussion on privacy, surveillance and security, defending the rights and interests of the individual. This is a part of Mr. Tarvainen’s skill set that many people in the NCSG don’t know about and I wanted to make sure all of you saw him in action before you cast your vote for Chair. He truly is an exceptional multifaceted and multitalented man. 

We all have an important decision to make. ICANN is entering a phase that some are calling ICANN 3.0 and we need, I need as Counsellor to help me, an experienced, educated person with the intellect and savvy to work with all of us, and our colleagues in other stakeholder groups, to advance and protect the interests of the non-commercial user. I thank our senior Councillor and Ethos award winner Avri Doria for nominating a man as talented and as experienced as Tapani Tarvainen for this post and, after full consideration, I hope you’ll be able to join us in supporting him in the coming election. The NCSG would be well served by having Tapani Tarvainen as its Chair. 

Good luck to all of the candidates and thank you, each and every one of you, for your support of and membership in the NCSG. We may be outnumbered and out resourced but because of you we will never be out motivated or outworked. Thanks all for considering my comments and ideas in this and in all matters. 

Kind Regards, 


Ed Morris 








From : "Remmy Nweke" <[log in to unmask]> 
Sent : Sunday, August 23, 2015 11:37 PM 
To : [log in to unmask] 
Subject : Re: Nomination of Tapani Tarvainen for NCSG Chair 




Thanks Tapani for accepting to serve. Like Stephanie said, sure some of us will be around to support your candidacy eventually by sharing in the sleepless night. Remmy Nweke @ITRealms 













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On Sun, Aug 23, 2015 at 10:45 PM, Stephanie Perrin < [log in to unmask] > wrote: 

This is great news Tapani! It is indeed a lot of work, and it is we who are honoured that you have gone to these lengths and considered so carefully, in order to make such a commitment. 
Thanks, and please be assured that you will have a team of us to help work through those sleepless nights! 
Cheers Stephanie 



On 2015-08-23 12:33, Tapani Tarvainen wrote: 

Dear Avri, all, 

I am honoured to accept the nomination for NCSG Chair. 

I have been really amazed by the amount of support given to me on in 
the list, given how low profile I've kept in NCSG of late. 
Thank you all. 

Indeed I can't help feeling a bit overwhelmed by the expectations some 
people seem to have placed in me. But I think I know what I'm getting 
myself into, and will do my best, should I get elected. 

I must admit I hesitated before deciding to accept: I have been around 
long enough to have a fair idea about the large amount of work Chair 
has to do, and I have full-time job and I've been doing long hours for 
Electronic Frontier Finland (Effi - not to be confused with EFF), too. 

But the timing now is good for me: Effi has just hired a new executive 
director, our first paid employee ever, which is easing my workload 
there significantly, and I've managed to convince my boss at the 
University to let me put enough hours for ICANN in my work plan 
(including going to meetings without using vacation time) that I'm 
confident I could handle it and still have time to sleep (most nights 
anyway). :-) 

-- 
Tapani Tarvainen 

On Mon, Aug 17, 2015 at 08:18:31AM -0400, Avri Doria ( [log in to unmask] ) wrote: 


Hi, 

I would like to nominate Tarpani for the role of NCSG chair. He has 
shown that he understands the administrative and leadership aspects of 
the NCSG and has gained experience serving in several roles. 

He has been with the the NCSG for many years now and has done service in 
roles in the NCUC including building some of their network 
infrastructure and is currently a member of the NCSG Executive Committee. 

I believe he understands many of the organizational issues the NCSG is 
facing, both at the NCSG level, and in terms of working with 
constituencies and within the ICANN system. 

I believe he would be a good Chair for the NCSG and would help in 
maintaining and furthering the improvements we have seen over the last 
years in the NCSG. 


Thanks 


avri 


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