[council] Re: Nomination for NC Chair

[Cary Karp <ck@nic.museum>]

In response to some of the queries and comments that have been made
about my previous involvement with the ICANN process and my
potential ability to Chair the NC:

I have been a Swedish civil servant for close to thirty years. For
over two thirds of this time I have held managerial positions
involving autonomous responsibility for administrative matters such
as organizational planning and budgeting in both local institutional
and broader international contexts. I cannot begin to count the
number of meetings that I have convened and chaired.

One of my chief tasks has been the development and maintenance of
strategic and collaborative liaison between the Swedish museum
community and the NGO's and IGO's with which it is involved. During
the course of this action, I have been on a large number of
committees, task forces, working groups and Boards; often in the
Chair.

If there is an aspect of my career to which I would point most
proudly, it is having been at the forefront of establishing the
museum community's identity on the global digital communication
networks. (If anyone is curious about the current scope of this
presence, try a Google search on "museum".)  This activity started
in the early 80's by enabling POTS access to mainframe-based
conferencing systems, gatewayed to academic e-mail services and
burgeoning Internet facilities. In the mid-80's, this action
extended to making distributed museum community resources accessible
via the global X.25 networks.

In the early 90's, these endeavors were migrated to the TCP/IP
platform. I became the central coordinator of the Internet activity
conducted by the International Council of Museums (ICOM) and was
pivotal in many aspects of the national Swedish museums' individual
and aggregated emergence on the Net. My participation in this
process had both egghead and gearhead components and I am familiar
with all aspects of network and domain administration and operation.

In the ICOM capacity, I was among the early responders to the 1996
Postel draft, convinced that a .museum easily might appear in the
envisioned battery of new TLD's. At the time, the multimedia
industry was aggressively acquiring electronic publication rights to
digital representations of museum holdings and it appeared
reasonable that the industry might perceive value in a .museum label
for such activity. It therefore became necessary for the museum
community to adopt a proactive stance if it had any desire in
determining the policy basis of the speculative new domain.

The ensuing crusade ultimately resulted in the creation of the
present .museum. The path from then to now was studded with all of
the political intrigue and delight that preceded ICANN's creation.
My personal involvement in this was not trivial, particularly as it
related to addressing the intricacies of European reaction to the
underlying US-centric initiative. The early history of this action
is documented at www.remunere.net.

I was not enormously attentive to the sequence of events immediately
triggered by the appearance of the Green Paper. My contribution to
the interim discussion was limited to an occasional reminder in one
or another e-mail context that interest in establishing .museum
remained. During the course of 2000, when it seemed as though the
actual creation of new gTLDs was coming back into focus, I became
actively involved in the DNSO. ICOM joined the Non-Commercial Domain
Holders Constituency, with me as its representative. My first
physical appearance at an ICANN meeting was in Yokohama and I have
been at all since then.

With the establishment of .museum, I moved to the gTLD Constituency
and was elected by its sTLD group as their one of the whole
constituency's three representatives to the NC. Shortly after my
assuming the latter role I volunteered to be our participant in
the .org TF. The circumstances leading to my being nominated to the
NC Chair were recently described in previous postings to this list.

I agree with Milton's view of the NC Chair as, "a purely ministerial
function that requires the ability to run meetings well and the
perform the preparatory work that make productive meetings
possible."  The .museum experience and its lengthy prequel have
provided me with a level of insight into political, strategic and
practical aspects of TLDs and the DNS that I believe justifies a
claim to significant understanding of the matters that the DNSO was
created to address. For those of you who are interested in further
details of my background, I maintain a vanity site at ck.nic.museum.

/Cary