[Npoc-discuss] MARTIN SILVA VALENT - NPOC VICE-CHAIR NOMINATION

Sat May 21 23:37:38 UTC 2016

Dear NPOC Members,

            I am Martín Silva Valent, current Secretariat of NPOC, and I hereby nominate myself for the Vice-Chair open position. I declare that: I am an active member of NPOC, and that if elected, I consent to serve; and I do not have any pecuniary or conflict of interest with ICANN.

I am finishing my term as Secretariat and after more than two years of work assisting the Chair and Vice-Chair of NPOC I feel I have concluded a learning cycle. My engagement with policy development, mentoring and outreach and in-reach work has increased and I feel I can contribute more as Vice-chair than as a Secretariat. I also think that is fair that someone else become Secretariat, a privileged role I enjoyed and from which I learned almost everything I know about ICANN.

About Me in ICANN:

            I am honoured for the trust I’ve received from the community to be Secretariat and I can only hope that the community feels I was up to the expectation. Besides being the Secretariat of NPOC inside ICANN I am an Alumni of the Fellowship Program and the Leadership Training Program, and twice the Coach Leader of the Fellowship, things that eventually led me to be an official Mentor for ICANN future leaders and developing both Coaching and Mentorship material and strategies (something I still work on). For NPOC I have done, and still do, extensive outreach both in my geographical zone, the LAC zone, and other places when I have the opportunity. I also participate in two working groups, “The Standing Committee on Improvements Implementation” and the “Review of all Rights Protection Mechanisms (RPMs) in all gTLDs”. This is just to mention some relevant events, but I also collaborate and help in a lot of other things (i.e.: last week I gave a presentation of NPOC in the LACRALO monthly call and I am helping the NCSG to present a Workshop Proposal for the IGF). 

About Me outside ICANN:

            I am 27 years old and a Lawyer living in Buenos Aires Argentina. I presented in my name and got approved a Workshop for the IGF in Brazil along with the Youth Coalition for Internet Governance regarding Youth in the Multistakeholder Process. I also do research in the NGO I represent (AGEIA DENSI, a specialized NGO in research and development of Internet Law and Economy issues) and the university where I teach Civil Law (Universidad Torcuato Di Tella). In the past I’ve done work with Human Rights and Genocide regarding the Argentina and the Armenian cases. 

            I do research on various Internet Law matters, some of them have been published (i.e.: Impact of Free Trade Agreements on Internet Policy, a Latin America Case Study, funded by the Internet Policy Observatory at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania). Besides my academic and IG work, I am a licensed Lawyer in Buenos Aires and I do practice corporate law in my own family law firm with some clients that are usually not related to Internet, all non-related to DNS in any way.

            I like to work with professionalism but I also enjoy the social and the affective part of working together with other people, especially when they are different to me. I work hard and I am kind, I trust any of my wo-workers can give testimony to that. I am not perfect, I make mistakes and I am always in a learning process and usually find myself being the ignorant in the room, but I love that because it means I am in the right place, challenging myself and making my experience better and deeper. 

About the future of NPOC:

            The past of NPOC is still quite short, but since I’ve started working the Membership base has been cleaned up and is more transparent, it has also grown in active members and participants (in my first constituency meeting there where only 4 members and some lost/curious people, imagine!). This was thanks to an extensive work that Joan Kerr did and the enormous amount of work that we all in the ExCom did with different outreach, and in-reach, activities. Said that, NPOC is about Policy making since is part of the GNSO, and therefore our ultimate goal is to produce policy that takes in account the interest of our community, in this case, the Operational Concerns of Non-for-Profits, a forgotten subject in ICANN since the dawn of times.

It still baffles me how ICANN is full of NGO people but no one acknowledges the challenges and opportunities that the DNS represent for the NGOs. Operating an NGO, just like operating an enterprise, using the domain name system has a rich set of problems and potential solutions that we are still yet to discover. That’s why the engagement activities are so important, because we need far more input, feedback and activity from the community to say that NPOC is producing accurate Policy according to its mission. So far, we have done all that we could to produce policy in a vast amount of working groups taking in account how many active members we had in the beginning (Rudi Vanna, Klaus Stoll and Sam Lanfranco to name the most influential in this last years). This is all changing thanks to the work done in the last years and I am confident that as time passes and the team grows and evolves the Policy work will be getting only better and better to give the NGOs out there the proper defence of their operational interest inside the GNSO.

            As Vice-Chair I will deepen my work and continue to develop in the most inclusive and multistakeholder manner the policy issues that the domain name system presents. I have to say it clear, even if I am not the next Vice-chair, even if I continue as a Secretariat or as just a simple active member, I will work the same with all the member of NPOC and continue to put my shoulder to the matter at stake, because I believe is the right thing to do and I truly enjoy doing it.

Final words:

Thank you very much for your time and don’t forget to vote on the elections and participate as much as you can in the NPOC activities after that. We need you all and we need you know, just as you need NPOC to not be left behind in the Domain Name System. I kindly ask you to vote for me if you think I can do the best work as Vice-Chair. If you wish to contact me don’t hesitate to drop an email or a message in Skype (user: mpsilvavalent).

Cheers to all,

Martín.
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