>>DEBRA HUGHES: Thanks, Jeff. It's my pleasure to bring the first update from this brand-new constituency on behalf of the more than 34 international nonprofit operations representing all five ICANN regions. I am delighted to say we were joined at our meeting by School Net Africa. Some of you may be aware of that organization. School Net Africa is an organization that unites more than 33 African affiliates providing ICT and Internet-related education throughout Africa, and they are very interested in our constituency as well.
So we were excited to see them.
We have also done a lot of outreach around the world, which I will talk about in a second. But I just wanted to first say that our meeting that we had on Tuesday focused a lot on our organizational requirements.
As you can imagine, a brand-new constituency, there's a lot to do organizationally. And so we have a set of interim leadership members, and they are currently Amber Sterling from the Association of American Medical Colleges. Our interim vice chair is Alan B. from (saying name). Our interim policy chair is Judy Branzel (phonetic) from Goodwill Industries. And we have two representatives to the Noncommercial Stakeholders Group executive committee. They are Klaus Stahl (phonetic) from (saying name) and Michael Carson from YMCA of the U.S.A. Klaus Stahl is also serving in the role of our interim communications and membership chair. And I am serving as the outgoing board-appointed councillor.
So we spent a lot of our meeting talking about the pending -- and actually, throughout the week, via e-mail, about the pending policy issues that are going on, in particular trying to review the proposed JAS statement that was being offered by the NCSG and we were glad to be able to join with them in supporting that, in JAS efforts. As a matter of fact, one of our very new members was an active participant in that work group and we were leased he was able to jump in and start working.
We also talked about the amendments to the RAA, and also the potential upcoming review of the UDRP.
Several of our organizations are very concerned, too, about security and stability because of the important fund-raising activities and other activities that we perform. So we are planning to really focus a lot on DNSSEC and other security and stability related concerns. And as a matter of fact, at our last NPOC meeting that we had last month, we had a visitor, Dr. Crocker visited us and spoke to us about DNSSEC.
So DNSSEC is really important to our organizations, and we're looking forward to being engaged there.
We wanted to just highlight for you some of the exciting things that are going on with our new constituency and invite you to reach out to them, as you see them walking around in the next ICANN meeting. Although we won't have a councillor that's actually sitting on the GNSO Council, we are excited to be a vibrant member of the ICANN community and are going to do the best that we can to try to get representatives there so that we can participate in events like this, talking about our constituency.
I just wanted to highlight that some of the organizations that are involved. There's an organization called the Global Knowledge Partnerships, which is a wonderful multistakeholder network of organizations that are devoted to providing Internet and ICT knowledge throughout the world. They were founded in 1997. They have a presence in more than 50 countries. So we are excited about their participation and their membership.
Another such organization is the YMCA of U.S.A. We were able to get a member here for his very first ICANN meeting. He is a member of our Executive Committee, and Michael Carson is here, and so we were glad to see their organization's participation.
>From the organizational perspective, we are still continuing our outreach, as I've mentioned. We have currently 34 members. We have another 19 or so with applications that are ready to be reviewed. And we collected ten applications, actually, at the IGF, which was really exciting. And we are really trying to encourage nonprofit organizations to make ICANN the place where they can talk about Internet governance, which we think is really important.
We're planning a presence at e-Asia why early in Bangladesh. We are also trying to plan a workshop in Costa Rica which will be a challenge since we are going to have to try to figure out how to get ourselves there but we are excited about being in Costa Rica, we are committed to being there and we are going to have a wonderful workshop at ICANN 43.
We are also planning a Webinar on December the 6th. You know, part of being a new constituency, in addition to explaining the policy issues and how to navigate work groups, and we all know outreach is important but you have to figure out how to teach them about ICANN. And so this Webinar on December the 6th will be not only about the important initiatives like the new gTLD program and what that means for nonprofits, but also ICANN 101. What is ICANN? How do you get involved? What's a work group? We didn't want to dump these organizations into the ICANN mix without helping them navigate. So we are really excited we are going to have this Webinar on December 6 and we will be sure to share that information so you can pass it on to those who might be interested.
So we are really excited, ready to be engaged, ready to be involved. Looking forward to all of our members being active members of the Noncommercial Stakeholders Group. Looking forward to continued outreach. One thing I always said is outreach is not a destination; it's a process. I am committed to that, and I am committed to being involved in this multistakeholder process as long as our organizations have a voice and have the ability to be involved.
So thank you very much.