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Chair’s Blog: Recap of the January Board Workshop

12 February 2023
By
Tripti Sinha

Tripti Sinha

ICANN Board Chair

Tripti Sinha is Assistant Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at the University of Maryland (UMD) in the Division of Information Technology. She leads Advanced Cyber Infrastructure and Internet Global Services (ACIGS) and the Mid-Atlantic Crossroads (MAX). She has over three decades of progressive experience in Internet and Cyber-Infrastructure technologies. Her wide-ranging experience includes leadership positions in engineering, operations, finance, governance, advocacy and policy. In her current role, she is the chief executive of the MAX, which operates a high-performance regional research and education (R&E) 100G network for advanced cyber-infrastructure services and research. She is also responsible for UMD's High Performance Computing service and strategy. Tripti is active internationally as the executive and operational head of UMD's global operation of DNS root services. She previously served as Co-Chair of ICANN's Root Server System Advisory Committee (RSSAC) from 2015-2018.

In the United States, she is very involved in the Internet2 community on activities related to the US national R&E Internet backbone. She is also Chair of the Board of Directors of The Quilt whose mission is to provide advocacy for research and education networking on the US national agenda. She has served on many other non-profit and private sector technology advisory boards.

Tripti has an undergraduate degree in Computer Science from Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts and did graduate work in Computer Science at the University of Maryland. She was born in India and lives in the United States. As a child and young adult, she moved back-and-forth between the USA and India which gave her an appreciation for global pluralism. She is proficient in English and Hindi, and has an understanding of Punjabi, Urdu and the ancient Sanskrit language. Tripti has a keen interest in Information and Communication Technology innovation, entrepreneurship, governance and policy, and international affairs. Tripti was nominated to serve on the ICANN Board of Directors by the Nominating Committee in 2018.  Her term will expire at the Annual General Meeting 2024.

The ICANN Board of Directors recently held its first Board Workshop of the year, and I'm pleased to report that we began 2023 on a productive note.

During the four-day meeting, held in Los Angeles, we discussed and made progress on many of the most important issues that ICANN is currently facing, including the effectiveness of ICANN's multistakeholder model of governance and the next round of new generic top-level domains (gTLDs).

We also had ample opportunity to engage with ICANN's Interim President and Chief Executive Officer, Sally Costerton. She gave us an update on the ICANN Organization's (Org) work in support of the many operational activities and community-led initiatives, including the ICANN Grant Program.

Here are the key takeaways from our workshop:

  • SubPro: The Board spent a full day considering the Operational Design Assessment (ODA) of the outputs and recommendations contained in the Generic Names Supporting Organization's (GNSO) Final Report on the New gTLD Subsequent Procedures (SubPro) Policy Development Process. We reviewed the community's recommendations and the Org's analysis, with a focus on the risks involved and which dependencies exist among the policy recommendations and efforts, such as Universal Acceptance, Internationalized Domain Names, Domain Name System (DNS) abuse, name collision, applicant support, and other activities.

    The Board anticipates making incremental decisions leading up to the final decision on opening a new application window for new gTLDs, and we expect to vote on many of the GNSO's recommendations during the upcoming ICANN76 Public Meeting. We will defer a small, but important, subset of the recommendations for future consideration. In the meantime, the Board has asked ICANN Org to provide more detail on the financing of the steps envisioned in the ODA, and to develop a variation of the proposed Option 2 that ensures adequate time and resources to reduce the need for manual processing and takes into account the need to resolve critical policy issues, such as closed generics. We also plan to hold follow-up discussions with the GNSO Council and will soon arrange to do so.

  • WHOIS Disclosure System: The Board made progress in its consideration of a proposed ticketing system for requests for access to nonpublic gTLD registration data, which is based on ICANN Org's WHOIS Disclosure System Design Paper. To better inform a vote on the proposal, we asked the Org to provide more details on specific aspects of the design, including projected costs and how to encourage adoption of the system.

  • Universal Acceptance (UA) and Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs): ICANN Org staff gave an update on the Org's progress toward UA-readiness. The Board also discussed how to share this information with stakeholders and reviewed the current analysis of dependencies related to IDNs for the next gTLD application round.

  • Intergovernmental Organization (IGO) Engagement: ICANN Org staff gave an update on ICANN's IGO engagement efforts last year, including the successful launch of the Coalition for Digital Africa, and previewed this year's IGO activities and processes. We discussed emerging trends in this space and the possible impacts on ICANN.

  • Board Effectiveness: We discussed proposed operational improvements that would help us better serve the community and improve our interactions. In addition to our ongoing efforts to increase Board efficiency and the timeliness in which we make decisions, we hope to implement these improvements by the next Annual General Meeting.

  • CEO Search: We discussed the process to identify and select the next President and CEO. There will be announcements in the coming weeks regarding the Search Committee and next steps.

Additionally, as part of our regular work, the Board conducted an assessment of ICANN's progress toward the goals of the current Strategic Plan, focusing on the strategic objective of improving the effectiveness of ICANN's multistakeholder model of governance. We discussed how the Board might better support community groups in their development of policies and advice, and the challenges to ICANN's governance model. As we have learned these past few years, the world is always changing, and we need to continuously re-examine and refine how we achieve our overall strategic priorities.

It is clear that we have a busy year ahead. As we approach a number of critical milestones for ICANN, both the Board and Org – one organization – seeks to work much more effectively and seamlessly alongside the ICANN community to make progress on these key issues and ensure a secure, stable, and unified global Internet.

Authors

Tripti Sinha

Tripti Sinha

ICANN Board Chair
Tripti Sinha

Tripti Sinha

ICANN Board Chair

Tripti Sinha is Assistant Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at the University of Maryland (UMD) in the Division of Information Technology. She leads Advanced Cyber Infrastructure and Internet Global Services (ACIGS) and the Mid-Atlantic Crossroads (MAX). She has over three decades of progressive experience in Internet and Cyber-Infrastructure technologies. Her wide-ranging experience includes leadership positions in engineering, operations, finance, governance, advocacy and policy. In her current role, she is the chief executive of the MAX, which operates a high-performance regional research and education (R&E) 100G network for advanced cyber-infrastructure services and research. She is also responsible for UMD's High Performance Computing service and strategy. Tripti is active internationally as the executive and operational head of UMD's global operation of DNS root services. She previously served as Co-Chair of ICANN's Root Server System Advisory Committee (RSSAC) from 2015-2018.

In the United States, she is very involved in the Internet2 community on activities related to the US national R&E Internet backbone. She is also Chair of the Board of Directors of The Quilt whose mission is to provide advocacy for research and education networking on the US national agenda. She has served on many other non-profit and private sector technology advisory boards.

Tripti has an undergraduate degree in Computer Science from Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts and did graduate work in Computer Science at the University of Maryland. She was born in India and lives in the United States. As a child and young adult, she moved back-and-forth between the USA and India which gave her an appreciation for global pluralism. She is proficient in English and Hindi, and has an understanding of Punjabi, Urdu and the ancient Sanskrit language. Tripti has a keen interest in Information and Communication Technology innovation, entrepreneurship, governance and policy, and international affairs. Tripti was nominated to serve on the ICANN Board of Directors by the Nominating Committee in 2018.  Her term will expire at the Annual General Meeting 2024.

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