Risk Committee of the Board (BRC)

Harald Alvestrand was born in Norway in 1959, and graduated from the Norwegian Institute of Technology (NTH) in 1984. Since then, he became a leading figure in the Norwegian internet growth while working for UNINETT (the university network of Norway). Harald has also worked for Norsk Data, EDB Maxware and Cisco Systems. Since 2006, Harald has been working as an engineer for Google. He has participated on various projects during his time at Google, serving as the standards coordinator for the WebRTC project in his most recent one. He has been active in Internet standardization via the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) since 1991, and has written a number of RFCs, including RFC 1766, the first standard for language tags in Internet protocols. In the IETF, Harald has been an area director of the Applications area (1995-1998) and of the Operations & Management area (1998-1999; a member of the Internet Architecture Board (1999-2001), and served as chair of the IETF from 2001 to 2006. He was alternate chair of the ICANN DNSO General Assembly from December 1999 to April 2001, and was a member of the WIPO panel of experts on the DNS in 1998-1999. Harald is a former board member of NORID (the .no domain name registry), ICANN and the Unicode Consortium. He lives in Trondheim, Norway, is married, and has 3 children. Harald Alvestrand has been appointed as non-voting technical liaison to the ICANN Board by the IETF.

Chris Chapman concluded his appointment in 2016 as the inaugural Chairman and Chief Executive of the Australian Media and Communications Authority (ACMA), the independent regulator of Australia's broadcasting, telecommunications, spectrum, and online services. His role was recognized by the Federal Minister for Communications as having been discharged for a decade with distinction.

In recognition of the broad-ranging experiences he encountered over that decade, the organizational transformation he prosecuted and sustained throughout his term, and the significant contribution that the ACMA made to the policy debate about regulation in these sectors, Chris was appointed President of the International Institute of Communications in 2016. He is the first president in the organization's nearly 50-year history to be appointed from the Asia Pacific region.

Since 2016, Chris' directorships and work have covered a broad spectrum of interests including philanthropic and not-for-profit, sports advisory work (particularly in the governance space), film script development, international media and communications developments, bleeding-edge digital technologies, and digital transformation consulting. He also has several digital platforms under development.

Some earlier career highlights include serving as the Associate to the Chief Justice of Australia, working as a corporate lawyer and legal counsel, holding senior management positions with the Seven Network, and being the Chief Executive of the Sydney Olympic stadium, the Optus broadband joint venture, and Prime Infrastructure Limited.

Chris has successfully chaired organizations in the private, public, and not-for-profit sectors, several of them very complex ones requiring agile stakeholder skills. Without exception, he has overseen appropriate corporate governance and has developed a reputation for effective chairing and a collegiate approach. In the mid-1990s, the Australian Government appointed him Chair of Film Australia, one of the country's most treasured cultural organizations.

Chris received double Bachelor of Laws and Bachelor of Commerce (Accounting and Finance – with Merit) degrees from the University of New South Wales. In addition, he completed the Harvard Business School's Advanced Management Program.

He was nominated to serve on the ICANN Board of Directors by the Nominating Committee in 2022. His term will expire at the Annual General Meeting in 2025.

Dr. James Galvin has over three decades of experience in secure and robust operations in all aspects of networking and the life cycle of a domain name. He currently serves as Donuts, Inc. Director of Strategic Relationships and Technical Standards, applying this experience to the development of technical standards and policies in support of strategic initiatives to advance secure and robust operations. James began his career in 1989 developing Internet Standards in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) for secure email, secure network management, and DNS security, which are still applicable and in use today. He continues to be an active participant in the IETF where he currently serves as Co-Chair of the Registration Extensions Protocols Working Group, the working group currently responsible for all Internet Standards related to the operation of domain name registration services and the protocol interactions between registries and registrars. He has been part of ICANN’s Security and Stability Advisory Committee (SSAC) since 2002, and served as its Vice Chair for seven years until December 2017. He has served the ICANN community as chair of various technical expert working groups and has engaged in multiple PDPs. He is currently active in the Registry Stakeholder Group DNS Abuse Working Group, the contracted party’s technical operations working group (CPH TechOps), and the CPH RDAP working group. James is a Pioneering Member of the Internet Society, and served as its Vice President of Chapters and Individuals from 2002 until 2005. He has been a member of both the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) and ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) since the early 1980s. James was appointed to serve as the SSAC’s non-voting liaison to the ICANN Board on 28 October 2021.

Wes Hardaker is a Senior Computer Scientist at the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute and is responsible for overseeing teams to develop and execute research ideas. He is principally responsible for the operation and management of the Internet’s Internet’s b.root-servers.net [b.root-servers.net] domain name system critical infrastructure.  His research focuses on enhancing the DNS, network management, routing and other Internet protocols, and studying malicious actor behaviors through intrusion detection. Wes has been actively participating in the Internet Engineering Task Force open standards body that documents Internet protocols for roughly 25 years, and he currently sits on the Internet Architecture Board. Within ICANN, Wes is the principal representative for b.root-servers.net [b.root-servers.net] in the Root Server System Advisory Committee.

Wes was appointed to serve as the RSSAC’s non-voting liaison to the ICANN Board beginning in September 2022.

As Vice President of Technology at Akamai Technologies, Christian Kaufmann leads the Technology department, which is responsible for driving the technical evolution of the Akamai Edge platform, including a wide set of responsibilities like hardware engineering, data center architecture, network architecture and engineering, and software and systems development.

Christian has extensive experience in corporate governance, including hiring Chief Executive Officers and handling mergers and acquisitions. He has served on various other boards over the last 15 years, including at Internet Exchanges and the Réseaux IP Européens Network Coordination Centre (RIPE NCC).

Before joining Akamai, Christian worked in various technical and managerial roles at several Internet service providers and carriers, including Telia Sonera, Easynet, and Cable & Wireless.

Christian has a Master of Science in Advanced Networking from The Open University in the U.K. He also holds various technical certifications, including Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert (CCIE) and Juniper Networks Certified Internet Expert (JCNIE) certifications.

He was nominated to serve on the ICANN Board of Directors by the Address Supporting Organization (ASO) in 2022. His term will expire at the Annual General Meeting in 2025.

Patricio Poblete was born in Chile in 1952 and obtained a degree in Mathematical Engineering from the University of Chile, and a M.Math. and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo, Canada. In 1975, he was one of the founders of the first Department of Computer Science in Chile, at the University of Chile, where he is currently a Full Professor. He has a long list of scientific publications, most of them in the fields of Data Structures and Analysis of Algorithms. He is also an Internet pioneer in his country, having started the first email network connecting Chilean universities to the world, and later participating in the connection of Chile to the Internet. Since 1987, the Department of Computer Science of the University of Chile took on the responsibility of managing the registry for .CL, the domain name registry for the Republic of Chile. Over the years, this grew and became NIC Chile, one of the oldest and largest registries in Latin America. Patricio has led NIC Chile since its founding. As representative of NIC Chile, Patricio participated in the International Forum of the White Paper (IFWP) process that led to the creation of ICANN, then served as a member of the Names Council of the Domain Names Supporting Organization (DNSO), until it split into the GNSO and the ccNSO. For many years he was a member and vice-chair of the ccNSO Council, and has participated in various working groups, notably the Framework of Interpretation (FoI), the ccPDP Retirement WG and the Meetings Program Standing Committee (MPC). In 2017 he received the ICANN Multistakeholder Ethos Award, jointly with his colleague Hiro Hotta. On the regional area, he was one of the founders of LACTLD, the Latin American and Caribbean ccTLDs Organization. In parallel with his work with NIC Chile and with the ICANN community, Patricio is a leading engineering educator in Chile, and served as director of the School of Engineering and Science of the University of Chile for 14 years. He has received many awards for his work in the field of Engineering Education and he has recently been selected as a member of the Chilean Academy of Engineering. He was selected to serve on the ICANN Board by the ccNSO for the term 2020-2023.

Matthew Shears is an Internet and telecommunications policy consultant. Matthew spent a decade in Brussels working on EU standardization and telecommunications regulation before becoming involved in international Internet policy work, starting with the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in 2005. Since then he has participated in a range of Internet policy and governance fora and processes, including the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT), the World Telecommunications Policy Forum (WTPF), the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) and was deeply involved in the work that led up to the IANA Stewardship transition and enhancing ICANN’s accountability. Matthew was a member of the UN Secretary General’s Multistakeholder Advisory Group on Internet Governance and is a member and past co-Chair of the non-governmental Advisory Network of the Freedom Online Coalition. He has worked for, among others, the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT), the Internet Society, Cisco, Teledesic and AT&T. A UK national, he received his MSc in European Studies from the London School of Economics and his BA in International Affairs from George Washington University. He was selected by the GNSO to serve on the Board and is entering his second term at the AGM in Hamburg in 2020.