Technical Committee of the Board (BTC)

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 Identity Digital, Inc. Director of Strategic Relationships, 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.

Alan Barrett holds a B.Sc.Eng. and M.Sc.Eng. from the University of KwaZulu-Natal (then called the University of Natal), Durban, South Africa. Alan was involved in setting up the first Internet connection for South African universities in 1990/1991. In 1993, he was a co-founder of the first commercial ISP in South Africa, then called TICSA, later Internet Africa and UUNET South Africa, where he remained until 1999. Alan then joined a small Internet firewall company, CEQURUX Technologies, where he remained until the company went out of business in 2007. After that, he worked as a software consultant. In 2015, Alan was appointed as CEO of AFRINIC, where he remained until 2019. Alan was a co-author of the 1997 proposal to create AFRINIC, serving on a steering committee tasked with creating AFRINIC, and was elected to the first AFRINIC Board in 2004, where he served until 2009. He was appointed by the AFRINIC Board to the Number Resource Organization Number Council (NRO NC) / Address Supporting Organization Address Council (ASO AC), from 2004 to 2014. During part of the IANA stewardship transition, from 2015 to 2016, he served in the IANA Stewardship Transition Coordination Group (ICG), as an appointee of the NRO. Alan was selected by the ASO to serve on the ICANN Board in 2021. His term will expire at the Annual General Meeting in 2024.

Chris Buckridge is an independent consultant, analyst, and commentator in the Internet governance and digital policy space. He worked for more than two decades with Regional Internet Registries, starting with the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre in 2003, before joining the Réseaux IP Européens Network Coordination Centre (RIPE NCC) in 2006. During his tenure at the RIPE NCC, he helped develop the organization's engagement in public policy and Internet governance, working closely with institutions including the International Telecommunication Union, the OECD, and the United Nations.

In 2015, Chris served a member of the Australian government delegation to the WSIS+10 review. Since 2016, he has served as a member of the EuroDIG Association Board, and has been actively engaged in national and regional Internet governance initiatives across the RIPE NCC service region (Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia) and beyond. In 2021, he was appointed to the Multistakeholder Advisory Group or MAG of the United Nations Internet Governance Forum, where he will complete his third and final one-year term in 2024. Chris holds a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Queensland in Australia.

Chris was selected in 2023 by the Generic Names Supporting Organization to serve a three-year term on the ICANN Board of Directors in 2023. His term will expire at the Annual General Meeting in 2026.

Nicolas "Nico" G. Caballero is a Data Analyst and ERP Software and Domain Name System (DNS) expert, serving as an ICT Adviser at Paraguay's Ministry of Information and Communication Technologies (MITIC). He is also currently serving as President of Centro de Emprendimiento e Internet de América Latina y el Caribe (CEILAC) DNS Center in Asuncion. Nico was a direct ICT Advisor for the office of the President of Paraguay, and as such he coordinated: the demonopolization of Internet service in Paraguay; the establishment of the Digital TV Standard (ISDB-Tb); the creation of the ICT Ministry, SENATICS; and the team that drafted the first Paraguayan civil satellite program, which in turn, led to the establishment of the Paraguayan space agency.

Nico was the founder of the Internet Society (ISOC) Paraguay Chapter and served as its first President. He was also the first Paraguayan GAC Representative. In parallel, he served as the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) Regional Initiative Representative in the country, where he organized the first IGF meeting in 2014. Nico was further responsible for the extensive capacity- building work carried out by the ICT Ministry, in particular the Memorandum of Understanding with ICANN in 2016–2017. He coordinated the establishment of the CEILAC DNS Center, as a cooperation agreement between SENATICS, the Latin American and Caribbean Country Code Top-Level Domain Association, and ICANN, which remained operative within the structure of MITIC.

Nico was also responsible for organizing key IT events in Paraguay: the ICANN DNS Roadshow,

ISOC Chapter events, and Chapter projects aimed at developing connectivity in rural areas, providing digital training and IT infrastructure to high schools, and providing Internet connection, e-commerce tools and digital training for Native Indigenous people in remote areas. In 2017, he moved to the private sector, and in 2022 resumed his role as the Paraguay GAC Representative at ICANN74 in The Hague, Netherlands. At ICANN76 in Kuala Lumpur, Nico was elected GAC Chair, marking the first time a Latin American representative has held the position.

Nico studied English at Pittsburgh State University in Kansas, USA; Computer Science at Universidad Autonoma de Asuncion in Paraguay; and E-Government at Konkuk University in Seoul, Republic of Korea. He also holds an Electric Car Technologies Diploma from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands.

He is fluent in Spanish, English and Portuguese, and also speaks French and Italian. Nico loves rugby, plays classical guitar, and is also a 4th Degree Black Belt in Taekwon-Do.

Raúl Echeberría is a broadly recognized Uruguayan expert in Internet development, Internet governance, and digital policies. In the early 1990s, Raúl was one of the Internet pioneers in Uruguay and has since held many relevant roles in the local, regional, and global digital ecosystem. Since 2020, Raúl has been the Executive Director of ALAI, the LatinAmerican Internet Association. He previously worked as Vice President for Global Engagement at Internet Society. He was one of the founders of the Latin American and Caribbean Internet Addresses Registry (LACNIC) and was the CEO of LACNIC for 12 years. Raúl has also served in other important positions, including as a member of the Working Group on Internet Governance (2004–2005), a member of the Uruguayan delegation to the World Summit on the Information Society (2005), a member of the Internet Governance Forum Multistakeholder Advisory Group (2006– 2014 and 2024–2025), the Co-chair of the Executive Committee of NetMundial (2014) and co-chair of Netmundial+10, and a member of the steering committee of the IA Action Summit, France (2024–2025). He currently serves in several volunteer positions in the following organizations: CETIC.br, CETIS, Global Cyber Alliance, UNESCO, and the Internet Society-Uruguay. Raúl has been recognized with national and regional awards for his contributions to the development of the Internet and for his work in digital transformation both in Uruguay and Latin America, including the Trayectoria award presented by LACNIC. He was nominated to serve on the ICANN Board of Directors by the Nominating Committee in 2025. His term will expire at the Annual General Meeting in 2028.

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.

With his regular participation in both the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and ICANN, David has sought to bring together policy and technology in a pragmatic way.

David started his career on the Internet at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the mid-1980s, where he acquired the nickname "tale" by which is he known by many in the industry. He soon became involved with Usenet governance, and served for nearly a decade as the caretaker of the Usenet newsgroup creation process. He co-authored the O'Reilly book "Managing Usenet" with Henry Spencer.

Following his stint at UUNET as the Usenet newsmaster and FTP archive maintainer, David joined the Internet Software Consortium (ISC) in 1997 where he was a member of the team that rewrote the popular DNS server BIND and started participating in the IETF.

He moved with several of his coworkers to the ISC spinoff company, Nominum. At Nominum, David became deeply involved in Internationalized Domain Name development, and also attended his first ICANN meeting.

David joined Akamai Technologies in 2005 and spent 13 years as a senior developer and architect on the proprietary nameserver that powers Akamai's content delivery network. In 2010, he was selected as one of the Trusted Community Representatives for the DNNSEC Root Key. He was a past board member of DNS-OARC and currently is a board member of CVFiber, which focuses on bringing fast, reliable, and locally managed Internet to north central Vermont.

David lives with his wife, Sarah, and twins, Jack and Abby, in the mountains near Montpelier, Vermont.

David was appointed to serve as the IETF’s non-voting liaison to the ICANN Board on 14 November 2024.

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 and renewed for the term 2024-2026.