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Avri Doria is First Winner of ICANN Multistakeholder Ethos Award

23 June 2014

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Photo of Avri Doria

The Evaluation Committee for the pilot ICANN Multistakeholder Ethos Award Program selected longtime community member Avri Doria as the award's first recipient. She receives the award in recognition of her multiple roles in ICANN (such as ATRT2, the ICANN academy and being an active participant in many working groups). The award also recognizes her active and constructive engagement in other Internet fora such as the UN Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG), the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), Internet Governance Forum (IGF), the UN Working Group on Enhanced Cooperation (WGEC), the Internet Society (ISOC), the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF), and others.

A Nominating Committee appointee to ICANN's GNSO Council from 2005-2009, and elected from the Non-Commercial Stakeholder Group (NCSG) from 2013 to now, Avri also chaired the GNSO and its council from 2007-2009. She has served in multiple GNSO working groups, as a key participant on the Joint Applicant Support Program Cross Community Working Group, and within several At-Large working groups. A resident of Rhode Island, US, she is currently a policy and governance advisor to dotgay LLC, on the research staff of the Association for Progressive Communications (APC) and a member of the faculty of the International School for Internet Governance.

Overall, the evaluation panel selected her from 22 nominees as the one who best demonstrated the spirit of collaboration as shown through empathy and a sincere desire to engage with people from other backgrounds, cultures and interests. She has demonstrated her willingness to reach out to new people, to listen and really engage with others who do not necessarily share her viewpoints or interests. She is well known beyond any one constituency or stakeholder group as someone willing to have a true dialogue and work toward consensus. She is a real steward of the multistakeholder model.

The community evaluation panel was: Carolina Aguerre, John Berard, David Conrad, Olivier Crépin-Leblond, Robert Guerra, Roelof Meijer, Jonathan Robinson and Stefano Trumpy. Nominees and nominators are confidential.

Working over a period of four weeks, they evaluated nominations sent in from the community and carefully deliberated each candidate on four criteria:

  1. Demonstrated multistakeholder volunteer service via working groups or committees.
  2. Demonstrated spirit of collaboration through engagement with other community members with the aim of consensus building.
  3. Demonstrated facilitator of dialogue and open discussion in a fair, cordial and collegial manner.
  4. Demonstrated additional devotional factors exhibited by time spent supporting ICANN's multistakeholder model and its overall effectiveness.

The pilot program was created to test the concept of a Multistakeholder Ethos Award that recognizes those ICANN participants who have deeply invested in consensus-based solutions and the importance of ICANN's multistakeholder model to Internet Governance. Because the multistakeholder model brings together competing or special interests to work towards a joint goal, it usually brings spirited discussions and debates on a range of issues. Because of the presence of so many different opinions and interests within ICANN's policy-making structure, courtesy and collaboration are key to its success.