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About ICANN’s Interim Ombuds

Krista Papac was appointed as the Interim ICANN Ombuds effective 1 October 2023. The ICANN Board appointed Krista to the Interim role, while they search for a full-time Ombuds, following the resignation of the previous Ombuds Herb Waye.

Papac has served as the ICANN Complaints Officer since 2017, when the office was launched. In her role as Complaints Officer, she is responsible for addressing ICANN stakeholders' operational accountability concerns regarding ICANN org and its work. Papac works with concerned stakeholders to investigate and resolve concerns through mediation, process improvement, education, and other conflict resolution techniques. She has agreed to take on the interim role while continuing to serve in her capacity as ICANN Complaints Officer. Papac will maintain these dual roles throughout the Board's search process.

Before Papac's role as ICANN's Complaints Officer, she served as ICANN's Director of Registry Services and Engagement for four years during the launch of the 2012 round of the New gTLD Program.

Prior to joining ICANN org in 2013, Papac worked in the domain name industry for 12 years, holding a variety of roles including leadership and management, strategic planning, business process design, sales, marketing, and business development.

Papac holds an MBA from the University of Southern California and a BS from the University of Phoenix.

Former ICANN Ombudsmen:

Herb Waye was appointed as the third ICANN Ombudsman in July 2016.

Mr. Waye has served as Adjunct Ombudsman for ten years. In 2011, during a period of transition, he served briefly as Interim Ombudsman.

Mr. Waye recently retired from a 33-year career as a police officer with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and still serves on occasion with its Reservist program.

During several years of his career with the RCMP, Mr. Waye was seconded to Criminal Intelligence Service Canada, where he was the National Intelligence Officer for Cybercrime and Intellectual Property/Trademark Crime. Mr. Waye's career with the RCMP culminated in his role as Leadership Coordinator at National Headquarters – training supervisors and managers in leadership, management and conflict resolution.

Mr. Waye holds a Master of Arts degree in Leadership and Training (MALT) from Royal Roads University in Victoria, British Columbia. His area of specialization was Justice and Public Safety Leadership. Mr. Waye is now a member of the Associate Faculty team at Royal Roads University, where he teaches the final course in the online Bachelor of Justice Program. In this course, students complete their degrees by conducting applied research projects.

Mr. Waye is a member of the International Ombudsman Association and the Forum of Canadian Ombudsman.

Mr. Waye and his wife Christine live on a small hobby farm in Oxford Mills, Canada.

Domain Name System
Internationalized Domain Name ,IDN,"IDNs are domain names that include characters used in the local representation of languages that are not written with the twenty-six letters of the basic Latin alphabet ""a-z"". An IDN can contain Latin letters with diacritical marks, as required by many European languages, or may consist of characters from non-Latin scripts such as Arabic or Chinese. Many languages also use other types of digits than the European ""0-9"". The basic Latin alphabet together with the European-Arabic digits are, for the purpose of domain names, termed ""ASCII characters"" (ASCII = American Standard Code for Information Interchange). These are also included in the broader range of ""Unicode characters"" that provides the basis for IDNs. The ""hostname rule"" requires that all domain names of the type under consideration here are stored in the DNS using only the ASCII characters listed above, with the one further addition of the hyphen ""-"". The Unicode form of an IDN therefore requires special encoding before it is entered into the DNS. The following terminology is used when distinguishing between these forms: A domain name consists of a series of ""labels"" (separated by ""dots""). The ASCII form of an IDN label is termed an ""A-label"". All operations defined in the DNS protocol use A-labels exclusively. The Unicode form, which a user expects to be displayed, is termed a ""U-label"". The difference may be illustrated with the Hindi word for ""test"" — परीका — appearing here as a U-label would (in the Devanagari script). A special form of ""ASCII compatible encoding"" (abbreviated ACE) is applied to this to produce the corresponding A-label: xn--11b5bs1di. A domain name that only includes ASCII letters, digits, and hyphens is termed an ""LDH label"". Although the definitions of A-labels and LDH-labels overlap, a name consisting exclusively of LDH labels, such as""icann.org"" is not an IDN."