During the 2021 OARC Annual General Meeting OARC Members will be electing four seats on the OARC Board of Directors. The seats becoming available are doing so on the following basis:

  • The Board seat held by Paul Ebersman, who has served for two years, is up for election by rotation.
  • The Board seat held by Benno Overeinder,, who has served for two years, is up for election by rotation.
  • The Board seat held by Ondřej Surý, who is stepping down having served 3 terms over 5 years, is up for election.
  • The Board seat that was held by Joe Abley, who recently stepped down due to a change of affiliation, having served 1 year, is up for election.


Note that Board seats are held in an individual rather than Member organization capacity. Candidates however must have been nominated by, and employed by or affiliated with, a DNS-OARC Member in good standing.

The candidates and their election platforms are given below.

Nominees

 

Ray Bellis (ISC)

As the Director of DNS Operations at ISC, I am responsible for the day-to-day operation of F-root. I am offering my breadth of experience in senior and board-level roles (see below) to DNS-OARC with the intent to help the organisation not only weather the current difficult circumstances but also to grow the services offered to its members while remaining financially stable.

I’ve worked in the Internet industry since 1996. The first 11 of those were as the Technical Director of a B2B ISP where I was responsible for all aspects of operations, product development and service delivery, helping it grow to a £6M pa turnover before its acquisition. Since late 2007 I’ve been focused on DNS, first as a Senior Researcher at Nominet and from 2015 as Research Fellow at ISC before returning to operations in mid-2019 to run F-root.

I’ve been active at IETF since 2007 with 8 RFCs to my name, and served as co-chair of the Homenet WG for several years. While at Nominet I was also appointed as their nominated board director of NICC Standards Ltd (the UK’s telecoms standards body). I have served three consecutive terms on the DNS-OARC Programme Committee - the last two of those as chair.

Brett Carr (Nominet)

Over the past 20 plus years I have worked with DNS holding a variety of industry related roles ranging from working for a global ISP to working at RIPE NCC (Leading the team who run K Root). I have also worked at ICANN (Assisting with the GTLD Programme) and for the last 13 years Nominet, helping to keep .uk safe and stable.

I have designed, deployed and managed DNS and DNSSEC implementations both small and large and have been responsible for designing and operating Nominet’s GTLD DNS/DNSSEC Platform which has now grown to operating 80 TLDs. I am an experienced leader having led various engineering teams across operations during my time at Nominet. I have and continue to enjoy playing an active role in the DNS Community, giving presentations at OARC, RIPE and ICANN amongst others. I’m currently serving as the Vice Chair of the CSC at ICANN, I am an active member of the ICANN TLD Ops steering committee and have been a member of the OARC PC for the past year.

I feel I will be able to bring a fresh and unique viewpoint of both a ccTLD and GTLD/EBERO operator to the OARC Board.

Joao Damas (APNIC)

Currently my main activity is Sr. researcher at APNIC, focusing on DNS and other network measurements. Additional activities include consultancy and running the spanish NOG (ESNOG) and being President of ISOC-ES (ISOC's Spanish Chapter), a non-profit organisation)

In past activities, while at the RIPE NCC, ISC, Hivecast, Dyn, etc I have been directly operating or managing groups of technical people who operate critical DNS and network infrastructure, as well as actively participating in multiple technical and policy organisations (IETF, NOGs, etc)

I have been involved with, and support, DNS OARC since its very beginning while it was still within ISC.

APNIC itself has been a long time supporter of DNS OARC and remains committed to support its ongoing work in the belief that OARC’s strength is that it provides a unique forum that brings together DNS researchers and DNS infrastructure operators, data and tools. As a Board member I will work on your behalf to continue along this path, working to continue with the sense of community in this forum.

Paul Ebersman (Neustar)

I've been building and supporting internet infrastructure since 1984, when I was in the US Air Force, and supporting large scale DNS since 1990, as an early employee of UUNET. I have continued this involvement over the years, working at ISC, Nominum, Infoblox, Comcast and Neustar.

In addition to involvement with various operational organizations such as NANOG, RIPE, ISOC and standards bodies like the IETF and ICANN/SSAC, I have been on the DNSOARC program committee as well as currently serving on the DNSOARC board.

DNS is a critical piece of the internet's infrastructure and a vital source of security and security information. DNSOARC has always been involved in efforts to understand and secure this. Having rich DNS research data, tools and research expertise is necessary to keep the DNS functioning well. Various standards, such as DoH and DoT, use of DNS for defense and attacks, and massive proliferation of edge devices (human and IoT based) all make DNS research more vital than ever.

I would be honored to continue and expand these efforts, as well as extend the currency and relevance of OARC.

Benno Overeinder (NLnet Labs)

I am a senior research engineer and the managing director at NLnet Labs. I have a strong interest in infrastructure stability and security, in particular related to DNS and routing. These topics are also relevant to our day-to-day activities in our company, developing open source software and contributing to open standards for the Internet. We often also carry out research projects, regularly in collaboration with other partners. Many of these research projects are based on data collected by OARC, based on measurements by the RIPE Atlas platform (see also DNSThought portal), or for example on the OpenINTEL platform in which we collaborate with other partners.

For the past two years, I have been a member of the OARC board and have enjoyed contributing to the OARC organisation and community. OARC has shown to be an excellent organisation and platform that brings together analysis and research of DNS-related operational practices and issues. The OARC meetings themselves are a good mix of DNS standards, operations and research, and allow for the exchange of ideas and discussion. I am actively involved in standardisation (IETF), in the operational community (e.g. RIPE meetings, *NOG meetings), research (with other organisations and universities) and see the importance of OARC as a platform for these three overlapping communities.