During the 2024 OARC Annual General Meeting OARC Members will be electing three seats on the OARC Board of Directors. The seats becoming available are doing so on the following basis:

  • The Board seat held by Joe Abley, who has served two terms over four years, is up for election by rotation.
  • The Board seat held by Ray Bellis, who has served two terms for a total of three years, is up for election by rotation.
  • The Board seat held by Shumon Huque, who has served for two years, is up for election by rotation.


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. No Member organization may nominate more than one candidate.

 

The candidates and their election platforms are given below.

Nominees

Joe Abley (Cloudflare)

I have been participating in technical community organisations of one shape or another for most of the last thirty years. I currently serve on the board at DNS-OARC and am the company Treasurer. I would very much appreciate the opportunity to continue for another term.

I have experience in management and as a technical contributor in both for-profit and not-for-profit organisations, and have been variously responsible for the operation of DNS root servers, TLD servers and enterprise DNS services. I led the team at ICANN that contributed towards the deployment of DNSSEC in the root zone in 2010 and was one of the people who woken up by increasingly urgent phone calls on 21 October 2016 when Dyn's DNS platform started to receive a lot of traffic due to the planet's sudden preoccupation with low-price, network-attached baby monitors.

I was previously employed as the inaugural CTO of Public Internet Registry, the home of dot-ORG, where I was responsible for building a technical organisation around both registry systems and PIR's technical outreach and community-building.

I am currently employed as a Director of Engineering at Cloudflare, a large Internet security company that handles a globally-significant volume of DNS traffic.

I have been a participant and enthusiast at DNS-OARC since its inception. I greatly appreciated the confidence of the community in electing me to the DNS-OARC board in 2020 and again in 2022. I would appreciate the opportunity to continue to serve the community as a member of the DNS-OARC board.

Ray Bellis (ISC)

I'm currently the Director of DNS Operations at ISC, responsible for F-root for the last five years. Prior to that, from 2007 onwards I was focused on DNS-related research, following on from 11 years as Technical Executive Director of a modest-sized B2B ISP.  I've authored (or co-authored) nine RFCs so far.

I have nearly two decades of Board Director experience at both non-profit and commercial organizations, with significant experience at top-level management. I've served on the DNS-OARC board for three years, having previously served a maximum term on the Programme Committee with two of those as PC Chair. My employer was one of the two founding organizations behind DNS-OARC and continues to be a long term supporter of DNS-OARC and its mission.

As Directors, one of our primary responsibilities is to ensure that the organization operates from a solid financial position, setting the corporate strategy to keep our income and costs aligned. As a member of the Finance subcommittee I've been pushing for significant improvements to the budgeting process so that the Board can see an accurate picture of how the organization is performing against the Board-approved budget. This is something that has been sorely lacking, especially since IRS-required changes to our revenue recognition model a few years ago.

Working as Board Liaison to the Programme Committee I'm leading an ongoing and thorough review of the PC Charter and working practices, especially relating to the appropriate division of responsibilities between the Programme Committee, its Chair, and the DNS-OARC staff.

I hope to continue to serve the organization and its community.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/raybellis/

Mauricio Vergara Ereche (DigitalOcean)

Hello there! My name is Mauricio Vergara Ereche and I am currently a Senior Engineer II in charge of DNS services at DigitalOcean, a cloud service provider aimed for developers, startups and SMBs. We have just joined as DNS-OARC members on June 2024.

I come with a long experience within the DNS world in different spaces: 
First as an Operations Manager under chilean TLD .CL where we deployed 3 anycast clouds, we were one of the first spanish-speaking places where we enabled DNSSEC for a TLD and we constantly helped to lead the DNS technical spaces in the LAC region. 
Then I relocated to California to serve as a Root-Server Operator of the IMRS (also known as L-Root) for over 9 years, where I was also in charge of the internal ICANN DNS portfolio and the DNS and DNSSEC design and operations of all of their assets (including the reverse in-addr.arpa and ip6.arpa SLD domains managed by IANA)

Over my whole career I have been involved around different *NOG, IETF and RSSAC groups, was co-chair for the DNS-WG in LACNOG and I have given several presentations about different DNS topics in governmental, private and educational venues; always trying to bring a broad perspective of why DNS is such an important foundational piece and why it takes so much collaboration to help us develop a more reliable and secure Internet.

From my point of view, DNS-OARC mission represent everything I believe and stand for, because of that, I have always fully supported it in different ways. Since my first meeting back in 2006 in San Jose, I have served as a volunteer on different roles: Either as part of the Programme Committee for the maximum term possible, or helping the webcasting and recording for several meetings, or even on the social media space anytime is needed. Anything that I can do to give back to this rich community, I try to do it my best and help it to improve as much as possible.

It is my believe that I can help DNS-OARC to offer a new perspective to continue a stable and continuous growth while helping to improve their current internal processes as a Board member, so I am very grateful of your support and consideration for this coming elections.

Shumon Huque (Salesforce)

I'm a software architect and senior technologist employed by Salesforce, and based in the Washington DC area. At Salesforce, I serve as product owner of central DNS services and am involved in all aspects of the DNS infrastructure, including operations, engineering, architecture, software development, and the integration of DNS with applications and cloud platforms. Prior to Salesforce I was employed as a research scientist at Verisign Labs, and as a technologist & engineering director at the University of Pennsylvania.

I am an active participant in DNS-OARC. I am currently completing my first 2-year term on the OARC Board. In addition I have served in the past on the programme committee for 3 years (and for 2 years as its chair), and am a fairly frequent speaker at OARC workshops.

I also actively participate in DNS related areas at other industry venues. At the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), I am the author of a number of DNS related protocol specifications (RFCs) with several more active RFC drafts in the pipeline. At ICANN, I serve as a member of the RSSAC Caucus, an SSAC work party member, and as co-organizer of a DNSSEC automation panel at the ICANN DNSSEC & Security workshops. In the past, I've also regularly taught classes on DNS and DNSSEC at venues like USENIX.

If re-elected to the board, I hope to continue to develop, strengthen, and expand the work and influence of DNS-OARC. Of critical concern is maintaining the long term financial viability of the organization, not only through fiscally responsible budgeting and management of expenditures, but also by significantly increasing the value proposition of being an OARC member, which will hopefully result in expanding its membership and revenues. In particular, I will endeavour to continue making it a highly relevant and collaborative place of engagement for a diverse range of participants, e.g. software developers, operators, researchers, DNS companies, clients of DNS companies, cloud infrastructure platforms, and others.

Some more details of my background are available at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shumon/. Feel free to reach out to me directly if you have any questions.