Jacqueline Johnson Pata, Executive Director of National Congress of American Indians
Jacqueline Pata is the Executive Director of the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI), the oldest and largest American Indian and Alaska Native advocacy organization in the United States. Based in Washington, DC, NCAI advocates on behalf of tribal governments and communities, promoting strong tribal-federal nation-to-nation policies, and promoting a better understanding among the general public regarding American Indian and Alaska Native governments, people, and rights
She is a member of the Raven/Sockeye Clan of the Tlingit Tribe and the 6th Vice President to the Central Council of the Tlingit-Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska and the Vice Chair of Sealaska Corporation. Among other positions she holds she is the Chair of the Native American Advisory Council for Boys & Girls Club of America, serves as a Vice-President for the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and is a board member for the George Gustave Heye Center of the National Museum of the American Indian in New York.
Fadi Chehadé, President and CEO of ICANN
Fadi Chehadé's career has been defined by building consensus and promoting collaborative technologies and practices. He has more than 25 years of experience in building and leading progressive Internet enterprises, leveraging relationships with senior executives and government officials across Asia, Europe, the Middle East and the United States.
Chehadé, age 50, is a citizen of Egypt, Lebanon, and the United States. He was born in Beirut, Lebanon, to Egyptian parents and left the then war-torn country in 1980 at the age of 18. He speaks fluent Arabic, English, French, and Italian.
Most recently he served as Chief Executive Officer of Vocado LLC, a U.S. firm that is a provider of cloud-based software for the administration of educational institutions.
Prior to Vocado, Chehadé was CEO of CoreObjects Software, Inc., a leader in new product software development services for both large and growing companies. He oversaw the expansion of the company to include more than 400 engineers and its successful acquisition by Symphony Services.
Prior to his role at CoreObjects, Chehadé served as the General Manager of IBM's Global Technology Services in the Middle East and North Africa. Based in Dubai, he led a team across an emerging region experiencing high growth. He also built and managed a new global business for IBM, providing managed services to large clients in telecommunications, aerospace and retail to improve the accuracy, depth and timeliness of business information visibility across demand and supply chains.
Chehadé founded and has led three companies since 1987:
- Viacore, launched in 1999, was the world's leading B2B process integration hub offering a complete solution of specialized software and services for global 500 companies. In 2006 he led Vicaore's successful acquisition by IBM.
- RosettaNet, a non-profit multi-stakeholder company founded in 1997. Chehadé rallied all the leading ICT companies in the world including IBM, HP, Microsoft, SAP, Nokia and Oracle to collaborate on B2B standards. RosettaNet became the high-technology industry's leading eBusiness standards consortium. RosettaNet adopted a multi-stakeholder approach to define and standardize a complete inter-company process language, enabling the ICT sector to use the Internet for real-time process synchronization between thousands of trading partners.
- Nett Information Products, launched in 1987 to create and develop an Internet-based content management and sharing solution, successfully weaving hundreds of ICT suppliers and thousands of their resellers into a powerful collaborative business web of applications and content. Ingram Micro the world's largest ICT distributor acquired Nett, where Chehadé became vice president of its Customer Information Services Group.
Chehadé is a graduate of Stanford University, where he earned a master's degree in Engineering Management. He earlier earned a bachelor's degree in computer science from Polytechnic University in New York, where he graduated Summa Cum Laude.
Fadi Chehadé is also the founder of Nilorado, a youth organization raising funds to support schools for handicapped children in Upper Egypt, also delivering bicycles to boys and girls from needy families in that region who otherwise cannot reach their schools.
Chehadé lives in Los Angeles with his wife of 25 years. They are the parents of two adult sons.
Steve Crocker, Chairman of the Board of ICANN
Dr. Crocker is CEO and co-founder of Shinkuro, Inc., a start-up company focused on dynamic sharing of information across the Internet and on the deployment of improved security protocols on the Internet.
Dr. Crocker has been involved in the Internet since its inception. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, while he was a graduate student at UCLA, he was part of the team that developed the protocols for the Arpanet and laid the foundation for today's Internet. He organized the Network Working Group, which was the forerunner of the modern Internet Engineering Task Force and initiated the Request for Comment (RFC) series of notes through which protocol designs are documented and shared. For this work, Dr. Crocker was awarded the 2002 IEEE Internet Award. Dr. Crocker also holds an honorary doctorate in mathematics from the University of San Martin de Porres in Lima, Perú.
Dr. Crocker's experience includes research management at DARPA, USC/ISI and The Aerospace Corporation, vice president of Trusted Information Systems, and co-founder of CyberCash, Inc. and Longitude Systems, Inc. His prior public service includes serving as the first area director for security in the the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), the IETF Administrative Support Activity Oversight Committee (IAOC), service on the Board of the Internet Society and the Board of The Studio Theatre in Washington, DC.
Dr. Crocker earned his B.A. in mathematics and Ph.D. in computer science at UCLA, and he studied artificial intelligence at MIT.
Steve Crocker was selected by the 2008 Nominating Committee to serve as a Board Member. He had been Chair of ICANN's Security and Stability Advisory Committee (SSAC) from its inception in 2002 until December 2010, and he served as SSAC's non-voting Liaison to the ICANN Board until being selected by the Nominating Committee. His first term ran from the end of the 2008 annual general meeting through the conclusion of the 2011 annual general meeting. He was selected by the Nominating Committee to serve a second term, starting in October 2011 and running through the Annual General meeting in 2014.
Steve served as Vice-Chair from December 2010 until June 2011. At the organizational meeting following the regular ICANN Board meeting on June 24, 2011, Steve was elected Chair of the ICANN Board. He was re-elected Chairman of the Board at the organizational meeting held in Dakar on 28 October 2011.
Olivier MJ Crépin-Leblond, Chair of the ALAC
Dr. Olivier M.J. Crépin-Leblond is a French national who has been an Internet user since 1988. He received a B.Eng. Honours degree in Computer Systems and Electronics from King's College, London, UK, in 1990, a Ph.D. in Digital Communications from Imperial College, London, UK, in 1997, and a Specialized Masters Degree in Competitive Intelligence and Knowledge Management from SKEMA Business School (ESC Lille & CERAM) in Nice-Sophia Antipolis, France, in 2007.
Having founded Global Information Highway Ltd in 1995, he took part in many Internet projects, several of which enabled Internet connectivity in developing countries.
Whilst attending all ICANN conferences in person since the Paris (June 2008) meeting, he has taken a keen interest in supporting ICANN's At-Large community. He was selected to be on the 2010 ICANN Nominating Committee (NomCom) and was Secretary of ICANN's European At-Large Organisation (EURALO) from June 2010 until March 2011.
He was selected as Chairman of ICANN's At-Large Advisory Committee (ALAC), at ICANN's Cartagena, Colombia meeting in December 2010, a yearly term renewed at ICANN's Annual General Meeting in Dakar, Senegal in October 2011 and again in Toronto in October 2012 (this time for a 2 year term). Through serving the At-Large Community, he has gained a unique practical experience in an operational multi-stakeholder policy-making environment, finding and building consensus at grassroots level.
In March 2013 he was selected to sit on the second ICANN Accountability and Transparency Review Team (ATRT2).
He was recently invited to speak in the United Kingdom, Sweden (EuroDIG Stockholm), several universities in Southern India (on matters of IPv6, Internet History and Core Values) as well as teaching at the Summer School on Internet Governance in Meissen, Germany (Multi-stakeholder Governance) and taking part in the third Ukrainian IGF in Kyiv on behalf of the Council of Europe and the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in November 2012.
In December 2012 he was part of the United Kingdom delegation to the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT-12) in Dubai.
Whilst Chairman of the English Chapter of the Internet Society (ISOC) since March 2012, he is also a Member of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), a Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and a Network Startup Resource Center (NSRC) affiliate since the early nineties.
Full details available on: http://www.gih.com/ocl.html
Alan Greenberg, incoming Chair of the ALAC
Alan Greenberg has over forty-five years of experience with computing and networking technologies. For much of his career, he worked for McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Over the years, this included software design and development, education technology support, management and policy development. He was one of a handful of people who brought the Internet and its predecessor networks to Canada and worked on a variety of Canadian and international networking initiatives. He has taught courses in computer architecture and design, as well as managed the Internet Society (ISOC) workshops which taught personnel from 150 developing countries how to build, support, manage and use the Internet in their countries. He was also an elected member of the ISOC Board of Trustees from 2001-2004.
After his retirement from McGill, he continued to focus on the effective use of technology in developing countries. Projects included how to effectively spread the use of technology to benefit the country and its people; and a study of the linkages between technology and poverty, and how technologies can be effectively used for poverty alleviation, and how web and specifically mobile technologies can benefit developing populations.
Throughout his career, he has focused on how technology can be made accessible to the widest possible audience and the empowerment of people through the use of technology.
Alan was appointed to the ALAC by the Nominating Committee 2006-2010 and again for 2012-2014 and has served as the ALAC Liaison to the GNSO since 2006. While serving in these roles, he spearheaded ICANN policy development initiatives related to gTLD domain name registration and protecting registrant rights. He served on the Affirmation of Commitment Accountability and Transparency Review Team in 2013, and has participated in or managed many ALAC and GNSO working groups.
In August of this year, Alan was re-appointed to the ALAC by the Nominating Committee, and in September was selected by the ALAC to be its new Chair taking office at the conclusion of ICANN 51.
Alan holds a BSc degree in Mathematics and Physics, and an MSc in Computer Science, both from McGill University.
Glenn McKnight, Secretariat of NARALO
Glenn McKnight has been active with ICANN since 2009 as a NARALO member representing the Foundation for Building Sustainable Communities. He is a former NOMCOM member, outgoing Secretariat and incoming ALAC member. As an active Open Education advocate he has captured many of the leading thinkers in the ALAC and ICANN community their observations in short informative videos on issues relevant to newcomers.
He is one of the founders of the Internet Society of Canada, Treasurer and Board member and has been active in Internet issues in Ontario starting with Freenet and being active in promoting Open Source and Open Hardware innovations with IEEE to promote humanitarian technologies for reliable electricity and data connectivity.
Loris Taylor, President and CEO of Native Public Media
Loris Taylor (Hopi Nation) is the founder and President/CEO of Native Public Media Inc., representing the media interests of Native Americans including radio, television, video, Internet, journalism and public policy.
Taylor's leadership has resulted in the first "Digital Journalism and Storytelling" curriculum for college credit; the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Tribal Priority for broadcasting, the establishment of the FCC Office of Native Affairs and Policy, and publication of the first seminal study on broadband "New Media, Technology and Internet Use in Indian Country."
In 2008, Taylor represented the only Native organization in briefing the Obama-Biden FCC Transition Team on telecommunications issues facing Native Americans. In 2010, Native Public Media in partnership with the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) advanced Native interests to be included in the FCC's National Broadband Plan.
The former general manager of KUYI Radio, Taylor currently serves as a member of the Distribution and Interconnection Committee of the National Public Radio Board. Taylor was a contributor to the Aspen Institute and Knight Commission's report on the "Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy" and "New Cities: The Next Generation of Healthy Informed Communities." Currently a co-Chair of the NCAI Technology and Telecommunications Subcommittee and a member of the FCC's Diversity in a Digital Age Committee, Taylor is a recipient of the Native Americans in Philanthropy Delgado Award and the Ford Foundation Leadership for a Changing World Award.
Taylor has over 30 years of management and intergovernmental experience. Formerly the Executive Director of the Arizona Indian Gaming Association and Associate Director of the Hopi Foundation, Taylor is also one of the founders of the Hopi Education Endowment Fund. Taylor concluded her service on the Free Press Board of Directors in December 2013.
Anthony Niigani, President of Manitoba E-Association
Anthony Niiganii is a member of the Pimicikamak Cree Nation, in Manitoba's Keewatin Tribal Council region – and he is a follower of the Goose Philosophy. He has a background in music and performance, Indigenous and not-for-profit governance, Indigenous youth leadership development, First Nations disability advocacy and community technology adoption.
More notably Mr. Niiganii has presented the "Lessons from the Geese and the Aboriginal Worker Health and safety strategy" to the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus and at the American Industrial Hygiene Conference & Exposition.
Anthony is an accomplished traditional flute player and composer who combines traditional, contemplative and modern sounds to create a unique voice of his own. In 2007, he premiered as an Aboriginal Composer with his piece "Prayer to the Great Spirit", performed by ReSound Ecumenical Chamber Choir. He has also performed at the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra's Indigenous Festival, including his performance of Mychael Danna's, "The Ice Storm", with the WSO in January 2014.
Anthony is the Executive Director with the Manitoba E-Association (June 2014 ALS accredited ). He led the development of MBE's successful 2013 Manitoba and Nunavut E-storytelling workshops. And he also currently serves as the Treasurer for TeleCommunities Canada.
Eduardo Diaz, At-Large Advisory Committee (ALAC) Member from NARALO
Eduardo is currently Principal Consultant at the D Consulting Group, Inc. as well as Founding member and past President of the Internet Society of Puerto Rico. His experiences and affiliations include: CEO of the Puerto Rico Domain Name Administration, Professional Engineer (PE) and Member of the Engineering Professional College of Puerto Rico, Member of the Puerto Rico Technological Corridor Advisory Board and Founding member of the NARALO.
Eduardo has been Director of Information Systems and Director of Product and Market Management at Puerto Rico for the Telephone Company, San Juan, Puerto Rico (1989 – 2003), where he launched PRTC.net (biggest ISP in Puerto Rico), Residential voice mail system, DSL, Broadband IP over Frame Relay and ISDN. Earlier, he was Member of the Technical Staff and Supervisor at AT&T Bell Labs, Whippany, New Jersey (1982 – 1989) where he designed narrowpass digital signal filters, spectrum analyzers and system tests for a parallel computing environment.
Eduardo is a graduate of the Georgia Institute of Technology (GaTech) with a Bachelor (1980) and Master (1981) degrees in Science of Electrical Engineering with a concentration in Computer Design and Electronics. Master in Computer Science (1984) through AT&T Bell Labs. He was also a professional recruiter for AT&T Bell Labs (1985 – 1989) at UCB, MIT, University of Michigan and University of Puerto Rico.
Derrick Suwaima Davis, Performer, Speaker, Artistic Director, and Choreographer
Derrick Suwaima Davis is a Native Arizonan, from the Hopi and Choctaw Nations. Suwaima, who began participating in Pow Wows at the age of 3, is the only adult, SEVEN Time World Champion Hoop Dancer and a Champion Fancy Dancer. Suwaima is the 2014 Champion!
In addition to dancing competitively and professionally, Suwaima is also a gifted Choreographer & Artistic Director. He currently serves (and has for the last 12 years) as Artistic Director for "Native Trails" in Scottsdale. Suwaima has been honored to be named Artist of the Year – Performing Arts category – by the Scottsdale Cultural Council, for his contribution to the Arts community.
Suwaima was a member of the pop/rock group "Clan/destine" and he has also worked with the Heard Museum, The Phoenix Symphony, The American Indian Dance Theater, Canyon Records and Willie Nelson. He was also honored to be designated as Head Man Dancer at the Inaugural Pow Wow at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian.
After having performed internationally sharing his interpretation of hoop dance in places such as Germany, Spain, Australia, Denmark, Malaysia, Africa, Japan and Singapore, in recent years Suwaima has turned his attention to presenting the people and cultures of the Southwestern U.S. via The Living Traditions Dance Troupe.
After having performed internationally sharing his interpretation of hoop dance in places such as Germany, Spain, Australia, Denmark, Malaysia, Africa, Japan and Singapore, in recent years Suwaima has turned his attention to presenting the people and cultures of the Southwestern U.S. via The Living Traditions Dance Troupe.
Suwaima has appeared as a model in Marie Clare and his image can be seen on everything from billboards, to Heard Museum and Arizona Office of Tourism ads, to a US Postal Service campaign. Auspicious publications Suwaima has been featured in include Smithsonian (cover), Native Peoples (3 covers), Phoenix Home & Garden (as Master Dancer of the Southwest), and Cosmopolitan (man of the month), Dance Life Magazine (cover) Arizona Highways Magazine, as well as many newspaper articles.
Along with his dance troupe and as a solo artist, Suwaima regularly performs in theatrical productions, school programs, concerts, festivals, corporate shows, key note speaking, and other special events.
Suwaima may be reached through www.TheCharlesAgency.com / phone 602.547.0708