First Asia-Pacific At-Large General Assembly Concluded, Beiram Nominated Chairman
18-Feb-2008
NEW DELHI - Bilal Beiram, a member of the Arab Knowledge and Management Society (AKMS), was nominated Chairman of the Asia-Pacific Regional At-Large Organization (APRALO) of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).
This nomination came during APRALO’s first General Assembly, which was conducted as a part of ICANN's 31st International Public Meeting held February 10-15, in New Delhi.
During the course of the meeting, a ceremonial signing of a Memorandum of Understanding between ICANN and the APRALO took place, creating the formal structure for ICANN to obtain input into its policy processes from Internet users.
“Through this Memorandum of Understanding, ICANN and APRALO will be working on outreach programs to spread knowledge of the Internet in the region,” said Beiram.
“Moreover, APRALO will be involved with informing the region's individual Internet users about ICANN activities and providing advice to the ICANN Board on Internet policy development that benefit the users at-large,” added Beiram, who represented the AKMS in the APRALO meeting.
“AKMS was the first At-Large Structure to be certified by ICANN from the Asia-Pacific Region,” he pointed out.
According to ICANN, there are now more than 100 user groups taking part in ICANN's five Regional At-large Organizations (RALOs), from the Asia-Pacific, Latin America and the Caribbean, North America, Europe and Africa.
The RALOs have direct input to ICANN, especially through the international At-Large Advisory Committee (ALAC), which represents Internet users in ICANN and whose members are chosen largely by the RALOs.
Commenting on the signing ceremony, ICANN's President and CEO Dr Paul Twomey said, “Today's ceremony recognizes the ICANN community's success in creating a formal, global structure to help ensure ideas and feedback from individual Internet users around the world is heard in our policy processes.”
“ICANN's work to introduce a process for applying for new top level domains - the part after the dot - especially those using the more than 100,000 characters from the languages of the world which do not use the Latin character set - will benefit from formal inputs through the Regional At-large Organizations worldwide. The Asia-Pacific RALO is a key contributor to this process,” he added.
More information on the participation of individual Internet users in ICANN is available at http://alac.icann.org/