Maria

I’m a member of the 2011 Nominating Committee which appoints several Board director and committee positions at ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names & Numbers). Funnily enough, when I was still on staff at ICANN, one of my last tasks was to support the 2009 committee, so though I’m a new member I’ve actually been through a cycle already. Our job is to attract and then sort through applications for positions doing unpaid work on fairly gritty issues in the technical coordination of the Internet’s naming & numbering systems.

So far, there are about 35 applications for 8 open positions. Half of them have applied to be Board Directors. None – not a single one – is from a woman. I have been told this is at least partly because previous nomcoms have disproportionately appointed men, discouraging women from applying. A propos of the thread below on the tiny number of women appointed to the new Irish cabinet, and their ghettoization in family-oriented ministries, I can only say this year’s nomcom is taking this criticism to heart. All other things being equal, we can only appoint women if they apply. There’s also a process to nominate a third person – you nominate, we contact them and ask if they want to go forward.

We’re participating in ICANN’s San Francisco meeting next week to rally troops and encourage people to apply for these positions, as well as to shine a bit of light on how the nomcom works. It’s been criticised – fairly, I believe – for being more secretive than is necessary, and this year’s committee is keen to open things up more. Nomcom is one of those highly imperfect processes that’s like democracy insofar as it’s the worst possible method to appoint directors and councillors, except for all the other methods. (The Internet election of ICANN Board directors you still hear some people banging on about almost a decade later was captured by the employees of a certain Japanese conglomerate – not quite the global demos we had hoped for.)

The nomcom’s rallying cry; “Apply Now to Join the ICANN Board, the Councils of GNSO and ccNSO, and the ALAC”, won’t mean much to people not steeped in the depths of Internet governance. But if any CT readers are interested by the basic pitch and would like to know more, please ping me and I’ll happily explain. [click to continue…]

I am so behind the times I’d not even looked at the new Irish cabinet line-up yet, but Eimear ni Mhealoid asks for thoughts in a comment on the post welcoming Niamh to CT.

Here is the new line-up, and some commentary is here. CT commenter Eimear quotes Olivia O’Leary pungently describing as “a Dáil bar cabinet – the boys have divided up the major portfolios and left the girls with the housekeeping and nanny jobs“.

Oh dear. How depressing. Is Frances Fitzgerald truly the only woman front bencher Fine Gael can field? And in the pink ghetto of Minister for Children… How utterly pathetic. (That said, I’m glad the appallingly reactionary Lucinda Creighton has not been given any encouragement.) There’s clearly been a lot more thought given to political rewards – fair enough, though sad to see real new talent ignored for supporting Richard Bruton – and to geographic spread (at least within FG) than gender balance. Why it’s thought more important to have people from every province than from half the population is beyond me.

What a pity to see cranky old limpet Michael Noonan in Finance – the Dept. of Health bossed him around like nobody’s business last time round. Though frankly I’m still sad it’s not Richard Bruton, who brought a moral and intellectual conviction to shadow Finance before his unsuccessful leadership heave against Enda Kenny. For all his loyalty and bluster, Noonan’s economic and financial vision for Ireland’s path forward is, shall we say, tactical rather than strategic. Finance will run rings around him. Kenny would have done far better for Ireland to put his own considerations aside and appoint a Finance minister who can articulate and prosecute the arguments and policy for the way forward, both at home and abroad.

Labour looks overall to have more depth of talent than FG, though it’s odd that they’re all pretty old and from within spitting distance of Dublin. Appointing a (Labour) woman as Attorney General looks tokenist and removes from FG a potential career stepping stone for future ministers for Justice.

I’m glad to see Simon Coveney rewarded with a decent ministry – agriculture, food & fisheries – that he can get his teeth into. A fair exchange for the enormous pressure put on him a few years ago to ditch his promising European Parliament career to keep his seat in FG hands.

Women are always told to wait for ‘next time’, but in Ireland the next time has a funny way of never happening. There are always more pressing concerns. This cabinet has only one more woman than FG/Labour’s previous coalitions in the 1980s. The only consolation is that so many people outside Ireland think Enda Kenny is a woman.

BoingBoing has an interview with John Robb, a security consultant whose book, ‘Brave New War; the Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization’, is about the idea of open-source warfare. Robb comes across as a classic, Washington idea-salesman, tarting up what may still be sharp insights into the kind of gee-whizz, tech-determinist hyperbole that might result from a drunken gene-merge of Wired and Jane’s:

“Back in 2004, the US military was getting trounced in guerrillas in Iraq. Worse, the US military establishment didn’t know why. Didn’t have a clue. To correct this, I began to write about how 21st Century warfare actually worked on my blog, Global Guerrillas. Essentially, I concluded that guerrilla groups could use open source organizational models (drawn from the software industry), networked super-empowerment (freely available high tech tools, network information access, connections to a globalized economy), and systems disruption (the targeting of critical points on infrastructure networks that cause cascading failures) to defeat even the most powerful of opponents, even a global superpower.”

Call me parochial, but isn’t this just the sort of thing Michael Collins was doing 90 years ago?

Apart from lower coordination and communication costs and bigger, juicier systems to disrupt, is there a substantive difference between the ability of a small, clever and determined group of people to humble a global super-power today as compared to 1919? Or, as we might say in the language of my current employer, are the modern and forward-looking insurgents of today “utilizing south-south networks to share best practice and enable technology transfer and empowerment at the grassroots to forge alternative development pathways”? [click to continue…]

After a disastrous poll last week that showed people in Ireland think little of the Taoiseach and less of opposition leader Enda Kenny, Richard Bruton has made a bid for leadership of Fine Gael. I hope he wins.

Bruton is the brains of the operation and an able and articulate politician. He has singlehandedly carried the almost forgotten social democrat mantle in a party long over-run by Christian Democrats who wouldn’t be out of place in North Rhine Westphalia. He has a social conscience and mastery of policy detail almost unknown in Irish politicians, but he seems able to get his ideas across in a straightforward and compelling way. Bruton offers a fully thought-through alternative economic and political vision to the crony capitalism that has dominated Ireland for almost two decades. And, in an era where cutbacks and ‘tough decisions’ are inevitable, he has shown today a willingness to wield the knife. [click to continue…]

A week or so ago, I received an email from an old friend – the redoubtable Bridget Hourican – asking for some family background about a great-great uncle who was made a character of in Ulysses. It should have clicked with me that 12 16 June was coming up.

Alluding to the other Timberteer who also rejoices in this ancestry, Bridget wrote:

“… when a friend of mine was asked in Germany what he thought of Ulysses – as all Irish abroad are asked at some point – he admitted that he hadn’t read it yet, but saved his reputation and astounded his questioner by adding that his great-uncle was in it. This great-uncle was Hugh MacNeill (the more disreputable brother of the revolutionary Eoin MacNeill) who appears, with his name cannibalised, as professor McHugh, murmuring “biscuitfully”.

Prof. McHugh is apparently a quite funny character who wanders around Dublin lecturing in Greek and Latin. Bridget’s written a gorgeous Bloomsday essay about the real people immortalised in Ulysses. It makes me want to give the book another go.

Fascinating interview with Jurgen Habermas in today’s Irish Times. Talking about Merkel and how she has burnt Germany’s reputation for putting its longer term interests as the greatest beneficiary of an effective European Union ahead of short-term, domestic politics, he notes a generational difference:

“Over the past four weeks Angela Merkel has squandered much of the capital of trust accumulated by her predecessors over four decades. … After Helmut Kohl, our political elites underwent a sweeping change in mentalities. With the exception of a too-quickly exhausted Joschka Fisher, since Gerhard Schröder took office a normatively unambitious generation has been in power. It seems to enjoy Germany’s return of Germany to normality as a nation-state – and just wants be “like the others”. Conscious of the diminishing room for political manoeuvre, these people shy away from farsighted goals and constructive political projects, let alone an undertaking like European unification. I detect a certain indifference towards this project. On the other hand, the politicians can no longer deceive themselves concerning the fact that the Federal Republic is the greatest beneficiary of the single currency. Self-interest dictates that they support the preservation of the euro zone.

[click to continue…]

A couple of years ago, I was in Rome for work. I never had the chica-boom, so to speak, to put in the following this taxi receipt for reimbursement.
Gotta love the patriarchy…

Yesterday, one of the biggest events in the history of the Internet took place; non-Latin top-level domains went live in the DNS root zone. In plain English, you can now type the whole of a domain name in Arabic script. Not just the left of the dot (as in dot org) but the right of it, too. The three new top-level domains are السعودية. (“Al-Saudiah”), امارات. ( “Emarat”) and مصر. (“Misr”). They are country code names in Arabic for Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Egypt.

How did this happen? Years of collaboration and cooperation between countless technical, policy and linguistic experts around the world, endless patience and a fair amount of justified and motivating impatience for people to be able to use their own scripts and thus languages to access the Internet.

As Tina Dam, who leads ICANN work on internationalising domain names puts it, credit goes to the “registries and governments that have worked actively locally; the IDNA protocol authors; the policy makers; application developers” such as browsers who had to figure out how to make the url field read from right to left, and many, many more.

As my old IANA colleague, Kim Davies, says; the hard work and collaboration required to get this far is just the beginning. The people behind these new domains now need to work with their own communities to populate them. Browsers like Firefox don’t seem to have caught on yet, though they’ve had plenty of warning. And many more script and language groups are lining up behind to get their own characters into the root. Word is the Russians want Cyrillic in next (Medvedev got his game face on when he heard the Bulgarians might get there first.). [click to continue…]

I’ve renewed my never-ending summer of Trollope, this time with the Eustace Diamonds, the second – though it feels like the fifth – Trollope where “Frank must marry money”. Never one to shy away from a lengthy aside to the reader, Trollope gives a rundown of the attitudes, circa 1873, of “a fine old Tory of the ancient school, who thought that things were going from bad to worse, but was able to live happily in spite of his anticipations”, a trick the Tea Partiers might usefully learn:

“It was bad to interfere with Charles, bad to endure Cromwell, bad to punish James, bad to put up with William. The House of Hanover was bad. All interference with prerogative has been bad. The Reform Bill was very bad. Encroachment on the estates of the bishops was bad. Emancipation of Roman Catholics was the worst of all. Abolition of corn-laws, church-rates, and oaths and tests were all bad. [click to continue…]

Just before Christmas, I wrote a piece discreetly titled “Sunnyside: Best Book of the Year“. I was surprised that one of the most inventive, funny and profound books I’ve ever read hadn’t made it onto the seasonal glut of ‘Best of 2009’ books. That post elicited an email from no less than Glen David Gold himself. And always with you, gentle reader, in mind, I asked Glen if he’d be willing to take part in a CT book event. He said he would.

So here we are, with (northern hemisphere) summer right around the corner and the paperback of Sunnyside due out in the US any minute. In a couple of weeks, I’ll be posting on CT a set of essays about Sunnyside. Some great writers are going to take part. We’ll have Stuart Evers, a writer many of you will know and love from the Guardian’s book review pages; New York comics guy Adam McGovern, the man behind Pood; deadlines permitting, Robert Hanks, who reviews films books and pretty much anything, often for the Independent; and of course Glen himself with an essay in response to all of ours, and plenty of badgering about in the comments.

Consider this a heads up to read that lovely hardback or rush out and buy a copy before the event kicks off. Sunnyside is a terrific read; fantastic fun, tugger of heartstrings, prompter of head-scratching thoughts on the meaning of life. You won’t regret it.

Over at Henry’s place earlier today, I handled silly putty for the first time in my life. Great stuff, especially when it pops those unexpected little bubbles. Henry’s missus, Nicole, showed me a great silly putty trick; you squash it onto a newspaper and make an awesome transfer. The nearest newsprint to hand was the FT’s editorial page with a great cartoon of Pope Benedict, which I now share with you on pink silly putty. Happenstance being the best form of creativity, my phone’s picture of same included an unintentional shadow that looks like the jaws of a shark or similar closing on the pope’s head while he looks worriedly away. Happy Easter Sunday, y’all.

Sad and upsetting times in Ireland. Cardinal Brady, it turns out, was instrumentally involved in the closed investigation of the monstrous Fr. Smyth, and himself swore to secrecy two children raped by Smyth. The incident simply resulted in Smyth getting some form of censure from the Church and going on to rape and abuse many, many more children. Whose parents were in turn stonewalled by the Church. How does anyone get over this? Should they?

Meanwhile, Pope Ratzinger is wriggling off the hook – at least this hook, this time – for his own involvement in a cover up. It’s odd to me that people are searching so intently for Ratzinger’s smoking gun, when as head of the Congregation for the Indoctrination of the Faith, he wrote to bishops telling them that breaking the seal of secrecy on church investigations of sex abuse was punishable by excommunication. That’s the smoking gun that destroyed not just the childhoods and perhaps lives of one or two children in Ratzinger’s direct responsibility, but thousands of children around the world who deserved better from the one, true Church.

The Irish adult voices of raped children are joined by American ones; people now grown up who were raped and abused by Fr. Smith when he was sent away from these shores and off to where he wasn’t known and could start again. A Connecticut woman poignantly asks why she was repeatedly raped by a priest who had been sent to America instead of to the police. An Irish woman asks why no one went to the police. If they had, she might have been saved. Many might have been saved. [click to continue…]

As foreshadowed a while back, I’ve taken myself off to Nairobi for the week to take part in the ICANN meeting here. The security is pretty heavy but I’m glad to report the opening morning was one of the best attended I’ve ever seen and had by far the best dancing. I’ll be blogging about it pretty much every day this week. So far, I’ve written about the CEO’s provocative speech on the first day, where he called out unnamed African government representatives for telling porkies about IPv6 availability. I also mused about how we should act with President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan probably attending an unrelated meeting in the building tomorrow.

Topics I’m planning to write about during the week will be what’s next for the proposed .XXX top level domain, local civil society organisations and social entrepreneurship, something about the new top level domain process in general, and a few other bits and pieces. If there are pressing topics of this meeting you’d like me to write about, let me know in comments here.

But as the blog posts are a bit specifically Internet policy wonk for CT and I’m also doing a bit of self-marketing at the mo, please come on over to www.mariafarrell.com if you’d like to read more. I’ll probably do a more general wrap up post on CT at the end of the week.

Update – just realised I forgot to add a link to the ICANN meeting itself, for anyone who’s interested. What with all the security concerns, remote participation has been beefed up. No better time to get informed & involved.

This is a travel bleg. In a couple of weeks’ time, I hope to meet up with my beloved who’ll briefly be in Fort Benning, Georgia, and spend a weekend travelling together in Georgia or Alabama. His initial thoughts lead to south Georgia and the coastline or perhaps into Alabama. Mine are more a night in Athens, soaking in some music, and a drive around the classic heartland. The cherry blossoms in Macon also appeal, though we’ve got plenty of those in D.C. We’ve already been to Savannah and are more interested in visiting smaller towns this time, and getting a feel for another side of America. 48 hours is a very short time so spend in a place I’ve wanted to visit for so long. We’ll be flying back from Atlanta but don’t plan to spend time there. Any wisdom to offer?