In a year that’s been challenging for the entire world, Public Interest Registry (PIR), the people behind .ORG, have announced their second annual .ORG Impact Awards. This week PIR put out a Call for Nominations to honour the remarkable organisations and individuals making the world a better place that use a .org domain name for their website.
Neustar (.us), Public Interest Registry (.org) and Verisign (.com/.net) are participating in a three month trial with the U.S. Department of Commerce, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and Food and Drug Administration to curb illegal online sales of unapproved opioids.
The .ORG Impact Awards is Now Accepting Nominations from Nonprofits, Corporations, Community Groups and More    Â
[news release] In celebration of organizations using the Internet to empower change around the world, The .ORG Impact Awards, sponsored by Public Interest Registry, launches today to honor .ORG domain name users for their accomplishments.
From individuals to large corporations, and small community groups to multinational NGOs, purpose-driven achievements from members of the .ORG community will be honored through this inaugural program. The award submission period is open through Friday, July 12, 2019.
Unlike other industry award programs, The .ORG Impact Awards does not seek to profit from submissions. In fact, winning individuals and organizations will receive up to $5,000 in a monetary contribution to the nonprofit of their choice, and finalists will receive two complimentary invitations to attend The .ORG Impact Awards Ceremony at The Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C. on October 10, 2019 where winners will be announced. Finalists in the âIndividualâ category also will be offered travel assistance.
Achievement will be honored in the following award categories:
Individual Awards honor the contribution of an individual to their organization or the broader sector:
Sector Awards recognize organizational and team accomplishments:
Initiative Awards celebrate achievement in a specific online niche area:
âThe .ORG Impact Awards is an opportunity to convene organizations of all types and sizes from around the world to learn from each other, celebrate each otherâs accomplishments and strengthen the work being done through .ORG to make the world a better place,â said Jon Nevett, president and CEO of Public Interest Registry. âThe mission- and affinity-driven .ORG community is vast, diverse and incredibly innovative in how it harnesses the power of the Internet to improve the lives of people near and far, and weâre thrilled to shine a spotlight on these accomplishments to help strengthen these stellar .ORGs for the future.â
All award entries must be submitted through a form on The .ORG Impact Awardsâ secure online platform and should highlight activities occurring between June 1, 2018 and June 1, 2019. Nominators may submit to more than one category/subcategory, but each submission must be original. All submissions must be in English and there is no cost for submission.
For official eligibility criteria and rules of The .ORG Impact Awards program, as well as submission requirements, deadlines and judging information, please visit https://orgimpactawards.org/.
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About Public Interest Registry
Public Interest Registry is a nonprofit corporation that operates the .ORG top-level domain â one of the world’s largest “generic” top-level domain with more than 10 million domain names registered worldwide. As an advocate for collaboration, safety and security on the Internet, Public Interest Registry’s mission is to educate and enable the global noncommercial community to use the Internet more effectively, and to take a leadership position among Internet stakeholders on policy and other issues relating to the domain naming system. Public Interest Registry was founded by the Internet Society (internetsociety.org) in 2002 and is based in Reston, Virginia, USA. Visit Public Interest Registry at https://pir.org/.
Public Interest Registry (PIR) announced Tuesday the addition of three new members to their executive team â Judy Song-Marshall, Chief of Staff; Joe Abley, Chief Technology Officer and Anand Vora, Vice President of Business Affairs. They are currently recruiting for a Chief Financial Officer (CFO) to round out their leadership team.
The new hires, starting throughout March and April of 2019, will bring enhanced operational and technology capabilities to Public Interest Registry in support of the organisationâs drive for continued growth of quality domains under management and its enhanced educational and outreach initiatives. The broadening of the executive team comes on the heels of Public Interest Registryâs appointment of Jon Nevett as President and CEO and will be instrumental to the advancement of the organisationâs advocacy in support of collaboration, safety and trust on the internet.
âOur latest executive appointments are some of the most well-respected professionals in the domain industry and true experts in their respective fields,â said Jon Nevett, President and CEO of Public Interest Registry. âIâm thrilled to welcome them to the Public Interest Registry team and am confident they will help us achieve our goals while, most importantly, upholding the impressive legacy of the .org domain.â
The three new hires will join the existing Public Interest Registry executive team consisting of Jon Nevett, President and CEO; Brian Cimbolic, Vice President and General Counsel; Paul Diaz, Vice President of Policy and Mary Cornwell, Senior Director of Human Resources. Public Interest Registry also currently is accepting applications for a Chief Financial Officer (CFO) to round out the organisationâs leadership team.
Judy Song-Marshall brings more than a decade of domain name industry experience working alongside executive management teams. She currently works as the Director of Registry Services at Neustar, overseeing the Policy, Industry Affairs, and Compliance teams.
Judy also led the marketing team that successfully launched the .nyc top-level domain (TLD) and rebranded the .us country code top-level domain (ccTLD). Judy serves on the ICANNWiki Board and is the Treasurer and a former board member of The Domain Name Association.
Joe Abley has more than 20 years of experience working with internet infrastructure in a variety of capacities including in the domain name system. At Public Interest Registry, Joe will be responsible for the organisationâs overall technology strategy including managing information security, business intelligence, software development and technical research.
Joe previously served as an Infrastructure Scientist for Afilias and as a Director of Domain Names System (DNS) Operations at ICANN where he provided direction for the operation of ICANNâs production DNS services, including the L Root Server and the systems and processes used to manage Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) in the root zone of the DNS. Joe also actively promotes technology education efforts in developing regions and is a long-standing participant in standards bodies and technical operator communities.
Anand Vora is a seasoned strategy and business development executive with a decade of experience working in the domain name and internet industries. Anand will be rejoining Public Interest Registry, where his career in the industry began, to oversee business development, channel services, marketing, registry services, and customer operations.
In this role, Anand will help expand Public Interest Registryâs presence in the marketplace and continue to foster customer and registrar relations. Previously, Anand served as the Director of Business Development at Donuts Inc., where he led the identification, development, creation, and execution of go-to-market strategy. At Donuts, Anand focused primarily on international markets including spearheading Donutsâ China operations.
Public Interest Registry has announced Jonathon Nevett will commence as their new CEO on 17 December, replacing Brian Cute who resigned in May. Nevett, a Donuts co-founder, himself recently stepped down from his role at Donuts as executive vice president of corporate affairs but remained for a short time as a close advisor to the company. Continue reading PIR Announces Jonathon Nevett As New CEO
The Public Interest Registry (PIR), who operates a number of gTLDs including .org, ngo and .ong and associated internationalised domain names, has begun accepting nominations for their Board of Directors.
In 2019 there are three positions opening on the PIR Board. The three directors will serve a 3-year term that begins mid-year 2019 and expires mid-year 2022. PIR says prior board experience is preferred. All directors must be able to read and understand a balance sheet, as well as read and communicate effectively in the English language.
There are approximately 15 full days per year for face-to-face meetings (not including travel time), regular conference calls (generally monthly), and daily email correspondence. Directors that participate in all meetings are eligible to accept compensation up to US$12,000 per year
The deadline for nominations is 15:00 UTC on February 4, 2019. Interested candidates should submit this form. More information is available here.
The Public Interest Registry has announced changes to the way they deal with registrars. The changes impact on the discounts, rebates and marketing products offered by the registry.
The changes were announced in a post on the PIR blog by Interim President and CEO Jay Daley. The first change is that PIR, the registry for .org and .ngo top level domains among others, wonât be offering any further volume discounts when the current agreements expire. While volume discounts are a long-established product offered by many registries, they clearly favour larger registrars as only the larger registrars can reach the volumes necessary to qualify for the discount. We donât think this is fair and we want all our products in future to be equally accessible to registrars of all sizes.
The second change is that theyâre going to measure the success of their products on more key performance indicators than just the number of creates they produce. For a start PIR is going to be looking at the overall revenue of a product â does it cost more to offer the product than the additional revenue we get from it? Then theyâre going to look at the quality of the new registrations generic generated â do they have a higher incidence of technical abuse such as malware or phishing? Theyâre also going to look at whether there is a positive impact on our brand attributes and how registrars and registrants perceive them.
Measuring brand in this way means two things the post notes. It signals a shift from a sales-led organisation to a marketing-led organisation so they can focus on strengthening the core characteristics of .org, such as trust. It also means that theyâll need to conduct more registrar and registrant surveys to help understand and measure the impact of their products and they will need registrar cooperation to achieve that.
The third change is that in future PIR will no longer offer products where they take all the risk and will instead ask for the risk to be shared along with the reward. Registrars and registries are becoming increasingly sophisticated in the use of data and together can design products where both have confidence in the outcome.
Daley writes PIR thinks these changes and their new approach are better suited to developing strong partnerships with registrars and generating quality, sustainable growth. He says they may see a dip in headline numbers as this strategy is put in place, but from the actions taken so far in cutting back the target market discount, the loss of income from the drop in creates is more than compensated for by the saving in expenditure.
To support all these changes PIR has invested heavily in their channel services team with three new hirings, Rick Terry, Scott McBreen and Gianni Ponzi, who join Senior Director Inma del Rosal Mendez. These new members of the team have extensive experience in our industry with long stints working for registrars and they are looking forward to building strong partnerships with .org registrars.
Following the departure of President and CEO Brian Cute in May, Public Interest Registry has begun the search for a new CEO.
Public Internet Registry (PIR) is the not-for profit organisation created by the Internet Society (ISOC) in 2002 to manage, enhance and expand the .org domain while acting in the public interest. .org currently has 10.3 million domains under management and is the seventh largest top level domain. PIR also manages .ngo and .ong TLDs among others.
For the CEO position, in their advertisement PIR say theyâre looking for a high- quality candidate to lead the company forward in this important stage of our development. The goal is to make PIR into a world leading registry in all aspects by adopting global best practice and leading-edge initiatives.
The CEO will execute their current strategy and to build on success and meet goals. The right leader will be someone with significant experience in the domain name industry at a senior level. While PIR is proudly not-for-profit, it exists both to serve the community and to fund ISOC. The right candidate will therefore have both strong commercial skills to drive revenue growth as well as a genuine passion for PIRâs public interest mission and broader Internet issues. The CEO will be responsible for delivering PIRâs mission within the domain name industry, the broader community of org/.ngo/.ong registrants, and the community of Internet users served by ISOC.
PIR is looking for a CEO with excellent organisational, strategic planning, financial management and diplomatic skills to lead a global and diverse community and reflect the organisationâs values. In addition to a wide variety of technical expertise, candidates should bring a track record of directing sustainable growth of an organisation or business unit. They must also have an inspirational leadership style, with experience working with an active Board.
For further information, including details of how to apply, go to the website of the recruitment firm Perrett Laver quoting reference 3669. The deadline for applications is Friday 27 July. Salary is not listed but is said to be âcompetitiveâ.
Brian Cute, CEO and President of the Public Interest Registry, has resigned after 7 years at the helm, the registry best known for .org has announced. While there is nothing to indicate anything untoward, the resignation and announcement seem to have been rather sudden.
Cute resigned on 7 May according to the PIR statement released Thursday. During his time as president and CEO, Cute helped advance Public Interest Registryâs mission through the headwinds of todayâs complex and diversified online marketplace, according to the statement. Public Interest Registry say they appreciated the leadership Cute has shown the organisation and the many contributions he made during his tenure. Public Interest Registry wishes him great success in his future endeavours.
The Public Interest Registry Board of Directors will soon commence a recruitment process to fill the CEO position, according to the statement. Jay Daley is serving as interim CEO. Daley knows the registry industry extraordinarily well, having served in various leadership roles within the industry since 2002. Daley is a recent addition to the Public Interest Registry Board and has indicated to the Board that he will continue in that role after the interim period. He will not be pursuing the full-time CEO position.
âWe at Public Interest Registry remain steadfast in our mission. Public Interest Registry has enabled countless non-commercial organisations across the globe to utilise the internetâs enormous potential to make the world a better place. And weâll continue to do our part and provide them with tools they need to advance their initiatives online,â said Roberto Gaetano, Chair of Public Interest Registryâs Board of Directors.
Public Interest Registry is a non-profit organisation that operates the .org top-level domain â the worldâs third-largest generic top-level domain with more than 10.4 million domain names registered worldwide â and the .ngo and .ong gTLDs and OnGood community website. Public Interest Registry also operates 4 Internationalised Domain Names to support and encourage local language use of the internet.
There’s an important need for widespread internet education among internet users of all ages and backgrounds following the findings of a survey to test U.S. consumer knowledge and awareness of the internet by the Public Internet Registry, operator of .org among other gTLDs.
But is it so surprising? Most people don’t know how their motor vehicles operate. They just know, to varying degrees, how to drive them. They know how to fill their fuel tanks and usually put air in the tyres. But under the bonnet, or hood, well, forget about it.
So it’s not surprising that only 31% of users could correctly define a “domain name system”, two-thirds (68%) could not identify the decade when the World Wide Web was invented and only 29% of participants correctly identified the meaning of HTTP, with 31 percent admitting outright they did not know the meaning of the term.
According to the survey results, an overwhelming majority (84%) reported that they believed they were “knowledgeable,” however the survey results painted a different picture. For instance, only 20 % of consumers knew the internet and the World Wide Web are not one and the same!
But there are positives. 59% knew a URL was another term for a web address, two-thirds (66%) could identify an domain name from a browser, email address and social media handle and 80% knew that they could find official information from their Congressman under a .gov domain name.
But more awareness is important so people understand, among other issues, the security risks when entering personal and financial information online for websites that don’t use “https”.
To check how knowledgeable you are, there’s an Internet101 quiz here.
