User:Maureenhilyard

In June, 2018, Maureen Hilyard was elected at the ICANN Panama meeting by the 15-member At-Large Advisory Committee (/ALAC) of ICANN as their next Chair. She commenced her new role at the conclusion of the ICANN AGM in Barcelona, Spain, in October 2018, as well as the start of more online meetings and more emails, skype, and with the advent of COVID-19, zoom communications.

Maureen is very honoured to be representing a developing country in the Pacific as the Chair of the section of ICANN that represents the interests of internet users around the world.

Maureen is a project manager and consultant for development projects in the Cook Islands. She has a Master of Management through Massey University in New Zealand, although her former career was in Education in New Zealand. She worked for nearly 15 years as a Regional Advisor with the New Zealand Correspondence School facilitating distance learning for home-based students working with their teachers in the school in Wellington.

She moved to the Cook Islands in 2004 under an NZAid contract as the Distance Learning Facilitator for students in the outer islands also working with Correspondence School teachers in Wellington. As part of this project, she helped to establish the internet into all the schools in the outer islands to facilitate more rapid communication between students and their teachers. During this time, she was able to persuade the Correspondence School to digitise their learning programmes so that students could use the internet to complete and return work. This saved months of turnaround time of hard copies of school work from students on their small far-flung islands in the Pacific to the largest school in New Zealand.

Following this contract Maureen has worked for the Cook Islands government and private organisations on a number of development contracts covering infrastructure, environment and eGovernment projects as well as assisting with policy and evaluation activities. She also worked as a Programme Coordinator with the New Zealand High Commission on Rarotonga. She founded an NGO - the Cook Islands Internet Action Group (CIIAG) which advocates for internet development focusing on accessibility and affordability and which became an APRALO ALS in 2011. She is a member of the Telecommunications Advisory Committee that advises the Minister of Telecommunications in the Cook Islands.

Maureen joined the Pacific Islands Chapter of the Internet Society (PICISOC) in 2006 after meeting Vint Cerf at a PacINET held in Samoa. She ran PacINET on Rarotonga in 2008 and joined the PICISOC Board in 2009. She was Vice Chair in 2010, Board Chair from 2011 until 2014, and Secretary in 2015. Her interest in internet governance was spurred by a Diplo Course on IG in 2008 after which she was awarded a fellowship to attend her first IGF in Hyderabad, India. The following year she was an ISOC Ambassador at the IGF meeting Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt.

In 2010 Maureen was awarded an ICANN Fellowship to attend her first ICANN meeting in Cartegena and was soon captured by ALAC and a working group reviewing the ICANN regions. The Pacific had become more integrated into the ICANN system before she attended her next ICANN meeting in 2012 in Costa Rica, but in the interim, she had maintained contact through APRALO and ALAC meetings as well as joining in with other working groups. Maureen has now attended over 20 ICANN meetings and is in her fourth term as one of the APRALO representatives on the ALAC. She recently had to leave her 5-year stint as the ALAC liaison for the ccNSO when she became the Vice Chair of the ALAC. She is currently the Chair of the ALAC. She is involved in a number of working groups and has been penholder for a number of ALAC policy statements.

Maureen is a Director on the Board of Dot Asia - a generic TLD that has recently been given permission by ICANN to extend its reach outside of the Asian region. She is also a member of the Advisory Committee of the Public Interest Registry which is a subsidiary of the Internet Society and coordinates the sale of .org and .ngo domain names.

She is the co-Chair of the Global IGF "Dynamic Coalition on Small Islands Developing States (SIDS) in the Internet Economy" and also is a member of the Multistakeholder Advisory Group of the Asia Pacific regional IGF.

Maureen is also the Pacific Representative on the DNS Women's Entrepreneurship Programme, as well as a tiny shareholder of a women's owned satellite company, OWNSAT.