Proposed by: (Board member retiring by rotation and restanding)
Seconded by: (Board member retiring by rotation and restanding)

Additional statement from Gordon Dick (pdf)

Election Statement

I have very much enjoyed the challenge of working with Nominet serving our members and I still have energy and ideas to bring to Nominet and therefore I offer myself to the members for re-election.

Diversity.
We have one of the most diverse and competitive registrar communities of any domain registry with just under 3000 members.  Such diversity also permeates through to views on what Nominet should be doing both now and in the future.  It is therefore important that the Board you elect seek consensus on the issues of the day.  As an independent director not beholden to any one membership community I will continue to seek to deliver consensus as we move forward.

Not for profit.
I have always believed Nominet's not-for-profit status is one of its greatest strengths, this does however lead to some unique challenges.  Nominet has since its early days been making surpluses and the reserves we require have now been achieved.  Our constitution limits the options available to the board, therefore we have started the process of finding areas of common ground within the membership to address our future profits.  The first part of the jigsaw is the establishment of a charitable foundation to give back to the community we all serve.  As with any jigsaw the first part is always the easiest and we must now move forward and find areas of agreement within the membership on the other components.

dot UK.
Our domain is amongst the most popular in the world.  This has been achieved through open and fair policies and delivering stable and scalable systems.  I believe it is vital that this remains core to our business and that we do not stand still or become complacent.

Marketing.
I believe that Nominet must provide further backing to, and partnerships with, all our member registrars as our channel to market to ensure .uk domains and our registrars continue to thrive.

Operations.
In recent years Nominet has made improvements to many of its processes to move away from bureaucracy and become more customer oriented.  There is still work to be done in this area both operationally and in policy setting.  I believe continued improvement on this is essential as it is not unreasonable for our members to expect any problems they experience to be fixed smoothly.

New frontiers.
With the backing of our members Nominet won the contract to run UK ENUM, a technology that bridges the telecoms and internet world.  I believe ENUM is only the first of the new frontiers Nominet must explore and we should look for opportunities that complement and benefit the services we currently offer to our member registrars.

Contact.
As many of you know I am always available to discuss Nominet issues with members, please feel free to get in touch (nominet-election2008@gordon.me.uk) if you have any comments or queries. 

Curriculum Vitæ

Email:    nominet-election2008@gordon.me.uk        Tel: 0131 516 6521

2004 – present :        Non-Executive Director, Nominet UK

• 2004 – present :    Nominet Board Representative, Policy Advisory Body.
• 2004 – 2007 :    Member, Remuneration Committee.
• 2007 – present :    Chair, Audit committee.

Working with my board colleagues and our staff, Nominet has come a long way while I have served on the board, including:

• We recognised that we were process driven rather than customer driven and set out to change this.
• We identified that we had an excellent and diverse channel to market through our member registrars and that we should do more to support them selling our .uk domain. As a first step towards this, last year we published market intelligence in the form of our Domain Name Industry Report and marketing support materials.
• We took a fresh outlook on our role internationally and agreed an exchange of letters with ICANN setting out our respective rights and responsibilities for the UK domain to safeguard it for the UK community. 
• We have taken an active role in the International Internet Governance Forum and launched a UK IGF to feed into the international process.
• We identified UK ENUM as a new market that would have synergies with our current business, sought member support to bid for it and won the contract.

As a director I regularly attend member events and am always available to discuss problems, concerns or hear what we have got right!

2004 – present : I provide consultancy services to small businesses to identify their business needs, then define and implement their online strategy. 

2007 :  ScotchSpam.org.uk – successfully used the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations and Data Protection Act to claim damages from a sender of unsolicited marketing email in a small claims courts.  This received international coverage in the media.

2002 – 2004 :  Working in Tokyo, Japan, my role involved the management of non-Japanese staff and their interactions with our Japanese colleagues and customers.  This gives me experience and skills in successfully bringing people from diverse cultures, backgrounds and viewpoints together.

1995 – 2001 :  E-commerce and online marketing.
In 1995 against the conventional wisdom and in collaboration with the authors and publishers I was involved in the launching of a full book online at the same time as its paper publication.  With our focus being on online retail from the early days we put small businesses online and provided content based marketing environments to draw end users.

Education :    BSc (Hons) in Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science from the University of Edinburgh.