Updated: Tue Apr 13 19:44:54 UTC 2021
PeeringDB Voter's Guide for Board of Directors Election April 15th through 29th 2021 UTC
Bylaws at https://docs.peeringdb.com/gov/legaldocs/2015-12-08_PeeringDB_Bylaws.pdf define Membership:
"A corporation, limited liability company, partnership or other legal business entity may be a Member of the Corporation. Membership is determined by having both an active PeeringDB.com account and an individual representative or role subscription to the PeeringDB Governance mailing list: http://lists.peeringdb.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pdb-gov"
Each Member may submit one ballot. We are employing Single Transferable Vote (STV) as the voting system. This means that you rank your candidate preferences from most preferred to least preferred. You do not need to rank all the candidates. A later ballot from a representative of a Member will replace a previous ballot from the same Member.
There are 5 seats on the Board of Directors, 3 of which are up for election this year. A Director term is 2 years.
The following schedule applies to Board elections:
Through April 14th 23:59:59 UTC 2021: Candidates may submit their candidacy and a maximum 300 word statement, as determined by the POSIX "LANG=en_US.UTF-8 wc -w" command, or revisions to their statement, to secretary@peeringdb.com.
April 15th 2021: A voter registration form will be sent to the PeeringDB Governance mailing list (pdb-gov@lists.peeringdb.com).
April 15th through 29th 23:59 UTC 2021: Voting. (Registrations received after April 28th UTC are not guaranteed to be processed in time for the April 29th 23:59 UTC voting deadline.)
List of Candidates:
Candidate Statements:
Patrick W. Gilmore
Having been involved since the PeeringDB’s inception, I am impressed and proud that the PeeringDB has become vital to the Internet interconnection ecosystem. I cannot give enough thanks to the current board under Aaron’s leadership, and volunteers like Greg who do not get enough credit. It would be a deep honor to continue working with this group.
While the PeeringDB is amazing today, there is much more it could do to ease the lives of engineers and peering coordinators. I believe my long tenure with the PeeringDB, work with multiple IXPs, experience on other non-profit Internet-related boards, and decades working in the industry make me uniquely qualified to help.
My primary goals:
1. Ensure the neutrality of the PeeringDB and guarantee users control their records.
2. Provide a stable and secure platform.
3. Be responsive to user requests.
4. Add features.
The order is intentional. Features are important, but it must come after the other priorities. As an example, I fought to ensure importing data from IXF was opt-in. Some wanted to import all data automatically, without user request or input. I believe the admins / board should not decide what is best for you. It is your record, you should have complete control.
If you agree the platform must be vehemently agnostic, and leave no doubt users own their own records, then I am your champion.
In conclusion, I would like to thank each of you for using the PeeringDB. The DB is only as useful as the members make it, and you have made it the most important repository of peering information on the Internet. It is truly humbling to have been involved in the canonical example of a grass-roots community effort showing value and bringing everyone together.
Christopher Malayter
I’ve been involved with PeeringDB since its inception. I helped to drive the creation of the not-for-profit organization that exists today. I’ve always been active within the PeeringDB community. I spent time volunteering on what is now the admin committee. I believe that the organization is amazing and the work that has been done so far has been fantastic.
I’d like to join the board to continue the great work, continue to ensure neutrality, and to enable frictionless contributions to PeeringDB.
My goals:
1) Continue to maintain neutrality as an organization
2) Enable contributions to be made to the database with reduced friction
3) Driving open-source contributions to PeeringDB
4) Improve CLI and API usability of the system
5) Enabling a better platform to take in feature requests from the community
I’d love to jump in to help the community continue to expand and improve PeeringDB.
Stephen McManus
I've been involved with PeeringDB for 5 years, volunteering on the Product Committee and for almost 2 years now the chair of that committee. In my day job, I manage a team of software engineers who work closely with PeeringDB data and features to automate peering. This makes me both very familiar with how the system works, and very motivated to make sure it continues to work as well as it does now.
I feel that PeeringDB has improved quite a bit in the past few years, but there's lots of opportunity to increase the value of the system for the community. My priorities are:
1) Ensure that PeeringDB remains free, stable, highly available and performant for the global community that rely on it
2) Improve the usability of the system so users can more easily find, create and maintain data they care about
3) Make sure that we're listening to the community about how they want to see PeeringDB develop - both by improving the way we get feedback from the community and by making sure our committees are made up of a diverse slate of industry professionals
4) Get the community more involved in contributing code to PeeringDB. PeeringDB has been open sourced, but we're not yet seeing a lot of contributions from community members
I've been working in the cross section of networking and software for 18 years, most of that time in a leadership capacity: https://www.linkedin.com/in/steve-mcmanus-288b161/
Bijal Sanghani
I believe PeeringDB is one of the most important tools for the internet industry. I first started using the system in 2005 while running the AS15412 network for FLAG Telecom. Since then I have served the community in various roles via programme committees and my role as co-chair of the RIPE NCC Services working group as well as today working for a non-profit IXP Membership Association, Euro-IX.
I joined the PeeringDB Board of Directors in 2017 and established the Outreach Committee, together we carried out a user survey, managed the rebranding project, created a PeeringDB video and worked to ensure PeeringDB is GDPR compliant.
If elected to the PeeringDB board I would continue using my experience and stakeholder engagement skills to build bridges and share knowledge across the community by:
1. Continuing to support the outreach committee and look at other services / support PeeringDB can provide.
2. Ensuring there is closer interaction between PeeringDB and the IXP Associations (the members of IX-F).
3. Building on the work done in both communities to ensure there is better communication, understanding and co-operation between these two complimentary databases.
4. Promoting data quality, accuracy, completeness and identify tools and data that would help networks automate further.
Thank you for your support.