Lenz Gschwendtner bio / election statement

There might be many (at least I hope so) who want to get a seat in council. All of them most certainly have more knowledge about the history of New Zealand internet and most probably are all well respected in the local industry. I am a guy who just started his own internet business down here, I am really new to the New Zealand internet scene and can only look back to two (absolutely stunning) years of living in this nice country.

So ... why me?

Honestly, you have do make that up for yourself but I will give you some pointers of what I did and why I think I could add some value.

I recently started a small domain registrar. The registrar is New Zealand based and US focused. We hold no .nz accreditation to avoid conflicts of interests but I have a solid working knowledge of the SRS and the policies around the .nz namespace. We grow well and did all that without external funding. I am a guy who gets stuff done rather than talking and waiting for others to do the work and I am a geek. I love programming since I am 14 and I worked in IT ever since.

I type this while sitting on the ICANN meeting in Sydney where I meet many of the guys I used to do business with in previous jobs back in Europe. My credibility in the international domain business - both registry and registrar related - comes from many years of work and contribution on an international stage. I've done domain business for about 10 years, I've done IDNs, I've done infrastructure scaling, I've contributed to the EPP implementations at .at and .ch/.li (and gave my input to the local EPP discussion). I maintained close relationships to various European registries and still have good friends in many of them.

I was CTO of a large registrar in Germany called united-domains that was bought by Lycos Europe in 2004 and is now part of United Internet. I managed about 10 direct staff and did projects with other business units within Lycos involving multinational teams.

In New Zealand I used to consult for Police, Contact Energy, Metservice and others as well as starting my own business. I started an erlang user group in Wellington - the first in New Zealand, I am active in the perl user group and I am an InternetNZ member since the day we are living in Wellington. I contribute to several mailing lists, local and international and I have a strong background in open source software.

I was active in the S92a discussion and did raise awareness for the problem (local and international) as well as contributing to the European software patent discussion that just recently became a topic down here as well.

If you search for a guy who knows his way around the business and with a strong technical background who does not talk too much bloat but gets things done - and yes, I can write technical papers even if someone has to get the grammar right afterwards - then I might be the one you vote for.