President Nominee - Steven Heath

Nominee for President 2007-2009

Steven Heath

Welcome,

The position that InternetNZ now holds is envied by many and despised by some. Some of the changes to InternetNZ since I was first elected in 2000 are huge and have made a big difference.

InternetNZ has implemented one of, if not the best, TLD’s in the world. After that the attention was working on advising stakeholders in the wider issues impacting the Internet in New Zealand. Both of these have been major feats and have had a positive impact to New Zealand in general and InternetNZ in particular.

However a building is only as good as its foundations and over the years InternetNZ has been unable to solve our two key internal issues:

• governance
• large and representative membership base.

Almost every AGM the members are presented with changes to the constitution or the membership structure or other recommendations on our internal approach.  None of these have made any fundamental difference, they may have helped incrementally but these need to be solved just like .nz was finally solved. If they are not solved then one day, maybe soon, everything will just come crashing down around us.

I think someone that has not been actively involved for the last couple of years is needed. What is required is someone that has not been caught up in the internal council process and day to day operation of the society. An outsider as you will.

Over the last 15 months I have been advising several state sector organisations on governance, strategic relationship management and large contract negotiation in the ICT field. This work as well as my previous roles in InternetNZ has enabled me to stand for President.

I have the skill, the experience, the time, and more importantly the passion to work with my fellow officers, councillors and members.

About me

I worked for nine years in Canada with the largest ISP in Canada as Product Director – Web Technologies and then as General Manager – GreyInteractive (part of Grey Advertising). I returned to New Zealand in 1999 and joined Ernst & Young as a Senior Manager which directly lead to my first involvement with InternetNZ.

With InternetNZ I have been a councillor, treasurer, a member of the Hine Working Group, completed all the process around the first .bank.nz and the .maori.nz 2LD applications, convened the panel to appoint the first directors of NZRS, as well as a member of many of the standing committees including technical and international affairs. I have maintained the nznews.org.nz blog since July 2002 which is in the process of being updated and re-released.

Since then I have worked for Azimuth Consulting, Optimation and Sybase and in May 2006 went full time into independent business consulting and ICT advisory.

I look forward with working with all members and stakeholders over the next two years.

The Photo

I took this photo in a town called Myawaddy in Burma. Two Buddhist monks are being driven on the dirt road by a local ‘taxi’. The monks not walking struck a cord with me about the juxtaposition of events and that things need to have context to make sense. Why would the monks not be walking?

In this case this area of Burma is controlled by the Buddhist monks and few years before split off from a local independent area and allied with the Burmese military junta. In a sense the monks are now the ruling class and have the trappings of power. Context turns an interesting picture into a statement of power.