Announcing the IPDB Foundation Board of Directors
Last week, representatives of organizations from around the world gathered in a small office in Berlin, joined on video chat by others from as far as Kenya, Estonia, Italy and the United States. They were all there for a meeting of the caretakers of the IPDB Foundation, which took two big steps toward its vision of a decentralized database for the planet — it became an independent organization run by its caretakers, and it elected a board of directors.
Meet the Board
We are delighted to introduce the founding Board of Directors for the IPDB Foundation, who were unanimously elected by our caretakers. The team brings years of experience and a ton of talent. We’re confident they’ll do a great job guiding the IPDB Foundation during their terms on the board.
David Holtzman — President
David Holtzman is an information technology security expert, educator and activist. He started his career as a cryptographic analyst, military codebreaker, U.S. Naval Security Group submariner, and Soviet Manned Space Program analyst. Holtzman is an early-stage internet pioneer. He was the CTO at Network Solutions when it managed the domain name system, where he oversaw the explosive growth of the commercial internet to more than 20 million domain names by the late 1990s. He is the author of Privacy Lost: How Technology is Endangering Your Privacy, and a regular commentator for major news media, including Bloomberg Television, BBC, CNN, The New York Times, Business Week, and The Washington Post.
Constance Choi — Secretary
Constance Choi is the co-founder and Director of COALA, an international multidisciplinary collaborative research and development initiative on blockchain technologies, smart contracts, and decentralized autonomous applications. Choi co-founded and was General Counsel and Chief Compliance Officer of the Kraken digital asset exchange. She holds a J.D. from UC Berkeley School of Law, and undergraduate degrees from Brown University and University of Cambridge. She has practiced at several law firms, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, focusing on internet and technology law, intellectual property, privacy, data security, and constitutional rights.
Greg McMullen — Treasurer
Greg McMullen is a lawyer, internet advocate, and Chief Policy Officer at BigchainDB, where he built the framework for the IPDB Foundation and helped bring together its founding caretakers. He is a leading member of the COALA IP working group and co-authored the COALA IP specification and policy paper. Before joining BigchainDB and IPDB, he was a litigator at one of Canada’s top class actions law firms, where he worked on class actions involving privacy, copyright, competition law, and price fixing conspiracies. He served on the board of directors the BC Civil Liberties Association, Canada’s largest civil liberties organization, and authored the BCCLA’s guide to privacy and security when crossing borders with electronic devices.
Member-at-Large — Dr. Nina-Luisa Siedler
Dr. Nina-Luisa Siedler is a lawyer and partner at DWF Berlin with over 15 years of experience. She is interested in FinTech and decentralized technology, and her practice includes blockchain matters. She is an advisor to Blockchain Hub Berlin. Dr. Siedler is specialized in structured finance, including credit and capital market instruments, especially acquisition and project financing, real estate transactions, asset-backed securities, structured cover bonds, debt loans, and corporate bonds.
Member-at-Large — Kaspar Korjus
Kaspar Korjus is the Managing Director of Estonia’s e-Residency program, which offers a fully digital identity for global citizens. e-Residency is built on inclusion, transparency, and legitimacy. It is meant to empower citizens globally and provide world-wide digital and financial inclusion. Korjus was chosen by Megan Smith, CTO of the United States, as one of 20 digital leaders for the Global Leaders Digital Exchange (GLDE) program, and is listed in Forbes Estonia’s “30 under 30” as #1 in Technology and Finance.
Caretakers Declare Independence
The group of founding caretaker organizations became the members of the IPDB Foundation, making it an independent organization. These founding caretakers are now guiding the operations of the IPDB Foundation. They can elect board members, set the bylaws, decide who can become a caretaker or remove caretakers who are not contributing, and set the direction of the organization. The caretakers can also hold the board accountable with a vote to fire the board if they aren’t doing a good job. The caretakers exercised their new authority by approving a set of bylaws for the organization and by electing the Board of Directors we introduced above.
Next Steps
There are three big things on our agenda for the next few months.
Register for Charitable Status
We need to formalize the IPDB Foundation by registering it with the Court in Berlin, which has already reviewed the articles and given preliminary approval. We hope this will be a streamlined process, so we can do things like opening a bank account and start accepting donations to carry the IPDB Foundation to the point that it becomes self-sustaining.
Expand the Test Network
We know it’s been a long wait, but we are getting very close to being able to open the IPDB Test Network to everyone who has taken the time to sign up on the waiting list. Right now we are putting the finishing touches on the developer portal, which will make it easy to sign up to start using IPDB. Each week we will be contacting people on the waiting list to give them access to the Test Network. By the end of the summer we hope that everyone who has signed up has access, and then we will open the Test Network to the world.
Conference and Caretakers Workshop
We are teaming up with BigchainDB to host a conference this fall, furthering our mandate for research and public education. The conference will bring developers and software engineers together with lawyers, policymakers, and others to discuss both the technology and the legal, social, political, and economic impacts of decentralization technologies.
We will host our second Caretakers Workshop at the same time. This Workshop will bring together the board of directors and as many caretakers as we can to discuss the next steps for the IPDB Foundation. The first Caretakers Workshop was incredibly productive, and we hope this one will be even better.
More details, including dates and speaker list, will be coming soon. Stay tuned!
