Since 2014, the ROW series has offered a platform for industry stakeholders to present and discuss technical topics related to real world experiences of implementing registration operations.
The Program Committee plans, organizes and provides a strategic oversight of each workshop to ensure the successful achievement of its objectives.
Current Committee Members
Scott Hollenbeck | Verisign - Chair
Scott Hollenbeck is a fellow of industry standards and technology in the chief technology officer organization, where he manages a team of engineers and researchers who focus on exploring innovation opportunities and emerging technologies. Scott has more than 30 years of expertise in the Domain Name System space, applications programming, systems architecture, network engineering, information security, financial analysis, and personnel management.
Prior to joining Verisign in 1998, Scott held management and engineering positions with Xerox Corporation. There, he chaired a cross-corporate group responsible for interoperability testing of all Xerox network and desktop software products. Before Xerox, Scott served as a first lieutenant officer in the U.S. Air Force.
Scott has authored many internet protocol standards, including: the Extensible Provisioning Protocol, a standard protocol for the registration and management of internet infrastructure data, including domain names; and the Verisign Registry-Registrar Protocol, a pre-cursor of EPP developed for use in the Verisign Shared Registration System; and most recently, he has co-authored the Registration Data Access Protocol, a standard protocol that was designed to replace the WHOIS protocol. He has been a contributor to several industry efforts related to domain names and internet security, such as internationalized domain names, public key cryptography, Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions, the Extensible Markup Language, the Transport Layer Security protocol, and the ENUM protocol.
He has also served in various capacities on the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers’ Expert Working Group on generic top-level domain directory services; the Internet Engineering Task Force’s Internet Engineering Steering Group; and the Web Extensible Internet Registration Data Service, Registration Protocols Extension, Extensible Provisioning Protocol Extensions, and Transport Layer Security working groups.
Scott holds a Master of Science in computer science and a graduate certificate in software engineering from George Mason University and a Bachelor of Science in computer science from the Pennsylvania State University.
Edward Lewis | ICANN
Edward Lewis is a Senior Technologist in the ICANN Office of the CTO. Prior to joining ICANN he worked 11 years inside Internet registries of many types - gTLD, ccTLD, sTLD and RIR. He worked for a DNS Hosting company. He co-chaired the original IETF WG that developed EPP. He developed some of the first DNSSEC codebases under the original DARPA contract in the 1990's. Before that, he worked building research networks attached to the NASA Science Internet (one of the three original backbones) and taught Networking courses at the University of Maryland - Baltimore County.
Steve Conte | ICANN
Steve Conte originally joined ICANN in October 2002. During that time, Steve was involved in IT, Meetings, IANA, and Security as well as administration of the L Root Server. Steve left ICANN in 2008 to join the Internet Society, where his responsibilities included supporting Open Internet Standards and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), including leading the ISOC Fellowship to the IETF. Steve rejoined ICANN in April 2014 as a member of the Unique Identifiers System, Security, Stability, and Resiliency team, where he coordinated the various ISSSR training across the globe. Steve now serves as Senior Director, IROS Operations within the CTO team.
Jean Gilbert | Cofomo
Mr. Gilbert joined the Cofomo team specializing in Internet protocols (LGR, RDAP, EPP, IDNA, EAI, UA, etc.) in 2022. He is responsible for the organization of the Registration Operations Workshop (ROW) events at Cofomo. He was previously involved for more than 30 years as a manager in a multitude of R&D and product development projects in the field of telecommunications, ship situation awareness, target detection, sensor performance and data fusion in a maritime environment for various NATO member country organizations, projects, and trials.
Mario Loffredo | IIT CNR
Mario Loffredo is a Senior Technologist and the Deputy Head of the “Digital Innovation” Unit at the Institute of Informatics and Telematics (IIT) of the National Research Council (CNR) in Italy, where he has been working since 2006. Since then, he has been involved in the technical management of Registro .it. He has been the leading developer of both EPP and RDAP servers as well as one of the main contributors to the design and implementation of the cybersecurity infrastructure. He actively participates in international forums such as ICANN-Tech, ROW, CENTR and IETF.
After graduating in Computer Science from the University of Pisa in 1992, he first worked as a researcher at the CNUCE Institute of CNR. His main research interests were software engineering and digital libraries.
After that, he held the position of Head of the R&D Department at an Italian ICT company working in the areas of systems integration, software engineering, reverse engineering of legacy systems and applications for industries and insurances.
Mario has been a consultant for Italian ministries and government organizations. He has authored many research articles, conference papers and technical documents. In particular, he is a co-author of three RFCs about RDAP extensions, three IETF Drafts about the JSContact specification which will soon appear as RFCs and other IETF Drafts currently under evaluation.
Michael Palage | InfoNetworks LLC
Michael Palage is the Chief Trust Officer at InfoNetworks LLC. Michael has been actively involved in Internet Governance and ICT issues over the last twenty years. During this time Michael has been intimately involved in ICANN operational and policy matters in an individual and leadership capacity, including a three-year term on the ICANN Board of Directors. As CEO of Pharos Global, Inc. Michael provided consulting and management services to a wide range of domain name registration authorities. Since co-founding InfoNetworks in 2017, Michael has focused on building online trusted ecosystems incorporating federated verified data. Michael has testified before the United States Congress multiple times and has been an expert witness in both Federal and State courts in numerous legal proceedings.
Michael holds a Juris Doctor from Temple University Beasley School of Law and a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Drexel University.
Nicoleta Munteanu | Consultant
Nicoleta Munteanu is currently a consultant handling various project and event management responsibilities for Cofomo, Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) and Southern California Water Coalition. Since 2015, she has been leading the coordination efforts for Registration Operations Workshops.
She began her journey in the internet governance community in 2012 as the IDN Coordinator at ICANN. Her focus was on streamlining the processing of IDN ccTLD Fast Track applications and ensuring efficient handling and applicant support of Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) requests from various countries. Nicoleta played integral roles in multiple IDN projects, including the Root Zone Label Generation Rules (LGR) Development Project. Her responsibilities encompassed budgeting forecast, contracting, event organization, marketing, program data and project team management.
Before her tenure at ICANN, Nicoleta worked in Paris as an Event Manager at Reed Expositions France, where she orchestrated comprehensive professional trade shows.
Nicoleta holds a Master’s Degree in Logistics Management from Bordeaux University and an Engineering Degree from Metz University, France. She is multilingual, and speaks English, French, Romanian, Hungarian, and some Spanish.
Former Committee Members
Marc Blanchet | Viagenie