Song-Marshall, Abley and Vora join PIR executive team.
Public Interest Registry (PIR), the non-profit that runs the .org top level domain name, has hired three domain name industry veterans to join its executive team. It is still searching for a Chief Financial Officer.
The three hires are:
Judy Song-Marshall, Chief of Staff: Judy comes from Neustar, where she was Director of Registry Services. She also ran product marketing for the company for over seven years and spent over 11 years at the company, according to her LinkedIn profile.
Joe Abley, Chief Technology Officer: Joe worked as Infrastructure Scientist at domain registry Afilias for the past year. He previously worked for Dyn and ICANN. Afilias provides the technical registry operations for PIR.
Anand Vora, Vice President of Business Affairs: Anand joins PIR from its new CEO Jon Nevett’s alma mater, Donuts. This is a round trip for Vora, who interned for PIR when he got his MBA at George Washington University and started his career at the company as a product management specialist and then channel manager for Asia.
It has been great hearing the altruistic, inspiring stance of their new CEO, Jon Nevett. I suppose there’s a role for marketing of .org, but a big rebrand? I hope that comes with measures to forestall speculation in the .org space.
DNW had a post about the Scratch Foundation’s attempt to RDNH the name SCRATCH.ORG. All things being equal, one would prefer that he had resisted the urge to register SCRATCH.ORG to begin with. It was just galling that Scratch Foundation was willing to break federal law, and was too entitled to use SCRATCHTEAM.ORG instead. They already use that name to sell merch, there’s no reason it couldn’t have been their umbrella brand. (Tellingly, that domain is still unregistered.)
There must remain a ‘hands-off .org’ attitude among domain investors. The reasons are many, and self-serving as well. 1) There’s no payday in such speculation, 2) it debases this industry, 3) opportunists will monetize the opprobrium via the UDRP and price increases, 4) it risks turning .org into a walled garden, which raises cost of entry and discourages non-profit endeavors…
And 5) it’s bloody embarrassing.
You do not want your children to see your name in the news as the crass little pig trying to cripple a charitable organization. See that train coming before it hits.