Domain industry veteran Kelly Hardy is now Head of Policy for Centralnic’s Registry Services division.
The announcement was made at the end of last week and it sounds like she’ll be covering both ICANN’s GNSO, the ccNSO as well as several other Internet governance fora:
Kelly will head up CentralNic’s Policy Consultancy, helping both ccTLD and gTLD registry partners with policy issues including launch processes, rights protection, eligibility, dispute resolution and more. She will also represent CentralNic and its clients at ICANN, IGF, and other Interner Governance venues.
While companies within the Centralnic group of companies have had key staff involved in policy work over the years this is the first time that the company has hired someone specifically to fill the role.
Kelly was previously with the .me registry where she was deeply involved in business development for the North American market as well as some policy work.
Personally I’ve known Kelly for over 10 years, so I’m more than a little biased towards her and I’m really delighted to see her switching to this new role with Centralnic. While .me may have lost a key member of their team, Centralnic will stand to benefit from Kelly’s experience and knowledge. She’s worked for both registrars and registries in a wide variety of roles for well over a decade and will be able to bring her practical knowledge to a policy role that is often a bit divorced from the “day to day” of running a business. She’s always been very good at bridging the gap between a hyper technical space and having to articulate its values in language that “outsiders” can understand.
