Töma Gavrichenkov

Name of nominee:
Töma Gavrichenkov

Nominee's country of residence:
Cyprus

Nominee's organisation or employer:
Servers.com

Nominee's email address:
ximaera [at] gmail [dot] com

Name of Nominating Individual:
Sergey Myasoedov

Motivation for nomination:
Töma has been an active participant of several ICANN and RIPE NCC activities in Eastern Europe. Over the last three years, he has represented his company in the appropriate ICANN constituency and was serving as the Vice-Chair and subsequently as the Chair of the Eurasian Network Operators Group (ENOG), a RIPE NCC Regional Meeting, demonstrating his willingness to invest time into the work necessary for the Internet community.

As the former CTO of an European Internet connectivity provider, he was responsible for the allocation and management of IP addresses for multiple LIRs and understands the policy making process well.

Biographical Information:

Since graduating from Moscow State University in 2010 ( with a Master's degree in Mathematics and Systems Programming) Töma has worked for over 11 years in different areas of computer networking, starting as a third-level support engineer at a 3G equipment vendor and then moving on to the greener pastures of the Internet.

Töma served as the Chief Technology Officer of Qrator Labs, a Czech-based Internet connectivity and DDoS mitigation provider, between 2015 and 2021. As part of that role, he brought up the software-defined network that served tens of thousands customers around the world with zero downtime, implemented IP allocation procedures for the customers in Europe and the Middle East, supervised the development of the DNS service platform, and represented the company
in external communications.

During the same period he also volunteered for the ICANN Fellowship programme, first as a Fellow and then serving as a Fellowship Alumni Coach, was an active member of the Eurasian Network Operators Group Programme Committee, represented his employer in the ICANN GNSO ISPCP constituency, and committed to the RIPE Executive Board Election Task Force and later to the Executive Board Election Code of Conduct Team. As a part of his career, he has taken courses in technology and innovation at Berkeley, California; sustainable innovation at the University of British Columbia; and behavioural management at Yale. He is now the Product Director of Servers.com, an infrastructure-as-a-service company with data centres in Amsterdam, London, Luxembourg, and Moscow.

Töma is a frequent speaker at Internet conferences, network operator group meetings, and a regular guest speaker at universities, covering the aspects of DNS (including anycast DNS implementations and the optimisations of DNS authoritative servers), BGP and other network protocol implementations, Internet infrastructure, policy making
process, technical debt, and the impact of the latter on information security. His research about the adverse effect that BGP security gaps had on the data encryption and privacy in 2015 was picked up and continued in Princeton University.

Moving between the countries on his career path allowed Töma to understand the importance of dialogue and diverse opinions from all over the RIPE region and beyond, and the value of these opinions for the global policy development process. Internet address communities are among the most important stakeholders defining ICANN’s future objectives as well as current operational procedures. As a deeply technical person with a recent management background, Töma believes that with the trust of the RIPE community he could add a lot of value to the NRO NC and represent the RIPE community well, making sure everyone is heard.