Mawaki Chango, author of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers study, is a doctoral student in the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University, where he holds the Katzer Fellowship in 2006-7. He has research interest in digital identities, internet governance and public policy.

Prior to his enrolment in the PhD programme in 2005, he held posts as a consultant with UNESCO in Paris, IDRC in Dakar, and various organizations in Mozambique and South Africa. During those assignments, he worked on projects in the area of information and communication technologies for development, including the provisioning and evaluation of community telecenters, the delivery of distance education courses online, and baseline research relating to ICT policy and indicators in Africa. In 2005 he attended the DiploFoundation online programme on Internet governance. He then earned a UN Fellowship appointing him to the Secretariat of the Working Group on Internet Governance, helping to prepare a report commissioned by the World Summit on the Information Society. He was also involved in the WSIS process as civil society participant. In November 2005 he was elected to a two-year term as member of the ICANN-GNSO Council.

Mr Chango is co-author of a forthcoming article in the journal Computer-Supported Cooperative Work on social challenges to the design of a broadband civic network.

During the workshop in Gothenburg Mawaki Chango’s ICANN study was discussed by Valentina Pellizzer, APC. This discussion was chaired by Håkan Thörn from Gothenburg University and the outcome of the discussion was used to develop and refine the study which will be published in book form along with all the other case studies in 2009.