Broadband Advisor

You've been with the Internet Society for a decade and CEO for seven years. How is it a different organization then when you joined it? How will it be different five years from now?

We're still following the same purpose and mission. We were initially founded in 1992 by [Internet pioneers] Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn. The improved financial situation has allowed us to staff up and fully address issues at the intersection of technical and policy.[ISOC's budget grew from US$14 million in 2007 to US$19 million in 2008, thanks to added revenue from the .org domain, which it runs. We have 80 chapters across the world. We're in the middle of a multiyear chapter development program. We really want to support their development so they are ISOC locally. It's the chapters that are getting people on the Internet. As the Internet has come of age, ISOC has come of age. We have a much more global profile. We're bigger, we're more active in issues and we're active at higher levels.

How will we be different a few years from now? I'd like us to have a strong network of local chapters. I'd like the chapters to be active and stable. Our organizational members are the key to our success in ISOC. It's getting more complex to get organization members to come together in a global forum because they have different business perspectives, different cultural perspectives and different national perspectives. We're looking at segmenting our membership in a way that's cause related. Our cause is the Internet and Internet development. What we'd like is a really robust set of engagement models so they can participate depending on where they are in the interest chain. The commercial world is very, very significant. That is where the Internet is developed and deployed. That's why we need to work on participation from that group.