In the past few years, the Internet Society has become an increasingly international and multicultural organization. We have increased the diversity and decentralization of our staff and currently have people based in 21 different countries, with 20 staff members working in our five regional teams.
These regional teams, or bureaus as we call them, are key in our efforts to increase our work on the ground by increasing our abilities to better understand local and regional issues and strengthening partnerships with local and regional actors to improve engagement.
The Regional Bureau Director for North America role has been vacant for a few months as we searched for the person we felt would be a good fit for this important position within our organization. We are happy to announce our search has been completed and we are pleased to welcome Mark Buell, who will join ISOC in May as the new Director for North America.
Mark is well known in the Internet world as a result of his work for the Canadian Internet Registry Authority (CIRA), the .CA registry authority. During his time there, he was involved in many Internet Governance related forums and processes such as ICANN, the Canadian Internet Forum, among others. Before he joined CIRA, Mark worked for the National Aboriginal Health Organization (NAHO) in Ottawa.
His experience in communication, policy issues and community-building gives him the variety of skills that ISOC needs for our work in North America. With Mark on the team we hope to strengthen our presence across the region, increase our work with the community, improve our involvement in domestic policy issues, and integrate our policy work regionally and globally.
To achieve these goals, we need to work very closely with our chapters and members. Supporting our chapters and members in the region including strengthening our existing chapters and increasing the number of new chapters will be among the priorities for the North America region.
Mark starts with us on May 2 and will be reachable then at [email protected]. Meanwhile, you can find him on Twitter at @mebuell. I cannot tell you how excited I am to have Mark working with us to help us achieve our goals in the region.