Itojun Service Award

The Itojun Service Award, established by the friends of Dr. Jun-ichiro “Itojun” Hagino and administered by the Internet Society (ISOC), recognises and commemorates the extraordinary dedication of Itojun to IPv6 development. The award includes a presentation crystal, a US$3,000 honorarium, and a travel grant.

The award is named after Dr. Jun-ichiro “Itojun” Hagino, who passed away in 2007, aged just 37. Itojun worked as a Senior Researcher at Internet Initiative Japan Inc. (IIJ), was a member of the board of the Widely Integrated Distributed Environment (WIDE) project, and from 1998 to 2006 served on the groundbreaking KAME project in Japan as the “IPv6 samurai”. He was also a member of the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) from 2003 to 2005.

The award is focused on pragmatic technical contributions, especially related to development or operation of IPv6 networking, keeping with the spirit of servicing the Internet. With respect to the spirit, the selection committee seeks contributors to the Internet as a whole; open source developers are a common example of such contributors, although this is not a requirement for expected nominees. While the committee primarily considers practical contributions such as software development or network operation, higher level efforts that help those direct contributions will also be appreciated in this regard.

Nominees’ contribution should be substantial, but could be immature or ongoing; this award aims to encourage the contributor to continue their efforts, rather than only recognizing well established work. Finally, contributions of a group of individuals will be accepted as deployment work is often done by teams or organizations, not just a single outstanding individual.

Past Award Recipients

2024: Jen Linkova
The award was presented to Jen Linkova for over a decade of work to extend the deployment and use of IPv6, the new generation of Internet Protocol. Her work has been particularly important in increasing IPv6 deployment within enterprises, which has been a significant challenge to its widespread adoption.

2012: John Jason Brzozowski, Donn Lee, and Paul Saab
The awards were presented to John Jason Brzozowski for his tireless efforts in providing IPv6 connectivity to cable broadband users across North America and evangelizing the importance of IPv6 deployment globally, and to Donn Lee and Paul Saab for their efforts in making high-profile online content available over IPv6 and for their key contributions to World IPv6 Day and World IPv6 Launch.

2011: Alexandre Cassen and Rémi Després
The award was presented to Alexandre Cassen and Rémi Després for their implementation and design of “6rd,” an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) protocol that aims to speed the transition to global deployment of IPv6, which is critical to ensuring the continued growth and evolution of the Internet.

2010: Bjoern A. Zeeb
The award was presented to Bjoern A. Zeeb for his dedicated work to make significant improvements in open source implementations of IPv6.

2009: Lorenzo Colitti and Erik Kline
The first Itojun Service Award was presented to Lorenzo Colitti and Erik Kline of Google for their outstanding contributions to the development and deployment of IPv6, the next generation Internet protocol.