[Chapter-delegates] in-person meetings and regional bureaux (was Re: A call to chapters’ action)

[Andrew Sullivan]

Dear colleagues,

On Tue, Apr 02, 2024 at 09:41:36AM +0800, Winthrop Yu via Chapter-delegates wrote:
>There used to be regular Regional (in-person) meetings of the Chapters 
>too ... until the Regional Bureaus were dismantled and Chapter 
>Enforcement was centralized.

The above makes an implication, without actually stating it outright, that the end of regional bureaux was the cause of the end of in-person chapter meetings.  This is false.

It is true that we decided in 2019 to eliminate the regional bureau structure.  The reason for this was simple: the Internet Society simply didn't have the money or staff to operate that way.  When I started in this job, every regional bureau wanted to have a miniature Internet Society staff organization with respect to technology, policy, and projects.  This meant two things: regional bureau positions and priorities could differ from the Internet Society's positions and priorities; and also, there was competition for resources and staff between the global organization and the regional bureaux.  To solve this, we reorganized most of the staff into a large pool of project staff, who work on projects according to need and capability.  The result has been a considerably more flexible organization that can bring its wide range of expertise to bear on a problem without worrying about internal politics as to whether a staff member is a "regional" or "global" staff member.  Under this arrangement we created the positions of Regional Vice Presidents (and, later, added positions for Senior Directors of Government and Regulatory Affairs).  Those staff members continued to hold principle responsibility for ensuring the Internet Society was paying attention to issues that loomed large in a given region of the world.  I won't pretend that has worked flawlessly, but it has often worked quite well.

Note that the regional bureaux were not primarily responsible for chapters starting in January 2019: that was the community engagement group, which remains an active part of the Internet Society's operations.  The reason for this was that chapter relationships were often quite unpredictable, according to the emphasis of a given regional bureau.  This was unfair to chapters, some of which got a lot of attention while others got little.

Finally, none of that has anything to do with why the in-person meetings ended.  You may recall that, in 2020, there were a number of travel restrictions around the world.  It was infeasible to hold in-person chapter meetings just as much as it was infeasible to hold any other in-person meetings.  But when we built a virtual event, something wonderful happened.  Because the old in-person meetings had to happen in physical meeting facilities and had to get everyone to the venue, the meetings were generally restricted to the chapter leaders -- usually, the president or something similar.  This meant that for _most_ chapter members, there was no way to engage with these events.  The online, virtual event had way more participation, from a much larger cross-section of chapter participants, than the old in-person meeting had.  So, we decided to extend the use of the virtual approach, and we believe that has continued to encourage deeper and wider participation by members of the community in our shared efforts as the Internet Society.

I hope this clarifies some of the history.

Best regards,

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan, President & CEO, Internet Society
e:sullivan at isoc.org m:+1 416 731 1261
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