Vittorio Bertola
Vittorio Bertola is an engineer, policy expert and activist, currently running the innovation and policy activities at Open-Xchange, a global leader in free software email and DNS platforms, maker of Dovecot and PowerDNS. In the past he founded startups, campaigns, Usenet newsgroups and political parties, served on the Board of ICANN and on United Nations Internet governance groups, wrote unnecessarily complex Perl scripts, and argued online about a lot of things with a lot of people.
A longer profile follows:
Vittorio Bertola, from Turin, Italy, born in 1974, engineer, deals with the Internet in all its aspects, including technical, business, social and political matters, as an entrepreneur, writer, activist and software developer.
He presently works for Open-Xchange, a global leader in free software applications supporting the Internet's infrastructure, where he takes care of research and innovation activities, leading projects to invent and develop new technologies; he also coordinates the company's policy and community activities, showing up in places as varied as the European Parliament and the IETF to argue for an open, safe and decentralized Internet. He is deeply involved in the European Internet industry's efforts to promote interoperability obligations for dominant Internet platforms, forcing them to open up their walled gardens. Previously, he worked as a freelance consultant and as a partner or founder in several small Internet start-ups; he was one of the promoters of Vitaminic, one of the most successful "dot com" companies in Italy, as its Vice President for Technology.
He deals since the 90's with Internet policies at the national and international level, and is currently a regular attendee at ICANN, at the IETF and in major Internet policy conferences. He was a member of the United Nations' Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG), and one of the inventors of the United Nations Internet Governance Forum (IGF), where he coordinated the civil society caucus and organized the Internet Bill of Rights campaign. He represented the global Internet users in the Board of ICANN, the global policy-making entity for Internet domain names. Over the last twenty years, he has been the promoter of a number of online initiatives, which made him a well known figure on the Italian and global Internet.