Vittorio Bertola
Organization: | Open-Xchange | ||
Region: | Europe | ||
Country: | Italy | ||
Email: | vb[at]bertola.eu | ||
Website: | |||
Blog: | http://bertola.eu/nearatree/ | ||
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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[1].
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 products; he also coordinates the company's policy and community activities. 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 is often busy as a conference speaker, blogger, and writer; he has also been dealing for many years with Internet policies at the national and international level.
In 2004-5 he was a member of the United Nations' Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG); he was one of the inventors of the United Nations Internet Governance Forum (IGF), where, in its early years, he coordinated the civil society caucus and organized the Internet Bill of Rights campaign.
In the ICANN environment, after being one of the founders of the At-Large constituency and the first Chairman of the At-Large Advisory Committee (ALAC) from 2003 to 2006, he represented the global Internet users in the ICANN Board (2006-7) and in other boards and committees, including several advisory groups to the Italian government.
In recent years he served as Vice-Chair of the Internet Society's European Coordinating Council (2010-13) and a member of the .IT policy board (2012-14). 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.
In Turin, he served for a term (2011-16) as Town Councillor and party spokesperson; in 2011 he was a candidate for Mayor of Turin, the third most voted, with over 22.400 votes.