Michiel Leenaars

Country:	Netherlands
Email:	M.A.G.J.Leenaars[at]nlnet.nl

Michiel Leenaars is the Direcot of Strategy for the NLnet Foundation, which is a charitable organization that provides mico-grants to independent people and organizations that propose projects to improve the overal experience of the Internet. His responsibilities include talking to the wider community, identifying strategic partnerships, and determining what projects represent beneficial and innovative efforts and how NLnet Foundation is best able to contribute. This often includes working with major stakeholders, such as Verisign, Neustar, and others; one such current project seeks to address the monopoly of broken hosting policies that are reinforcing the technical status quo through standard offerings that are not utilizing innovative technologies and deploying such necessities such as IPv6. The approach to this issue is to bring together stakeholders and raise the bar for hosting companies by working with software providers to make more innovative hosting options readily available.

Industry Participation

Mr. Leenaars has been involved with ISOC Netherlands since 2000, and has been its Director since 2002. The Netherlands' chapter is one of the larger ISOC chapters in the world.

From 2006 to 2010 he was member of the strategic committee of the European domain name registry EURid.

Organizations that Michiel participates in include: OpenDoc Society (vice-chair), Accessibility.nl, NEN-normcommissie (NC) 381034 'Behandeling en uitwisseling van tekst' (former chair), ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34 wg6 'Document description languages and processing languages', and Petities.nl foundation (treasurer). He regularly publishes articles and columns in a number of publications, and participates in international ICT, regulatory, and technical conferences.

He has also worked briefly for KPN, the largest Dutch telecommunications and Information Technology (IT) service provider.

Background

Michiel Leenaars has been an advisor on e-Infrastrucutre and e-Science and a Software Engineering Coordinator for the Netherlands National Computing Facilities Foundation (NCF), which is a subsidiary of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). He has been very active in the European policy body IRG|e-Infrastructures Reflection Group (e-IRG) and has been the lead editor of the e-Infrastructures Roadmap, a long term strategic pan-European vision document maintained by the e-IRG. He iss a founding board member of Gridforum Nederland.

Michiel studied Physics, and the Theory and History of Visual/Verbal Communication.<ref.Leenaars, NLnet.nl</ref>