A few years ago, our Chief Internet Technology Officer (CITO), Leslie Daigle, was frustrated by the fact that the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) was creating excellent Internet standards… but those standards weren’t being deployed by the network operators whose networks make up the Internet nor used by the content providers, developers, and others who provide services over the Internet. Her question was:
How do we get critical IETF standards deployed and used in the daily operations of the Internet?
That line of thinking led to Leslie’s creation of the “Deployment and Operationalization (DO)” team within the Internet Society in 2011 and to the creation of the Deploy360 Programme of which this web portal is a major part. Leslie was involved in hiring all of us on the DO team and in guiding the vision of what Deploy360 would become. Mostly, too, she gave us the mandate to make this program happen and encouraged us to do whatever we needed to do to get the site online and to start taking away the pain points that were preventing deployment of these key technologies.
And so, given her critical role in creating this Deploy360 Programme, our team is certainly sad to see her leave this week. As Leslie wrote in her farewell blog post on the Internet Technology Matters blog, her six-and-a-half years here at the Internet Society has been a rather amazing ride with some remarkable accomplishments – and she does leave this organization in a much stronger place than when she began.
Beyond her work with our program and the Standards & Technology team and programs such as World IPv6 Launch, she’s also been a tireless and effective communicator explaining complex technologies in simpler terms and seeking to get people to understand why Internet technology matters and why they should care. Whether it has been tirelessly championing permissionless innovation, speaking about the “Internet Invariants” that make the Internet unique, outlining how current events can break the Internet, explaining the importance of open Internet standards … or any of a hundred other topics she has written about on the Internet Technology Matters (ITM) blog, on CircleID, on her own web site or in the many thousands upon thousands of email messages she has sent over the IETF and IAB mailing lists… and in all of the many presentations she has given at conferences of all types and all around the world… through that all she has remained focused on ensuring the Internet remains open for everyone. As she says on her own site:
It’s that openness and accessibility of the Internet that we need to preserve if we want to see our brightest possible future.
Thank you, Leslie, for all you have done within the IETF, the IAB and here within the Internet Society to ensure that open character of the Internet continues.
We wish her all the best with her writing, her yarn projects and her other opportunities she wants to now pursue… and we look forward to seeing her at IETF 90 in Toronto in July and in future events! Somehow we don’t think she’ll be too far away from continuing her passionate defense of the open Internet! 
P.S. Leslie, you do know we might be asking you to speak at a future ION conference, right?
