BITAG (leadership and board of directors) recognizes the importance and value of having a diverse array of technical experts from various parts of the Internet ecosystem participate in the BITAG Technical Working Group (“TWG”) and believes such is essential to the TWG’s success.  BITAG further recognizes that some of our participating members, especially some public interest groups in our community representative member category, may not have internal engineering resources available or sufficient funds to retain a technical expert to serve as their TWG representatives.

To help solve this, BITAG established a program – when we first began operations back in 2011 – to retain independent engineers and other technical experts to serve as TWG representatives in our community representative member category. BITAG engages up to two engineers or other technical experts for each TWG Committee established by the TWG, which is where the group analyzes particular topics and writes the subsequent related reports. The funds for these experts come from BITAG’s general budget, thereby representing the contribution of every BITAG member and do not come from one specific member category or another. For emphasis, each community representative engineer retained under this program is specifically required to consider the issues presented independently of any other BITAG member or member category or even BITAG itself, and are required to divulge any potential conflicts of interest to BITAG staff on an ongoing basis.

BITAG technical topics and reports can range across different aspects of Internet network management techniques and practices, as well as other related technical issues.  As such, BITAG welcomes participants with specific and varied technical expertise.