Ermanno Pietrosemoli: In the first place I would like to thank the Internet Society not only for this award but for the unre­lent­ing sup­port of the train­ing activ­i­ties under­tak­en by EsLaRed, the Latin-American Networking School of which I am the president. 

Next, my grat­i­tude to the International Center for Theoretical Physics, which in 1990 held the first net­work­ing school that was the inspi­ra­tion for the cre­ation of EsLaRed, and for the con­tin­u­ing sup­port offered ever since to out institution. 

The Latin American and Caribbean reg­istry Glenn Ricart. He invit­ed me to spend part of my 1991 sab­bat­i­cal at SURAnet, where I was able to observe the com­plex­i­ty of run­ning a big region­al net­work. Furthermore, Glenn intro­duced me to Saul Hahn from the Organization of American States, OAS, who had a pro­gram to pro­mote Internet in Latin America through which he pro­vid­ed fund­ing for the first net­work­ing school that was held in Mérida in 1992. 

OAS had also donat­ed a VSAT sta­tion to Venezuela. Years lat­er, I was able to res­cue that sta­tion and use it to con­nect our uni­ver­si­ty direct­ly to the National Science Foundation back­bone in Homestead, Florida. 

Ben Segal from CERN was one of the instruc­tors of the ICTP net­work­ing school who accept­ed to par­tic­i­pate in our train­ing ini­tia­tive in Mérida, and he lat­er sug­gest­ed that we should seek ISoc’s sup­port to con­duct fur­ther work­shops in Spanish in oth­er coun­tries of the region. 

My thanks to the Association for Progressive Communications, APC, and to the International Development Research Center, IDRC, from Canada for it’s sup­port to devel­op train­ing mate­ri­als and con­duct long-distance wifi experiments. 

So I real­ly want to thank all the peo­ple, and some of which are in this room. And I will also like to men­tion Peter Deutsch, that was one of the ear­ly instruc­tors of EsLaRed, and who also worked in the devel­op­ment of Archie that was men­tioned before. And George Sadowsky, who was one of the ear­li­est sup­port­ers of our activ­i­ty, and Lynn St. Amour, and many oth­er peo­ple around here that I don’t have the time to rec­og­nize all of them. But thank you very much.