IFIP President, Mike Hinchey, speaks about how IFIP is changing to maintain its relevance and impact globally. Mike shares how his extensive professional career will enable him to maximize his contribution to IFIP.

 

How is IFIP changing to maintain its relevance and impact?

We’re having the great opportunity now to bring in new members. We’ve changed our structure so that we can have various types of associate members and members who are from organizations that as I say are not necessarily ICT directly but very closely related to it and have significant interest in ICT and contribute to that so this is giving us a great opportunity to diversify to some extent to bring in new members to bring in members from other countries, that we haven’t had before and to truly have a global representation.

The benefit of diversifying is that we bring in extra expertise and of course ICT is prevalent in everything whether it’s automotive, whether it’s in the computer industry, whether it’s in tourism, absolutely everything uses ICT in some form or other. So if we can actually bring in expertise from other areas and other domains we can greatly influence what we do in the ICT industry and how we contribute to the economy and to the world.

 

How will your professional career enable you to maximize your contribution as IFIP President?

I’ve worked in many countries, I’ve had professorships in Europe, in Asia, in America, in Australia. I’ve actually been working with a number of the member societies that we have within IFIP and others. So I work with IEEE in the UK and Ireland, I work with the Brazilian Computer Society and I work with the ACM in the US and using these opportunities, these connections will enable us to leverage our global representation and to actually contribute around the world and bring in extra countries who are very important. It’s important the countries work together to achieve our ICT goals, we can’t just leave it to individual governments. It has to be done on a regional and global level.