Ms. Manal Ismail is Chief Expert, Internet Policies at the National Telecom Regulatory Authority (NTRA) of Egypt. Prior to her work at the NTRA, she worked at the Egyptian Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT), where she has been involved in a number of initiatives that successfully served Egypt's national plan of building its Information Society, and at the Cabinet Information and Decision Support Center (IDSC) among the team who first introduced the Internet to Egypt. Ms. Ismail represented Egypt on the GAC for more than 15 years, served as one of its vice chairs twice, in 2009 and 2017, and is now serving as the GAC chair and GAC non-voting liaison to the ICANN Board since ICANN60 AGM on November 2017. She has also served as vice chair of the first ICANN Accountability and Transparency Review Team (ATRT1), member of the IANA Stewardship Transition Coordination Group (ICG), co-chair of the Board-GAC Interaction Group (BGIG), co-chair of the GAC-GNSO Consultation Group, and member of the ICANN Middle East Strategy Working Group (MESWG). Ms. Ismail has led the establishment of the DNS Entrepreneurship Center (DNS-EC) in Egypt mandated to serve the Arab and African regions, contributed to various early community and ICANN efforts on Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs), and led GAC discussions until the successful introduction of IDNs. Ms. Ismail is an active member of the global Internet community. She participates to the Internet and Jurisdiction Policy Network, global Internet Governance Forum (IGF) meetings, the Arab Internet Governance Forum (Arab IGF), the League of Arab States (LAS) Working Group on Domain Names and Internet Issues, and was member of the NETmundial Executive Multistakeholder Committee. She is founding member of the Internet Society Chapter of Egypt (ISOC-EG) and founding member of the Regional Internet Registry of Africa (AfriNIC). Ms. Ismail holds Master of Science degree in Computer Science from University of Louisville (UofL), Kentucky, USA, and Bachelor of Science degree in Electronic and Communication Engineering from Faculty of Engineering, Cairo University, Egypt.

Passionate about the implementation and monitoring of information systems projects, through the strengthening of the digital ecosystem throughout Africa, I opted to develop digitalization strategies and their implementation my specialty. I have run many projects at the level of the public Administration and some institutions where I was responsible for development projects and held positions of responsibility. Within the public services, I was able to develop a certain ease in the communication and delivered several training activities at several levels. At this position, my experience will help to consolidate actions to support internet governance in Africa through ICANN, our institution. These actions will be based on:

• Strengthening the strategic capacities of African countries in setting up digital ecosystems and their ability regarding Internet governance;
• Providing strong expertise in internet governance;
• Training actors on rapid changes;
• The development of local organizations to better understand the management of the internet.

Mr. Jorge Cancio is Deputy Head of the International Relations Team at the Federal Office of Communications (OFCOM), Switzerland. As such he has managerial and coordination duties and represents Switzerland in a number of international fora, and processes related to Internet Governance, Digital Cooperation and Artificial Intelligence (notably UN, UN Commission on Science and Technology for Development (CSTD), UN IGF, Eurodig, Council of Europe Expert Groups, European Union High Level Group on Internet Governance, the UN High Level Panel on Digital Cooperation and follow-up work, the Geneva Internet Platform, or the Swiss IGF). Amongst his duties, he acts as Swiss Representative within the Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

Prior joining OFCOM in 2015, Mr. Cancio held different positions within the Spanish Administration, in the fields of Copyright, Internet Law and Policy, including Internet intermediary liability, Open Data, Internet Governance, and Telecommunications.

He holds a law degree from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid as well as an LL.M. from the Benjamin N. Cardozo Law School, New York. Mr. Cancio is fluent in Spanish, English and German, and has a working knowledge of French.