Board of Directors

Mark Calkins
Co-Founder, President

Mark Calkins is a technology enthusiast, motor head, and a general knowledge-seeker. He is intrigued by stability at scale, and simplicity through complex abstraction. These concepts are what drew Mark into the field of ‘building the internet’ in the late 1990s and why he still enjoys it today. Mark has over twenty years of experience in the Telecom/MSO/Service Provider segment with a proven track record of ingenuity and dedication to the craft. Mark is very excited about the non-profit IX movement because he feels it is an excellent way to give back to the community in which he lives by improving connectivity for all people in the region. Mark is a founding member of the IX-West organization and the IX-Denver Board of Directors.

Nate Todd

Nate Todd
Vice President, Secretary

Nate Todd has been involved in network engineering since serving in the Air Force in from 1995-1999. He spent 12 years with USWest/Qwest/Centurylink in a variety of work groups supporting TDM based telephony systems on up to a worldwide enterprise backbone. Current work has been with multiple ISP’s on backbone overhaul and growth, cache deployments, and peering awareness and strategies.

Chris Grundemann
Co-Founder, Director

Chris Grundemann is a passionate, creative technologist and a strong believer in technology’s power to aid in the betterment of humankind. Chris has a couple decades of experience as both a network engineer and solution architect designing, building, securing, and operating large IP, Ethernet, and Wireless Ethernet networks. Chris holds 8 patents in network technology and is the author of Day One: Exploring IPv6 and Day One: Advanced IPv6 Configuration, an IETF RFC, and various other industry papers and blogs. He is also Chair of the Open-IX marketing committee. Chris often speaks at conferences, NOGs, and NOFs the world over.

Elisa Jasinska
Director

Elisa Jasinska has been automating large-scale networks for over 10 years. She started her career at the Amsterdam Internet Exchange and was later involved in setting up various other Internet Exchanges. She implemented numerous traffic accounting and automation solutions for Internet Exchanges and CDN’s. Elisa actively takes part in the Internet community, contributes to open source software and regularly presents at conferences such as NANOG and RIPE.

Anne P. Mitchell, Esq.
Director

Anne P. Mitchell, Esq. has been involved in Internet policy, and anti-abuse, since 1998, when she joined MAPS (Paul Vixie’s organization) as their in-house counsel. Since then Anne has, among other things, written part of our Federal anti-spam law CAN-SPAM (the only part with teeth, in my opinion), led the Institute for Social Internet Public Policy for 15 years, provided expert consulting on GDPR compliance, done both legislative analysis and legislative drafting, testified before numerous legislative bodies, drafted Internet policy documents for various organizations, and served as legal counsel for, among others, the CyberGreen Institute (they scan the Internet looking for open and abusable ports, and render an Internet health report based thereon). ISIPP also runs several groups, including a Network Hotline group (to facilitate large networks being able to quickly reach someone at another network when there is an urgent situation), and a Trusted Reporter group, for people in the anti-abuse industry and network anti-abuse roles to be able to report abuse directly to the networks being abused.

Jon Shephard
Director

Jon Shephard began his career as a voip tinkerer/enthusiast. His true calling. It didn’t take long to investigate and add multicast video to his list of hobbies. Since then, he has assisted rural telecoms transition from dialup/dsl-only to fiber to the home voice/video solutions. More importantly, he has been on the other side of the fence working with small isp’s and local lec’s where every peering opportunity matters. Jon currently spends his time exploring how network programmability and automation can efficiently improve space and commercial networks. In his free time Jon explores democratizing financial networks with programmability and automation.

Spencer Gaw
Director

Spencer Gaw has been building Service Provider networks for over 10 years. He started his career at Front Range Internet in Fort Collins, CO before moving on to large-scale networks such as Time Warner Telecom, Level3, and CenturyLink. Spencer is currently at DigitalOcean, helping to redesign their Edge and Backbone networks for 400G and SR-MPLS.