Michiel Leenaars

Michiel Leenaars (1972, Netherlands) is Director of Strategy at NLnet. He is responsible for defining and initating short term and long term policies and managing strategic activities within the NLnet foundation, and acts as its spokesperson to the press and society. He currently also leads NGI Zero, a family of research programmes including NGI0 Entrust, NGI0 Core and NGI0 Commons Fund, part of the Next Generation Internet initiative. He joined the management team of NLnet in 2007. He has a background in Physics at Technische Universiteit Eindhoven and Theory and history of literature/Visual and verbal communication at Tilburg University.

He is active in a number of national and international organisations, such as The Commons Conservancy (chair), OpenDoc Society (vice-chair), SIDN Fund (Board of Advisors), and Petities.nl foundation (treasurer). He is co-founder and board member of Technology Commons Trust. In 2022 he was awarded the NLUUG Lifetime Achievement Award.

Past experience

Between 2002 and 2021, Michiel Leenaars was director of Internet Society Netherlands, one of the more sizable Internet Society chapters in the world. Between 2005 and 2022 he was a W3C liason officer for the Benelux Office of the World Wide Web Consortium.

He was a member of the UNESCO PERSIST Technical Taskforce, and the IPDC/IFAP working group at UNESCO NL.

From 2014 to 2018 he was part of the Netherlands national Education Council. The "Onderwijsraad" is the highest Netherlands governmental advisory body to advise the Minister, Parliament and local authorities on education policy.

From 2002-2012 he worked parttime for the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) within its subsidiary Netherlands National Computing Facilities Foundation (NCF) as an advisor on e-Infrastructure and e-Science and as coordinator of the Software Engineering programme. For a number of years he was very active in the European policy body e-Infrastructures Reflection Group (e-IRG) and has been the lead editor of the e-Infrastructures Roadmap, a long term strategic pan-European vision document maintained by the e-IRG.

From 2006 to 2010 he was member of the strategic committee of the European domain name registry EURId. He was a founding board member of Gridforum Nederland. He is a former chair of NEN-normcommissie (NC) 381034 'Behandeling en uitwisseling van tekst' and was a member of ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34 wg6 'Document description languages and processing languages'. Between 2009 and 2018 he was a board member and member of the board of supervisors of Accessibility.nl, the Netherlands expertise centre and certification organisation on Accessibility.