ISOC

The Internet SOCiety (ISOC) is a community consisting of more than 100 Organisations and 20.000 individual members from more than 180 different countries. ISOC has two headquarters, one in Virginia, USA and one in Geneva, Switzerland, but it is made up of many metropolitan (ISOC-NY, the ISOC New York), national (ISOC-SE, die ISOC Sweden) and continental „chapters“ (ISOC-ECC, die ISOC European Chapters Coordinating Council).
In 1992 ISOC was created by a number of long-time IETF members with its mission “to assure the open development, evolution and use of the Internet for the benefit of all people throughout the world".

Since then ISOC has been a parent organisation for the groups responsible for the infrastructure and standards used on the internet. These groups include for example IETF and IAB. On the one hand ISOC is the mother of the IETF, since ISOC has the copyright on all IETF RFCs , on the other hand ISOC emerged from IETF to reconcile all ‘task forces’.