VANCOUVER, B.C. -- The Internet has 1.3 billion users, but that’s not enough for Lynn St. Amour. As CEO of the Internet Society, she is expanding the nonprofit group, which promotes development of the Internet globally. St. Amour doubled the group’s staff in 2007 and beefed up its outreach activities in Africa, South America and Asia in her bid to add another billion Internet users worldwide. National Correspondent Carolyn Duffy Marsan sat down with St. Amour this week at a meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force, an ISOC-funded standards group. Here are excerpts from their conversation:

The Internet Society’s staff is growing and the organization is getting more involved with technical issues as evidenced by the hiring of Leslie Daigle as the first Chief Internet Technology Officer. Why is ISOC making these changes?

One reason is that we have the financial means. We’re acting within our purpose and mission. Putting in more full-time staff allows us to do that much more aggressively. [ISOC has 26 staff, compared with 14 a year ago.] Mark Thalhimer came on last year as our first-ever communications director to help us get our message out to different audiences. Leslie Daigle came on as Chief Internet Technology Officer to allow us to get more involved in standards development and technology. Yesterday, we added Bill Graham, who used to be with the Canadian government, to help us reach out to the highest level of policymakers. We are doing what we can to preserve the open, end-to-end model of the Internet and to address issues such as IPv4 address space exhaustion and IPv6 deployment. It’s clear that we have a unique role to play at the intersection of technology and policy. The creation of these new positions gives us significant resources to do that.

The Internet Society has 26,000 individual members. What are you doing to increase your corporate membership?

We’re reaching out along with the IETF to network operators and particular communities like ISPs. Some of those communities are participating less in the IETF than historically. It’s critical that they do participate. At the end of the day, standards are how the Internet gets deployed. We’re looking for their input in standards development. The Internet Architecture Board, [another ISOC-funded group], plans to be much more present in some of the network operator forums.