Dimension Data Middle East and Africa chairman and Convergence Partners founder Andile Ngcaba has been named to a top international panel on which he will contribute ideas on the future of Internet governance, alongside Internet luminaries such as Google vice-president Vint Cerf and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.

Ngcaba, an ANC activist during the apartheid era and a former director-general in the department of communications, has been appointed to the global panel on the future of global Internet cooperation at a time when many governments and industry experts are debating the subject following revelations of mass surveillance by the US National Security Agency and the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters.

East London-born Ngcaba is the only person from Africa that has been named to the panel, which will hold its first meeting in London in December. Its report, which will include principles for global Internet cooperation, a proposed framework for such cooperation and a road map for future Internet governance, is expected to be released for comment in early 2014.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) was the catalyst for the panel. Estonian president Toomas Ilves will chair it, while Cerf, who is chief Internet evangelist for Google and a former chairman of Icann and co-founder of the Internet Society, will serve as a vice-chairman.

The members of the panel are:

Mohamed al Ghanem, founder and director-general of the UAE Telecommunications Regulatory Authority; former vice-chair, UAE Information and Communications Technology Fund
Virgilio Fernandes Almeida, member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences; chair of Internet Steering Committee; national secretary for IT policies
Dorothy Attwood, senior vice president of global public policy, Walt Disney Company
Mitchell Baker, chair, Mozilla Foundation; chair and former CEO, Mozilla Corporation
Francesco Caio, CEO of Avio; former CEO, Cable and Wireless and Vodafone Italia; founder of Netscalibur; broadband advisor in UK and Italy
Vint Cerf, vice president and chief Internet evangelist for Google; former chairman, ICANN; co-founder of the Internet Society
Fadi Chehade, CEO and President of Icann; founder of Rosetta Net; technology executive
Nittin Desai, Indian economist and diplomat; former UN Undersecretary General; convener of Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG)
Toomas Ilves, President of Estonia; former diplomat and journalist; former minister of foreign affairs; former member of the European parliament
Ivo Ivanovski, minister of information society and administration, Macedonia; commissioner to the UN Broadband Commission for Digital Development
Thorbjørn Jagland, secretary general of the council of Europe; former prime minister and foreign minister of Norway; chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee
Olaf Kolkman, director of NLnet Labs; “evangineer” of the Open Internet; former chair of the Internet Architecture Board
Frank La Rue, labour and human rights lawyer; UN special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression; founder, Centre for Legal Action for Human Rights (CALDH)
Robert M McDowell, former US Federal Communications Commissioner; visiting fellow, Hudson Institute’s Centre for Economics of the Internet
Andile Ngcaba, chairman, Convergence Partners; executive chairman, Dimension Data Middle East and Africa; former South African government director-general of communications
Liu Qingfeng, CEO and President of iFLYTEK; director of National Speech & Language Engineering Laboratory of China; member of Interactive Technology Standards working group
Lynn St Amour, president and CEO of the Internet Society; telecoms and IT executive
Jimmy Wales, founder and promoter of Wikipedia; member of the board of trustees of Wikimedia Foundation
Won-Pyo Hong, President, Media Solution Centre, Samsung Electronics