Especially, are there a significant number of them, do they experience good longevity in the locales, do they mix generations of members and genders well? Do they celebrate significant global IT events, comment on topical items from a local professional perspective and participate actively in regional and international fora? Most importantly do they develop their sector or the nation?
In general, an Internet Society Chapter can be more focussed on being inclusive and tackling national Internet development issues, and tracking and evolving inline with local to international Internet Governance (IG) discussions (see http://intgovforum.org).
The Internet Society is not just another IT or Computer Society. It is potentially for everyone, regardless of sector or professional alliance.
It is potentially for any Internet user or prospective user who finds value in the basic mission and direction and is willing to be a local to international change-maker with respect to opportunity development linked to the Internet.
It embraces a multidisciplinary, multi-stakeholder approach. It tries to promote openness, inclusiveness and border-less connections.
It is an instant link to a community that is active and involved in several streams of projects and conference spaces.
Many of the change-maker members are not IT professionals. Yet there are so many interesting and well impacting activities that they pursue. See more at http://isoc.org.
If you wish to use the Barbados context as an example, it has an Internet Society Chapter http://fb.com/ISOCBB and an ICT organisation http://fb.com/BarbadosICT. The activities on the Events page and posts have different leanings.
Similarly T&T has an ISOC Chapter (http://isoc.tt) and a Computer Society (http://www.ttcsweb.org).
In both case though, there are usually some shared membership and joint interests.
For situations where both exist, they likely challenge each other to higher activity and provide an easy link to the local technical community that may be needed to create, implement, configure etc.
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