Informally established in the early 1990s, the Federal Networking Council (FNC) was later chartered by the US National Science and Technology Council's Committee on Computing, Information and Communications (CCIC) to continue to act as a forum for networking collaborations among US federal agencies to meet their research, education, and operational mission goals and to bridge the gap between the advanced networking technologies being developed by research FNC agencies and the ultimate acquisition of mature version of these technologies from the commercial sector. The FNC consisted of a group made up of representatives from the United States Department of Defense (DoD), the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), among others.