______________________________________________________________________ DRAFT TRANSCRIPT Annual Member Meeting - part 2 Friday 25 February 2005 11.00am ______________________________________________________________________ PAUL WILSON Well, let's start again. For those APNIC members here, you will have noticed that you have some ballot papers available to you for the EC election. You may also have noticed that there's a ballot box up here at the front, which has an APNIC logo on it. And, if you're familiar with the voting system and would like to post your ballot papers here at any time, you can do that. I will explain later, but the ballot will close immediately after lunchtime today, so that will be at 2:00 pm. You're welcome to vote at any time between now and then. But, if you'd like an explanation of the voting system, the voting method, then I'll be giving that just before lunch. OK. The next segment will be the reports from our RIR colleagues from AfriNIC, ARIN, LACNIC and RIPE NCC. The first up will be Ray Plzak, who will report on I think ARIN first and then AfriNIC. OK, thanks, Ray. RAY PLZAK Good morning. I've been honoured by Adiel Akplogan to present the AfriNIC update. Adiel is not travelling these days. He is heavily engaged in the final activities of leading up towards the final recognition of AfriNIC, which we anticipate being at the ICANN meeting in April. So I will be providing you with his report. So, first question you always ask is, Why do we have an AfriNIC?" Well, RIRs are supposed to be continental in scope and Africa is currently being served by three RIRs. Those three are north of the equator - RIPE NCC, south of the equator - ARIN and then those islands to the east of Africa in the Indian Ocean are being serviced by APNIC. So we needed to do more coordination in Africa and to basically do the same things that you enjoy in the APNIC region or we enjoy in the ARIN region, which is a more regional forum for the local community to discuss and express itself. A need for consistency across Africa. ISPs that operate in Africa, they operate anywhere across the continent have the possibility of working with three RIRs instead of one. And the policy set that works in Africa needs to be close to the business models and environments in the Africa region. This map shows you the current situation that I described (refers to slide) As you can see, Africa, the orange - it's yellow on the screen here - is the RIPE NCC administered area. The green portion is administered by ARIN and the blue portion is Madagascar and further to the east - you see Mauritius and a few other islands - is administered by APNIC. Developmental history It goes back to 1997 when we looked at developing AfriNIC. It has not become a formal organisation. It's registered in Mauritius, that's where it's incorporated and that's the administrative and business offices. The operation centres is located in South Africa, Pretoria and there's a backup disaster recovery centre and that's located in Cairo. The AfriNIC setup was designed by an interim board based on sub-regional representativity. This board was appointed in 2001. A couple of things happened in 2002. There was an agreement to train the AfriNIC staff. 2002 was busy and 2003, in that that's when we really started working on incorporation plans, started to identify the hosting countries. There are about 61 countries or economies in Africa and so trying to find THE ONE place to host the African registry was a difficult situation. So, in the end, they followed the model that was very successful at LACNIC, which was to divide up the operations of the registry unit in a few areas and take advantage of a more diverse set of people and not tax one particular economy with this. And so the agreements to work on these things began in 2003. And they also hired new staff. There are very few staff at this moment. AfriNIC has received some very, very strong support from its community - more than 40 ISPs from more than 30 countries. They've got paying members now. Will point out that these are people that are separate from the members in the RIPE NCC region and from the members in ARIN and the APNIC region who are actually paying their fees for services to those registries. The RIRs - through the NRO, we've expressed our support for AfriNIC. As I mentioned earlier, there was an agreement with the RIPE NCC to train staff. LACNIC organised a workshop in early 2003 to work on shared experiences in how to bring an emerging registry online. The NRO pledged funding support to the amount of US $100,000. And the most recent activity is that the NRO, through the RIRs, has been providing substantial engineering support to bring the registration and whois services and so forth online in Africa. In this past year, several things have happened as AfriNIC has matured. The coordination office was set up in South Africa and that's where the work was tonne to set up the technical infrastructure. We started to relocate staff, then the relocation to Mauritius, the setup there. I had the opportunity in January to pay a visit on behalf of the NRO to inspect those facilities. I would say they were very modern. They were in a suburb area just a short distance a way from Port Louis, which is the capital of Mauritius, in an Internet, if you will, industrial park, very brand new buildings. The buildings are wired with fibre and all kinds of good stuff. It's really a very impressive setup. The first public policy meeting that was organised by AfriNIC was conducted last year in Dakar. And the initial set of policies that are going to be used were adopted. Also at that time, a board was formally elected and a budget for the year 2004/2005 was adopted. This is the board of directors. Unlike the boards in the other regions, AfriNIC's board is organised in a slightly different manner. First of all, there is a regional representation throughout Africa. As you can see, the divisions are West Africa, Central Africa, Indian Ocean, Southern Africa, North Africa and East Africa. So a board member has got to come from an economy in one of those particular sub-regions. The other thing that you'll notice is that there are two people from each of these areas. One of them is the primary and the other one is an alternate or a backup. So the board actually consists of six people but there is a backup for each one of them who is also elected. So, in essence, when a board member is elected from a particular region, there are two people that are elected. So this is a very interesting way of doing things. And the board organises itself through committees. I can personally testify to the fact that they have a congress called, a business meeting, once a month because ARIN is providing the tech support for that activity. There is a chart of organisation. And, as in all the other registries, the CEO, the chief executive, manager, director, director-general - whatever name that guy happens to have - is the link between - the bridge if you will - between the board of directors, Executive Council, executive board and the staff, secretary - whatever you want to call that group of people. And, in all the other registries, the whole organisation is accountable up to the members of the community as a whole. This is a quick description of the policy development process. If you were to compare it with the APNIC process, you would see that it is very similar. AfriNIC's got three observers appointed to the Address Council of the ASO. The CEO of AfriNIC is a member of the Executive Council of the NRO. When the Executive Council of the NRO had its first meeting in November of 2003 the first order of business was for the EC to elect its officers. The second order of business was to appoint the CEO of AfriNIC as a member of the council in an observer status. Since then, that has become a more formal recognition. There's been policies developed in the other regions to support the deployment of addresses in Africa. And the RIR coordinated in the v4 world to allocate all of the addresses out of a particular /8. And, as I'm doing on behalf of Adiel on this point, AfriNIC reports its activities at all the RIR meetings. So things that are going on now last September, the ICANN board provided interim recognition of AfriNIC. This is based on the satisfaction of requirements in ICANN policy number 2. At that time, the first phase of the co-evaluation process was begun where the AfriNIC staff requests for number resources and, since September 1st, there's been about 400 such requests processed. And the beginning of the legal transition of members into AfriNIC beginning first with the RIPE NCC. There's been transfer activities going on with data, counting records -- accounting records have to be transferred. A number of things are going on. For those of you that are not familiar with the process, starting a Regional Internet Registry is a very, very difficult thing to do. The only thing that's really visible to most people is that the interface with, for example, the APNIC Secretariat number resources but, behind that there's a whole host of activities. Just the effort put in to sponsor and run a meeting such as this is a large undertaking. You're basically running a small business. So the accounting system has got to be working - it has to work properly. The books had better be kept properly. Paul made a budget report this morning. Those budgets are audited all those things have got to take place. So, if you look at a Regional Internet Registry, you are actually looking at a small business. So what we're doing here is starting not only a small business but you're starting an internationally based small base that's incorporated in only one country and, in the case of AfriNIC, is serving 61 other economies. So you have to deal with different finance systems, different legal systems and so forth. So it is a difficult undertaking. I'm sure that those of you in the APNIC region are familiar with that as well because you have a multitude of economies here and a much similar set of problems. So just try and figure out what it would take to start APNIC tomorrow. Lot of work. So, beginning this week, we moved into phase two of the transition process. AfriNIC in a sense is operating as a full RIR. The evaluation period is still going on except now all the requests are going directly to AfriNIC and then the staff is evaluating them and them the appropriate RIR is making - providing a second opinion as to the activities that occur. Also, the transition has occurred to have an operational whois at AfriNIC. The registration database is established there. A lot of things are going on. The transition has begun to begin moving the economy systems over. Billing cycles have got to occur. Lots of things to happen. On top of all that, there's going to be a legal transfer of documents. All the registration service agreements and contracts that exist in the three registries that currently administer Africa have got to be moved to AfriNIC. Any supporting documentation that exists to show how a particular LIR or ISP qualified for address space has got to be moved to AfriNIC. It's got to be legally transferred. The same thing is true about counting records. So that's what's going on now. So challenges that occur in Africa - the outreach. They have got a large training program in front of them. They're going to be conducting two member meetings and policy meetings per year. They have got to make sure that the level of service that's provided to all the current customers, clients of the RIRs that are established working in the region remains the same. In the end, thats going to happen and has occurred is that to a LIR or ISP in Africa, they will see no change in the level of service that they are currently receiving. So the same excellent service that's been provided by the three RIRs there now will continue as it evolves to AfriNIC. So the challenge exists to get a skilled staff and to basically make the organisation structure strong and efficient. Financial stability - starting up any new business - if you're familiar with businesses, you know that most new businesses fail within the first 1.5 years, 2 years, they just go. Well, in a lot of cases, there may be some loss to personal investments and so forth. If an RIR fails, it's a lot more that goes on in that. You've got number resources that are no longer controlled. You've got DNS services that would no longer be provided. You've got lots of things that would occur. Basically, that would be a substantial hit on the economy in that region. So one of the things that has to occur is the financial sustainability in the region. So that is a challenge. LACNIC did this through a two-year period in terms of receiving substantial support from various organisations in the region. AfriNIC would receive the same thing. And we're working to get more participation in the region. It's interesting to note that, as the registration services have moved to Africa from the other RIRs, there actually has been an increase in the number of requests for services for number resources because people now say I can go into the local registry and get what I need and I don't have to go to Brisbane or to Chantilly or to Amsterdam to get it. I can now go to Pretoria to get it. Big difference. So, participation in the AfriNIC process - here's the mailing list (refers to slide) Here is the staff that exists now and they're in the process of identifying the chief engineer. Interviews are ongoing. The next meeting is the 26th and 27th of April in Maputo in Mozambique. And Adiel extends a cordial invitation to all of you, if you can do so, please attend. This will be a significant meeting in that this will be the first meeting that AfriNIC will hold as a separate and independent registry so there will be a celebration there. If you can make it, please do so. With that, I'll say thank you and entertain any questions you may have. PAUL WILSON OK, thanks very much, Ray. While switching here to the next report, I'll just say on behalf of APNIC - and this is a message perhaps Ray could take to Adiel - just sincere congratulations on the progress that's been made so far. Just recently when the announcement was made on the AfriNIC mailing list that they had embarked on phase two - the genuine processing of requests by AfriNIC staff - there were many messages of congratulations and they were well justified and well based, because it's a significant step towards operational independence. In the case of APNIC, we have had - you may not realise but - we've had five countries in the APNIC region which have gone to AfriNIC and, within those countries, are three members which have been transferred. So APNIC's operational involvement in this transition has been relatively minor compared with the - five members I Think Irene is telling me - APNIC's involvement has been relatively minor compared to the huge support that's had to be given by RIPE NCC and ARIN. So I think congratulations extend to NCC and ARIN as well for that excellent support. One thing I'll say that APNIC has been able to offer is that the AfriNIC logo was designed by Chiaki Kanno, the graphic designer at APNIC. It was very nice to be able to contribute that and you'll see a bit of a story about that later. Ray is now ready for the ARIN report. I'll hand you back to Ray. RAY PLZAK Time to update you on what's been going on in the ARIN region since the last meeting in Fiji. Briefly I'll go over organisation and membership, look at our activities, recap what happened at ARIN XIV and then invite you to ARIN XV. This is the distribution of members in the ARIN region (refers to slide) Of course, the bulk of them are inside the United States - a little over 2,000 - and 203 in Canada. There are 41 members currently in Africa. The next time you see this chart you will not see any representation of Africa in the ARIN region. ARIN has 22 members in the Caribbean and we still have six members from outside the ARIN region. Three of them are from Australia - and I can testify that Paul Wilson is not one of them! - one from Guam, Japan and Indonesia. Organisation - the members elect a seven-member board of trustees and a 15-member advisory council. And, the duty of the advisory council - which is a unique organisation amongst the RIRs that occurs only in the ARIN region - is to provide advice to the board of trustees. That advice is primarily in the policy development area. However, from time to time, the board has asked the advisory council to provide advice on other matters. The staff is organised into three groups - an executive, a services area and support. The executive consists of the president, the director of operations and the director of external relations. In the services area, we have three departments - financial services, member services and registration services. Then, supporting those three service areas are two departments - the engineering department and the human resources and administration department. So the diagram looks something like that (refers to slide). A couple of notes from the HR and admin people. Currently ARIN has about 41 full-time equivalents. We have one intern. We've been entertaining an intern from Vienna for the last three years. The latest intern we have demonstrated some capabilities that we didn't hire him for at the last ARIN meeting. Part of our social activity was to provide lessons on how to do hip hop and so he was a very, very - he didn't need lessons. He did very well at it. So it was a good social activity too. We've created one new position and we currently have two vacancies. As a matter of interest, the time it takes for us to fill a vacancy, regardless of the position, the average amount of time, is about 47 days. And that's not a very long period of time. In fact, it's significant when you consider the fact that the unemployment rate in the Washington DC area is only about 2%, which means that there are not a lot of people looking for jobs and basically the people who don't have a job or people who don't want one or can't get one in the first place, so we're doing very well in that regard. The average age is 38.5 years. Broken into the sexes, we have 23 men and 17 women and 21 members of the ARIN staff have been a member of the ARIN team for three years or longer. That does create a problem for the budget in that the longer people stay there, the more money that has to be contributed to retirement funds and so forth or the more time they accrue for holidays and so forth but that's a good problem. The board does not object to that. Registration services in 2004 - we received about 205,000 e-mails and an average of a little over 17,000 a month. That's after you take out all the spam. These are actual things that you actually have to work out and process. The amount of spam takes it's number up to an astronomical number. The help desk phone calls total for the year was about 16,000 and that averaged out to just about 1,400 phone calls per month. These phone calls, by the way, are handled by six people so, if you do the math, you'll see that an IP analyst is handling somewhere in the vicinity of 200 to 300 phone calls and the director of registration services hands out awards and prizes and so forth for who takes the most calls in a month. It's quite successful. Generally, the things that they get are gift certificates to go shopping with, so if you get to choose the type of store we want - if they want the electronic store or exclusive wine shop or whatever. You just get to pick and she's got this chequebook and says, "Here you go." Processing templates - as you can see, we continue to book of our work automatically through the autoreg, 80% in fact. The total for the year was a little over 500,000 and we're averaging somewhere around 44,000 per month. I will say that, even though these things are done automatically, there are points of human intervention to look for certain things to guard against such activities as IP address hijacking. In the member services area, we are about ready to roll out our new website. The current website has been in place since 2001 and so, over time, we've gathered a lot of comments and suggested improvements and so you see on the right side of the screen there an exemplar of what the new homepage will look like. Some of the improvements are the navigation is a little bit better, adheres to standards. We've done some work on the code to make it more efficient and it's actually smaller so the two buzz words all the time - efficiency and size - and we're adding step-by- step registration guidelines in there as well to make it a little bit easier to obtain resources and it's coming soon and we may have it out by the end of March. One of the bigger holdups in the process is that the guy in front of you right now has to review this stuff and give his final approval and sometimes he's not as efficient as those who run the website! Over the past six months, our on-demand training - as many of you are aware, we do not get training teams in remote locations, we do it interactively or do it at our meetings. We had four interactive registration flow charts in the last six months and there've been 14,000 hits on that. We've got two computer-based training modules which, over the last six months, have had about 8,000 users. We are in the process of evaluating those training modules and will be probably replacing one of them and upgrading another one and we're actually looking at adding some more. The stand point of people hitting the web, just for information, this count, you can take out all the whois queries, in the last six months, we've gotten 45 million hits, which is about 7 million per month, and those are not whois queries, which represents the total amount if you add in whois queries, this is about maybe 30% of the hits. So we have a lot of hits! But the interesting thing about these numbers is the fact that we are reaching a large number of people. Certainly we're not reaching 45 million people, people come in and do multiple things and come in multiple times but the point is that it is available and it's being utilised. In the engineering area, the big watchword this year is going to be 'integration'. We're going to be integrating our accounts receivable activities. The member database will be integrated into the registration database. The billing database will be integrated into the registration database. And we will be overhauling and replacing our ticketing system. We are completely overhauling our mail system and we were working on some new aspects in security, both from the standpoint of audit and evaluation of current procedures. And the last thing that will occur probably this year is a web-based registration services agreement, what the general council calls a click-through form so that we will remove the requirement to use multiple mail to send contracts back and forth. So that, when a person comes to get a resource from ARIN, they will be able to use the website to execute the contract. Some areas of operation we're looking at - we actually went through an evaluation for our accounting system. The accounting system that we have, we've had it in place since 2001. We felt it was time to take a look at it, see what it does, is it doing what we need it to do, should we look at replacing it and improving it and so forth. The result of the evaluation was that we will keep the same accounting system. We have changed the relationship we have with the vendor for that accounting system and we're adding more modules that will make it a much better system. We have gone through a significant activity in spam reduction. We have put in some new spam filters and we established it and worked it through first on personal accounts. I can personally testify to the fact that it's much easier for me to get into my e-mail now because I don't get the big large spam download into my inbox. The filters are very efficient and it's very easy to train a system to say, "Hey, I won't let this through. I'll dump it into the spam filter." When I check the spam filter to make sure that something good didn't get through, I throw it into a folder that says, "This is ham, not spam, it's a good one." It learns real well. We are totally examining the directory services in the ARIN region. Over the last several years, we probably have had in the vicinity of 10 policy proposals that deal directly with whois and we are evaluating the whole directory services block and there will be policy activity throughout the year. One of the things that's been discussed is similar to the APNIC policy which is privatising part of the database and the other thing is looking at what is maybe having a multiple set of directories that is just like the phone books. You don't have one phone book. You get many phone books -White Pages, Yellow Pages, in the US we get Blue Pages and so forth - so taking that thought process to it and coming up with a series of directories. And, depending on your need or authorisation level will depend upon which directories you would have access to. We're looking at improving operations and I'll show you some special projects in a little bit and lastly legal activities. We are looking at expanded things happening in the legal arena, both from the standpoint of our interface with courts as well as our interface with law enforcement activities. ARIN was called upon to testify in November as an expert witness in the first spam case trial that was held in the US. The state of Virginia passed a very stringent anti-spam law and about a year ago, there were a couple of guys that were in North Carolina that were spamming and they were caught. They were extradited from North Carolina to Virginia and they were put on trial. And ARIN, as the holder of registration records for the IP addresses involved was called upon to testify and actually Bob Stratton, our financial services director, had to put on a suit and go to court and raise his hand and testify. We get subpoenaed almost every week for information. And so that had been an ongoing activity. We are looking at expanded our activity, working with the attorneys-general of various states. In one regard, if you look at the United States, you actually are looking at 50 countries, 50 sets of laws, so we have to interface on that level, plus we have the progresses in Canada, so we are undertaking that activity. We are also looking at working with law enforcement groups as well. So, as you see, an extended amount of activity in this area over the next year. Special projects - I reported on the three-year activity road map at the last meeting of APNIC. And, since that time, it's been working very well. It is a very dynamic document. Our director of service operations holds a weekly amigos meeting - amigos are the senior management team of ARIN - and that document is looked at every week and evaluations are made about where we are on the road map, what has to be moved and shuffled around, where we need to change priorities and devote more resources. And much, much better on the workload forecasting. The risk management has definitely been better. The Internet number resource policy manual which was established last year is now in effect and is becoming a very useable document. The ARIN Advisory Council is taking at good strong look at it because we're now able to look for language in there and look for inconsistencies in the policies in use of terms and start to come up with clear definitions of terms, will leads us into the work that we're doing on ARIN glossary. AfriNIC transition - I reported through the AfriNIC presentation that we've been doing a lot of work so I won't go back through that here but you can see the things we're working on (refers to slide) And also at the last APNIC meeting I talked about the fact that we are going to do targeted surveys. We don't do and never intended a general survey. We'll do the first targeted survey at our upcoming meeting in Orlando in April and this will be two surveys that will be done by registration services that will be targeted I guess two different groups and it's going to be a fun thing to do and we look forward to it. We're also looking at producing specific targeted surveys so that, when we go to new groups to do our outreach activities for example, GSM, North America and so on - we will take a survey with us that would ask specific surveys about their knowledge of what a registry is about and so forth. So we'll report on those results. The coordinated activities amongst the RIRs - I already mentioned AfriNIC. There is the logo that Paul Wilson is talk being that was designed by APNIC and I will say that it's a very attractive logo so, APNIC, thank you very much. Working inside the NRO, in the communication coordination group, the engineering coordination group - I won't belabour these things, they're things you're familiar with. Last year, the RIRs through the NR O assigned the ASO MoU. The chairman of the NRO at that time was Paul Wilson and he - unfortunately something came up so he couldn't make the trip to sign the document, so we had to use express services to get things moved around and so, he did that and we had special pence that we this to sign the document and so we did send a pen back to Paul and I assume you got it. PAUL WILSON I did. Thank you. RAY PLZAK Good. And Paul will report more on the World Summit on the Information Society this afternoon. But we've been active in supporting the activities in WGIG and PREPCOM and will be participating in the summit this year. So policy activity at the last ARIN meeting. There were two policies that were abandoned (refers to slide) There were two that were deferred (refers to slide) Which means that they will be discussed again at the upcoming meeting and there was one that was ratified. So not a lot happening in there. Now, if you take ARIN and you add to ARIN the North American IPv6 Task Force and you add to that the centre in Disney World in Orlando Florida, you get our next meeting, which will be an IPv6 summit and ARIN XV. It will be April 17 to 21 in Orlando, Florida and so you don't have to bring your Mickey Mouse ears with you. You can buy them on site, no problem. Some of the things that are going on - we are going to have a totally integrated agenda in that, on supped, there will be a full long day of tutorials that are both IPv6 and specific to the registry. There will be some blending in tutorials where one will feed into another. The meeting agenda during the week will be an integrated agenda in that there will be policy discussions and where there is a technical subject that deals with IPv6 that would have bearing on a policy discussion, a technical presentation will occur first. In addition, on Wednesday afternoon, is when we will have the ARIN members' meeting and the v6 summit will have their separate summit members meeting. For those of you that have been to ARIN meetings before, we are conducting our annual foosball tournament and you are welcome to come and try your skill at foosball and we are going to have a good social event on Monday evening and for those of you who have been to ARIN meetings before, I can guarantee that it will be another well-run social event and the meeting is now open for signup and so the website is there for you to go to (refers to slide) And check it out. Of course, we will be webcasting this as well. I would cordially invite all of you, if you have the opportunity, to come to Orlando and enjoy yourself at our meeting. And with that I'll say thank you and answer any questions you have. PAUL WILSON Thanks very much, Ray, for that interesting report. One thing you didn't report on this time, which is of great interest each time, is the vital statistic of the average number of computers per ARIN staff member. What would that be? RAY PLZAK We haven't actually done that survey in a little bit. I imagine it is quite similar to what it was. If you notice the longevity of the staff is a little over three years in their time there. I can't have that -- I can have that done. I will guarantee this - if you come to the ARIN meeting, those kinds of fun facts are always presented by our director of human resources. You'll find out how many musical instruments are played by ARIN members, how many languages we speak aside from English and find out how many computers we have and how many kids, etc. PAUL WILSON OK. Well, that's a reason to be there. Thanks very much, Ray. And next up - Ricardo. PAUL WILSON Ricardo reporting for LACNIC. RICARDO PATARA Good morning, everyone. My name is Ricardo Patara, I'm the LACNIC RSG manager. I will sum up our region, and Internet address space. Here in this graph you can see some numbers about the IPv4 allocations in our region. It is something that we came to highlight the growing rate of the address allocation in our region. It's very important for us. The yellow part showing the numbers allocated after LACNIC in 2002. It's feasible to see 99, the growing rate. Not just the location. Next screen. This is almost the same thing but now we can see the number allocated. We can see the growing rate. We have some spikes here but it is allocation to NIRs in our region. So we have some spikes but in these spikes we can see some growing rates as well. The idea here is to show the number of requests we received since 2003. It's separated by semesters. We can see that for ASNs this kind of static, we don't see many changes, but on the other hand we can see the growing of numbers of requests for IPv4 and for IPv6 as well. It's very important for us, we are very committed to IPv6 deployment in our region. We can see, for us these numbers are good especially because we're just starting to deploy. ISPs are just starting to deploy IPv6 in our region. About training, we held 7 training in 2004, 7 different conferences. This is our list of the conferences we have trained. We had 1,300 trained in 2004. The basic idea of this training is to explain to our neighbours and ISPs what is LACNIC and how to participate in the policy process. And also we try to have some technical tutorial talk to make this training more interesting as well. We will have some more training in 2005 and this training will be focused on IPv6 as well, to help the ISPs deploy IPv6 Policy discussion in our region - we have a new policy for IPv4. We changed the minimum allocation size, it used to be - this is for ISPs - /20, now it's /21. This new policy was discussed and approved during our last meeting in Costa Rica. It was ratified by our board member and will be placed in March first. We have a new policy - PDP in process. This process was discussed in 2003. It was put in place in 2004. At the last meeting we used this new policy development process and. We should have an opening policy to share. The open policy forum chair is Christian O'Flaherty. We discussed the employment of IRR services for LACNIC. We also are discussing the IPv6 policy for allocation from IANA to RIRs. We are also discussing the resources recovery, some sort of process like APNIC has now. We just start this discussion in 2004, last meeting. One of our members also submitted a proposal for - to see the private address as justification for the first allocation. This subject is also being discussed in our region. Some special projects that we are involved in. This first one we called FRIDA program. The idea is to give some grants to support projects in our region in the ICT area. The idea is to give small grants to these projects so they can be very attracted to the universities. These programs - it is a joint initiative of the organisations listed here. In 2004 we have 12 projects approved and received the money, they are working. This closes next Monday. We also have another project we called +Raices. The idea is to deploy in the region. We now have two F-root projects in our region. The idea is to support LACNIC's - the idea of LACNIC's support in the implementation of other servers. We expect to have at least two more in the second part of this year. Some important information for LACNIC in 2004, we had new procedures that were not used by ISPs. They were voluntarily given back to LACNIC. We also tried to conduct a campaign to contact all of our members. The contact information we have is not valid. We started to put AS in because we thought it would be easy. We had a campaign to try to contact them. We had 316 ASN holders with no filing contact information. At least 30% of these holders could be contacted for their information. We also contacted every neighbour of LACNIC. It might be easy for us because we're just starting so the number of members is not so big. It was easy for us to contact every member. To give them some information, like about the elections, encourage them to update their information in the database. We received some feedback about the service we're giving them. It was very good. We had 3% of the neighbour parts, election for the board. We are planning to do the same thing this year before our meeting in April 2005. For 2005 we, like other RIRs, are very highly involved with the Internet governance discussion. WSIS, the working group for Internet governance, our CEO is one of the people in the working group, so we are highly involved in these discussions. We also try to bring these discussions to our group as well. We start something in 2004 to improve our service, the quality of our service, very oriented to our neighbours. It was very good. We had at the end of 2004, December, for two days our staff join - had a meal, they stayed in a hotel, to discuss what we are doing, how we can improve ourselves. It was very good and the idea is to improve this concept to increase the service to our customers. LACNIC VIII will be in June in Peru. We will have some more information on the web site soon, but I can tell you that the idea is to have joint meetings with other groups who have - DNS, et cetera. This meeting will be jointly with this group, will be a joint meeting with this IPv6 Latin American forum, also NAPLA, American ISP organisations, we will try to have these meetings together. You are all invited to LACNIC VIII. It would be very nice. That's all I have to tell you. If you have any comments or questions I'd be glad to answer them. PAUL WILSON Thank you, Ricardo. Are there any questions? AXEL PAWLIK Thank you. I think they've just run out of time for our presentation so I'll be quite brief. I am the managing director of the RIPE NCC which operates the Internet Registry. First of all, I'm very happy that I had the opportunity to come here, Kyoto's a beautiful town so I came a little bit early and did all the things that a tourist usually does. Go to temples, make photos. That was the first day. On the second day I cottoned on to what the locals were doing, making photos of trees in bloom. On the third day we went round the corner and saw this sign on the west of town out towards the mountains. I have on good authority that it says the bears are coming round the corner to eat me . So I didn't go further round that road because I've seen dangerous animals in their natural habitat - sorry! LAUGHTER AXEL PAWLIK Back to work then. We currently have a number of policy proposals that are basically all on the public discussion mailing list. It's on us now to bring the chairs to get the discussion going in preparation for the next RIPE meeting. Training. The new layout material will be ready for a test at the course at the RIPE 50 meeting, also a new course on using the RIPE Whois database. We are also preparing a computer based training delivery and this next year we are doing so closely together with APNIC also. A few things that we have done since the last presentation in Fiji. We are still busy with the K-root server anycast. We have 2 global nodes and 9 slightly smaller instances of local nodes deployed. We are currently working with APNIC on deployment in this region. Of course we are also very happy, we heard yesterday that the ERX project is finished. Next generation software, the Whois database has been deployed and what we've also got before is AfriNIC now is operational. Phase II is on the way as of this last Monday. As has been said before we were very, very active especially over the last few weeks in making that possible. In the course of this year we are focusing on our internal back office systems. The resource management system we have in place has been evolving since, I think, 1992 and as you imagine evolving systems need serious streamlining after about a dozen years, so basically we'll throw it out, replace it and integrate the new stuff with our business processes. Also, we have over the time had a number of ticketing system islands and also that is being replaced by one big ticketing system. Again, we once upon a time thought the telephone system that also is quite old now and doesn't know anything about VoIP or things like that so we think we dont need that really. That's not a big project that we are attacking this year. Basically it means a lot of our manpower will be taken up by somewhat internal projects that aren't immediately visible to the outside world but will have great influence on the efficiency of our operations. In terms of membership liaison, we have done several regional meetings in the course of last year and will do so again, this year we'll go to Russia in summer in the fourth quarter and to the gulf area. The times of course we picked due to the weather constraints. Governance. We have had the second general meeting of last year in September and the big thing there was that the members approved the charging scheme for this year. We were able to reduce our fees by roughly 10% over the different membership types from small to big. Then later in the year the executive board approved our activity plan for this year. Also the overall budget which is more or less the same from last year. Slightly over 10 million euros. We've just closed our audit for last year, we are still writing up or we have a draft of the financial report which will be presented at the RIPE 50 meeting later in May. We see that we have made a surplus of 2.7 million euros on the cost of last year and that brings us relatively close to our goal of having one year turnover, one year operating cost in the reserves, so possibly if everything goes well during this year and the members approve it we might actually be able to quite dramatically reduce the service fees for next year, but that's for later in the year. External issues. We've heard about this already. WSIS and WGIG are the domain focus these days, we do go around between all the RIRs to various meetings, we have been to Damascus, Dubai, preparing for these events. We have started in a way related new initiative that is a round table for governments and regulators basically wanting to get as many officials from the region together to explain to them how Internet management these days works, what the problems are, what the fears are and what is no problem. So, we are very eager to see how that goes. The first meeting of these will happen on 30th of March. We are looking forward to having the second round possibly around the Luxembourg ICANN meeting but we'll see how the first one goes first of all. Then also we have been very busy in trying to get a meeting with the new Commissioner in the European Commission for the information society. There is a new lady there. We've had several meetings with her predecessor, we want to establish good relations from the start there. It was a little bit difficult to find the date with her but it was much more difficult to find joint dates for all the folks who run the Internet management stuff - run the Internet in our service region. It's about a dozen people go there ring - going there and that was the main challenge to get them into the same place at the same time. This will happen on 16 March. We will be busy preparing that. You will hear how that went at the next APNIC meeting. Also, we thought with this WGIG and WSIS thing around it might be a good idea to inform our members very thoroughly on what we are doing there and prod them a little bit to become more confident with themselves and talking to their own governments and regulators and tell them how things are going. Then lastly, RIPE is turning 50, which is not 50 years but 50 meetings. Still very exciting, so we are going to Stockholm for that in May. It should be really nice. Obviously with 50 RIPE meetings there will be a serious amount of partying going on which of course is the main reason we are all going. You are all invited but there also will be some side events and some meetings and working groups! Do pay attention to the web site. We are changing the meeting form slightly. Basically we have a long block of presentations in the plenary then we have shortened working groups afterwards, so to keep yourself up-to-date, have a look at the web site and, as I said, as usual you are all very welcome to participate there. If you have any questions and answers - well, any questions I might have any answers. Another one is you see this presentation is rather short. If there is anything you'd rather have me included or omit then I'm open to that as well. Thank you. PAUL WILSON Thank you very much, Axel. The picture that Axel displayed before, just to explain, was from the ICANN meeting in Cape Town where we had the opportunity to go up Table Mountain, one of the local geographic features, so Axel had his new camera with him and was trying it out. Thanks for that, Axel. At this stage, on the agenda we have an open microphone session. I think in view of the time, however, what we should do is defer that till the afternoon and move straight on into the voting-related procedures before lunch. As I've mentioned, the important business of the day is the election of APNIC EC candidates. Kazu, do you have a query? KAZU YAMAMOTO Can I use the projector? PAUL WILSON Just in view of the timing is it possible to do that after lunch? KAZU YAMAMOTO I have to PAUL WILSON OK, well please come up. I'll just mention that at this time when we are preparing for the APNIC EC election there is an opportunity for each of these candidates to make a statement to this meeting, so any candidates who are in the room at the moment, please be prepared to come and make a brief statement in support of your nomination to the position on the EC. Thank you. As part of the open mike, Kazu has a presentation. Thanks. KAZU YAMAMOTO IIJ is an ISP in Japan. I am wearing the ISP hat. I have some request to NIRs from ISP's point of view. This is summary. Please provide the information of "abuse" contact point address in whois database and encourage your members to fill it out. Let me explain the background of this. We ISPs battle abuse activities. Without this kind of information we cannot tackle them. Let me explain an example of spams. Probably the audience are curious about where spam comes from? IIJ counted "user unknown" messages last December. This means that IIJ received messages but we cannot deliver to users because they do not exist. And this is the result. We APNIC members should recognise our countries in the AP region generating much spam. JP, et cetera. So, what can ISPs do? Suppose my PC in my home is hijacked by somebody and becomes unable to - sending massive spam to other countries. So received ISP first get an IP address from an SMTP session and look at whois database. This is the result. My PC has this kind of IP address and look at an IIJ and the contact person is him. (Indicates on screen) I'm sure that he never read messages! Trust me, I know him. (Laughs) As you can see, his title is director and he cannot abuse a messages relating to abuse. So, again, I request you NIRs from ISPs, to please provide abuse information to your whois database. Personally it's not enough, probably because he's very busy, so ML or a group contact which staff are surely reading, that is important, and encourage your members to fill it. Having entries is not enough. I think this could be an agenda to the NIR SIG. Thank you. That's it. PAUL WILSON Thank you very much. In view of time, again, I think there could well be some discussion arising from this proposal on contribution but I would suggest we leave that further discussion until the afternoon and move along as I've mentioned, with the EC election preparations. At this meeting we have the need to elect four of the seven EC member positions. Four of those positions, four individuals elected two years ago are coming to the end of their term with this meeting, so those positions need to be refilled. We have a rather unusual situation with almost I'm sure a record number of candidates available for these position, which is I think, excellent to see, in terms of offering the membership a variety of candidates to choose from. It does make the voting and I'm afraid probably the counting procedure a little more challenging this time. What I'd like to do is summarise the voting procedure in order that it's absolutely clear to the members here who may have any doubt on how they should fill out the ballot paper and I will go through those details right now with a request again that any of these candidates who wish to make a statement to this meeting, please be prepared to do that. There will be an opportunity if you wish to take that before we break for lunch. Just to the voting form, I have a sample here. It is a sample because it doesn't have the stamp that has been allocated to a member vote. The voting form, which all members should have in their possession, each form corresponds to a to a single vote. Some of the members who are here may have one form or two or four or 8 or anything up to 64 forms and the forms need to be filled in individually. For each vote that is for each form, you have the option to mark four candidates of your choice. There are four positions to fill and you're asked to mark four boxes with a cross to indicate which four candidates you wish to vote for. The idea behind having multiple forms is that you don't have to enter the same vote on each form. There are some members who wish to, let's say, split their vote or to allocate votes to individual staff or voters according to their preference. The downside of that flexibility is that if you happen to be an extra large member you do have 64 forms to fill in and you're also asking our volunteer vote counter to count your form 64 times. On the bottom, it says there are notes here which indicate that the number of votes that you should have or that you're entitled to according to your membership category, you may wish and you're encouraged to count the number of forms you have to confirm that you have the right number of forms for your category and inform APNIC staff immediately if there's any discrepancy. We go through this preparation quite carefully so I hope you'll find no discrepancy in the voting forms you have. If you mark more than four boxes then that form will not count at all. We cannot count if you have made more than four marks. Also if your marking is ambiguous - please be careful to write an X clearly in four and only up to four of those boxes. So that is, in summary, how you should exercise your democratic right to vote as an APNIC member. When you've completed the forms, please submit them or post them into the ballot box which is here at the front and do so by 2pm at the very latest, so you have the lunch period in which to vote. Because of the challenge of counting the number of ballot papers here we do need to close the ballot box at the end of the lunch period, 2pm sharp. If you attempt to return ballot papers after that time they cannot be accepted, I'm sorry. I think I've covered all the necessary points. Are there any questions about the voting procedure? The counting of these votes when they've been submitted is carried out normally by a set of volunteers, so at this stage could I ask for any volunteers from the audience, Ray and Lesley, thank you very much. Axel, thank you. Nigel, thank you. We have four volunteers, I hope that's enough. Let me warn you that I think there are 1,600 forms to count. You've been through this before. You can't retract your offer now, Axel, sorry! LAUGHTER PAUL WILSON You've been through this before and the APNIC community has noted your encouragement to adopt electronic voting and you will have noted that has been adopted for meeting. For the sake of the four people here who have volunteered and who need to eat some time this afternoon and who would like to leave this meeting before midnight tonight, are there any more volunteers? I have a feeling it may be useful to have more than four. Rob, thank you. Another one? Yoshiko, thank you. Six I hope is going to be enough. At this time I'd like to invite the candidates in order, if you would like to make any statement, brief statement, a couple of minutes or so to the meeting. I will just note that everyone should have a statement of the details of all of the nominees for this election as part of your meeting kit. So you've got the names, the affiliation, the nominators, the details of the nomination for every candidate. In the case of any candidates not here I would ask you review the forms here in any case to review the details of the nominees. So is Jethin Chandran here? SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR He's not here. PAUL WILSON If you'd like to make a statement on his behalf you can do so. SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR Hi. We have offices in Java and China and also we're going the Asia Pacific region. He will support APNIC in this region. PAUL WILSON Thank you very much. Billy's here. Thanks. BILLY CHEON Hi. Good to see you. I hope you guys enjoy this great city and its culture and well organised APNIC meeting. To briefly introduce myself, my name is Billy from IP department of the NIDA which represent Korean community. I have spent five years within APNIC community cooperating with other NIR region and I think I learned a lot from the community and I think it's time for me to contribute to the community. So if you give me chance to serve as one of APNIC EC I won't fail you. Thank you. PAUL WILSON Is Manish Dhawan here or someone who would like to speak on their behalf? Garin Ganis? GARIN GANIS Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Garin Ganis, I'm representing Indonesian association of ISP organisation. It's a non-profit organisation. My fellow Indonesians have selected me to represent at the EC committees to help gain some support and my plan was actually to be able to contribute to development. There isn't much I can say about myself but I'm promoting more on the education values of Internet technologies as was shown by Paul in the screen - part of the presentation before. The so-called NICE program, it's similar to the early APRICOT years, 1996, 97. Based on that experience, I put to the fellow Indonesians a similar conference in Indonesia. From then on we are planning to expand more on the training. So my involvement in EC hopefully can also better address some of the issues in the Asia Pacific region. Thank you. PAUL WILSON Thank you, Garin. The next candidate on the list is Michael Green. Is Michael here or anyone who wants to speak on his behalf? OK, the next is Sanjay Khatri. Is there anyone here who could speak on his behalf? The next is Ma Yan. MA YAN Thank you. Is it clear? OK. Good afternoon. My plan to serve in the Asia Pacific region. My name is Ma Yan working for a University, I have a telecommunications. education background - graduate of Beijing university and also attending lecturer in Belgium for one year. I hope you understand my pronunciation. Current position - I'm serving for a professor, I'm currently making a contribution to the Internet development in China. We started the China next generation project. I am a key member of that project. We're starting IPv6 service in my campus already. For international activities I'm already one term for APNIC executive council. Also active in other international activities, for example APAP and APEC. For some professional activities I really enjoy all those activities worldwide and domestic in China. Not only for the Internet but also a lot of telecommunication engineering projects, so I have many connections not only with academic but also with the ISP community in China. I have a natural connection with telecommunications communities in China. I am familiar with telecommunication and computer networks and technologies and providing service in my university and also operating one of the - we cover something over 100 universities over 20 or 30,000 university students in this region and also providing the IPv6 and all Internet services, a lot of the information services. For IP network operations and security issues - network security issues, we work on converting the IPv4 traffic to 6 and backwards. Also IP address for my group. Major contribution to Internet in China. I have mentioned a lot so I won't cover all of them. Why select me? I would like to make my contribution not only to China community but also in our region to all Asia Pacific region. I already have the familiar experience with network operations and ISP related issues. I have a background in the telecommunications industries. So thank you for your support. Thank you. APPLAUSE PAUL WILSON Thank you very much. The next candidate on the list is Qian Hualin. I am working in Chinese academy of sciences which cover all the natural signs fields, it has about 50,000 people, scientists and technical persons. I am also working on the board of ICANN now for two years already. I am still running for the APNIC EC member. The purpose is to improve the structure, the efficiency of this region's IP address, because there are many misunderstandings for the IP addresses around this region. This region is a fast developing region for the requirement of IP addresses so it's critical to have a country in this region to have a right policy to have efficient allocation IP address allocation and to a better understanding of policy, allocation of IP address in this region. Nowadays there are many different noise about the IP address, domain name and other things in the world, so this is a critical time for us to better understand it, to improve our efficiency and to explain to people what's a pinnacle task, what's a policy. Many people are shouting about it, IP address in this region, especially with some officials they're not quite familiar with this policy, so it's our responsibility to talk to people to get them to understand to let APNIC run efficiently and successfully. That's my purpose for running another term of APNIC EC member. Thank you. APPLAUSE PAUL WILSON Thank you very much. The next candidate on the list is Jichen Thinley. PHILIP SMITH Hello, everyone, I'm not Jichen Thinley but I'm going to say a few words on his behalf. I've known him since I helped set up the Internet in beaut an in 1999. He's very active as one of a small group of people in the South Asia region. Some of you may have heard of SANOG, that's a very successful operations group and Jichen sits as chair of the organising committee of that. I'd like to encourage you to vote for Jichen. There hasn't really been much representation on the APNIC EC from the South Asia region. South Asia is a very large portion of APNIC's activities so I would encourage all to vote for Jichen to serve on the EC. APPLAUSE PAUL WILSON Finally, the last on the last is Kuo-Wei Wu. KUO WEI WU I think this is my third time I've stood to run for the EC again. First of all, I Introduce my personal education, I started from the BS in mathematics, then in science. Both are in Taiwan then in the United States. From 1982 to 1984, so you know my age! I was a member in the computer science department of the Kentucky College in the United States. From 1984 to 1990 my job is particularly in the computing developments. I was working in a scientific library and Fortran compiler. I dont know how many of you remember that! The last, 3 years I was in the working on architecture developments. From 1990 to 2003, I began to embark on management work. Also policy decision process. That is including the national Centre for high performance computing in Taiwan and senior VP of Yam Digital Technology in Taiwan. That is one of the major portals in Taiwan. Then I moved to Acer Inc as head of the e-services division. From year 2003 to now I'm the CEO for NIIE. PA, a fully non- profit organisation, funding is from the industry in Taiwan. The activities I was in charge in the past several years, I organised a supercomputing workshop in Taiwan in 1992. But also organised the first HPC Asia conference in 1995 in Taipei. That is a whole series of the Supercomputing Conference in Asia, one of the major ones. Then in 1996 I organised TANET 96 domestic network conference. In 1998 there was a networking conference, also I was in charge of the Fujitsu supercomputer user group meeting in 1998. For community service I was a member of HPC Asia international committee since 1994 to 1998. I worked as the EC on the China Open Systems Association from 1994 to 2000. I also was vice chair of Fujitsu supercomputer user group from 1996 to 1998. EC of APNIC, that is the first time for me to serve for APNIC EC from 1999 to the year 2001. Then I was re-elected as the vice chair of the Chinese Open System Association from 2000 till now. Then I was re-elected second term as EC of APNIC from year 2001 to 2003. I was also a committee member of AOSS, open source symposium from 2003 to 2005. Then there is a third term to re-elect as EC of APNIC from 2003 to 2005. Last year, I would be elected as vice chair of Asia PKI Forum involved with 7 countries on particular PKI topics. I think basically I'd like to say I have a technology background, I have a management background, I have a policy process experience and I was heavily involved in Asia Internet community and hopefully I can serve you in the first term again. Thank you very much. APPLAUSE PAUL WILSON Thank you. That concludes the list of candidates for this election. It's well time now to break for lunch and for APNIC members to deliberate over their voting decision. I'm say once again please note the ballot box will close at 2pm and your ballot papers need to be submitted by that time. If you are aware of any APNIC member who is out of the room and who may be at risk of not submitting their papers by that time I would ask you, if you can, to please help to notify such people to make sure that we don't have disappointed members returning after 2pm. If there are any questions about the voting procedure, please feel free to approach any of the APNIC staff or the scrutineers for the ballot and to do so in time to submit your ballot before 2pm. I would suggest to the scrutineers that you might like to stand and identify each other and meet somewhere within this room so that you can plan your strategy for attack on the 1,600 papers that you'll be charged with but I'll leave any further discussion to you. I'll tear up this sample ballot paper that I've been using in this discussion to make sure it's not used by anyone in the voting that's to come. Finally, lunch is served in the Sakura room, the same room as the APRICOT lunches, so please find your way there and enjoy your lunch and see you back here at 2pm this afternoon. Thank you very much.