Transcript: AMM
Disclaimer
Due to the difficulties capturing a live speaker's words, it is possible this transcript may contain errors and mistranslations. APNIC accepts no liability for any event or action resulting from the transcripts.
Friday, 27 August 2010, 09:00-10:30 (UTC +10)
SRINIVAS CHENDI: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen and APNIC members. I hope you enjoyed last night with the kangaroos and koalas. I hope you didn't take any koalas from there and try to take it back home.
This is the APNIC Member Meeting and we have the NRO NC elections today. I request the delegates, if you haven't picked up the ballot papers, you can pick up the ballot papers from the registration desk where you registered in the last three days or when you walked past the foyer. You saw the registration desk, and also, today is the last day, so I request all of the Members, if you haven't approached our Member Services Lounge to visit our Member Services Lounge and inquire anything about the APNIC -- enquire anything about the APNIC Member Services and if you have feedback, you can pass it on to the Member Services staff. And we'll be doing the Member Services Lounge prize draw after the lunch break. So it is a good idea to drop in and drop your business card, so you might win a prize or two.
Don't know!
So today's APNIC Member Meeting is chaired by the APNIC EC chair, Akinori-San. So I'll pass you on the mic to welcome the delegates.
AKINORI MAEMURA: Thank you. Good morning everyone. Welcome to the APNIC Member Meeting. My name is Akinori Maemura and I'm the chair of the Executive Council of APNIC. To start the agenda, I would like to say something that this APNIC 30 meeting is very big for APNIC. I remember in the year 2000 in October, we had the very first stand-alone APNIC meeting, which was held in Brisbane. We took ten years from there and then we came back to Queensland, not to Brisbane, but to Queensland. And we were happy and I feel that this is a really big effort. So in ten years, we spent ten years with the current APNIC and now we have all of the APNIC EC members on the stage. As you can see, all of the Members again, thank you very much. And we'll have the reports and elections for which is really important for the APNIC community.
OK, the APNIC Member Meeting starts with the Secretariat reports. And first, the first part of the Secretariat reports is from Paul Wilson, our Director General.
PAUL WILSON: Thank you very much, Akinori. I just saw a note on the web cast that the audio wasn't coming through, so I hope that that is being looked at. If you could just confirm that, thank you.
OK, thank you Akinori and thank you EC members and thank you to everyone who has come and participated in the meeting so far, who has helped to make it a success. I've had really nice feedback and nice comments from many people who have come to this meeting and on behalf of the Secretariat, I would like to say that we really appreciate your feed back. We really do hope that this meeting has been an event that's been useful to all of you for your own personal learning, networking, your ability also to participate in this community and to gain from it in the way that we hope that everyone can. If you do have any questions, I believe that we have a survey form which you're strongly encouraged, please, to help us by filling it out and giving us your feedback so that we can keep improving the performance of the meeting in future and making sure that it is serving the purpose and suiting your needs a little more on our survey processes is coming up in this presentation.
I'm going to be leading the Secretariat reports here. I'll be followed by the four area directors from APNIC to provide you with the details of much of what I'm going to be talking about. I'll be trying to give a high-level overview of the activities of the Secretariat and how they're structured and what we're here forammo and aiming for. And I may be giving you a few teasers as to what is coming up but, there are plenty of details of what the APNIC staff have been up to coming along and I do hope that you'll be finding those quite interesting.
We're involved with operational planning these days on a more or less continuous improvement basis, so I'll be structuring this presentation along the lines of our operational plan. Talking about some of the highlights and achievements before, as you say, you hear further details. But I'll also be talking about the next round of our very important survey process, which is being launched at the moment. And as I say, it will be followed by each of the areas.
The framework for the planning that happens within the Secretariat under my management as DG is to take, as our key driver, the member and stakeholder survey. APNIC is a service organization. We're a non-profit service organization, so we exist solely to benefit the community in the provision of services, and in these changing times, we need to keep in close contact with all stakeholders and not just Members, but the wider community as well in making sure that we are making the very best use of our resources in servicing the needs of the Members and what the Members and the stakeholders feel we should be doing both now and in the future. So, that is the key input, and we do these surveys every couple of years.
We use what we hear from the surveys to develop a set of activities and to refine existing activities. We are guided, of course, by the budgetary constraints and the activities also feed into the budget to create the plan for each year as it goes by. The survey happens every two years. We have an annual budget process which is overseen by the APNIC EC, elected by the Members for that, among other purposes. Internally, we have a six monthly review of the achievements, our key priorities internally at the staff level, and as the head of the Secretariat, I report into the APNIC EC on a monthly bails is with updates about major operational activities as they are happening.
Of course, the EC exists for that purpose to oversee the Secretariat operations, and as you'll hear, they meet monthly and they do hear from me monthly about what's happening at the Secretariat.
A simple diagram shows the relationship of these components. The Member survey feeding in with the current and future budgets. All of those things go in together to form what we call an operational plan. You might think of that as a strategic plan, but I want to ensure and enforce that this is something that's happening at the staff level under the guidance of the Executive Committee. I don't see it as my sole role, although I am the CEO of APNIC, to set the strategy of the organization that's something that happens between myself and the EC and of course, the community.
So the operational plan defines key outcomes, which we are striving collectively to pursue. We are trying to deliver the best value possible to Members and stakeholders in terms of the acutal services that we provide. We are, in accordance with our long-standing tradition and mission, supporting the development of the Internet across the Asia-Pacific region to the extent that we can within our limited resources and in particular, within the area of IP address management. And related facets of infrastructure management.
We are doing these things through active collaboration and communication with the organizations around us, including Member and non-Member organizations, including the peer RIRs, other organizations such as ISOC and ICANN. Increasingly, governmental and intergovernmental organizations, so the collaboration communication we do is a large part of our activity.
Internally, we define corporate support as a whole set of activities which ensure that the organization itself works effectively.
So you'll be hearing about our achievements in each of the areas, that is within the organizational structure of APNIC. The four areas that are defined and you'll be hearing about activities according to those outcomes, and I hope that that will make sense to you in terms of how APNIC is doing, what we're doing at the Secretariat. Why we're doing it and so forth.
Under the first of these key outcomes, delivering value. You can read this, but it states that as a service organization, we're providing value to all of our stakeholders according to their needs, and that's pretty important, because the needs of all of us are changing and as I say, we try to keep on top of that.
We're applying the resources and the funds of APNIC and the mutual interest of all Members. We're striving for high quality services related to in and around the core responsibilities of APNIC in IP address allocation and management.
And you'll see how widely that set of responsibilities is currently interpreted in the reports that are coming.
Some highlights from delivering value. We provide resource services, of course. And I think everyone who is an APNIC Member is primarily interested in this area. That is the allocation and management of Internet resources. But we're focusing very strongly on the impending exhaustion of the IPv4 supplies. So the resource quality assurance, which has become more and more necessary as we scrape the bottom of the barrel, if you like, in terms of remaining IPv4 supplies is important. The actual planning for exhaustion. What is specifically and precisely going to be happening over the next few years? This is a strong area of priority for us and I hope that you've seen quite a lot of evidence of the thinking and the planning that's being done.
Lowering the barriers for IPv6. Ensuring the barriers, which are pretty low already, are as low as they possibly can be within the policy frame work for IPv6 to be distributed and for us to support the transition.
The APNIC Helpdesk, which is the front end for our resource and Member Services is under continuous improvement. We've made quite a few advances recently in how we're delivering those services.
On the technical side, we've got quite a focus these days, if you look at our activity set there as a whole. We've got quite a focus on security and robustness of APNIC services, so DNSSEC in particular is something that's come into our set of priorities very strongly, both in services we provide and in training and in Member service management, resource certification. I think you know about something, it's something along those same lines.
The high availability of our services, that is, we run 24/7 online services that are critical to the Internet's operation, and the high availability to the absolute maximum extent possible of those services is a very strong part of our mission a we've done a lot of work on service security, redundancy and robustness.
We also, alongside these services, provide concrete training assistance to our Members and stakeholders in a very deliberate manner, concerned directly with the best use of IP addresses, the best management of networks that use them. We have a small training team that works very hard, but we're scaling our training footprint markedly these days through e-learning, and you'll be hearing about that.
Moving along, supporting Internet development. The second of those key outcome areas for the APNIC Secretariat. It's to recognize that we all share a common interest in a healthy and vigorous development of the Internet in this region. We support the maintenance of an open and neutral Internet, in particular based on the global addressibility of all network components. And we all know what that means in terms of IP addresses.
We're after the minimal barriers to global end to end reachibility, and you should be thinking IPv6 when you hear those words.
So, first on that list is the IPv6 program which is an active set of, activities led by Miwa Fujii, who we all know. But also a set of activities which is cross set across all APNIC Secretariat staff. We're involved with outreach and networking at the professional level, facilitation of discussion development of IPv6 as an issue for the entire Internet. Very actively involved in promotion, if you like, of IPv6. So workshops and training and education. Online support. Attending many, many meetings. Speaking at many events. Communicating actively. The IPv6 program falls under German Valdez as the Communications Director, and he'll be talking more about that to come. The development of the infrastructure of the Internet in this region is something that is always needed.
We're unmore rapid growth, more rapid demand for robust and high quality Internet services in this region than any other part of the world. APNIC was the first of the RIRs, in fact, the first organization of any type outside of the root server operators to deploy an anycast root server, and since then, there are some 50 or more. So in a short time, we've gone from one to 50 plus. So that's a huge increase, a huge benefit to you as members of APNIC, as network operators and also to your users and customers.
Alongside that, we're now more actively engrained, as you've asked us to be, in measuring activities, so that we can see, we can report on and share with you what we see in the sense of the Internet's performance stability, effectiveness and so on, and you'll be hearing more about that.
And the event that we're at the moment, it's for continuous improvement and they belong under the delivering objective, but also, we feel, a strong mechanism and a vehicle for promoting the development of the Internet. You know, we have training and education happening at these meetings. We actively support APRICOT, as one of the forums for APNIC meetings. We actively support the Fellowship program. At this event, we've got nine newcomers as funded Nellows to this meeting from eight different developing economies of the region, and that's typical.
Collaborating and communicating. I've spoken about this in it's first few words. It's really a critical part of what we do. The communications area is a major component of APNIC's organizational structure.
Internet governance is, to put it bluntly, it's kind of an overhead that's come upon us in over the last ten years, increasingly, from a time ten years ago when we were able to do the job that we thought that we were being paid to do that, as allocating addresses and training people. To something that has now required a great deal of activity. A great deal of travel, of outreach, of liaison and communications and the extent of what we're providing into much more interact liaison activities. So, our outreach to governments and intergovernmental organizations is a high overhead, it's a high cost for what we do, but also one that has a great benefit in ensuring that the importance of what APNIC does and what we, as a member of our whole community, share in doing is understood and supported by governments.
I'm glad to say that for the large part, it very strongly is supported and so, our successes in that area, I think, are demonstrable, although it is something that we will continue to do and it may even keep growing as a cost for APNIC, and therefore APNIC Members for some time to come.
The liaison with the National Internet Registries is coming under the public affairs along with the governmental and intergovernmental outreach technology, and hope that most, if not all of you have met our new Senior Public Affairs Specialist, Pablo Hinojosa, who joined us only a month ago in carrying and taking charge of public affairs activities within the Secretariat.
The Number Research Organization, the NRO, that's the umbrella organization which unites the five RIRs, and under which we coordinate both formally and informally on a whole range of activities that are related to what we need to do in engineering, communications. In the development and the delivery of our services. Recently also in areas like human resources and business and finance. Because we all have a great deal to learn from each other. The RIRs are at different stages of development. There are three large RIRs. There are two much smaller ones who, I have to say, have got as big a job as the larger ones do in terms of some of the overheads, for instance, the tackling of Internet governance and related activities.
We do provide a lot of mutual support and again, that's something that I expect will be increasing as we all face the challenges which are coming.
So that's the Number Research Organization, the NRO. And it represents, as I say, our communications and collaboration with peer RIRs, and I would like to say, welcome to the staff of other RIRs who are here with us at the Gold Coast.
And lastly, corporate support. As I say, it is the internal functioning of the organization that is necessary, of course, to allow this to all happen. We are striving to be fully professional, to demonstrate full accountability as well to the Members and stakeholders of APNIC in everything that we do. We're developing, as APNIC grows now to some 60 staff. We're developing all of the internal systems for human resources and administration. For business continuity and disaster recovery as well. The human resources side of things is extremely important. At least 50% of our budget is spent on the salaries of the staff that work at APNIC, so the ongoing professional ongoing development of the staff is a very important.
Performance appraisal, remuneration, adequate health and safety and all of these things are targets for some active work. We recently had a health and safety audit, which gave us full marks in terms of the operation of APNIC as a work place. Which was good to see, and a credit to everyone involved.
Diversity is sort of hidden away under human resources there, but it almost deserves to be one of the four top outcomes that we're seeking for the staff and the services of APNIC, and while we have 60 staff, we have 23 different nationality or cultural backgrounds on staff at the moment. That's pretty representative of the ratio that we've been able to maintain through the last ten years. We've got 26 different languages on staff and I'm sure that you all know that we're providing multilingual telephone support as part of the Helpdesk improvement and these days across a far increased office hours.
One of the other things that is occupying us internally quite a bit at the moment is the relocation of our offices into a new building and we'll be doing that, accomplishing that completely by the end of this year according to the current plan.
OK, so as I said, I've try to give you a high-level overview of how the activities of APNIC, the Secretariat of APNIC are structured. Why we're doing what we're doing and I think you'll hopefully have a barrage of details about all sorts of stuff that falls under the general areas that I've described. I'll just mention and stress though, before I finish, that the 2011 Member and Stakeholder Survey is being launched with this meeting. We've had Dr John Earls and also Professor Peng Hwa from Singapore at this meeting and John is still in the room here. Professor Ang is now responsible for conducting the Member and Stakeholder Survey as the independent expert representing an independent expert organization, who will provide the final report of the survey results.
But, of course, this is a very active outreach survey, so John and Peng Hwa are very involved this week in firstly trying to identify the issues which are of most importance to Members and stakeholders at the moment. So that the survey that is finally launched in October this year can actually reflect the best issues. The most important issues for all of you. The way I describe the survey these days is, as a sort of an audit. APNIC, the APNIC EC undertakes an annual financial audit, voluntarily, but it's a complete and thorough financial you had it every year, and that is the basis of, one of the basis of APNIC's financial governance and oversight. But this audit is, that is the Member and stakeholder survey, is an audit of the membership and community of your views of how APNIC is performing, which I think is always important if you see it as a customer satisfaction survey, if you like.
But it is also an audit of your views and opinions and your requirements for the future. And that second part of the survey is the most important one, I think, for determining exactly where APNIC is going in the future.
As it says here, your feedback is shaping APNIC's future. So I do hope that everyone here will participate and that you can also encourage your friends and colleagues to do the same thing.
The details are that the survey is being launched in October 2010. It's an online survey, so shouldn't be too much trouble for any of us to complete. It will be analysed fully independently by John Earls under Peng Hwa. Professor Ang's authority as a fully independent expert, and the report will come back to you via the EC at APNIC 31 in Hong Kong. So I do want to stress the importance of that activity that will shape APNIC into the future. Certainly, you'll be hearing about how we are responding to it in the coming two years once it's done.
OK, that's all that I wanted to present to you now. You do have four more reports, so I do thank you for your patience and your understanding and your interest. But I'll hand back to the chair and then to the four area directors to give you all the details. Thank you very much.
APPLAUSE
AKINORI MAEMURA: Before moving to the next report, I would like to advise you that the ballot box for the election is now open, and if you feel that you want to, if you want to vote now, you can do that. And the ballot box is open until 2 pm, so please don't forget to cast your vote up until 2 pm. Thank you very. So then, we'll now invite Sanjaya, the Director of Service Area.
SANJAYA: Thank you, Chair. My name is Sanjaya, the APNIC Services Area Director. I'm here to give you a ten minute report on what the Services Area has been doing and is going to do in the next, until the end of this year.
Being the Service Area is the primary contact of service delivery to all of the Members and stakeholders. So my report this time will focus on delivering value, supporting Internet development and our service level statistics.
In the area of delivering value, as Paul has briefly mentioned in his report, we are focusing more on the resource quality assurance activity. This is by no means a new activity. We've been doing this for the past five years or six years. But we are putting more focus now, because the IPv4 is, like Paul said, at the bottom of the barrel now. So we can't expect it to be clean. So we do more reachability testing and experimentation conducted in collaboration with many organizations. And also, a lot of reach-out to the operators' community with basically just one message. And that single message is simply - if you do filtering, maintain your filter properly. More information can be seen in the APNIC website, www.APNIC.net/rqa.
Continue on the delivering value, MyAPNIC is the primary interface to our Members, so we are keeping it fresh with new features and what you are going to see now in the, by the end of this year is more support for transfer policy implementation. Whois update features. DNSSEC features and support for secondary reverse DNS service.
DNSSEC, later this year, we will provide a feature in MyAPNIC for Members to update their DNS with their DS record. As you can see from the screen shot, which is a bit small, but this is what you will see in the MyAPNIC for your reverse DNS delegation management. On the top field, you will enter your address range. The second field you will enter your name servers and the third one is the new field for DNSSEC, and that allows you to put in your DS record in that field.
So, very simple interface to a somewhat complex DNSSEC system.
In promoting IPv6, we have implemented the kickstart IPv6. The policy that has been passed a few meetings back that every IPv4 address holder can get IPv6 practically without evaluation and no additional cost. And we're happy to report that there has been 403 applications so far since we implemented this policy in February 2010. With 35 economies participating, including 12 new economies
Following on to that, we also streamlining membership applications for IPv6, so if people want to become APNIC Members, and they simply want IPv6, then there's a very, very streamlined one, almost like one page form for them to sign up and get their IPv6. And it could be either a /48 multihoming assignment, or a /32 provider allocation.
As I have reported to you in the previous meeting, that we're going to extend our Helpdesk hours. We have successfully done that, so beginning 1 July this year, we are operating 12 hours of the Helpdesk operations starting from 9 am Brisbane time to 9 pm Brisbane time. And 9 pm Brisbane time, if you compare it with the western most APNIC footprint, that corresponds to 4 pm UTC +5 for Lahore time. So our South Asian customers, you know, we are open until almost the end of the business day for our South Asia customers.
All right, in the area of supporting Internet development, we are going to implement the abuse contact policy that got approved in the last meeting. This is going to be implemented in November, so starting November 8, all inetnum objects and net inetnum 6 objects should have a corresponding IRT object. This hopefully would improve or assist in reporting abuse and handling them properly and measuring it in collaborative manner for everyone who has the objects.
We also have the MyAPNIC features to support this policy.
TTM and root server development. Although we have deployed more than 25 instances of root servers by now. There are still some economies that haven't been covered, so we're still working on it. We're also starting to develop TTM nodes across the region as well. This year, we make a TTM installation in New Zealand, Nepal, Cambodia, and Bangladesh. Cambodia also got their first root server that went operational just last month. And coming up would be Bhutan, Mongolia, and the second instance of the root server in Pakistan. And just last night, I met with a Member from Laos, who had an an exchange in Laos which could be a good candidate to deploy a root server there.
Service level, this is my last slide. We now have 3,132 account holders. It's a combination of Members and non-Members, account holders. Our growth rate has been consistent in the past four years. It's about 300 Members a year. There's steady growth. The Helpdesk enquiries has grown over 12% in the last year, so we're serving more enquiries now. And you can see the delegation statistics. Still predominantly IPv4, but IPv6 is not far behind.
Thank you.
APPLAUSE
AKINORI MAEMURA: OK, here I see a question.
NARESH AJWANI: I just want to say... I'm currently an NRO NC and an activist in the Internet community in India. I want to inform everyone gathering out here, the Government of India has given a mandate, has got a mandate to ensure the implementation of IPv6, compulsory by all the member service providers by 2011 in December. It is mandatory now. Thank you.
AKINORI MAEMURA: Thank you very much. OK, now I'm inviting Byron Ellacott who is the Director of the Technical Area.
BYRON ELLACOTT: Good morning everyone. I'm Byron, I'm the Technical Director. And for the next ten minutes, you'll know what the technical area has been doing. Doing in the past six months. So, as Paul said, we've got four major topics to discuss today. We'll talk about delivering value. I'll talk about the dual-stack efforts we're doing And the efforts we're making to improve our remote participation.
I'll also talk about how we're supporting Internet development with the improvements in DNSSEC, the information transfer we're doing on that and also on the Anycast which is coming up.
We're also collaborating and communicating on a global level and on a more direct level on the RPKI and on other topics, and we're providing our technical expertise to the other areas of APNIC, particularly in this presentation I'll help you to learn about what we're doing in our software processes.
So with delivering value, we are treating IPv6 and IPv4 as equal on all of the services. It is absolutely critical to us that we provide the same level of service for both of these protocols, so we're working to make sure that they're monitoring all of our reliability measures, all of the robustness principles are applied equally to both protocols. We've delivered information on the IPv6 work at past APNIC meetings and put some of that information into ICONS, so I would encourage all of you to check ICONS regularly and see what efforts we're making and what you can learn from our experiences in this area. We're also working hard to improve our remote participation options, so at this meeting, hopefully you may have noticed a higher bit rate on the web cast.
We've worked to try to deliver our web cast services from multiple locations to improve the local connectivity, and also supporting activities like the APIPv6 Task Force with WEBX connections there.
With supporting Internet development, we've rolled out DNSSEC and reported on our experiences and observations at this meeting. If you caught the Lightning Talk on Tuesday, sorry, Wednesday. And as Sanjaya said, we're moving forward on phase three of that to support DS records. In the coming weeks, we'll be enabling anycast for the DNS servers. We hope that this will provide a much better service level for many regions of the world. We'll report on our experiences and observations with this activity at the next APNIC meeting.
So just a reminder of how the DNSSEC project has been unfolding. In phase one, we introduced a test service where we signed our zones. In phase two, which is now complete, we published that signed zone to production servers and we completed that sortly after the last APNIC meeting and since then, we did a key role level, which is completed successfully. And the final phase, which is due for implementation shortly, is to accept signed records from Members.
We've been doing a lot of work with collaborating and communicating. We've been working with the NRO and the IETF to put a global RPKI system into there into operation at the end of the year, in alignment with the NRO statement on this. We have passed a major milestone not long ago where all five RIRs were able to produce ROA objects, signed objects that could be validated by third party tools. So that was quite a good milestone to get in terms of a global coordination effort. We also provided, just recently, our software and expertise to AfriNIC to help them move their RPKI implementation along, which was a wonderful experience for the staff involved and we're continuing that level of interaction with collaborative work from RIPE on databasing and we're getting help from RIPE ourselves on some of the processes, which I'll talk about shortly.
And we're working with the other RIRs to provide DNSSEC across the ERX and transferred space to provide that same level of service to all of the resources.
So in order to support a lot of the developments which come through in MyAPNIC and other areas, we have a software team and that software team is continuously improving their processes and in particular, adopting Agile methodology, which is a well proven methodology for delivering software that more closely matches expectations. And we're getting assistance from RIPE on this, because they have rolled out Agile across all of the development processes, a number of years ago now.
We're also using site redundancy to provide more resilience to site failures such as air conditioning and generator disruptions or third party physical interruptions. So we're working towards what we like to call the triangle architecture, where we have two co-location facilities and the office independently. We expect this will have a greater degree of resiliency and redundancy to our network services.
In other highlights, we do have IPv6 deployment for all of our major services. There's a long list up there, if you would like to look through. In general, if there's an APNIC service, we make sure that we provide it on IPv6 as well as IPv4. And also, our research and development has been providing a lot of important work. You may have seen the presentations earlier this week on Wednesday at APOPS on the background radiation measurements, telling us which blocks are toxic and should be monitored before being allocated and giving us common baseline measurements so we understand just what's going on in the Internet. We've also been measuring IPv6 adoption and the relativity of some of the IPv6 connections and see some of this as we approach IPv4 exhaustion.
And because we run the reverse DNS service, we get a unique view of the edge, which is information that we've been feeding back into other bodies.
That's all I have for you today. Thank you very much for your attention.
APPLAUSE
AKINORI MAEMURA: Next, German Valdez from the communications area will give his report.
SRINIVAS CHENDI: Just a reminder for the benefit of the remote participants. If you're approaching the microphone. They're directional and speak straight into the microphone so that the remote participants can hear as well. Thank you.
GERMAN VALDEZ: Thank you. My name is German Valdez and today I'll offer the Communications Area report. My presentation is going to be concentrated with some projects which are touching some of the key deliverables that Paul said in a previous presentation. I'll talk about our training activities and some improvements we have done in this area. I will also explain a little bit about the implementation and policies in the report to the last APNIC meetings.
I will talk about the involvement in the Asia-Pacific IPv6 Task Force and also in the APEC group. Activities also that we have performed in Internet governance and I will end my presentations about some of the activities that we have performed in the public affairs arena and also the work about spreading the IPv6 voice across the region.
I have mentioned before in this report that according to the results of the Member survey, or training activities, it is one of the services that is highly appreciated by your Members. And in this regard, we have taken a very self-critical perspective in the content that we are delivering to our Members, so we are conducted to very thoroughly review of two of the more popular courses. This is just the beginning and we'll do the same with the rest of the courses we have in training. For the IRME, we will review and have better flow and exercises. The IPv6 course has been revamped. It is more flexible now and we have the possibility to offer basic and advanced content, and also, the material can be easily adjusted from one-day to four-days.
And it is also important to mention that Lab has been upgraded and is now IPv6 capable and that the exercises are in line with the IPv6 content.
Starting this year as well, we started very successfully elearning program. Basically, we broadcast from the offices in Brisbane. Interactive e-learning sessions. These are orientated and focused in sub-regional zones based on time zone difference, so people participating in these sessions can be doing it in business hours.
The way we are performing this is that we are delivering two eLearning sessions per month. The first is the IRME, which is generally conducted on the first week of the month. And then the second session is more technical, can be Routing, it can be IPv6, it can be DNS or IRR. So far, we have offered 14 eLearning web classes and sessions and with more than 200 people who have attended and I would like to extend an invitation to visit our training section in the website. We have scheduled the eLearning sessions for the rest of the year. If you want to subscribe to one of the sessions, please visit the website.
In the last APNIC meeting, we discussed and reached consensus on three policy proposals. Two of them have already been implemented. I won't go into the details of this. Sanjaya already mentioned about prop-079, which is to introduce some mandatory abuse content filters In the Whois database. This requires some internal efforts from different areas. Changes in the software and some work in the services department. But also, it requires some informational work in advance before the implementation of the policy. So this is a good example of policies proposal that can trigger a lot of activity internally in APNIC. Of course, it must be transparent for you, but I like to highlight this as a good example of a cross areas coordination effort and this is planned to be implemented in November.
In the last APNIC meeting in Kuala Lumpur, we had a very good level attendance, 753 participants with 123 of them were APNIC Members. We did this in conjunction with APRICOT and I think that it is a very good example of a project which is win-to-win. For the first time also, we provided the hosting for the APRICOT website. We provided the resources and the time to facilitate the integration of both meetings.
As is becoming more tradition, we also offered two remote venues. One in Thailand and one in Laos, which had 35 participants. And also, we enjoyed the participation of almost 500 people through our remote participation tools. These figures are based in unique addresses and it's not including APNIC staff or people onsite.
Also in the last meeting, APNIC was elected to serve as the Secretariat of the Asia Pacific IPv6 Task Force. This is a responsibility that we will have for the following two years and we are doing this and supporting Tony Hill who is the chair of the task force. So far, we have organised two gatherings. The first one was in June in Bali, Indonesia, the last one was yesterday. A few people arrived late to the social event because we spent one and a half hours in conducting this gathering. As part of the strategy of the Secretariat, we are investing resources to allow people that cannot do the travel and meet face to face to and we invest in the remote participation. In particular, we've been using Web X which has been a very good result for us.
And we have a few short-term plans, like the revamp of the website to reorganize the content and the way that we already changed the mailing list infrastructure in order to give more robustness in this regard.
Also, we have worked very closely with APEC. APEC is the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation. It is a very important government body, which is made up of 21 economies from the Pacific rim. This group has a working group dedicated to discuss telecommunications and information topics, and through the IPv6 program led by Miwa Fujii, we have been providing and organizing workshops some delegates from the governance of APEC. The last two, we've organized has been very successful, and as an outcome of the workshops, the members of the working group agreed to support the inclusion of the action plan and the recognition of the needs of IPv6 adoption as part of the declaration of the next ministerial telecommunications meeting, which will happen in October this year. This is a meeting made of the Minister of Telecommunications of the 21 Members of APEC.
For us, it would be an important statistic. This action plan would be included as part of the declaration of this meeting. Also, for the first time, we were able to organize the first regional Asia Pacific Internet Governance Forum which was held last June in Hong Kong. We did this in conjunction with other important stakeholders and APNIC was one of the core organizers and one of the main sponsors for this event. It's very important, and other regions have been doing This in the last years in the Asia Pacific of losing the opportunity to bring all of the stakeholders together and to create a report to bring back to the main meeting of the I GF to express the concerns and the specific concerns of the region in the main meeting of the IGF, which is going to be in two weeks' time in Vilnius, Lithuania.
As part of our support to Internet governance activities, we are organizing four remote hubs to connect to the main meeting in Vilnius. We're doing this in conjunction with dotAsia and we will be in Dhaka, Manila, Hong Kong and Jakarta. We will be sending APNIC staff to help with the coordination and right now we're training on the tools to help with the connection of the remote hubs.
Also, we have been doing some public affairs activities, that now will be handled by Pablo Hinojosa. As you remember, we have a consultation in the last Kuala Lumpur meeting and we had a report that we brought to the ITU IPv6 working group. The working groups are still on the deliberations. we're sure to provide the most accurate information about IPv6. Of course, we brought the report from the consultation that we had in Kuala Lumpur. At the same time, we've been participating in another important conference like the World Telecommunications Conference in Hyderabad. And for the first time also, we started to participate in the Asia Pacific Telecommunity, which is a group which are also part of the ITU, and through the APT, is where we're trying to make the contributions to the main ITU meeting that will happen in October, which is called the Plenipotentiary Conference, which is the most important meeting for the ITU, it's where they decide the operational plan, the budget, they elect the authorities.
It's the big summit. And also, they will discuss the strategies and the priorities for the following four years. So it is really this group that we're also trying to contribute to the ITU Plenipot.
We are taking in, as part of our efforts of doing The communications activities across the region, we are taking a multi-stakeholder approach. It's not exclusive for a single group or exclusive for members or exclusive for the public sector. We are really concerned to bring the IPv6 messages across the region to different groups. This is just a few examples of the different meetings we have been part of. Some of them we organized. We lead the organization of the meetings as we did in the workshop with APECTEL. Somehow, we conduct individual sessions and go like the governance IDA briefing. Also, we participate in ICT events like CommunicAsia in Singapore. So we are really trying to cover all of the community.
This is my last slide. Just to give you a little perception of the hobbies we have been having in the last month, or since the beginning of the year. Covering different kinds of meetings, including Internet governance meetings, face-to-face training, IPv6 Summits, network operation group meetings, NIR open policy meetings, and other events like the Inet and IANA and events like that. The following month, I don't think that we're going to reduce our pace. It is going to be a very busy four months, and I would like you to keep an eye on the activities that APNIC is performing across the region.
that's all from me. Thank you very much.
APPLAUSE
AKINORI MAEMURA: Next speaker is Richard Brown who is the Director for the Business Area.
Thank you, chairman. I welcome the opportunity to give everyone an update on the activities of the Business Area. I'll begin by showing a slide of all the fantastic people in my Business Area. A lot of them work very hard behind the scenes and aren't terribly visible to most of you, but you probably notice today that there's a lot of white shirts out there, so we don't often have meetings this close, so we've taken the opportunity to bring as many staff as we can today, so certainly, please engage with APNIC staff as much as you can today. They really welcome the opportunity to come to this meeting, and it may be some time before they have the opportunity to attend another APNIC meeting.
Today I'll be talking to you based on the format that the other Directors Have, which is set out in our operational planning. Under delivering value, I'll be talking about the implementation of the new fee schedule. I'll give you an update on APNIC's taxation status in the corporate support area. I'll talk about some of the great work we're doing In operational planning. I'll give you an update on what is happening with the new building. I'll give you a little more information and detail around some of the HR strategy work that we're doing and an update on our financial reporting and compliance.
As you're aware, we implemented a new fee schedule in 2010. At this stage in the year, we have bill over 75% of our Members under the new fee schedule. It's been a very large piece of work and quite a lot of work went into the project to actually develop and get the fee schedule approved. Then, of course, the implementation was quite complex, because the fees are based on a totally different model than they were before. That's going very well. The work we did for the budget last year around September or October when we were forecasting has shown to be very accurate, and our forecast for our membership revenue aligns very closely with the work that we did in that budget.
The EC approved a new non-Member fee schedule for 2011, so that's a large piece of work that we're currently undertaking for implementation on January 1.
APNIC's taxation status. Over two years ago, the ATO began with a routine goods and services tax investigation into APNIC, gradually scaling that up to a review of our private ruling, which supported our status as a mutual organization. We're very pleased to hear in the last couple of weeks that our financial advisors and tax advisors in discussions with the ATO have been advised that our not-for-profit status via our private ruling as a mutual organization will be upheld, so that's very good news for the membership.
Operational planning. Paul gave you a high level view of this. This is a piece of work that Dr John Earls, myself, and Connie Chan have been tasked with implementing. That's been a very exciting project to work on. It's been going since late 200 9. This, Paul mentioned and displayed in the diagram, there's key elements that support and underpin that plan. It's all about taking information from the member survey. Sorry, the Member and Stakeholder survey. We do a lot of workshops internally to understand the strengths and weaknesses and opportunities and threats that we have in both our internal and external environment. We, from there, develop that into an activity plan, which we believe provides the services that our membership requires, and of course, there are budget constraints, so many of those, there's a number of iterations we go through in that process to arrive at a robust plan for implementation.
The very important thing in that is that it is about mobilizing the organization, so it's about communicating broadly with the staff so that they understand what we're trying to do as a group. It's aligning everyone's priorities and making sure that we communicate effectively with all of our staff. That they know why and how we plan to do things. And it's becoming very much a part, and you'll see it in these presentations, plus more and more, you'll see that this is just a part of our activity. We do a review every six months, as Paul mentioned, where we may need to make minor adjustments to reflect changes in the environment. But the overall process which involves a large amount of consultation will align closely with the Members and Stakeholder Survey, and then we roll that out to broad engagement in the community, and then we develop the complete planning process every two years.
New building activities. I know I've got late August there, and it is very late August, but I'm hoping that we'll be under way very shortly. We're still sorting out some of the final issues and I'm very confident that we will be able to move into our new premises before Christmas. So there's a lot of work and I think most of us underestimated the amount of work that was involved in this. But we've got a great team and we're going well. So mid-December, we're supporting this with some change management initiatives. We're going to use the building re-location as a pilot for a broader change management frame work in APNIC. It's a good opportunity to have a specific project that we can really understand how we can manage change better, and it will be a significant change for a lot of APNIC staff to move into a new environment.
The HR strategy, we continue to focus on hiring high-quality people with the best specialist skills to represent our Members. And Paul mentioned, we have a broad range of staff from different backgrounds with 26 languages spoken and staff from 23 different economies.
We also embarked on an internship program in April 2010. We have someone from Mozambique who worked with the technical area for a month or so. We're going to roll that out with interns in the finance and accounting area in the coming months.
Paul mentioned the focus on continuous improvement. I think that as part of the planning process, we're really encouraging people to always look for better and more efficient ways of doing things, and we're pushing that down to individual KPIs, so that they really understand that we're always looking for more innovative ways of doing things. We have a very systematic approach through the systems that we use, with Appraisal Smart. We have a formal job evaluation practice. We use the Hay Group who evaluate all of our roles. We can use the relevant relevant PDs to ensure that our salaries are in line with market conditions. Training and development. As we get to a staff now of over 60 people, we're looking for more efficient ways to roll out training and development for our staff, so we're increasing the use of in-house and online training.
We've launched English conversation groups to assist those with their English skills. There's been a lot of work going on in the RIR staff exchange program. This is an initiative of the HR managers from each of the RIRs. So I think that we currently have Diane from AfriNIC who is here from this meeting. She's been in the APNIC offices for a couple of weeks. More recently, we had Gary from Software, he did some work in RIPE. And Tom recently was in AfriNIC, and I think Gerrard from RIPE is coming to work in the APNIC offices very shortly. We have also been working on our training skills for our training staff, ensuring that all our trainers have a base-level qualification. Work place health and safety. As Paul mentioned a great effort.
We had an inspection by the government health and safety officers of our premises in Park Road in Milton, and we got the highest commendation, so that was a great effort. Particularly from all of the staff and members, particularly from those from the health and safety committee. We're committed to ongoing first aid training for the staff as part of the BCP.
Staff participation in the Global Corporate Challenge. I was tempted to put figures up there, but I understand that RIPE might be beating us at the moment so we have work to do before we get to the closing date, but I think that we might come home strongly. I do notice a lot of people with pedometers on in this environment. This has been a really good initiative. In APNIC, we have nearly half of the staff involved in this and everyone aims to try to walk 10,000 steps a day. We've been doing it for two years and there's a number of people who wouldn't normally have walked or engaged in the activity twho are now committed to it, and there are some who aren't actually so good. And as Paul said, "They're doing that in their own time, not during APNIC time! " We're focusing on management of leave and focusing on making sure that people maintain a healthy work life balance and we provide travel and medical support to manage the health risks for those of us who do a large amount of travel.
The business continuity plan. We've done a lot of work in this in the last couple of years and we have a completed manual and we meet regularly. We do scenario testing. We are ready for an audit, but there's a significant amount of work required for us to get up-to-date with the new building. So over the coming months, we'll put in a lot of resources into ensuring that the business continuity plan reflects that and we'll have a new audit. Financial reporting and compliance - one of the areas that we're looking at making some improvements is trying to develop a more comprehensive activity-based costing than the financial view of activities. It's coming along well. We're working on assigning everything that we do to an activity. And we're getting close to seeing some really positive results from that.
We're not helped by an accounting system, which is not ideal. So there is a fair bit of manual work around for us to get there, but planning a new financial accounting systems and developing that towards the end of the year. So hopefully we can build all in the learnings that we picked in through the project so far. So that will give us, rather than the pure accounting type of view that we do, it will give us a much more transparent view of how activities cost APNIC and where our resources are spent.
As I said, we're looking at new business systems for the financial systems and payroll, expenses, travel management as well. Thank you very much.
APPLAUSE
AKINORI MAEMURA: OK, that's all of the reports from there. I'm now moving on to the next agenda which is the NRO election procedure and speeches from candidates. If you have any questions or comments, we welcome that.
SUNNY: can go to the microphone.
SATYA GUPTA: I'm from BT India. We are a Member of APNIC. First of all, I really, from my heart, would like to congratulate the Secretariat led by Mr Paul, and his Directors for doing a wonderful job during the intervening period. And the report actually showed a lot has been done and as far as my comments are concerned, it is actually my first time to APNIC, and I really regret not being there earlier. The loss is mine. Actually, it has been a great learning experience, all of the three days and especially today, knowing so much work has been done. And I personally feel that I have missed a lot and the opportunity not only to learn, but also even to contribute, actually. So that is my starting point.
As for my comments, they of course will come from just my heart, actually. And I feel, actually, APNIC, though they have delivered much more than was expected from them for the resource management, core competency, and core mandate and managing the resources of the Internet. Going towards the world growth and the development of the Internet in this part of the world, but still, there are some missed opportunities on their part as well. Actually, in this part of the region, as you know, for the growth of the Internet, it is not only the addresses which are required. Though they're fundamental technical requirements. But we have to go beyond that if we really want to grow the Internet in this region so that it is accessible to everyone in this region and that is the rural areas mainly, and some unconnected sub-regions actually.
Further, I personally feel that maybe, it appears to be a knee-jerk reaction that APNIC now, though they have been doing very well for the last ten years, the time has come now, it has to reinvent itself and maybe we have to start talking about APNIC Version 2.0 maybe. Maybe the next wave of APNIC. We are talking about the next generation of the Internet, v6 and all of that. So maybe the management of resources also have to move towards the next generation, and it has to go beyond the core competency and become all-emcompassing and all-inclusion. That is the main comment, that we have to make the management of this wonderful organization all-inclusive by participation from every stakeholder, actually. That is what I thought. And here, I would like to again mention about the role of relations with the government.
Though we all know that it is better to remain away from the Government if you want to progress, and that is a a fact. But that remains valid when the market leverages. If the stakeholders are getting their dues, yes, in market. Then yes, governments should not be told off. But if there's a market failure and there are some aspects of Internet where it is there, the broadband especially in the rural areas, and the national broadband plan actually, most of the countries are struggling and it has become a political agenda in this country itself and in many countries, there is a failure of the broadband plan. And that is why I thought, maybe, these are the issues which should be taken up by the APNIC...
AKINORI MAEMURA: Just for the progress of the meeting, please be concise.
NEW SPEAKER: No, that's all.
AKINORI MAEMURA: Do you have any comments, Paul?
PAUL WILSON: Thank you very much for the kind comments about the Secretariat. I appreciate that very much and I thank you for bearing with us on the reports. The object of those reports is indeed to condense six months of the activity of a large group of people into a short space of time. And I hope that we went some way towards doing that. The comments about APNIC's direction, APNIC 2.0, are really for the community to look at. I would suggest that you may be raising new issues for community consideration and the survey process, as I've described, is one which you can contribute directly to the preparatory process so that issues can then be raised within the whole community. Dr Earls is here for precisely that reason. He'll also be travelling further and doing more work on that consultation phase, which is the opportunity I've described.
Thank you.
AKINORI MAEMURA: Okay, thank you Paul. Yes?
TOSHIBA ICHIBAN: So, Paul, in Paul's speech, you were talking about the technical side. I look at the issue. However, on the other hand, sometimes, we get some trouble. So, we wanted to improve and get a share of the information to the community. I think. Just a comment, thank you.
AKINORI MAEMURA: Thank you very much. Any other comments? OK. We'll go on to the other topic if there are no other questions or comments?
OK. OK, the next agenda is the NRO Number Council election. And this is kind of a new tradition of ours - introduction, on how we do the election.
Introduction, there is the general principles for... sorry. OK, the general principles. This is an election and in APNIC's tradition, it is very respected that voting is secret and anonymity should prevail. And the Number Council election is a bit different from the APNIC EC election. The APNIC EC election is the need to be holders within the bylaws. But the NC election is regarded as a community election and it's totally different from the EC election in a point. Members and individuals have equal voting rights. That's totally different. But this election is just conducted in some accordance with the bylaws if it can be applied. The election is held according to the best practices and the procedures which are -- to the past practices and the procedures which are subject to review and future change.
We'll keep on reviewing to improve the election process, and making some major changes here, here today.
OK. Let me explain about the NRO Number Council, which is defined by the NRO Memorandum of Understanding. And the primary functions of the NRO NC is to serve as the ICANN ASO Address Council. And in that, there are three members. In the NRO MoU, there are three members from each region will be there, and three members from the five RIRs make up 15 people in the NRO Number Council. And within the three members in each region, one member is to be appointed by the board of each RIR. In our case, the Executive Council of APNIC apoints one member. Usually, it is happening in December and in our case, Tomohiro Fujisaki is our appointee for the year 2010 by the APNIC Executive Council. And the other two members are there by the regional policy forum of each RIR.
In our case, the regional policy forum is, OK, the APNIC Member Meeting is regarded as the regional policy forum, and that's why we are now having an election for the NRO NC. The election process by each RIR and this kind of... sorry, this kind of thing is provided in a document called NRO 1. And that's available on the NRO website.
The NRO NC selection in APNIC. It's our job, the Executive Council's job to run this election. And the process has been under way since 2004. And as I mentioned just before, one member appointed by the APNIC EC annually, for one term. And the two members elected during the APNIC Member Meeting. And one member is to be elected each year for his or her term of the two years. Then the term of the two people on the member elected, the NC member is staggered like this. And then, as I mentioned before, the NRO NC election is not governed by the APNIC bylaws. But we sometimes refer to the bylaws for some reference. And it is conducted in a general manner described in there.
if you heard in the election, I think many people will look at the election report panel. And that's already available in the website as we have announced, and the ERP report makes recommendations regarding that the APNIC Executive Council election process, and a note for the NRO NC election. And the APNIC EC has adopted certain recommendations and that is for the next APNIC EC election which will be held in February 2011. And it consists of some very good advice which can be applied to the NRO NC. And they've adopted some processes and procedures for the NRO NC election this time.
Here I will explain about this time, the NRO NC election. This slide provides the explanation for the chair of the election. This time, the chair of the APNIC Executive Council, which is myself, will serve as the chair of election. And it will oversee the responsibilities to oversee the election process. To describe the election process, as I am doing right now. And to handle complaints and resolve disputes, and other specific responsibilities describe later.
The APNIC NC election 2010. One vacant seat in the NRO NC at the beginning of the year 2011. And and the NC member has a two-year term of his or her office until December 31st, 2012. The call for nominations have already ened and it ended in July 26th, 2010. And the call for nominations is already available on the website. And for this election, online and also onsite voting. Both of them are available.
OK, online voting. Online voting. The voting period started in August 13, 2010. And it ended at August 25th, 2010. In the time of 9 am of the Brisbane local time, which is the UTC +10. Voting entitlement is that each APNIC Member organization is to be entitled to one vote via MyAPNIC.
The NRO NC election used to be or has been a community election, but in the AP region, especially it has the issue that some Members have difficulty to attend the APNIC Member Meeting in person, then the APNIC EC decided that instead of the onsite voting, we entitle each APNIC member organization one vote instead of that.
Online voting procedure. The online voting is as I described. It's accessible via MyAPNIC. Forms provide clear instructions and validation of the submitted votes. And the system preserves anonymity and storing a record of who has voted and a separate record of the votes cast. And there is the record. And the logs are accessible and to provide record of voters and votes cast. That means who has already voted and how many Members the vote cast. And the report provided as the final result, after the close of the voting period, for use in the counting process.
OK, now you can see on the screen, the online voting form. It's like this. And like this. And you can click to select the candidate, and then just click.
OK. Now, the onsite voting. The voting period starts, not now, sorry, but it has already started. And it ends at 2 pm local time here, UTC +10. Today, August 27, 2010. The voting entitlement, each registered AMM attendee is entitled to one vote as an individual. Not available to APNIC Members or any associations or organization, but as the individual. And the APNIC and other RIR staff do not vote and because this is the community election.
AMM attendees - and in the provision of the rule for the NRO NC, it is not limited to the restoration to this particular meeting. And you know, since 2010 APNIC meeting, everyone who has been registered will be entitled. But I don't think that there are so many cases, but really, really rare.
Onsite voting procedure. Ballot papers can be collected from the meeting registration desk. If you haven't had ballot papers, then please don't forget to collect it at the registration desk. All ballot papers are stamped for authentication of the paper. A ballot paper is invalid if no boxes are marked. One or more box is marked and the ambiguous marking to be sure that the ballot paper is selected.
And for the authentication sake, it does not bear a validation stamp. If so, then it is invalid. And the ballot box is set at the registration desk and please don't forget to put your ballot paper into the ballot box at the registration desk, no later than 2 pm today.
Here is shown the onsite voting ballot paper. Yellow. It consists of this kind of content. OK, the election tellers: Here, we started to use the word "teller" for the vote counter. Tellers are appointed by the chair of the election, which is me. And drawn from the APNIC Secretariat staff. The responsibilities of the tellers are to supervise the collection of the ballot papers. To review the logs and print the reports of the online voting system. And to valid date and count the votes, and to report the result to the chair of the election.
And with the tellers, we will elect the scrutineers. They are appointed by the chair of the election, which is me, by random draw from staff of other RIRs who are present at this meeting. Scrutineers do not vote and plus be independent from any APNIC Member or candidate. And it is our tradition to have the tellers mainly from the other RIR staff, staff from other RIRs in terms of independent from any APNIC Members or independent from this region.
And the scrutineers' responsibilities are to observe the tellers in all their duties and to notify the election chair in case of any anomally or issue identified. And not to handle or touch ballot papers. So the scrutineers are just observing what the tellers are doing. That is the scrutineers' job. And here you can find, this is a bit different from... not a bit, but very different from our APNIC tradition where scrutineers are used for the vote counter in the meeting. But here, we changed our conduct to be really compliant to the bylaws and where the "tellers", the word "tellers" is used for the vote counter. And then, we thought we could equip the scrutineers as the observer of the vote counting and the scrutineers in this meaning, is quite consistent with the dictionary definition.
The announcement of the result, the result of the election will be announced by me, the chair of the election. And this announcement will include, name and total vote count received by each candidate in the election. In our tradition, we just disclose the number of the successful candidates, but here, it has changed to disclose all of the numbers of the vote count of each candidate if they're successuful or not successful. And the number of ballots cast and the number to be disclosed. And to disclose any communication from the scrutineers.
OK, as the chair of the election...
PAUL WILSON: I did want to mention that this morning, an anomaly in the handling of the ballot box was identified. One voter approached the ballot box, which had not been opened at that time. He unzipped the ballot box and dropped a ballot paper into the ballot box. This was noteified by, thankfully, it was noticed thankfully by some other individuals who were present and who notified APNIC staff that this had happened. The ballot paper, as I understand it, was returned to the person who had dropped the ballot paper in so the ballot box was emptied. The ballot box was then closed. Further ballots were refused until such time as the ballot, the vote was announced to be opened here at this meeting. So my apologies for the fact that the status of the ballot box was not clear, both to the first voter who opened the ballot box and dropped the ballot box in, and also by those who were concerned by what they saw.
AKINORI MAEMURA: thank you very much. Let me move on to the part, do you have any questions at this time?
SURI CVS: My name is Suri. Earlier on in the your statements, you are mentioned about the election review panel report and certain recommendations to be considered for the next election. In that context, I wanted to state that I had submitted a proposal to the EC for putting up an independent election panel for conducting the elections. I've not formally heard from the EC.
AKINORI MAEMURA: Excuse me, I beg your pardon. I'd like to ask you that... I think you mentioned about the ERP report and your request to the EC about the election. And I think that it is for the Executive Council election. And I'm afraid that it is not in the NRO election. And if you still have some comment for the NRO NC election, I'm willing to accept that. But if not, please do that in the open microphone section, please.
SURI: Sorry, Sir. I would not have brought up the subject. I only brought it up because you in your speech a little earlier had referred to the ERP report, and said that there are certain recommendations there which are going to be implemented for the next election. That was just five or seven minutes ago. That's the only reason I brought it up.
AKINORI MAEMURA: Thank you very much. Actually, we have discussed the change on the NC election. What do I say? Yes, we are now concerned about change in the APNIC Executive Council election, and we thought that it is reasonable to adapt some recommendations for the ERP report, if it is applicable for that and also the NRO NC election. And some of the elements are included here. So I think that it will be a reasonable approach for us for us to see the change in the election.
BRAJESH JAIN: You just mentioned the online voting. Can you please tell us the outcome. Has it been taken and where will be the record and will it be there at the close today. For online, thank you, NRO NC.
AKINORI MAEMURA: Results of the online voting, it's only known for the tellers, when we're counting the vote. I don't think the Secretariat has no kind of idea what kind of result there. Let's move on to another section of my presentation, which is appointment of the tellers and the scrutineers. As the chair of the election, I appointed the tellers from the APNIC Secretariat who are Connie Chan. Sunny Chendi, and Sanjaya. Thank you very much to you three for accepting this teller job.
And the selection of the scrutineers. We'll select the three scrutineers and this time, I would like to select the three by a random draw from the staff of the other RIRs who are present at this meeting and I think that that's there. And right now, I am drawing it. And thank you very much to our RIR colleagues if you are selected to do the job for the scrutineer and I hope that you accept this job.
First one Nigel, Titley, who is the chair of the RIPE NCC executive board. Thank you very much. Can you accept this job? At this time at this time at this time yes.
AKINORI MAEMURA: Thank you. Second. OK, again, from RIPE NCC Andrew De le Hay. Can you accept it? Maybe some others from some other RIRs!
Oh my God, but I drew out RIPE NCC! Laura Cobley? Do you accept the job for the scrutineer? Thank you very much.
NIGEL TITLEY: I've just realized, although I'm on the board of RIPE NCC, the organization that I work for is also an APNIC member, so I probably have a conflict of interest here.
AKINORI MAEMURA: OK, so are you now withdrawing?
NIGEL TITL EY: Yes, apologies, I should have thought.
AKINORI MAEMURA: OK, another chance for me to draw someone else. Farhad from RIPE NCC Executive Board. Do you accept this scrutineer job?
FARHAD: Yes. Too many of us here.
AKINORI MAEMURA: This time, we have, you know, many people from RIPE NCC, but a few people -- from LACNIC and AfriNIC. And even some people came here, but some of them have already departed.
For the sake of the time and time keeping, the speech for the candidates should be done after the coffee break. If you don't mind? Any objections for that? If there is objections, I will...
No. OK, thank you.
PAVAN DUGGAL: Mr Chair person, practicing advocate in the Supreme Court of India. For the benefits of experiencing and for enabling the membership community to cast their votes, it would be a good idea to let the candidates have their speech now so that the break can be utilized by the community for casting their ballot and give them additional time for the thought process for your consideration.
AKINORI MAEMURA: Thank you very much for the input. And yes, that is correct and reasonable. I would like to ask the candidates to make their speech quite concise, I guess. So I would like to proceed to the candidate speech, and this order, and I would like to invite here Mr Naresh Ajwani.
NARESH AJWANI: Thank you, chair.
AKINORI MAEMURA: If you don't mind, please come up to the stage so that you can show your face in front of the community.
NARESH AJWANI: Thank you, chair, EC panel, and august gathering. Good morning. I am very obliged to the EC chair today, the way he has elaborated the entire process of election. It is the first time done in such an elaborative manner. I personally feel no change, no revolution, no reform takes place until, unless the leadership is big enough to understand and acknowledge the gaps which create some kind of a challenges within the community. Actually, I really want to pat myself for the last election issue which took place and that has led to this elaborative set-up of processes. I'm glad the EC has assured me to correct some recommendations, which actually took place because of the so-called gaps or confusion, or there was no reference about it.
I appreciate the way, the description of the scrutineer has been corrected, because that has helped everyone to understand who all can be there and who can't be there. Having said that, all of you know I had to pay some price for this. But I don't mind. I don't want people to live in disillusion that we have some bottom-up processes. We have some democratic norms. If this disillusion continues, then no change can take place. The Internet works at a speed of thought and having any kind of a reference or a procedure has to be dynamic, keeping in mind how the Internet is all about. The Internet is a leveler. I'm glad this leveler is there in the NRO NC election, where everybody has one vote.
I will keep paying the prices if it helps the community. This time, the vote has to be a conscious vote. This time, the vote has to be for a person who has contributed to the society as a game-changer. I was very glad to diffuse the situation in the morning, which actually took place by another candidate, by casting his vote, by opening the box. While other Members wanted to make it an issue, I felt my duty, that what happened to me last time shall not happen to this person also. Irrespective of anything, whatever has happened, mistakes happen, and mistakes need to be corrected. I spoke to Paul and requested him, please close this issue here, because that's not the culture we come from. Whenever we have some issues, we are supposed to address them.
I was very glad by the visit of Mr Akinori, Mr James, who acknowledged and appreciated everything which took place in terms of positive reforms. I must also clarify to everybody out here, people who proposed the reforms during the BoF are in no way associated, in any way, having any kind of a derogatory remark for the leadership and the DG out here. Our faith in the DG is very high. We respect him. He has devoted his life to this committee, to this society, to this community. And we respect him very much for this. So this vote, this time is all about conscious decisions. It's all about thinking about whether we have really followed a right way or a wrong way so far. If we have followed a wrong way, it is not a big issue. It can be corrected, and it can be corrected always.
That said, thank you very much, please.
AKINORI MAEMURA: Thank you very much, Naresh. We would like to invite Hasanul Haque. Any friends here of this candidate?
If not, I should move on to the next, Mr Jonny Martin. Thank you Jonny.
JONNY MARTIN: Good morning everyone. I'm Jonny Martin. I'm going to keep this short. Please don't look at the length of the speeches as to how qualified or not I am for this role. So, firstly, I've had quite a long involvement with the APNIC policy process. I've been an active contributor and I talk quite a lot with my colleagues, peers and people I meet at these things. So I feel I'm quite well positioned to actually contribute to the job of the NRO AC. Secondly, I'm independent and realize that going into this job, I'm not representing a faction or a country or a company. That's generally the way that I work, often to the chagrin of my employers. I'm looking forward to the next two years of the address allocation policy is going to provide. And we have v4 running out and I look forward to the challenge.
Thank you very much, everyone. And one last thing, unfortunately, it was me who got excited this morning and vote. What our friends over there failed to see is that I had already invalidated my vote so I'm looking forward to seeing people contribute in a positive way to the APNIC community and stop trying to rip it apart. Thank you.
APPLAUSE
AKINORI MAEMURA: Next candidate. Tony Sampano? Or someone who can make a speech for him, like his friends?
OK, if not, then that is all for the candidate speech. If you have any questions? OK, if not, we finally come to the end of this session and please relax with coffee, and Sunny, any house keeping?
SRINIVAS CHENDI: No.
AKINORI MAEMURA: OK, we will have the 30 minute coffee break. Please come back in 30 minutes, please enjoy the coffee.
Friday, 27 August 2010, 11:00-12:30 (UTC +10)
AKINORI MAEMURA: All right, thank you very much for getting back to the meeting room. Here, I would like to... before I deliver my EC report from Executive Council. I would like to invite Judith from PHCOLO because they're the general sponsor of this meeting. But she needs to depart right now.
JUDITH DUAVIT VAZQUEZ: This is too embarrassing.
PAUL WILSON: Judith is needing to leave, but as a gold sponsor for the whole event, I would like to pass her a gift from APNIC as a token of thanks for what has now become a regular sponsorship from a regular participant and contributor, and that's really, really good to see. It's very welcome. So here you are, Judith.
plues plues
AKINORI MAEMURA: OK, now I will have my report from the Executive Council.
OK, usually I deal with this report from just standing and from that place, but I prefer to present this just sitting with my colleague in the Executive Council.
All right, and here is the Executive Council report.
Here is the line of the EC members for 2010. And here is a brand new format for the list of the EC members. You will have the name of them and the country code of the country, the member and where they're located. And in the column of "terms", I just put in the numbers that each EC number, the year to elected. And my term is counting up to almost ten years after six successful elections. And you can find, we have in the Executive Council, we have both old blood and new blood. So it's quite a fair balance. I hope that you perceive it so.
And the last column, it says that it is the office term expiration. So in my case the office term will be expiring in 2012 in the APNIC general meeting in February.
OK, so I would like to have the all EC members to introduce themselves. Myself, my name is Akinori Maemura. I'm working for JPNIC and I'm the chair of the Executive Council. James, please?
JAMES SPENCELEY: Hello, my name is James Spenceley. I'm now the Treasurer of the APNIC Executive Council and will be giving my first Treasurer's report today. I'm also the CEO of Vocus, which is a transit provider in Australia and have been a long time APNIC participant. I hope I know most of you, and I look forward to meeting as many people throughout the rest of the day that I haven't met before.
JIAN ZHANG: Hi, I'm Jian Zhang, I'm working for APTLD right now, I used to be the co-chair of the Policy SIG sessions so you probably know me from the time that I was chairing the Policy SIG.
CHE-HOO CHENG: I'm Che-Hoo Cheng, I'm from Hong Kong. As a full time job I'm the IT infrastructure manager of the Chinese University Hong Kong and also in charge of the operations of the Hong Kong HKIX and I'm not associated with an NIR because there's no NIR in Hong Kong. And I think I'm considered the old blood or incumbent EC.
MA YAN: My name is Ma Yan from Beijing University Post of Telecommunications. I'm really happy to work with all of the community members who are very prosperous in the development in our region. Thank you.
AKINORI MAEMURA: And other member, Paul Wilson.
PAUL WILSON: I'm Paul Wilson, the Director General. Under the bylaws, I am an active member of the APNIC EC, that is a practice that's been in the bylaws for some time since the establishment of APNIC, I was asked to activate my membership some years ago, so if you look at the earlier records of the APNIC EC, you'll find that I'm not generally referenced as member of the EC, but I was asked to take that role actively some years ago.
AKINORI MAEMURA: That's all of the EC members present. And one member, who is Hyun-Joon Kwon, unfortunately cannot make himself to be here and I'm cascading that on to you, you Members of the APNIC community. And Hyun-Joon Kwon is from KISA, Korean, Internet and Security Association. And he is elected at the previous election. OK. Thank you.
OK, as you see, here, all of the EC members sit on the stage and we will try to be here for as much time as possible on the stage. And then, if you have any questions, comments or some chat, or taking a photo with me or with us! We are happy to have that kind of conversation, so please don't hesitate to do that. And please allow us, though, to have coffee or to go to the toilet or rest room for our rests! Thank you.
OK, we had changes in the Executive Council in terms of the composition. In April 2010, Kuo-Wei Wu who was a member of the Executive Council resigned after his appointment to the Board of ICANN. Then, the EC extends its thanks to Kuo-Wei Wu for finding such a resolution in the EC meeting. For his service to APNIC as a member of the EC. And for the long time, from March 1999 until April 2010.
And Kuo-Wei Wu's position on the EC, according to the bylaws, will remain vacant until the next AGM which is at APNIC 31 in Hong Kong.
And the functions of the APNIC EC. There is quite a concise explanation of that. Which is to represent the interests of the Members in the governance of APNIC and oversight of the activities of the APNIC Secretariat. And to consider broad Internet policy issues for APNIC's strategic direction. And to set membership dues is our responsibility, and to endorse the policy consensus towards implementation. They're our jobs with the APNIC EC.
We periodically have the EC meetings. It's almost monthly. Usually over the telephone conference and we had eight EC meetings since the previous APNIC meeting. So eight out of the six months is a bit more than we usually have. So that is why we have a bunch of things to be solved, so we are trying very hard to work on that.
So the meeting minutes can be found on the EC website. It's a really easy URL which is www.apnic.net/ec. And you can find the webpage where you can obtain any of the EC minutes from before.
The policy endorsement as I explained is our job of the APNIC EC. And then the APNIC EC endorsed the final policies. We have three. Prop-079, prop-080, prop-082. And they are all of the proposals which were reached to consensus.
Other matters. And you are now seeing several matters and it is quite a substantial in comparison with the usual APNIC EC's job. The monthly review of the APNIC financial reports. That is just a usual thing. Monthly considerations of the APNIC operational updates, which is based on the Director General report, consisting of some news and reports from his operations of the APNIC Secretariat. And this is the first time to have the NRO EC observer from each RIR board, and after the discussion within the EC, myself Akinori Maemura, was appointed as the observer to the NRO EC. And then the observer, as the observer, I have access to the NRO EC mailing list. And if the NRO EC had a retreat meeting, then I can go there for observing the activity of the NRO Executive Council.
By the way, the Executive Council of the NRO is the composition of the five CEO, or the head of the RIR Secretariat.
Review of the progress of the office purchase, which is now ongoing by Richard, Director for the Business. And we just, you know, that is just, we are just looking at the progress. And also the status of the ATO review. That stands for the Australian Tax office. And also, this is just looking at the status of the ATO's issue and the ATO issue is already explained by Richard in the previous report.
Review of the India NIR proposal. As I reported to you at the previous APNIC meeting, we've already had, in principle, recognition of the Indian NIR and we are waiting for some documentation to fulfil the criteria which is provided in the NIR recommendation criteria document.
We moved the location of APNIC 30, because it is really unfortunate of ours that we needed to cancel the hosting of the APNIC 30 by the TOT in Bangkok. So that's really a big regret for us, but it is for us to ensure the security of all participants to the APNIC meeting. Oh time?
Hello. Hello. OK. All right. Yes, the cancellation, the reason of the cancellation of the Bangkok meeting was really very well understood by the TOT and we appreciate their being generous to us to have offered to us with the hosting of the APNIC 30 and decided to entitle Platinum Sponsor status to the TOT. And we are now working very hard to review the APNIC EC election process and some of the progress was already seen in my explanation on the NRO NC. The election process which consists of some of the elements of the improvement there which is also applied in the APNIC EC election process.
The 2011 budget, the EC has commenced the process of the determination of the 2011 budget and the Member fees. And usually, the budget is to be discussed in October, November, and the December meeting of the APNIC EC. But we have some need for us to start a bit earlier. And the EC is pleased to announce to the Member that APNIC Member fee for the 2011 will be held at 2010 levels, which means that we don't have any adjustment to the current membership fee table.
Member feedback. The EC welcomes the comments from the membership. And also from the broader communities. And if you have any concerns, questions, comments or something like that, you can easily have access to us, ask us, the Executive Council. Post a message to the exec-sec, which is the EC Secretary email for APNIC EC.
That's all from my side of the meeting for the EC report. Again, the EC minutes is available in the EC website. Www.APNIC.net/ec. Thank you very much and if you have any questions, I would invite people to go in front of the microphone, please.
All right, thank you very much. Then next, the report is the Treasurer report from our Treasurer, James Spenceley.
JAMES SPENCELEY: Thank you, Mr Chair. This is my first report as Treasurer, so it's certainly been a fast learning experience for me, and I would just like to thank the finance staff internally and APNIC for all of their assistance.
So the key highlight really this year was we implemented the new fee structure. The new fee structure came into effect on 1 January this year, and then was applied to any new Members going forward, as well as any existing Members who renewed after that date. So as of June 30, 76% of all existing Members were now under the new fee schedule.
The most important facts are obviously the financial status for the six months to June 2010. APNIC had a surplus of 862,000, so that's quite a large surplus, but I think that there is some subtle changes in the way that the invoicing is happening between the old fee structure and the new fee structure, so that is probably more to do with the change of fee structure than necessarily APNIC operating ahead of budget.
Revenue for the six months was $6.5 million, and expenditure was $5.6 million. Membership growth was 148 new Members in 2010, which was up 8% from the previous period. And then, year-on-year, so for the six months for the previous corresponding year, it was 145. So as you can see, there's a pretty consistent amount of new Members for the six-month period. The current membership stands at 2,318 Members at June 30. So the financial status for 2010 is a projected loss of $200,000. The projected revenue is going to be $12.98 million. The original budget was $12.8 million. So revenue is ahead of budget by 0.8%. Projected expenditure for the full year, $13.17 million. We've budgeted at $13.02 million. So as you can see, that 1.2% above budget. There's one cost that contributes or mostly contributes to the increase which is fit-out of the APNIC office, the new office. That wasn't budgeted for because of the approval of the office purchase which wasn't made at that time. So that mostly contributes to... in fact, that's over 80 percent of the budget overrun, about $140,000. So if you look at the financials, so total revenue for 2010 is budgeted at $12.8 million. It's now projected to be higher at $12.9 million, which is 0.8% up. The current revenue is 14% higher at $6.45 million, and that's to do with the change of fees, contributing to the higher fees in the first six months than the second. The total expenses from $13 million budget, and then, looking to be slightly over budget here.So if we move to the balance sheet, there's been a 10% increase across the balance sheet. There's been, if you notice, a significant shift from current assets to non-current assets and that represents a change from cash holding into the property purchase. So that accounts for you'll see a 30% drop in current assets, cash and cash equivalents and a 100% increase in non-current assets which is the building purchase.
So, a good segue into cash reserves. As you can see, the cash reserves have dropped significantly in 2010 and that specifically relates to the building purchase, so what I did, and we can continue to report in this fashion is to normalize this graph to include the green section which is the building purchase. The positive thing here is that, you know, when taking into account, the purchase price of the building, the cash reserves are actually at the highest level they've ever been at.
So those numbers in terms of the cash reserve is $12.8 million, including the building purchase, compared to last year of $11.8 million. Obviously, we're expecting a loss this year of around $200,000, so that will drop again. But at the half year, it was certainly looking very positive at $12.8 million.Before we go on to questions, the chair mentioned that at this time, APNIC begins its budget process for the next full year. APNIC operates on a calendar year basis, not a financial year. Companies are usually used to a June 30 financial year-end. That is beginning for the 2011 budget and there is no plan to increase fees. So if you consider that the consumer price or inflation in Australia is around 3%, and that represents a real absorbtion of a 3% decrease in fees in terms of APNIC's operating costs. With that good news, I'll open the floor to questions and we have the first one.
DAVID WOODGATE: David Woodgate Telstra. Just a quick question about the reserves, the sort of position. Yes, I understand that the building is obviously an asset. However, I thought that it was the position of APNIC previously to try to keep about operating cash reserve of about one year's worth. Assuming that the building won't be able to be necessarily realized in that category, what is the expectation going forward with APNIC's cash reserves and what will we be working towards?
JAMES SPENCELEY: Sure, and I think that the key point there is that while the building can't be solved for cash at short notice, it does contribute to significant cash reductions over long-term. We no longer have to pay rent and hopefully it will appreciate in value. So the financial department built a great business case for the purchase of that building and that will contribute to us being able to us regain cash reserves over the long-run, so it is absolutely the intent to do that.
PAUL WILSON: I'll just mention as part of the EC discussion, it was that the asset would be an asset against which cash could be borrowed. So in the event that cash was needed in such an event as we were preparing for which we were preparing by maintaining that reserve, then cash can actually be obtained against the value of the capital asset as well, without liquidating the asset.
DAVID WOODGATE: Thank you.
JAMES SPENCELEY: Any further questions from the floor?
GREG SOFFE: Telecom New Zealand. James, you mentioned that your tenure was to reduce the costs imposed by APNIC and the staff and the costs of running. Apart from purchasing the building for long-term, are there any plans to further reduce costs?
JAMES SPENCELEY: I think that the key thing for us is that budget time is a great time to look at exactly what processes and services we're going to offer, and particularly budget time when we have a membership survey. So the key consideration for this in all of the discussions is, what services the membership is actually asking us for. So once we get a result back from the membership survey, we can accurately assess where the funds need to be deployed. If there's a requirement for training more in the regions, then we will devote more funds for that effort. Until we get a more fresh membership survey pack, it is more difficult to answer that question. But absolutely, we are focusing heavily on costs and cost reduction.
JUDITH DUAVIT VAZQUEZ: With the advent of our IPv6 program, I think that there will be a need to invest in the infrastructure that will manage the number blocks. So, and this will, of course, be most helpful to the Members, including the training programs that are required to promote IPv6 across the region. So I suppose, these aren't included yet in the budget.
JAMES SPENCELEY: Correct. I mean, I think the APNIC Secretariat has a strong history of providing training and worked to develop online training and resources.
JUDITH DUAVIT VAZQUEZ: But these aren't included yet, or are they?
JAMES SPENCELEY: They aren't yet. If there's any additional training the membership requests,
JUDITH DUAVIT VAZQUEZ: I would like to suggest that maybe, with the program down to what was presented by Paul. You had some interesting future projects. It would be great if we could actually put numbers towards making these projects real and then sit on them, probably next year at a reasonable time? Thank you.
JAMES SPENCELEY: OK, I'll take that feedback that we include costing to the major projects. Absolutely. Any further questions? Thank you for your understanding, it is certainly a new role for me and I look forward to reporting again on the finances at the next meeting. Thank you.
APPLAUSE
AKINORI MAEMURA: Thank you very much, James. OK, we are now moving to the report from the APNIC meeting. Starting with the Policy SIG report, which is the newly-employed chair of the Policy SIG, who is Gaurab.
GAURAB RAJ UPADHAYA: Thank you Maemura-San. I would like to point out that I'm not employed by APNIC at all. And like James, I'm also presenting this for the first time. So, we had the Policy SIG yesterday, starting with the elections and thank you to everyone once again for electing me to the position of the chair.
Just a quick recap of the policy development process. I mean, we are... this part here. Generally we have the policies presented on the mailing list in advance and then discussed on the mailing list ar discussed at the Policy SIG. If there is consensus on the policies we present it to the AMM, this meeting, and then if there is consensus at this meeting, we further send it to the EC and the Secretariat there. If there is no consensus, we either drop it or it is sent back to the mailing list. So we're at this middle layer there where I'm presenting some of the Policy SIG discussions at the AMM.
So, we had four policy proposals. Prop-084, Frequent whois information update. Prop-085, eligibility criteria, for critical infrastructure for critical assignments from the final /8. Prop-086, Global policy for IPv4 allocations by the IANA post exhaustion and prop-087, IPv6 address allocations for deployment purposes.
Prop-083, alternative criteria for subsequent IPv6 allocations, was withdrawn by the author for this meeting. He plans to present it at the next meeting and is currently rewriting it. Prop-085, that was returned to the mailing list for discussion, as there was no consensus on whether to drop it or whether it needs further discussion. So it was sent back to the mailing list. Prop-087, a similar state. There was, there was a bit of discussion and audience agreed that it should be returned to the mailing list as well. Same for prop-086, the global policy for IPv4 allocations by the IANA post exhaustion. There has been a constant bit of discussion on the mailing list on this policy, so it has already been discussed back on the mailing list.
It might be coming in the next APNIC meeting in a different form all together. We don't know yet. Prop-084. Frequent whois information update was also sent back to the author for some clarification and to be discussed further on the mailing list. These were the proposals. We didn't pass any proposals and we didn't drop any proposals at this time. So there's no implications for the members as of yet. Any questions? If not, thank you very much.
AKINORI MAEMURA: Thank you very much. We move on to the next NIR SIG, Izumi Okutani from JPNIC is the chair of the NIR SIG.
IZUMI OKUTANI: Good morning. I'd just like to briefly introduce about the NIR SIG. I'm Izumi Okutani from JPNIC. Also chairing the NIR SIG and... and we had a session this Wednesday, a one and a half hour session this Wednesday. And well, I'm just waiting for the slides to be up, but we had... and we had roughly about 25 attendees at the session. And we also had co-chair elections, because
Can Ching-Heng Ku from TWNIC, his term ran out. So the new co-chair that we had is Ji-Young Lee, from KRNIC, so the current chair is myself, and Ji-Young who is over there, and Wendy, I think she's left. So she's off to travel back, so she's not here today from CNNIC. And the presentations, the list of presentations that we had was here and generally, we usually share activities and operations of what the NIRs are doing, but for the past few meetings, we tend to focus more on the NIRs and what each of the economies are focusing on and helping in deployment of IPv6.
So, some of the interesting topics and information that was shared was, for example, APNIC has earlier adopted the policy of simplifying IPv6 allocation criteria. CNNIC has also adopted that, and as a result, they have an additional 73 allocations as a result of this policy that was passed in APNIC. So it actually had effect in the NIR's economy. And KRNIC of KISA, they're running what's called 6 NGIX, which is free peering that KISA is setting up to help peering connections in the IPv6 space and they now have 37 networks and out of it, they also accepted five ISPs peering from ISPs outside of Korea, and they now have five ISPs that are connected to their network.
And they're doing collaboration with what KISA is doing as the NIR. So after they make allocations, IPv6 allocations to their members, they actually let them know about this network and recommend them to connect to the 6 NGIX. And if any of you are interested, please visit this URL and anybody from outside of Korea is also welcome to connect to this IX.
And there was an introduction from TWNIC about IPv6 readiness in Taiwan, and they are doing measurement on readiness in the core network, access line, applications and user level. And it seems the general trend is, people tend to be more ready in the access line as you go up higher, like on the application level and the user level, people are still not as prepared as we would want them to be, but there was, statistics showed that about 65% of LIRs advertise IPv6 allocations they have already received, so more than half of them are actually using the space that they have received an allocation. And then, also, in terms of web content, both KRNIC and TWNIC are focusing on encouraging more web content to be used in the IPv6 space, so for example, there's a directory that just shows a list of v6-enabled websites in Taiwan and they currently have over 680 websites registered in Taiwan and KRNIC is building infrastructure on the IPv6 network using the IX that they're running, that I introduced earlier.
And I think that there is a move to start using IPv6 using mobile, so in Korea, IPv6 over WDCMA, they're doing this project. And also, China Mobile is conducting tests for scaling and IPv6 connectivity. So all of these kinds of trends and what's going on in each of the economies were introduced just to, you know, share what's going on in each of the economies. And that was how the general sessions went. And it was also discussed last time that instead of just sharing information, for every meeting, we felt it was better to regularly share information on a more daily basis. So APNIC Secretariat has helped us set up the ICONS wiki to exchange information about the IPv6 deployment measures for each of the NIRs, so we're starting to categorize and put information in that page so that we know what's going on in each of the economies.
So that's it for the NIR SIG update.
AKINORI MAEMURA: Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much for your contribution as the SIG chair.
SATYA GUPTA: Thank you, Mr Chairman. I have just suggestion on this. I had attended on the first day, this NIR SIG on the first day, and my impression came out and all of the discussion on this particular thing were on IPv6 actually. For IPv6, we have a separate task force. Yesterday, we had the discussions there also. So it is just a suggestion that in this NIR SIG, if we can also take and discuss about the fundamental issues and operational issues of the NIR in general, and IPv6 issues of course are being taken care of in the IPv6 task force. Thank you.
AKINORI MAEMURA: Thank you very much. And the SIG chair gift is going of course, also to Gaurab.
APPLAUSE
Any other questions? Sorry about that? Not so smooth coordination! Anyway. Right.
OK, this is all for the SIG report there and we now have the BoF report for the membership petition BoF, which was chaired by James Spenceley.
JAMES SPENCELEY: OK, most of you were here so I won't recount overly heavily, the individual proposals and comments. I will recap specifically what the working group decided and then where appropriate, I'll ask if we will apply some chairs to those working groups.
So the first proposal was to change the voting structure from being a tiered structure with the largest member getting 64 votes to the smallest getting one vote, to being equal votes for all Members. It was an eloquent presentation and many international organizations that have one vote per member. Where APNIC was a country and not a country. But typically, those who owned more shares of a company have more of a vote. It was considered by some people that one vote per member was more democratic and there were a number of comments from the floor there.
There were some concerns as to whether an associate Member would get a vote, given that they don't have the resources and if that was the case, how you would account for the fact that somebody might stack voting by applying for a large number of associate Members. And another comment was that the proposal didn't consider an NIR, who might have hundreds of sub-members. The general view of the floor was mixed, but I think there was a strong support to continue to discuss the topic, and that it was valid for the membership to continue discussing that. The floor strongly supported setting up a working group to continue to discuss this matter. And I'll just see if there are any objections to setting up the working group. If the membership agrees and there aren't any objections, we'll proceed with setting that up.
So if there are no objections, so given that we're setting up a working group, I think that it is probably positive to appoint a chair. So I would ask probably the floor, if there's anyone who would like to volunteer to chair this working group. The chair should provide some impartial discussion and you know, gain participation. So it looks like we have one volunteer. We have two volunteers? Could I suggest that we have a chair and a co-chair? Is that acceptable to you both? Or two co-chairs? How is that? Two co-chairs and you'll have to decide who is the chair? Is that acceptable? Any objections to appointing these two gentlemen as co-chairs? Fantastic! We'll take that as agreed.
NEW SPEAKER: Can we see?
AKINORI MAEMURA: OK, stand up and go up to the mic and please state your name.
KENNY HUANG: From TWNIC.
DESI VALI: From India.
JAMES SPENCELEY: Thank you both. So, from here, I'll ask the Secretariat to set up the working group and we'll announce that to the mailing list. Proposal 2 was to form a Government Advisory Council General involvement and participation of the Government in the APNIC arena. Certainly as important stakeholders which the Government, as well as ISPs and telecommunication companies all are. The other RIRs provided invaluable contributions there, ARIN and RIPE with working groups and formal change or adoption of a council into the RIR structure. The results were that there were some changes to the proposal. The proposer agreed to change the call for a former Government Advisory Council to creating a working group to effectively promote communications between the Government and APNIC.
That had the strong support of the community as well, so the floor supported setting up a working group to discuss this further.
I'll just call if there are any objections to setting up a working group? No objections. So there should be at least a chair or co-chairs, so I can ask if there's any call for co-chairs?
NEW SPEAKER: I would like to volunteer for chair.
NAVEEN TANDON: My name Naveen Tandon from India.
SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: Eli from TWNIC also volunteers.
JAMES SPENCELEY: Any more?
SATYA GUPTA: I'm from India, I'd like to volunteer for co-chair.
JAMES SPENCELEY: I might limit to three co-chairs, then.
DESI VALLI: Since Satya is the proposer for this proposal, I object to he becoming the co-chair for this. He's a proposer.
SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: I object to him becoming the co-chair for this. He's the proposer.
SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: I'm from India, I'll be the co-chair. Shayan ?nair.
JAMES SPENCELEY: So who are the co-chairs now? So we have three co-chairs. That's a record so a very well discussed group. Thank you all for volunteering.
Proposal 3 was the limit for EC terms. There was quite a lot of discussion from the floor and a lot of comments provided. There was a question certainly around the lack of disadvantages in the proposal and I think that there were some questions around the implication that potentially longer-term ECs may inappropriate assets. And the new EC considered a great thing by the floor, I think that's generally accepted, and also a suggestion that experience was also positive on the Executive Council. Myself, I made the comment that there were three current ECs with less than one year experience. So I think that the common thing is that the floor supported dropping the proposal. Of course, the author is also welcome to resubmit but this did not reach consensus to progress on the floor.
SHASHI PARKASH JERATH: I'm the proposer of this particular proposal. I'm very happy to see today's presentation by the EC of all of the various policies and procedures, but I'm disappointed that my proposal has been rejected without giving me an opportunity to explain any particular method. Time was too short, and therefore, it was suggested that we should take it to the alternative band. But it was not agreed eve. And it was just unceremoniously rejected on the floor, for which I feel, a proper transparent and democratic procedure was not followed.
JAMES SPENCELEY: The only thing I can comment as the BoF chair is that I did review the transcript and I did observe the floor at the time and there was a strong majority of people preferred to to drop the policy. So I think that we have to respect that the floor wanted to drop it.
JERATH: But due to the limitation of the time, if you do not ask proposer to explain. I can explain everything. Now you with the EC. There are 50% of people with one year experience and 50% with three, six, four, five. seven terms. So I don't want to say the comment against anything, I'm saying that when you yourself are suggesting that the APNIC is very much in for reforming certain election reforms, and I think that there is a very strong point to be considered for that, but which has been in whatever way, which I feel undemocratically has been sidelined.
GREG SOFFE: Having discussed this proposal outside of the BoF afterwards with several other Members, there is potential that it may be rewritten in a form that would include a member of the EC board. One that would be a term of only one year, and at which time, the member would even move into a permanent position on the board or be removed from the board.
JAMES SPENCELEY: Thank you for the comments. I think that the common theme here is that the policy as presented didn't have the support of the floor, but I think that this is obviously something that the membership wants to discuss. So I think that there is absolutely no reason this can't be presented as a policy if Members choose to develop it in the future. But I would be hesitant now to overrule what was quite a clear majority to dropping the proposal.
APPLAUSE
SATYA: Mr James, I have a suggestion on this, actually. First, I'd like to second the thought of the proposer, and also, if we can say that this is the AMM, the APNIC Member Meeting, which is much beyond a BoF, and any decision can be taken here. And any decision supporting a committee can be reversed here. So it makes sense for all of us to see if you decide to have the voting by a raise of hands again in the AMM on this, whether at least we can go ahead to set up a working group. Don't take a decision, but setting up of a working group. That's not giving away much, and if the majority of the honorable Members agree even now, after these two or three debates, maybe it is worth while. And maybe it is against the protocol, but I think that it is worth giving it a try now.
JAMES SPENCELEY: Look, I'll again reiterate the comments that I think that the BoF report which I'm delivering was a large majority to dropping the policy proposal as written. I would encourage any Members to resubmit a policy. But this, I think we have to stick to an agenda of a meeting and calling for votes of the Member Meeting as we progress down a Member Meeting is probably not the most productive precedent for an annual Member Meeting. But I'm happy to ask the chair.
JERATH: I don't mind losing it on merit, effectively, ok. But I want to put it very clearly in this report that no appropriate discussions, and no appropriate transfers even for the proposal for really giving answers to any particular questions.
PAVAN DUGGAL: Mr Chairman, one thing I found very intriguing was, either is a practice of various international organizations that you do not invite questions. In that case, a vote takes place. What I really found intriguing was, the questions that were called for and they were directed to the proposer. The proposer was not allowed to answer. And the matter was put to a vote. Which, I think is against all established principles of natural justice and good conscience. You have every right, as a community, to throw out a proposal, and that's the inherent sovereign right of the community. But if the questions had been asked and the opportunity to answer, or the opportunity to be heard has not been granted to the concerned proposer, then I think that these are blatant violations of principles of natural justice, and therefore, I think that more important than anything else, this entire act has got bigger ramifications, and I think that we all, as a community, need to understand that.
I'll be looking at it. Because people who would look at the transcripts and what's available on the website would clearly show that here is, on the unprecedented cases of a proposal without being given an opportunity to the proposer to answer specific questions, including questions raised by you, the presenter of the chair. Including questions raised by Mr Akinori. Once these questions are asked in your capacities, despite knowing fully well what is the established jurisprudence pertaining to conflict of interest, and what the rules of APNIC say in that regard, I thought it was in the best interest of transparency and accountability to at least have the concerned proposer given an opportunity to answer. And then after, the proposal could be taken in some particular course.
But given these facts that both you and both Mr Akinori, asked specific direct detailed questions, for which no opportunity for answering was given , I thought that this was clearly not in sync for what was there for the transparency and accountability. So it is a Cardinal principle that justice should not only be done, but be seen to be done. Good things must not only be done, but seen to be done. So my suggestion is, that these are very, very crucial things and should not be just stepped below the carpet.
JAMES SPENCELEY: Thank you.
NARESH AJWANI: I hold myself responsible for this scene, because that time, I was the chair. There was a specified time and we had to follow the timelines. We have to respect the community members' time and we followed exactly in that manner. Having said that, I don't think that we are able to connect with James, who has specifically need said this proposal can be re-presented. I don't think that there is any challenge after that. Once he has already allowed for a new presentation, it means a new discussion, and I request that we should bring an end to this discussion at this good proposal of James, to be re-represented and the community is willing to discuss it later.
JAMES SPENCELEY: Thank you. Any further comments? I'll take that as a no. Great, thank you, all.
AKINORI MAEMURA: All right, thank you very much.
APPLAUSE
Now, can we have the NRO report and stats report as scheduled. I think so. OK, the NRO report is to be delivered by Axel Pawlik, chairman for the NRO Executive Council. Thank you.
AXEL PAWLIK: Thank you, good morning. A quick overview of what the NRO has done over the last couple of months. What is the NRO? The NRO is basically the RIRs all working together without any cooperation at this time, basically for coordination between themselves and speaking with one language for one world. So that's what we've done in the last couple of years. And we've also established, as you probably know, the ASO within the ICANN framework in 2004. The current office holders, I'm the chairman this year, Raul - couldn't come - is the Secretary and John, who might have gone already, is the Treasurer. We have coordination groups set up groups that coordinate various aspects of communications and engineering within the NRO and Andre and Paul is the respective chairman there and it rotates with the chairmanmanship of the NRO. So that will change next year.
We have, traditionally, as the RIRs, given money to ICANN for the good work they are doing There. That for quite a number of years, it was fixed at USD 823,000, and of course, we need someone to split this amongst the RIRs and we have a formula that we're using for probably about ten years already. That is based on the revenue of the individual RIRs and the amount of addresses that they have allocated and that's the percentages for this year. Of course, it will change.
We also do make a point to go to the ICANN meetings regularly to have some sort of a representation there. We are a very small sliver in the whole big pile of ICANN activities there. So we are very, very visible, which sometimes is a good thing and sometimes can be improved. We do make a point to slip ourselves into the GAC schedule there, the Government Advisory Committee within ICANN to give them an update of what we're doing, What our concerns are, and also to hear from them. In that form, and what their concerns are and typically, the last couple of years, they're always asking us about IPv6 and what we are doing, what they should be doing and where the industry is going there.
So, there was a meeting in Brussels. We had a short meeting with the ICANN CEO also. We had an update during the public forum and we don't have too much visibility within the ICANN field, which is not necessarily a bad thing. However many people are looking at us now as we're running out of IPv4 addresses and have all sorts of concerns around that. So we want to make an effort as the RIRs to raise this profile somewhat and to also use a presentation at the ICANN meetings. We're still working with it. Have some forum there that also gives the opportunity to talk about current policy proposals and the like. As we're all reaching out to new communities and well, the ICANN community isn't exactly new, but they could know more about us.
Speaking about outreach, obviously there is the Internet Governance Forum. By now, we like to think that it is actually quite brilliant for talking to all sorts of governments and industry partners certainly also. We've always been there. The initial rota for this was five meetings. The fifth of those meetings will happen in September. This month, nearly. Next month. In Vilnius, as I said, we do like the IGF and support the continuation in the current form, basically as a big talk shop, as a forum to exchange opinions. We usually sponsor or make up workshops with our industry partners. There's one basically a bit upbeat about IPv6 around the world. Yes, this is happening. There is a distinive push towards IPv6 and we were discussing this with all of our partners from industry and Government, including folks from the ITU to put out there what's happening with IPv6.
And all of the RIRs are working on more cooperation with the governments within the regions and we have the workshop Transparency in the Internet Governance that basically is on an international level, what many of us are doing on a regional level in terms of coordination and communication with the governments. Of course, there are dozens, maybe even hundreds of workshops and we get invited to other workshops as well and we obviously participate in those. We also have a booth where we have material and giveaways and people, also at one point during the whole conference, that people can be approached there and talk about the good things that we are doing.
ITU issues. Obviously, for a number of years, we were talking about the ITU and the ITU about us and about them. About ways to improve the world. We keep this very closely, very closely in check and go to their meetings and participate and basically talk about what we're doing and defending the way that we are doing things. And that's basically that. And we always hear that there are issues with the allocation of number resources from the RIRs for instance, in the developing countries. The ITU set up the working group, the IPv6 group. And it was set up for correspondence, basically the mailing lists to get to the bottom of what the problems are and how in principle, it can be developed and enhanced and moved forward. I'm happy to say that within those groups, there were no, basically no issues brought forward about concrete problems.
Now we'll see the reports being prepared for the mother group, the IPv6 group, that will meet again next week and then maybe we'll learn something about that. Very interesting.
Other ongoing activities apart from outreach. Engineering, obviously. All of the RIRs are working on certification with quite some pressure. All individually, but also, we coordinate that today. Communications outreach, again, the ITU is there. The IGF preparation and advocacy for the IGF to continue. IPv6 obviously also. We have a couple of retreats. We found it quite useful to sit together among ourselves for one and a half days, roughly, to go through our agenda as the NRO executive and to get some things done that is prone to fall to the wayside on the day-to-day meetings from home. That is my short update from the NRO.
AKINORI MAEMURA: Thank you very much.
APPLAUSE
SATYA GUPTA: Thank you very much. After seeing this presentation on the NRO, just one thought I've got and maybe a suggestion. Like the activity related to the ITU and as you know, the ITU is becoming very aggressive to entering to the Internet domain though they have been focused on the telecom domain only. So personally Ifeel that we should be also planning or at least discussing that rather we can have a separate focused committee to deal with the ITU, because that is very complex objective and in future, we are likely to have more and more challenges in our reelingship with the ITU and it is better to have a specialized body within the APNIC framework for ITU.
AKINORI MAEMURA: Thank you very much.
GUANGLIANG PAN: Hello everyone. My name is Guangliang Pan, Resource Services Manager at APNIC. I would like to give you a quick update on the Internet number resource status. The data in this report is up to 30 July 2010. And this report is prepared by five RIRs. First, let's look at the IPv4 first. I think that the most interesting thing is, how many unallocated blocks are still in the IANA free pool? You can look at the number in the middle, but the IANA reserved block is 16. As the data is up to July. So actually, these numbers have been down to 14. So when this number will finish, he expect this will be finished -- I expect this will be finish some time next year. This is a very important message to you.
Move on to the RIR allocations. This graph shows the RIR allocations by year. In the last two years, you can see the APNIC allocated more IPv4 addresses than any other region. In this year, we also allocated more space than other regions. In the first six months, we allocated more than three /8 blocks.
This graph shows the total of IPv4 allocations since 1999 and you can also see that APNIC actually allocated more space than other regions. You may ask why? And I also asked myself -- why APNIC allocated more than the other regions. And I came up with a slide to explain that, but it seems that this is the old presentation. But actually, I can explain it to you. The number of Internet users in each region, APNIC has become the largest Internet user in our region. We have more than other regions in the Internet users. And also, the population in our region is much more than other regions. We have nearly four billion in population in the Asia Pacific region. Sorry about that, I think I still have the old presentation slides in here.
So to move to the AS number. This graph shows the AS numbers assigned by each RIR by year. If you look at this, globally we assign about 5,000 AS numbers. Under 5,000 AS numbers per year. And this year, so far, we have assigned about 2,300 AS numbers. And APNIC normally, we will assign 600 to 700 AS numbers per?year. And so far, this year, in the first six months, we assigned under 300. So there's no change, not much change, in the AS number assignment.
This graph, it shows the AS number, total assignment of each RIR. You can see, RIPE NCC and ARIN have slightly more AS numbers than other regions.
And we have added one new slide about the 4-byte ASN. This is the AS number assignment by year, by each RIR. You can also see RIPE NCC assigned more AS number than other regions.
And this slide shows the total 4-byte ASN number assignments assigned by each RIR.
And last, let's look at the IPv6 address space. Since October 2006, IANA allocated /12s to each RIRs, and one of them came back to IANA for more IPv6 address space. So this slide has not been changed for the last few years.
And let's look at the allocations by year and by each region. You can see, recently, IPv6 allocations has the fast growth, and especially at APNIC, look at the yellow bar. In the first six months of this year, we have allocated nearly 300 IPv6. And it's more than the last year.
And this slide shows the total IPv6 allocations. The left-hand side is counting by prefixes, and the right-hand side is counting by the total size. You can see all the RIRs and their allocations. And we also added a new slide about IPv6 assignments. This is the RIR direct allocation to end-user assignments. And you can see the numbers of each RIR by year. And APNIC so far, also assigned nearly a hundred IPv6 to those end-users and in this year, we have about 70 IPv6 assignments.
And if you would like to know about the statistics or interested in doing some research, then these are the links.
Thank you, any questions?
APPLAUSE
AKINORI MAEMURA: Thank you very much. OK, that's all for the morning sessions. And we are now going to a lunch break. And I would like to remind you that the ballot box for the NRO NC election will be closed at 2 pm and the ballot box is allocated at the registration desk. So please don't forget and never forget to cast your vote to the ballot box. And now we are now going to go to the lunch break. So enjoy your lunch and please be sure to be back by 2 pm. Thank you very much.
Friday, 27 August 2010, 14:00-15:30 (UTC +10)
AKINORI MAEMURA: Welcome back to the 2:00 session. Again, I would like to remind you that the ballot box for the NRO election is now closing. And just in case you still have the ballot paper with you, please don't forget to - not don't forget, but immediately go to the ballot box and cast it to the box. Does anyone have a ballot paper with you right now? No. OK, then I will ask the Secretariat to close the ballot box. OK.
All right, welcome back to the afternoon session of the APNIC Member Meeting here. The afternoon session is beginning with the member services lounge prize draw. And then Frank has it. This is the first prize. A USB media player made by Sony. Is this for anyone? OK, here it comes. Ma haro tam from Cambodia. No? I should draw another. Oh, all right. Mr Tomohiro Fujisaki. OK, the Japanese product goes to the Japanese. Back to Japan.
OK, this is a one terabyte hard disk by. From Optus, Sadira Singh.
OK, moving on to the next agenda, which is, oh, the ASO AC report to be read by the winner of the first prize! Tomohiro Fujisaki-San. He's an appointee by the APNIC Executive Council for the NRO Number Council. Thank you.
TOMOHIRO FUJISAKI: Good afternoon everybody. I'm Tomohiro Fujisaki, the prize winner! And the report for the ICANN. So here are the activities. And many parts of the content is already presented by Maemura-San in this morning's session. But I will make it short. OK, so the ASO AC consists of just the same members the NRO Number Council. And we have the number resource policy advisory body. And consists of 15 members, three from each RIR region. And two members are elected by voting, and one is appointed by each RIR board. And our term is two years for elected members and one year for appointed members. And our job is to advise the ICANN Board on number resource policy and select ICANN Board members and select Number Council community members. And our activity is conducted by monthly telephone conference and annual physical meeting. And this is the current 2010 Address Council member with Kenny and me and Naresh are members of this Council.
And this is our activity report. After APNIC 29, we had six teleconferences and one as a special meeting and one face-to-face meeting. And on July 22, it's a special meeting for proceeding to the global policy for AS numbers and I will mention that later. And we have a face-to-face meeting for ICANN week in Brussels. And the next report is the activity topics.
And this year, 2010, we elected Kuo-Wei Wu on the ICANN Board. And we don't have the ICANN Board election next year, so we try to improve our Board election procedure. The main point is the time frame, the current time frame is looking at the operational document, but it is a little bit flexible. The schedule is tightly defined and if we miss one for the procedure it could fail. So we discussed to make it more flexible.
Our major global policy management, currently, we have three global policies. The global policy proposal of the allocation of IPv4 blocks to RIRs, and actually, this was adopted in four regions. So we decided that this policy did not reach global consensus. And the next was global policy for allocation by AS numbers to RIRs. This is looking at the allocation number, and this policy was adopted in all regions and there for the ICANN Board for consideration last month. And and the comment period was ending 13 August. So we hope that the global policy will be recognized by the ICANN Board soon. And the last global policy for the IPv4 allocations by IANA post-exhaustion, and we discussed this policy yesterday and it did not reach consensus, but we need further discussions about these policies.
OK, other activities can be found on this website, including the comments and minutes and many documents. Thank you. Any questions?
AKINORI MAEMURA: Questions or comments? No, thank you very much Fujisaki-San.
APPLAUSE
OK, the next report is from IANA from Elise Gerich. From IANA, and ICANN.
ELISE GERICH: Thank you. Many of you haven't met me before. That's just because I just started at the IANA role at ICANN on May 17th, so I'm in my third month and I was really pleased to be invited when I met Paul at the ICANN meeting in Brussels. So normally, Leo would be here, but since I was so nicely invited, I decided to come along and meet you all and attend my first APNIC meeting as an ICANN representative. The first thing one person asked me is, what is the IANA role and ICANN going to do when we run out of IPv4? And won't you be out of business? They figured that I would work for three months and then be done because there would be no more IPv4. So in my presentation today, we hope to show you some of the other activities that take up the IANA's resources and time, which are not just related to IPv4.
So, as a general overview, what the agenda is for my speech today, we'll talk about the deployment of a new IANA whois server. And the international domain name, ccTLDs which have been launched during the last year. The deployment of DNSSEC for the root. The AS global policy number, the AS numbers global policy that was just mentioned by the speaker ahead of me.
IPv4 status, I'll be very brief on that. I think it's been discussed to death this week and you all are well aware of where that is. And then a few other things about multicast. So basically, the IANA has upgraded the Whois server that we support. The Whois.IANA.org, and it now has a look and feel similar to RPSL. And you can get additional information from the Whois server that was lacking in the past. So you can get unicast IP address information, multicast registrations. AS numbers, and DS records.
Also and I'm sure many of you are aware, because there are several countries within the APAC region that applied for and have IDNs, ccIDNs, we have launched the international domain names, which means that basically, you can have a non-ASCII character as a domain name. So within the APEC region, we have representations, two representations for China. And one representation for Hong Kong. Two representations for Taiwan. Two representations for Sri Lanka. And one representation for Thailand. So, you all are on the leading edge of getting representations in non-ASCII characters and I congratulate you on the activities.
Another activity that has taken a lot of resources and time and energy and it's been a large contribution from the entire Internet community is the deployment of DNSSEC at the root. And I'm sure that you all are aware of what kind of a historic step this is, because it allows us to protect the authenticity of a domain name, so that if you get an email from a domain name, you can trust that it actually came from that organization that sent it. It doesn't protect the content, but it does protect the authenticity of the domain name itself. So we do have 17 top-level domains that have taken advantage of the deployment of DNSSEC at the root, and those 17 now have a chain of trust from the root to those top-level domains. One particular domain that has already gone through the full process to have this chain of trust that's in the APNIC region is Sri Lanka.
Again, they're leading the way in being an early adopter of some of the new technologies. Oh, we already did it. The DNSSEC was signed in July and we had representatives from all over the world who were there as trusted advisors to participate in the ceremony. Most people don't realize what was involved. Pretty much, it was an eight-hour ceremony at both of the two locations, so the representatives who came and paid on their own dollar to participate in this historic moment had to stay in a small, enclosed, secure room for the full time. And at that point in time, there was a process that had over 300 steps, closer to 400 steps, that were walked through individually to generate each individual key and then to document exactly what happened.
It was quite an impressive event. It probably would put you to sleep if they made a movie of it, but it was exciting and the energy was really something. But we want to thank everyone who sent representatives to this ceremony because it really made a huge difference to have the participation of the community during the DNSSEC key signing.
Now, this is the policy that was just spoken about. And basically, what we have on the slide is sort of the timeline. The public comment period ended on August 13. And the ICANN board will take its decision by September 20th. What this really means for those of you who may have forgotten, and I had to look it up, because I'm new to the role, is that there was a single pool and the RIRs were supposed to be distributing only 32-bit AS numbers. Well, it turned out that some of the vendor community hadn't kept up with the technology and the standards that people wanted to roll out, and so, therefore, if you gave out a 32-bit AS number, someone might come back and say, "This is broken, it doesn't work. My equipment won't accept it." So this policy is to allow the RIRs, if need be, to get another allocation of 16-bit AS numbers, and so that's what the decision will be in September to - I don't know what the decision will be, but the decision will be taken in December on this policy.
Finally, I'm not going to say too much about this slide, but basically, this shows that there are 12 /8s that have been allocated this year. Six of those 12 were allocated to APNIC, so that's a total of 50%. ARIN, LACNIC, and RIPE NCC have each received two. So that leaves the IANA with 14 unallocated /8s. Only nine of those will be allocated under the global policy that was ratified in 2005. The last five will be allocated simultaneously, one to each of the RIRs, and that was a policy that was ratified in 2009 by the RIRs. I'm sure that you know that.
So moving right along to multicast, another activity that the IANA is undertaking. So basically, there's an IETF draft, and I have the name of it up there. That says that everyone is a /24 of IPv4 unicast space can argorithmically create a multicast address space using 234/8. So the picture that I have up here kind of shows that if you use the 234/8 as your first eight bits, and then your last 24 bits, you can have a multicast address. So if, for whatever reason, some entity, organization needs more multicast address than this will provide, the way to address that is to contact the IANA and then the IANA IETF working group will look at how to address this on a case-by-case basis. Also in multicast, Leo in particular, who most of you know, will be introducing an annual review process for multicast address assignments.
This is to update the information that we have in our database on the registrant names and contact information as appropriate. So as you can see, there are many things other than just IPv4 addresses that the IANA is involved with. And we want to thank you for your participation in all the work that you help us do. Thank you.
APPLAUSE
AKINORI MAEMURA: Thank you very much.
BRAJESH JAIN: In the APNIC presentation in the morning, we saw certain blocks which are reserved. Do we have any specific information about this, number one. And number two. There are some unused IPs with some organizations, so is there some thought process toward that as well?
ELISE GERICH: The first is the circle diagram where it said there were reserved unallocated addresses and those are reserved by the IETF and defined by IETF and reserved for multicast anycast and some other special purposes. So these are not addresses in the normal pool. And the second question is, is there any activity to reclaim addresses? Now, I know that we had quite a bit of conversation in this hall not long ago about a reclamation policy and what would happen if you reclaimed addresses. And APNIC, I heard, has its own internal process for transfers between Members. ARIN was proposing that if there were reclaimed addresses, that they would come back to the IANA and there would be some sort of policy for distribution of the addresses from IANA.
But at this point in time, it's a community activity to discuss what to do with any reclaimed addresses.
BRAJESH JAIN: Thank you.
ELISE GERICH: Thank you for your questions. Oh, we have one more question?
OLE JACOBSEN: It's not really a question, it's just a comment. You said that if there were a movie made, it would put us to sleep, well there is a short movie on the ICANN website, if you go to ICANN.org and click on the press thing, you'll find something about Culpeper, Virginia and an instructive video of how the process went down. So you might find that interesting.
ELISE GERICH: I probably should have put that link on the slide, because for those of us who were there, it was very exciting day, and they were able to condense the activity into a video. It was a live video and taken while it happened. So we had the entire day videoed and they did a very nice job of editing that so people could get a flavour of what it was really like to participate in the DNSSEC key signing ceremony. Thank you, Ole. And thank you all very much.
AKINORI MAEMURA: OK, thank you very much
. APPLAUSE
Next, going into the part of the RIR reports. First of all the reports is ARIN. Leslie?
LESLIE NOBILE: Good afternoon everyone. My name is Leslie Nobile, the Director of Registration Services at ARIN and I have a really quick update on what's happening at ARIN in the region and ARIN itself. So, our 2010 focus, we've been concentrating on these areas, particularly the first one. We're continuing our development and integration of our new web-based system. We call it ARIN Online, and it is basically a secure login. All features and functions will be online and we're currently integrating all of the old legacy systems, software, databases, etc, into the new online system and also operating the Legacy system and a new online system as well. So we operating templates, a template system and a new online system as well. We're doing a lot of outreach and IPv4 depletion and IPv6 adoption.
Our community has told us that we need to get out there and tell everyone that we can find, pretty much, that IPv4 is going away and there's a need to adopt IPv6. And so, we are reaching out to the traditional technical community, the ISPs, the places you would expect, and then we're reaching out to lots of other new non-traditional venues and people and forums to pretty much let them know what the situation is.
We're enhancing our RPKI services like all of the other RIRs. We'll be rolling out new DNSSEC production services at end of this year and we're working quite a bit on that. And of course, continue our participation in the Internet governance forums, just like the other RIRs are doing. As far as public-facing development efforts, we deployed our Whois-RWS system in June of this year and it basically uses a restful service and it has lots of, you know, nice bells and whistles. It really enhances services over the traditional Whois service. We are, as I said, working on ARIN Online. We are deploying new services and functions and features at the end of each month, so we're making quite a bit of progress in there.
DNSSEC, we're now signing ARIN's IPv4 /8 zones and we're developing the interfaces to allow the insertion of DS records, delegation signer records at the end of this year, and as far as RPKI, we plan on rolling out production service in Q4 of this year. And we have a pilot program available at that link right there.
Outreach, OK, so we're doing a lot of outreach, and just within our own region, we've spoken or exhibited at over 50 venues, speaking about IPv4 and IPv6. But we also continue participating in all kinds of national and international forums. We interact quite a bit with the media. We have John Curran's name everywhere talking about IPv4 depletion, so that's a big focus for us and those are just some of the upcoming events. Annual Whois POC Validation - I know there's a policy in this region, so I thought I'd share a bit about our experience with this. We have a policy now, but last year, before the policy was actually implemented, we started the annual Whois POC validation process and it was really manual and we were using templates and we started with all of the direct resources. People had resources directly from ARIN and there's about 42,000 of them and we got about a 5% response rate.
Which isn't great, but it's something. So we implemented the policy this year in June and we fully automated the process via the ARIN online system. So we made it simple. We have two buttons to click here and say, I validate my record. And then another to say, let me go online and update my data. So we started again with the POCs with the direct resources and we've completed our first cycle. There's 42,000 of them and we found that the response rate was about 33%. A very smooth process. Didn't get any questions, everyone knew who we were, so that was a good thing. And in August, we started sending emails to our 200,000 points of contact with indirect resources and that's the reassignments. Our policy said that we have to send email and contact these people. Every single point of contact in our database, not just those with direct resources from ARIN.
So we're still in that cycle, but what I'm seeing and I've checked the data and it looks like only about a 5% response rate. People don't know who we are and they're calling us and saying, "Why are you spaming me? Why am I in your database and who are you?" It's not quite as successful as our direct points of contact. New policy implementation. We have three that we're implementing in a couple of weeks. A simplified merger and acquisition policy. It stipulates that any unused space has to be returned to ARIN. We have a rework of the IPv6 allocation criteria. It is pretty simple to get allocation from ARIN, because you have to meet one of the three criteria.
You have an IPv4 allocation, or your multihomed, or you have a plan to have 50 customers in five years; just one of those three and you get that /32. And we have the end-user minimum assignment unit, and that will be replacing the current minimum assignment of /22 for multihomers or /24 for non-multihomers.
We've got seven draft policies to come up to be discussed at the Atlanta meeting in October. Some of those were discussed here and I won't go into all of them. You guys are probably familiar with them or if you're interested, you can look them up. Meetings, we have the Atlanta meeting coming up in October and that's the joint meeting with NANOG, the North American Network Operator's group. And then the spring meeting in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Everyone is invite to attend and if I was to choose between the two, I would go to San Juan. Any questions?
AKINORI MAEMURA: Alright, thank you very much.
APPLAUSE
Next is from LACNIC. Artuno Servin.
ARTURO SERVIN: Thank you. I'm Arturo Servin. I just started in LACNIC three months and a half ago so I'm very excited to be here in my first registry meeting. So this is the LACNIC update. This is our projects in 2010. We start doing it like a strategic plan and what we needed to do for 2010. So from that strategic planning, we have different trial projects. One is customer-orientated. So we decided to, well, who are our customers? It's not just only the people who are requesting IP address systems and autonomous systems. So we're in the process of consultancy to see who are the customers, what do we need to do to become better? And from that, the same project. Well, we have the new website. Well, we are building a new website.
It's not like a strategic. The website. But it is part of the customer-orientated projects. So we're planning to have a new website in the end of 2010. We realized that we need to keep... well, we need to embrace all the new technologies, Facebook, Twitter, and social networks. So we're working on that. Also, we have a project where we want to see how LACNIC is seen by the Government, by the regulators. So that's another of our projects, and the rest of the projects that we have, they're mostly related to engineering. One is that we are reviewing our intranet. And I don't want to tell you what is RPKI, because you already know what it is. And while we are working with the other registries to build our site, our RPKI system. We're on time and we're committed with the time frame of the deployment that we have with the NRO.
Also, we have the EPP project. It's an interface for... well, it's an interface for to-do. Automatic queries and changes in our registry system. And we have a commitment with DNSSEC as well, so we're working in our project to build our Anycast clouds. And have the infrastructure ready for DNSSEC. And well, IPv6, we are doing a lot of IPv6 in the region. We are training people, making the awareness with all of the community that IPv6 is important and we need to embrace it and we need to start deploying IPv6 in a larger scale.
We are very small, so every time that somebody joins to LACNIC, it's like a big party! Right now, we are just 23 people. We have a new CTO, that's me. We also have a new Hostmaster. Now we have two, so that's part of our customer project, because the customer focus project, because we want to give a better service. And we are having very good results, so far. Also, we have a new innovation and development engineer, Carlos Silva. It's actually Carlos Martinez. He works in Uruguay and he was present at the DNSSEC ceremony. And he's now working with us. And we reached 1,300 members this year.
In the Internet resources, we received two /8s from IANA. Now we have them in what we call research status. Very similar to what you have in the quality assurance and we are checking the traffic to the networks and checking the filtering and everything to be sure that they will be fine for allocation in the very near future. This is our numbers of allocations. We almost have allocated a /8 during 2010. 70 /32s in IPv6. And 143 autonomous system, those include 4-bytes AS.
This is where we have, in May, our LACNIC meeting. We have 250 participants from 19 countries. We held the Members Annual Assembly, and we had six, well, six policies were presented and three of them were approved. One dealing with transfers after the IANA exhaltation of the global pool. Another thing that is changing how we do the IPv6 initial allocations, and the last one, it was for the electronic election of chairs of the policy forum.
Also, in the same event, we have pictorials and we also have three within the meeting we have three forums. One is the interconnection forum. Like we have the technical speeches there and it is working in the security forum. The IPv6 forum, and also, we held a working group with governments where we... I don't like to say trained, because it is not like training, it is just like, we try to use the not so technical language with them and we wanted to translate some of the complexities of the Internet and what is going on in the Internet to them, so they can be aware, for example, of the problem with IPv4 and the necessity to deploy IPv6. DNSSEC. RPKI, which are very complex concepts so we're trying to make awareness with the governments. And also, we held the LACTLD Members Assembly.
The LACTLD the group, a group of country code top level domains.
We also have some other projects. In AMPARO, we train security professionals for computer security incident response teams. So we'll train the people to work in those teams and also we train them to train other people. So we're doing this kind of domino effect there. We have FRIDA, that is a project where we fund some projects that are related to digital innovation and how we can create... we can enhance the development of ICT technologies in Latin America. And we have Raices, the translation is roots. So the target is to install anycast copies of root servers DNS. And right now, we have DNS in several countries. The last one this year was going to be to be in Haiti, but because of the earthquake there, it was taken out. And also, we are working with public affairs. With the registry of where it was with the public.
And our next meetings, the next one is in Sao Paulo in October. It's going to be a small meeting. We are going to have the policy forum, and also, we are organizing this meeting with LACNOG. That's the group of network operators in Latin America. And the next year is in Cancun in May. We don't have the exact date, but in this one, we have all of the forums and the interconnection forums and the security forums and the IP forums and the public policy forums. That's all.
APPLAUSE
SATYA GUPTA: A question for Mr Arturo. With your permission. In your presentation, the one activity for which the details are there for your participation in the IGF Internet governance forum. And you mention that they are participating in the IGF, so what is your association like, whether you have any formal way of representing in the IGF or there is no party special?
ARTURO SERVIN: You mean for LACNIC? The staff of LACNIC or the members of LACNIC?
SATYA GUPTA: Both.
ARTURO SERVIN: As members, we are very active in the IGF, we try to go to every meeting. We try be the face of developing the protocols and also we have an important project that is RPKI, so there is a group working on that and we are working in that group as well. And for the community, well, we don't have a specific program, but it is a very good idea and I'm going to write it down, because I think it will be interesting to do something to encourage people, because what we are seeing in the IGF is that most of the participation is from North America, from Europe and from Asia, and from Africa and Latin America there are just a few people there that go and participate in the it. And I think that we can do something about it. But we don't do anything like programming with the project. But that would be a good idea.
Sorry. Sorry. I understood IETF, not IGF. Well, I thought about IETF. OK, the IGF. Yes, we are participating in the IGF. We are very active of the Government forum. It's not part of my activities as CTO to go every time. Normally Raul and Ernesto, who are in charge of the public affairs with governments, and the community, those are the people going there. We are very active with that, and we are participating and we are creating the awareness with the people that this is an important forum. Sorry about the confusion!
AKINORI MAEMURA: OK, next is from RIPE NCC. From Axel Pawlik.
AXEL PAWLIK: Thank you. Good afternoon. I'm Axel Pawlik, Managing Director of the RIPE NCC with a short update on things that we're doing That might be new to you, or new developments.
Right, since we were talking yesterday a little bit about the corporate governance and things like that, I could go into this here. We have two general meetings per year, as per our Articles of Association. The meeting in spring typically brings the financial reports and elections for the Executive Board. And the General Meeting in autumn brings the budget and the charging scheme and the activity plan. And I'll talk about that in a moment. So what we did this year in May, for the first time, we did electronic voting. Now, our old election system was very nice. It was also quite dependant on the number of candidates that we had for a given seat on the board. And it could be so and it did actually happen that people were getting quite hungry waiting for an hour and going through all of the election processes.
I found it always quite interesting how it happened. However, some of our members were more hungry than interested and said that they should change the systems and introduce electronic voting or something like that and that's what they looked at. My first instinct, I have to admit, was to do electronic voting by a postal ballot, because that was supposedly relatively cheap. We didn't have to implement or integrate anything, and that's what we had to do as a first reaction to that. However, it turned out under Dutch law that the postal ballot for the general meetings for the Dutch associations was not possible, legally. Interesting.
So back to electronic voting. We looked at various systems, basically, we didn't want to do it ourselves. Implement anything or integrate anything, because we have other things to do like certification that might be a little bit more important. The big picture there. So basically, we outsourced the whole thing, basically to an Australian company, or part-Australian company, Big Poles. That actually worked quite well and it is still a little bit arcane and byzantine. Since Dutch law requires the possibility of interaction with the members during the general meeting, even if the members aren't right there, but the first time we web cast the whole meeting and then we said, I don't know what time it was. But at 6:45 , we will have elections and then we open the system and then you can do remote electronic voting and the tally is made up and we'll announce the results of that and then go into the second seed elections. We were a little bit nervous about how that would all work, but now it is dependant on the network and things like that. It was nice it worked. There was also a requirement to have local paper ballots and that was integrated in the system on the spot there. And it worked for the elections of the Executive Board.
We are also looking into widening the whole system, maybe giving opportunities for other resolutions as well. Instead of just the elections. Now, having done those elections, you see the result. We have a new Board Member, Remco van Mook, who is Dutch, and we are sad to see Janos Zsako, our Treasurer go out at the time and that is part of life and it is interesting to see new blood coming in occasionally. Overall, I'm happy to say that our board, as long as I've been there and that's the last ten years or so, it all works well and is quite stable.
Right, the registration services. You might suspect that we do allocate Internet numbers, we do that. Occasionally, we also get some back and especially around the idea of the runout of IPv4. We wanted to demonstrate also good stewardship there, so we're running a project that gets us some space back. At least some members back, maybe even. What happens frequently is, or relatively frequently, is that some of the our members forget paying or don't want to be a member any more. What we do then is contact them and say, we have some results allocated to you. Are you using all of that or are you ready to give some back? And sometimes they wake up and say, no, we wanted to stay on as a member. And then they send us some money and re-sign the contracts, which is nice.
And on the other hand, we do get some resources back and we all understand that in the great scheme of things, it is not really important. IPv4 will be running out anyway, and so that's how it goes.
Also, with regard to the quality of the data in our database, who is using which resources? For instance, we have increased the frequency of audits of our members and how they're using the resources and you see the numbers there. Basically, we have a few until 2008, and then we stepped up the frequency, and well, we are increasing, which is good. So doing audits is good. Of course, being the auditor is always nice, but we need to be audited ourselves. That's the middle bullet there. We have said that we wanted to get... basically, a third party certification on that that we are doing the right thing according to the policies, and that worked out quite well. So KPMG looked at us and our policies and said, OK, that matches, actually.
Also, that's something that relates a bit to what Leslie said earlier. We have a policy in place, 2007-01, that requires us to have contractual relationships or contracts, basically, with the users of providing independent space. Also with an idea of increasing the correctness of the data in the database. That has actually worked quite well. Basically, the options are there for you as an end-user to either go through your upstream, it might be a member or should be a member of the RIPE NCC then. So we have a contract with that member. But if you don't have that upstream, or if your former upstream says, no, we don't know these people any more, we have no relationship with them. We say, guys, we need contracts with you.
And that is something that will happen after the next RIPE meeting. We are going out to find them. And it is similar to what Leslie has said. It will be quite an adventure. I don't know how good the data is that we have there? How many of them are still there? How many of them still remember us? Or if they say, "Who are you?" And that is still ongoing and will be ongoing at the end of the year.
And similar also to APNIC practices, we do internal escalations for large requests, also looking at it that people don't hazardously want more than they can demonstrate need for in terms of resources.
A couple of new things. Quite a number of you have seen the presentation that Mark gave a little bit earlier about the RIPE Labs and the relaunch of that. The intention of this is basically to get into a shorter development cycle. Get into it... sorry, get a better understanding of what the community needs before we go out and implement large systems for a lot of costs that nobody needs. This is quite an agile environment.
So we have, as we said a year ago, weapon wanted to see if it was a success about for a year or so, and we seem to get a lot of positive feedback, and there is quite some activity on the site. Of course, it should be more, and I would like to invite you all very much to have a look at this and this is not only for the RIPE community, but basically for the community globally. If you have any projects that you would like to showcase there or if you would like to use The platform to get some feedback there. Please do.
Measurements - the RIPE NCC for quite a long time does measurements. We have the test traffic machine network that is getting a little bit old by now. And also, requirements are changing. This basically was invented as a tool. It was intended as a tool for ISPs to check whether their lines are too busy or not quite so full yet. And yes, as you see, the distribution is centered on Europe. We have a couple of nodes worldwide, but it is limited. And it's getting old. And we have new ideas also. Basically, the Internet has grown quite a bit over the last ten years or so.
Our theory is that where you see light on the planet, there must also be some sort of Internet around. So we would really like to get into the white area there, getting some more measurement nodes out. The high goal is there to reach every autonomous system and every major city there and maybe small cities with the services which are beyond that, ideally, of course. So we are looking at a way to do this with the community involvement, with relatively small, or really small costs compared to the traditional way that we did it with the test boxes.
Now, this is not really an announcement. We do the pilot announcement at the next RIPE meeting. However, on the Labs website, as it should be, is the first in a series of articles on this and the thinking there, and have a look at this and keep coming back.
I think Mark talked about this already. IPv6 RIPEness or IPv6 readiness. Basically we get a lot of questions as it is these days. How deployment goes with IPv6. And how to measure that. And of course, there are lots of servers out there, and we thought of a couple of different things to do and yeah, basically, we have four markers, four stars. And you see the bars giving IPv6 RIPEness or readiness for the countries that have at least a handful of local Internet registries or RIPE NCC members.
And we're currently thinking and we have some feed back about the next one would be another criteria to add about reachability IPv6 and follow it on the Labs website and see how it goes.
I did talk about Labs as a method to get a better understanding of community needs. Like I said, the formal process that the RIPE NCC uses is an activity plan. So around this time, or a little bit earlier actually, the folks at the RIPE NCC, write up their intentions based on what they heard from the community earlier on on what the RIPE NCC should be doing, stored on an activity plan, which describes in detail, all of the activities that we're doing And also highlights the new ones that might be coming up.
But this is happening, as I said in the beginning, on a yearly basis. So once a year we do this and it is not particularly agile, as I say. We wanted to improve this a bit, so we are developing different trends. Labs is obviously one. Training services, we do lots of personal training. We send our trainers Out into the service region and do meet quite a high number of members personally, so why not ask them about what they want or give them ideas of what we're thinking of and see what they think of that, personally. That is actually working quite well.
And of course, another formal thing is that we have employed earlier is membership services. So the next membership survey will be coming up, probably early next year. One of the things that I thought when I came into work at the RIPE NCC is that this is a really cool thing to have, at the time, three RIRs around the globe. Now it is five doing similar things. Wouldn't it be nice if you could rotate some staff members around. And finally, this is actually happening. You've heard the report from APNIC already. We're now happy to say that Gary came over and worked at our place and everyone was extremely happy afterwards, so that's a good thing and we want to repeat that by sending Gerard out here over the next couple of weeks.
So this all needs to be organized and thought up, and of course, we want to avoid that everybody from APNIC storms into Amsterdam and all of the people from Amsterdam storm into the new APNIC offices and that wouldn't work and there needs to be some criteria and familiarity around that. And Louise here and Angela in Amsterdam have been extremely helpful in setting this up and kicking it off.
Now, again, community and involvement with the community. What do want, what do people think of us? What do we think of other people? External relations communication is something that we do quite a lot. It is a growing department, certainly. Apart from things that we do in the background, basically activity plan that I just mentioned. The support for the RIPE meetings and all sorts of other meetings that we're doing. Support for the websites, PR activities and the like. There is the overhead again of coordinating with the other RIRs within the NRO. And while that is fun it's also quite a bit of work, but it does bring good results.
Speaking of outreach and other meeting. We do roundtables. It's basically a roundtable for governments and regulators that I'm talking about here that we invented a couple of years ago just to target the governments and the people who don't usually come to RIPE meetings, who don't feel so happy in such an environment as we have it here. So smaller meetings are more intimate.
ITU, obviously. Law enforcement in London. That is a meeting that all of the RIRs did together on the request basically of law enforcement. The police forces had a major meeting for themselves on that day in London and they asked us whether we would be around on that day. Whether we would be able and will to come with all of the RIRs and describe what we're doing and how we could interact with them and where they could also bring forward their requests, requirements, and thoughts. We did that and the room was really, really packed. I thought that it was a really good success, and we have been asked to do it again. So it can't have been all that bad. Although you see 17 March. It was St Patrick's day in London, and the pub that we were in ran out of Guinness! That was really weird
We hope to have it working better next year.
MENOG, and the regional meeting. It was based on the result from the member services. We started going into the regions outside of western and central Europe, so the Middle East for instance and also into Moscow. And out of that, comes the operator's group, in this case, the Middle East network operator's group, which is a multiday meeting. We want to Riyadh earlier this year. And if you look at the date and on the way back, I was told that I might have to land in Brussels instead of London because this volcano thing in Iceland had erupted. And a couple of our people were stuck in Riyadh for quite sometime.
But it was worth it doing The meeting before. Again, lots of other meetings. A regional roundtable in the Middle East. It's something that Paul Rendeck who is in charge of this at home. He laughed at this. He seems to have a problem getting it off the ground. He claims that the year is not long enough. I told him to hire more people. He started to laugh and then he started to cry, so you know, it seems to be difficult. Of the idea is to do the roundtables for governments and regulators that we have been doing In Amsterdam also, for instance, in the Middle East. That's one target there.
And the ITU again and the IGF again. The road show in the Middle East, that's basically also done by MENOG and supported by us and other industry partners and we'll go to Istanbul, Damascus, Tehran, and Amman, to tell the story that IPv6 is there and you can use it and if you don't have an allocation yet you can use it and here's some training as well.
With the outreach channels, we have IPv6actnow.org with interviews and videos from people who have deployed IPv6 and find it so boring by now because it just works - or not! And that's something that we're using and have started to do regular articles for CircleID. We do briefings on the telephone and in person with analysts and journalists just to get the story out again. The third party events, we offered for years that we would come out to a conference and talk about what we're doing And various aspects of that and that is quite popular as well. And that's the good thing about the whole IGF and the pre-IGF governmental interaction. The governments remember us, and by now, most of them know where we are, what we are, and what we are doing And they request us in and talk at their events.
In October we go to Norway. The EC is playing something like that. The European Commission in November and go off course and do other things like that. So that's a good thing.
Talking of meetings. Of course, we also have a meeting coming up. That's a little bit late this year in November, but then it is in Rome, that should be nice too. So, you are all of course invited. Have a look at the website. Registration is open for a couple of days. I don't think that you'll make the first registration prize. We have a prize we give out at RIPE meetings for those who register really, really early. It may be too late for that but still it might be worthwhile coming. If you have any questions there.
GEORGE MICHAELSON: From APNIC. I would like to say from the research group in APNIC that we really, really appreciate the collaboration we've been able to have with you over the years. The 12 TTM machines that we deployed in region were a really significant investment from you towards the community here, and it provided very high quality timing sources and also information on packet flows that I think have really helped to improve quality of service in the region and it also opens the door for other actions like the root server deployments. So, this kind of collaboration between the regions has paid back very strongly for us. I would also like to thank you for the work that you did deploying roots in regions. K-root for instance has been very, very significant for us.
So this kind of interaction between us works very well. You talked a little bit about something that you were going to be releasing in Rome and I would not want to preempt your announcement, but we've had small amounts of background information, and I hope that this is something that we can collaborate on and help to build your model of data collection into this region. It really does work very well for us, so thank you.
AXEL PAWLIK: Thank you very much for saying that. I'll make sure that I'll forward your thanks to my colleagues back home. And of course to our members who finance everything. It's just nice to be able to collaborate with other people like that.
GEORGE MICHAELSON: If I can do one more. We got really good feed back from the hosting of the staff exchange and that will make a big difference to how we do software development inhouse, and that kind of interaction is also very good.
AXEL PAWLIK: Happy to hear. Thank you.
SATYA GUPTA: I'm encouraged by your presentation when you mentioned that you have been successful in recovering some of the IPv4 addresses. So my basic question is, what technique you have used, either to motivate the ISPs, or you have compensated them through some fiscal benefits?
AXEL PAWLIK: Basically, it is rediscovering old members of ours who had fallen off the plains. And maybe they had a change of stuff and didn't remember who we were and it's not really important to pay that invoice. So coming back and saying - hey, we're still here. Do you on purpose go away? Occasion, that helps. On the other hand, if people really want to go away and have resources that they don't use any more, just asking brings them back, occasionally. And actually, much more often than we thought, initially. Because they are well-meaning, and in some cases, we said also that we talked to the upstream and said, look guys, the resources shouldn't be announced any more and are you aware of this and that happens, but that's sort of the least frequent case.
SATYA GUPTA: So no financial compensation?
AXEL PAWLIK: No.
SKEEVE STEVENS: Just a quick question regarding the audits. Just 20 seconds about what that entails. I done think that we have member audits as such, and I'm interested in what that actually is and what it is about?
AXEL PAWLIK: Now, the idea is that according to the resource policies, we only allocate if there's a demonstrated need. And that also entails that the resources which have possibly been previously allocated are used according to the policies. So basically, we go and check whether we have the information, whether the entries in the database have been made properly, so that we have an audit trail, a paper record or a record of what has been done with the resources. Sometimes people wake up and go - oh, oh, I wasn't aware that I should have done this. And so, typically, they do that. In other cases, we say, no, apparently you haven't used your resources according to our policies and the requirements, so come back when you have done so.
BRAJESH JAIN: You mentioned electronic voting. On the commercial side, do you think it costs more or less than the previous?
AXEL PAWLIK: Like I said initially. The thought of having to implement a system was troublesome to me, because our engineers are already busy. So what we did is we outsourced the thing. The company, Big Poles, I'm not involved in that as any shareholder. But then, it was extremely cheap compared with what we thought it might be to do it ourselves. I think it was worth it, you need to know, we have about 7,000 members. Or about to have 7,000 members and at general meetings, we get about 150 votes, which is not very much. It's disappointingly low. On the other hand, yeah, if you have to travel to a meeting, mmm. So we see the incentive to do electronic voting and we have had quite a number of registrations to be able to do the voting, but then, I think we doubled roughly the amount of votes that came in.
So again, that was not as positive as I would have thought. But on the other hand, we are open. If you want to vote, you can come and vote.
BRAJESH JAIN: Thank you. The other question you already answered. The number of votes, doubled actually?
AXEL PAWLIK: Yeah, it is good, in absolute numbers, it is still not enough. Thank you.
PAUL WILSON: OK, I'm taking the chair for a couple of minutes right now. We have been stalling a little bit because we had a presentation coming through from AfriNIC. Unfortunately, Adiel Akplogan or a representative hasn't been able to be with us and the staff have been trying desperately over the last hour to get in touch with him and get the slides. And I was told a few minutes ago that they were coming through by email, but it seems not. So, the agenda had already been updated to indicate that the AfriNIC presentation was not going to be given. We did think that it would be for a minute there, but what we will do now is move on to... since we're running early for the coffee break, we actually have an open mic time now. And so I will open the mics for any discussion or contributions from the audience, whether it is questions about the past reports or in fact, questions about anything that's come up today.
We also have Chi-Hu lined up for the APRICOT 2011 report which was due after the afternoon tea break if time permits. So are there any contributions from the floor? As I say, on any of the reports that we've heard this afternoon or this morning?
AKINORI MAEMURA: If there are any questions or comments, then I need to announce something from the election.
I've got some report from the scrutineers about a situation of the vote counting. The report from the scrutineers regarding this. Can we have this? Farhad.
FARHAD: Hi. We're the scrutineers. I'm sure that you know everybody who was scrutinizing the votes for the NRO NC. We were comfortable with onsite voting ballots. We've seen the box, since it was sealed, until it was in the room. We've seen the counters divide the ballots and actually do the physical count. We're satisfied that it is accurate. However, we have a technical question on the voting procedures that puts doubt on the validity of the online votes and whether you will accept them or decide to not accept them. The situation that we have found. We found an issue with six votes, but that was what we could see immediately and relevant.
There were six votes cast using four certificates, with one certificate carrying three votes, and the remaining certificates each carrying three votes. And those three of those certificates are one technical contact. And another had another technical contact and all of the certificates voted from the same IP address at relatively the same time, within 20 minutes of each other. To us, we can not find any clear statement on the electoral procedure on whether one subject can have multiple votes or one vote per certificate. Whether multiple voters can collude and vote from the same machine at the same time. We can not find this clearly stated. And therefore, we cannot, with confidence, make a decision on the validity of the online voting and as such, we require a judgment.
And just to be clear, we've asked the EC and we're asking you and nobody knows the results yet. We've not communicated any results to anybody. And prior to doing so, we would like to get a judgment on what to do? Whether to accept online results or not?
AKINORI MAEMURA: Thank you very much. And I'm very sorry that the system has... the program. And that would be very, very difficult for the scrutineers to make such a clear handling. And I would like to have some explanation from the Secretariat's technical side. Sanjaya can you give us a summary?
SANJAYA: Thank you, chair. The system is, for the NRO NC election, is the system is designed to allow one vote per Member. It doesn't really care whether a vote from the Member has to be from different IP addresses or from a different user. The system checks that one Member can only have one vote, and on that one, the system performs perfectly on that one. But again, there are six votes that are cast from one computer using four different certificates and two different user IDs. But each one of them is only for one account. So that's what happened.
JAMES SPENCELEY: A question. Is it conceivable...
SANJAYA: Different account. Six votes for each of them for six different accounts. So six votes from six members but from...
SANJAYA: Same computer. Is it conceivable that one -
JAMES SPENCELEY: Is it conceivable that the one contact is from multiple organizations?
SANJAYA: It is common in APNIC membership to have a consultant having access to a few different accounts using different user IDs and certificates.
JAMES SPENCELEY: So if we could summarize the issue. The issue is that only one Member voted in each of those occurrences but it was the same contact that voted. Sorry, the same...
SANJAYA: The same computer. The same IP address.
AKINORI MAEMURA: In that case, the technical conduct for those Members is, one single computer to cast the votes from those memberships. I think that that is correct.
FARHAD: Just one addition. It is four certificates. If there was six, there would be no doubt, we would be okay with it. It is four certificates which is why there's some doubt and there's nothing that we can read that says the number of certificates equals the number of Members or not.
JAMES SPENCELEY: My understanding is no correlation between a Member and a certificate. That could be shared across two Members. Is that correct? It is correct.
SKEEVE STEVENS: I'm assuming this is me. My voting. And if there's any specific questions I'm more than happy to address that. It sounds like the same numbers but there were questions at the time about certificates and I had an APNIC staff member assisting me with browser configurations and we do represent many Members and we have the appropriate voting rights in the settings in MyAPNIC. So I believe that everything was done right, but I'm not sure what the issue is about that. Because there were multiple certificates used and ones that weren't in the specific issues with the log-in and the right to use.
JAMES SPENCELEY: So to clarify. You're a technical contact authorized to vote on multiple Members.
SKEEVE STEVENS: I have more Members, just not configured from my account. We have seven or eight in the current account that we look after which was one of the enhancements in the last year ago that MyAPNIC can do. Because that's what my business does. We build Internet companies, we form new Members and our customers trust us to do voting on their behalf.
JAMES SPENCELEY: OK.
GAURAB RAJ UPADHAYA: I think what Skeeve said there. I was going to say that. And as far as I understand, I think you can be a Corporate Contact voting a network person for two different organizers and use the same certificate. That was the MyAPNIC announcement we asked for because we were getting tired of having to maintain many different ones, just because we were responsible for more than one Member? So, you know, if you are a Corporate Contact for more than one Member, would you probably get two votes to be able to vote twice using the same certificate, same browser and same IP, same computer.
SKEEVE STEVENS: I mean, certificates are not. There was one Member for vote. I'm sure that that is not in dispute.
JAMES SPENCELEY: Scrutineers, that's not in dispute?
GAURAB RAJ UPADHAYA: So what the scrutineers are saying is that you are the same Member voting twice? Using two different certificates?
FARHAD: Actually, both comment answers seem to be yes. Yes, it seems that the number of total Members equals the number of votes, because we have two separate reports on each and the numbers do match. And yes, there have been one Member with two certificates using two votes and one having multiple imvotes and another having one vote. That's also there. Sorry, not one Member, one user.
GAURAB RAJ UPADHAYA: You can't have one Member voting twice.
FARHAD: One user using two certificates and another one and having multiple votes. That's been the case.
SKEEVE STEVENS: I should explain the situation that is and that is that you can have multiple MyAPNIC accounts. I have a Skeeve log-in which has multiple Members and it has one certificate. But I also have, say, Member name, Skeeve, as another log-in. And that has its own certificate. So that's how that came up. I have multiple accounts, but still one Member and one vote.
GAURAB RAJ UPADHAYA: Yeah, I think what Skeeve is talking about is the transition phase, because I have to deal with multiple APNIC accounts in the past, and I asked for this feature whereby we said, can we have one certificate, and one way, we can do all of our APNIC stuff. And I think that I have managed to consolicate everything into one account now. I done know if Skeeve did that.
SKEEVE STEVENS: I don't have them all yet.
GREG SOFFE: My opinion is that if the certificates are valid, the votes should stand. Regardless of what IP they came from. They were there to identify the Members and if the Members have a vote, the certificates should take precedence.
FARHAD: I'll cut you off, just for time's sake. Because we don't want this to go on forever. I think that our question has been answered. If one certificate can have multiple votes and one individual can have multiple certificates, that's fine and the online voting should stand. I think that that answers our question, so thank you.
AKINORI MAEMURA: Thank you.
PAVAN DUGGAL: Mr Chairman. This is one example to demonstrate to the entire community that the rules, regulations pertaining to conducting elections are not adequate. Though an attempt has been made this morning by the honourable chair to come up with certain things, there have been a lot of glaring anomalies here. This has demonstrated the technical challenges that any kind of an online election would be facing, and so, for example, in the words of the chair, terming it as not a formal election itself does different connotations for the community. Secondly, the EC chair, who is currently the chair of the election, technically, and ethically, morally or not, to be adjudicator of a dispute. Because if you have apointed an independent election review panel, you, as the EC, have believed in the efficacy and indeed the effectiveness of the independent panel.
So the adjudication should only be done by an independent panel and not by the chair of the election. So it is a violation of the basic principle that a party can not be the judge. Once you are chairing the elections, you can not be the adjudicator of any kind of disputes. These are some of the primary thoughts coming to my mind at this juncture. I'm sure as the process is going across, we will have far more challenges, but this is a point that we, as a community, need to note, to say that elections like this can not be done in these kind of ad hoc manners without giving the opportunity to the community to react to the election processes and also to contribute. Thank you.
AKINORI MAEMURA: Perhaps
FARHAD: Can I respond to that? Actually, as scrutineers we are the adjudicators of the dispute. We were asking on procedural clarification from everybody else, not from the seat. And as such, we've received the clarification and we've made a decision on this. There is actually no longer a dispute. As independent members, we're unaware of all of the processes of APNIC and as such, when we see something we're not familiar with, we should ask. And when answered by the appropriate procedures, that is how in fact APNIC conducts its elections. We can easily make a decision and we see that there is no longer a dispute. Thank you.
APPLAUSE
JAMES SPENCELEY: I'll just quickly point out, and thank the scrutineers for taking this to attention and clarifying this. I think that this is a positive step that there was a query raised and was able to be answered. So thank you.
OWEN DELONG: Hurricane Electric. With all due respect to Mr Pavan, I don't believe that there was an anomaly. I believe that there was a need for clarification on the details of the technology requested by the scrutineers. That's not an anomaly, that's a a request for clarity. They received the clarity. The room seems to be in general agreement with the clarification that they received. I done see an anomaly or a dispute, I think that it is a proper election and we should move forward.
APPLAUSE
AKINORI MAEMURA: OK, then. We need to see... right now, the question to be going to the community here is to accept the case as the full Members?
JAMES SPENCELEY: My interpretation, and I may be wrong, but the scrutineers had a query that's been answered and I believe that you've withdrawn the query now and you're satisfied with the results.
AKINORI MAEMURA: Result regarding this advice, this confusion.
OK then, how should we do this? Once I had a result, is it better for having the result disclosed to the membership, or should we wait? We shall respect the planned agenda?
OK, then, I will report to you the results of the election. Here is the result. Total votes counted, 269. Total valid ballots, 268. Total invalid ballots, one.
Here's the results of the candidates. Mr Naresh Ajwani. 156 votes.
Mr Hasanul Haque, zero votes. Mr Jonny Martin 108 votes. Mr Tony Sampano, 4 votes. So the successful candidate is Mr Ajwani. Congratulations.
APPLAUSE.
NARESH AJWANI: OK. Thank you very much. I'm glad that the community has voted. I think that it is a very large number of members who participated. I'm very surprised and delighted, but it is a good sign. Thank you very much, community. I assure you of my goal in terms of IP numbers. We have already done certain things out there, and we are planning to do it more. Thank you very much.
AKINORI MAEMURA: Thank you very much. And thank you very much. I would appreciate all scrutineers in this kind of quite extraordinary case, and the APNIC, I think that APNIC should be more accurate to do the election process and get prepared for that. And please, ladies and gentlemen, please send big hands for all of the scrutineers.
OK, let's go to the tea break and please get back to the room in 4 pm. We have the 30 minutes for the tea break. Thank you.
Friday, 27 August 2010, 16:00-16:30 (UTC +10)
OK. Thank you. The next session of the APNIC Member Meeting is starting very soon. Is starting very soon.
AKINORI MAEMURA: OK. Before we get back to the reports, we remain. We'll have some house keeping notices from Sunny.
SRINIVAS CHENDI: Thank you, Chair. Regarding the informal closing dinner tonight at Q 1 Towers, if anyone is interested to go for the informal dinner, we will level the registration desk open for 15 minutes for you to approach the registration desk and pay the $60. And the first bus will leave at 5:45 from the lobby level to the Q 1 Towers. Thank you. Thank you chair.
AKINORI MAEMURA: Thank you very much.
OK, there is one additional report from the RIR. Because we just had the presentation file from AfriNIC and Paul Wilson will deliver the report of AfriNIC for Adiel Akplogan.
PAUL WILSON: Thank you. Thank you, thank you Adiel. I'm pretending to be Adiel for this presentation, sort of a role switch we do from time to time when it is not possible to be around in person. We did speak to Adiel about possibly presenting remotely, but he is travelling at the moment which also explains the delay in the receipt of these slides. So it is me pretending to Adiel. He may actually be available online somewhere on jabber if there are any questions as well. He did say that he would try to do that.
So, speaking for AfriNIC.
We have grown continuously during the past five years in terms of activity, budget, and membership. The factors behind that being the community and its continuous support. The team at work, the board, and not to mention our peer RIRs.
At a glance, AfriNIC now has 16 employees with more than 600 active members, $2.1 million operating budget for the year. Twelve policy meetings held so far, training more than 1,000 people so far on IPv6 and Internet number resource management. Visiting 38 countries for awareness and training, 19 policies adopted through the policy process. And three more are currently under discussion.
AfriNIC also has a new office. They've just moved in June this year to an office that looks rather like that. Very nice.
They are very busy, I know. Engineering and infrastructure is a busy area for all RIRs as I hope you heard today. Ongoing projects, optimization of infrastructure services, virtualization is something that I know that several of the RIRs are doing. And work on a new network operations center in Mauritius, which is where of course we, AfriNIC, are based, in Mauritius. So, the resource PKI deployment. They've implemented a test bed and testing. Also integrating into the membership portal which, for those APNIC Members, is rather like MyAPNIC. In fact, it's called MyAfriNIC and it is undergoing continuous improvement to bring in features include payment, evoting and resource business PKI interfaces. They're also working with the RIRs on whois DNSSEC.
Anycasting their DNSSEC and other related projects. In the Member Services area, new dedicated membership service areas, enhanced automation, creation of dedicated frontline support liaison. Rather like the Helpdesk that we've got. Payment and administration is something that, as we grow, we all need to deal with. And as I said, the Helpdesk goal in general is to consolidate member related services into a single point of contact. These, I know, are all challenging things for any RIR, and AfriNIC being the smaller of the five, has no doubt got a lot of big challenges in doing these things, it's a good thing to see. In terms of a new registration and a new category of individuals and organisations that I gather would be for those who don't need IP addresses or other resources but want to join AfriNIC for the sake of support.
Modifications to the old RSA and appeals process. And clarification AfriNIC's role as an RIR.
AfriNIC's membership looks like this. The left-hand chart is the membership distribution across the economies of the region. For those who may not be familiar, and I can't claim to know all of the African ccTLDs, but ZA is South Africa. NG would be Nigeria. Egypt, Tanzania, and Ghana and so it goes on. The right-hand side show the distribution of AfriNIC members as they've grown in the different size categories and they seem to have six different sized categories and maybe adding a new category of the 'membership only' at some point soon. And the membership growth has been pretty steady and obviously accelerating as you see on lower part of the graph, so a total of substantially over 600 members across Africa is a pretty substantial load for the people at AfriNIC. And I'm very glad to have the pleasure of reporting these figures to you.
Busy also at awareness and cooperation and training. So six trainings, I think, in this year. Regional involvement with governments. AfriNIC has a huge continent to cover, and many governments of course. A GWG meeting. Someone might be able to help me there. I might take a guess at Government Working Group, meeting planned during AfriNIC-13. The second law enforcement workshop taking place during AfriNIC-13 as well. Incubating new interest groups. AfCERT would be the emergency response team, and of course, AfriNIC is a fully-fledged member, one of five in the NRO, and they are continuing to actively participate in the NRO and support and contribute to the operations of the NRO through the NRO's Executive Committee and the coordination groups that you've heard about today.
The biggest challenge that AfriNIC faces today is human resources. Hiring a skilled and dedicated staff. They have had a few positions unfilled for some time, so here's the plug. If you're interested, APNIC staff please close your ears! If you're interested in spending some time on a beautiful island and supporting what AfriNIC is doing, please contact HR@afrinic.net there and there are positions open in communications area manager, technical writer and editor, marketing officer, systems engineer, software engineer, web developer, and IPv6 program manager. So there you have it. I mean, that's obviously a big challenge for AfriNIC and I'm sure that Adiel is being quite sincere in seeking any help that he can get in finding people who can contribute to AfriNIC in those roles.
So quite seriously, it would be fantastic if there were people in this room or if you could help in some way to fill those positions.
OK, I think this is the last slide. You're very cordially invited to the AfriNIC 13 meeting in Johannesburg, 20-26 of November and there you have the details. I'm sure that they're on the AfriNIC website. And I think that South Africa would be a very interesting place to go to these days after the infrastructure development that they've had recently at the World Cup, for the World Cup in South Africa, I mean. So I'd love to go there myself. I'm not sure that it will be possible, but I'd highly recommend those who are interested in the development, particularly of an RIR and it is in this stage of AfriNIC's development, then please do consider going along to visit AfriNIC at AfriNIC 13. Thank you.
APPLAUSE
Whether Adiel is online at the moment, I don't know.
AKINORI MAEMURA: Thank you Paul.
PAUL WILSON: If there are questions then please go ahead and we'll see. If not, thank you.
AKINORI MAEMURA: Thank you for preparing the slides. OK, this is the last part and we have a couple of announcements. First, APNIC 2011 in Hong Kong is being introduced by Che-Hoo Cheng, part of the hosts.
CHE-HOO CHENG: Good afternoon. My name is Che-Hoo. I'm representing the Hong Kong hosts of the next APRICOT-APAN joint meeting. But if you've been to the previous APNIC meetings, you probably have seen this presentation before. But anyway, I'm going to repeat it. I don't want you to forget about it, because you have to mark the dates into your calendar now.
As listed here, well, the hosts of the Hong Kong meeting will be Internet Society Hong Kong and dotAsia organization, and we have HKIX, Hong Kong Internet Service Providers Association and JUCC, the co-hosts. So we have very good support behind. And this is our logo. A bit complicated but if you are familiar with Hong Kong, you probably can recognize some of the buildings here. And if you don't know, please come to Hong Kong and hopefully you can find out where they are.
And the dates is February 21-25. That's the main conference week. And as the tradition of APRICOT, we have a technical workshop one week before and this year, we tried to have a short break on Sunday, so the workshop will be from the 15-19 February. And we'll hold the workshop in Cyberport, which is not in the same venue as the main conference. And one thing I really want to highlight is, this is the very first joint event of APRICOT and APAN. I'm not sure whether you know about APAN. APAN is Asia Pacific Advise network. And it is an organization which is composed of people mainly from the Internet community and not a lot of them actually come to APNIC meetings or APRICOT conferences. There are only maybe five to ten of them attending both. There's me, Professor Ma Yan. Bruce? Bruce?
There he is! Maybe he's gone. Anyway, there are not many people attending both. But it is a good opportunity for the commercial providers to talk to the academic people, and the usual number of attendees is in the range of 200 to 300. So we expect that we can have around 1,000 participants and also, this is the first APAN meeting in Hong Kong and the second APRICOT in Hong Kong. So I think that it should be attractive to people and if you look at the beautiful pictures here, you can experience the harbour view alongside the commercial center, and we also have good food and also good shopping areas.
I don't want to go through this video clips, but if you click on it, you can have a better understanding.
Coming to Hong Kong is easy. More than 170 countries can come to Hong Kong without visa. But before you come, do check the list first. Some of the countries actually need to have a visa, need to apply for a visa to come to Hong Kong. And the infrastructure, well, we're very strong, we have very good power infrastructure. And we almost never have power outages, not like the other countries. And in terms of transportation, we are airline hub in the heart of Asia. And we also have very good internal transportation system.
Currency, our Hong Kong dollars are actually packed with US dollars so in terms of budgeting, it is quite easy to do. And safety and security is excellent. You know, you don't need to worry about that.
And we also have and picked a very good meeting venue. I'll talk more about that, and also we have very good hotel facilities around the conference venue. And another good thing is, it's easy to import things to Hong Kong. We don't have any import tax and if you want to do a demonstration with your high-end equipment, it's easy to import into Hong Kong. And wow, the best part of course is dining. We have all kinds of western food and Chinese food and eastern food but, I cannot guarantee you that you can have good food in the conference hall! But definitely, the food, at dinner will be good, I guarantee!
The language barrier. There's no language barrier. A lot of people can speak English and nowadays, of course, you know, more people can speak Mandarin because after the handover we had more and more tourists visiting from mainland China. And the other best part is that there's no sales tax in Hong Kong, which is really good. You know, if you buy a an iPad here, don't forget when you go out of this country, don't forget to claim your tax back. But in Hong Kong, you don't have this kind of worry. and the iPad is very cheap in Hong Kong, probably the cheapest. iPhone too! And all unlocked!
In terms of venue, we have chosen the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre. There's a picture of it. Very excellent facilities. Big rooms, theatres. And it's located in Wan Chai in Hong Kong Island alongside the beautiful Victoria Harbour. And it has walkway and bridges to the nearby hotels, commercial buildings, ferry pier, MTR station. And of course, the other facilities like banks and post offices and everything which is very close to the venue. Here's the map. And actually, you can see, HKCEC is almost at the centre of Hong Kong Island, the northern side. And it's just between San Cho and Causeway Bay. San Cho is the business area in Hong Kong, the main business area in Hong Kong. And Causeway Bay is the main shopping area in Hong Kong. So you can go to either one to experience that.
And in terms of hotels, there are a lot of hotels around the convention centre. Well, the convention centre actually is very big. But the rooms that we have gotten are closer to the MTR station and closer to the hotels. So of course, if you want to do exercise, of course, you can have many options, but if you don't want to do exercises, you know, that's better.
And in terms of hotels, we have already got agreements with these hotels. We have got very good rates from them. And especially the Harbour View Hotel, we have blocked more than 100 rooms over there and the rates over there is very, very reasonable, less than $100 US per night, and it is very, very close to the convention centre. So this would be our recommendation. If you want a more luxury hotel, you know, there are Grand Hyatts beside the convention centre and the Renaissance Harbour View beside the convention centre, and many others.And in terms of keynote speaker, we have invited Dr Vinton G. Cerf, the Father of the Internet. Well, I hope that we can have the confirmation from him by the end of this month, and if we can have him, I think that it will attract a lot of participants, including the local participants.
For the technical set-up. For show, we will have dual band WiFi and we are talking about having 1GB upstream connection. And because of APAN, well, we are talking to our sponsor to get 10GB circuit specifically for medical workshops and other super high end video streaming and that kind of thing. And in fact, we have got a very good response from our sponsor. We may have more than 10G to the venue. If it is confirmed, I will let you know. And if you have any idea which can make use of this huge bandwidth, just let me know. But I suppose that it will be video-related.
And so, in terms of connectivity, I don't think that it is a big problem. But WiFi of course, as always, it may have some issues and I hope that those WiFi experts over here can give us some suggestions and advice.
For the social event, most probably on Monday night, we'll go to the Peak. As you can see from the left side, from there, you can have an excellent night view of the harbour. And of course, the food over there will be very, very good. And because it is a bit away, a bit far away from the venue, so we will arrange shuttle buses, but you know, you don't need to worry about it. It is only a 25 minute ride up to the hill.
And for the closing, tentatively, we have chosen a restaurant which is close to the HKCEC. Eight to ten minutes by foot. And we also think that, thinking about where to go on Wednesday and where to go on Friday. But anyway, yeah, don't worry about that. We definitely will find good restaurants.
We got a registration fee. Because it is a joint event, we want to make things as simple as possible, so we will do one registration fee for all sessions, and we'll have special rates for members, APAN, APNIC. And we also want to encourage the students to join, so we will have special rates for students. And it should be good, especially for the APAN sessions. And we expect a lot of other co-located events. Of course, APNIC 31 will be there. And also, Asia Future Internet Forum will also have a meeting there. APNG Camp. APTLD. AP Star Retreat, Dot Asia and many others. And if you want to hold co-located events over there, especially if it is Asia Pacific based, related, then just let us know.
For the technical workshop, as I said, it will be held in the Cyberport, which is a bit far away from the main venue. But the facilities over there should be very good. And these are the topics that is we are thinking about. And well, especially I think the DNSSEC is one of the hottest topics recently, so we'll do that.
Yeah, this is the email address for you if you want to hold co-located events. And, the most important thing is sponsorship. If you want to do branding, marketing, and things like that, we welcome your sponsorship. We have a lot of sponsorship, different sponsorship packages for you to choose from. And please contact us if you're interested. And one of the hosts, dotAsia will underwrite the loss. But dotAsia is a not-for-profit organization, and we don't want to have a loss. So we definitely welcome your sponsorship if you plan to do so.
See you all in Hong Kong. Any questions?
AKINORI MAEMURA: Questions, comments? OK, thank you, Che-Hoo.
APPLAUSE
All right, we are now announcing the next APNIC meeting and the next one then.
PAUL WILSON: OK. The next APNIC meeting will be APNIC 31, which will be held with APRICOT 2011 next year in Hong Kong. There are a few slides on this, but I think since we've heard such a great presentation from Che-Hoo, I don't need to go through all the details. You can see them here. If you would like to join us for this meeting, please do. If you wouldn't like to join us, then please change your mind. There will be a lot happening, including an APNIC meeting, and the APNIC meetings which occur with APRICOT tend to be bigger, and even bigger than the stand alone meetings and well worthwhile coming to.
There are a lot of preparations going on coordinating and joining the programs of the APNIC meeting, APRICOT 2011, and APAN. There will be a call for papers for the APNIC segments at least coming out soon, but it will all be well coordinated amongst the program committees for the meetings. We can definitely speak to Hong Kong's amazing status as a destination, and what Che-Hoo mentioned about the events coming up, the social events sounded great. I think that APNIC will have a social event as well, which is yet to be determined. I did hear some whisperings about the Jockey Club! Which would be a pretty ambitious one! For which sponsorship would definitely be required, but that would be a pretty exciting venue, and I'm sorry if I've spoiled the surprise for anyone there!
Again, take the opportunity, please, if you can, to contribute by way of sponsorship to these meetings. The sponsorship really is critical. We think that you get, as a sponsor, a very targeted access to an expert community, a community of people who really understand what they want and need, and are in positions to really make decisions about the products that their companies are purchasing. So for sponsorship, we find that it is definitely a high-value event for your recognition, and hopefully for your business around the region.
The surprise that should probably be built up here with a bit of animation is the meeting after the next one, but it is all there. Imagine the fireworks. It's been decided this week that APNIC 32, that is in August 2011, in a year's time, will be held in Busan in South Korea. And that will be hosted very generously by KISA, the Korean Internet and Security Agency, which hosts KRNIC, of course, one of the long-standing APNIC NIRs. So we've received a very fine proposal for the next APNIC meeting, the next stand-alone meeting, APNIC 32 next year. And do we have KISA, KRNIC here? Would you like to come and say, Welcome to Korea!
APPLAUSE
YOONJEONG: Thank you, my name is Kim Yoonjeong, I'm from KRNIC from KISA. It's my second time to the APNIC visit, but I feel like it is a great present for me from APNIC. And I don't know many if you know about Busan. It is a very famous city and the second largest city in Korea, and Busan is very famous for the beaches and the high temperate people, and plastic surgery! If anyone is interested in that. Just come together with your wives!
So we will prepare for APNIC 32 very hard, and I hope that you enjoy Busan and the Korean food like kimchi, they can make the APNIC 32 a fruitful result.
APPLAUSE
PAUL WILSON: I hope that the husbands have access to plastic surgery as well, living in an equal society. Thank you very much. I think that we'll hear at the next meeting, I think that we'll hear yet more about what is planned for APNIC 32. It is a year away, so we've got time to prepare and the arrangements will all be coming over the next six months to report to you again.
So we look forward to next time, to seeing you in Hong Kong. And then in Korea. Thank you.
AKINORI MAEMURA: OK. All right, that's all for the APNIC Member Meeting for here. If you have any comments or questions or... I think that we have some more time here. And it's like an open microphone? If you have anything to share with us then? Please approach the microphone. The floor will be yours!
DAVID WOODGATE: David Woodgate Telstra. I would just like to say, thank you to the Secretariat for an excellent running of the meeting this week and thank you to all the chairs and the EC members who ran the meetings and BoFs throughout the week and did such an excellent job with that too.
AKINORI MAEMURA: Thank you very much, David. Any other comments? If not... right, then, OK, that's all for the APNIC Member Meeting for APNIC 30. Thank you very much everyone for participating in that. Thank you very much. See you next time.
APPLAUSE
PAUL WILSON: We do have the traditional roll of thanks though, to go through here and I hope that you'll bear with me. We really do again like to thank the sponsors of APNIC meetings very sincerely. We are deeply grateful for the support that we receive from all of the sponsors in all of the tiers, of course, and the attendance of the sponsors really does make the meetings successful. As you know, the Opening Reception and the IPv6 connectivity from sponsor by Vocus, and Vocus has had their acknowledgement for that, but I would again like to say to James and his crew here, thank you very much for a really enjoyable session on the opening evening. And also for IPv6 connectivity, which I know has been working extremely well all week.
So thanks very much to Vocus.
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Telstra sponsored the following night's event, the Social Event over at Seaworld, which was also a great event. They also provided the connectivity, the bandwidth for this meeting and that was really important. It's also performed fantastically well and so thanks very much to Telstra. David.
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Now, this meeting was intended, as everyone knows, we intended to be holding it in Bangkok. But events conspired against us and the APNIC EC had the very difficult decision a few months ago to relocate the meeting. We felt that the, although the chances of any mishaps were very low, and it turned out that they would have been very low. But the travel advisories and company policies were conservative, and in order to allow the, all of you to receive permission to, and support to come to this meeting, we did, the EC did decide to relocate to Brisbane, or nearby Brisbane, which has been the back-up location, which thankfully, we haven't had to rely on in the past. We did this time, but the real shame of it was the Telecom of Thailand, the host of the APNIC 30 meeting, really had a lot of great stuff in store for us and they did some really good work for us in preparation for the meeting. It was, I hope, maybe not just disappointment, but there might have been some relief at the time that we actually did have to relocate the meeting, but I think that it is a shame never the less, and I really do hope that we get the chance to go back to Thailand in person. We had participation, as you know, remotely from the remote room in Bangkok as well. And that was supported by TOT, but I really think that their contribution, the contribution in the preparation and in the remote room really does deserve a vote of thanks and we do hope be able to take them up again at another time.
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SYLVIA CADENA: Just one comment from the jabber chat with the remote participants thanking the organization for opening the meeting to the global community and in joining. We have been monitoring all of the sessions and channelling any questions. And they are just expressing that to the floor.
PAUL WILSON: That's nice to hear. Thanks Sylvia.
We have three Gold Sponsors to thank. Alcatel Lucent, PHCOLO, and Google, all of whom came to the party and helped with this meeting. So thank you to those three.
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We have In Kind Sponsorship from Next Byte and On The Net for some of the facilities here on the Gold Coast.
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and we have four Sponsors for the Member Meeting today, and I believe all are in the room, and I would like to say a personal thanks and give a gift to representatives from CNNIC and KRNIC and JPNIC and TWNIC, if you're in the room. So please, please come up and allow me to do that.
APPLAUSE So, more thanks, the Program Committee worked particularly hard this time. It's committee was regenerated, as you see. There's a long list of individuals who helped to put together the content. I think that it was a great success this time, and I think that we should offer them all, collectively, the biggest encouragement to keep improving the program of the APNIC meeting and make sure that it gets better and better. So thanks to the program committee.
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To the invited and guest speakers, to the chairs and the moderators. The SIG chairs and co-chairs, all of whom have been helping out in preparation beforehand, not only this week but in preparations.
Emer and Alannah from Red Bee giving us the fantastic live captions feed, which always seems miraculous. So thanks to you especially and to everyone I've just mentioned.
There's also the Executive Council who have bravely agreed to all be up on stage from this meeting onwards. And there are some gifts, which Sunny will distribute to the EC members. These are not bottles of alcohol by the way. These are a traditional Australian gift, which is kind of like a small didgeridoo. The story is there, but it's an emu caller. So you if go home and learn to blow through that, you may attract emus! If you don't, keep trying.
The APNIC staff are here in some number today because they work just up the road, well, one hour up the road in Brisbane. And we have more staff than usual. I encouraged everyone in the office to come down, if not during the week earlier, then for the day today. Normally the staff who turn up at the meetings and support and help the meetings are the ones who you get to see. But there are also quite a handful who stay back at home and for some of them, they may have been working at APNIC day in and day out for years and not had the opportunity to see a meeting. And this was a good a good opportunity and I really do welcome all of the staff and appreciate the support and the hard work of all of the staff here and those who do stay back in making this meeting a success, the relocation from Thailand was a special challenge, because we did only have not the normally year of preparation, but actually only a few months.
So everyone chipped in and I hope that it has paid off. I think it has, but I would like to thank the APNIC staff in particular. Thank you.
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We've had the Asia Pacific ASO AC members here. We've had Fujisaki-San, we've had Kenny and Naresh, all playing their part. We've had colleagues from RIRs who had a new challenge today as well. Thanks to all of you and to those who helped today. Thanks, last, but not least, to everyone who is here, or who has left early. I see that there are a few. But that's fine. But also, those who came along remotely, and who sat through, in some cases, I know quite a lot of the meeting as it is being web cast too many of you to list here. I hope that I'll know everyone's names eventually, because I hope also to see you back here so that I can do that. Thank you to you all for being here.
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You know by now where we're meeting again, so I'll see you in Hong Kong. Thanks.
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AKINORI MAEMURA: OK, thank you very much. That's all. This time, it's really last. Thank you very much.
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SRINIVAS CHENDI: Just for the APNIC staff, can you come forward for a group photograph, please.