Transcript

APNIC 23
APNIC Member Meeting - Session One
Friday 2 March 2007
0900-1030

PAUL WILSON: Good morning, everyone. I think we should probably make a start, thanks.

This is the APNIC member meeting, the last day of APNIC 23, and it is the day where we talk about member business and you will hear a number of reports about what has been happening at the APNIC Secretariat and APNIC more generally over the last year.

The first thing we should do before getting into the agenda is to say thanks to the sponsors. CNNIC is gold sponsor for today and they have made a contribution to make the meeting a success and they are joined by JPNIC, CNNIC, NIDA and TWNIC. Thanks very much to those sponsors of the meetings and I would like to give them a round of applause.
APPLAUSE
This meeting is being web cast, so welcome also to anyone who is tuning in on the web cast. What it means is if you are going to speak, and you are encouraged to speak, then please wait for a microphone to come to you or come up to one of the microphones. Please say who you are and speak clearly into the microphone, it is also for the benefits of the audio archive and the stenocaptioning, which is going on here.

A couple more announcements. We have, in the annual meeting, an election of positions on the APNIC EC. The EC election web page has been up and is on the website for some time. You should be able to see we have got 11 candidates being elected today. There will be a chance for all of those candidates to introduce themselves and make a speech just before lunch-time. There will also be an explanation at that time of the voting system. But for those who are quite familiar and who would like to vote any time now, they can do so by filling in the ballot papers and depositing them in the ballot box outside at the registration desk. Voting is open now and will close immediately after lunch. That is necessary to give us time to count and announce the result before the end of the day.

What I would ask you to do before you vote is to check that you have the right number of ballot papers in your registration pack. This applies to APNIC members only. As an APNIC member, you should, or someone from your organisation should have received a kit with an envelope for ballot papers, one for every ballot paper you hold. Please check the number of ballot papers is what you expect. The valid papers are also stamped on the back with a stamp, which will be checked to make sure they are valid papers.

As I say, voting is open now. If you have any doubts, then please wait until the voting process is explained just before lunch.

We have got a couple of prize draws happening. We have got two of these beautiful little MP3 players here. They are being given to a random, lucky person who has filled in the meeting survey, which you are all encouraged to do and go into the prize draw and also by visiting the APNIC services lounge you can find out how to win the other iPod Shuffles. It is the area outside there where we have got the flash demonstration playing and that sort of thing. You can go out there and drop your business card or something like that. If you haven't done it already, you can visit there and find out how to win the second of the iPod Shuffles.

What else? We have, at the end of the day today, an informal closing dinner. Anyone who would like to join is very welcome to do that. But what I will ask you to do is please put your name down, if you wish to join, outside at the registration desk and to do that before the end of morning tea today so we can confirm numbers and let the venue know. I think that is all I have got to mention.

Let's move on then to look at the agenda for this morning.

As usual, there is a fair amount of reporting that is going on today. We have reports from the Secretariat, including the various areas of the Secretariat, from the EC, reporting on the NRO and other various projects, also reports from the RIRs. So there is a fair bit to listen to today. I hope it is all of interest to you. The afternoon is similar but we are reporting back from the SIGs and BoFs and so forth. Then the end of the day, we will announce the EC election results and the winners, the prize draws.

That is the agenda. All this information is on the website. We are trying to reduce the printing and use of paper these days so we haven't provided a lot of printed information but you can see the agendas on the website. If there are comments, suggestions or questions about the agenda, right now, please let's have them.

The one thing I would like to try today, something a little new, not entirely new but fairly new in this audience - I'll ask everyone to pay attention for just one second and look up from these things. As I say, we have a quite a few people preparing reports and they have come quite a distance to prepare and give the reports, so I would appreciate, on their behalf, if we could all just pay attention to what they are presenting and try to avoid being sucked completely into the technology.

That is not something I have actually asked before, but we might try some experimental systems or some sort of incentive in the future to get you all to look up from the screens and try and participate a bit more. One of the things about this meeting is we have web cast, roving mics, there is plenty of opportunity to contribute and talk. I know, myself, if I have been sitting looking at my screen for too long then I do sort of tune out. I know it is very hard to participate if you are trying to time share.

So far we are still providing wireless in the meeting rooms and will continue to provide wireless in the meeting rooms unless the more voluntary effort is a complete failure. Enough said, but I will remind us all again as time goes on.



Moving into the reports, I have a couple of reports of a general nature about the Secretariat before we move into the specific areas of the reports about certain activities that have been under way.

One of the things I would like to mention is during the second half of last year we, internally within the APNIC staff, looked at the structure of the staff and undertook a sort of restructure of the internal organisation. The Secretariat has grown to about 50 staff and we had a fairly flat structure. As Director General I have had upwards of 12 or so people reporting to me, which is fairly difficult when we are required to be travelling and so forth.

What we have done is looked at the most effective way to organise the Secretariat and there is an extra level of management which has been put in. I think that will help us with our internal communications and general operations quite a bit in future.

What this diagram is showing you is we see APNIC services are central to everything. These are resource services, membership, training and online. It is in the middle surrounded by three separate organisational units which provide supporting services to those core areas.

The communication area is documentation, marketing and outreach and events. The technical area is network operations, software and security. The business area is financial, office and HR matters.

That is what it looks like. The people who are involved with this structure, there is the DG at the top, smiling away. These are the four units, services communications technical and business. There are four areas.

We have another person at the same level represented by the mad scientist who is cooking up 32-bit ASNs in a beaker, and you can probably guess who it is. But those five people plus myself form the executive team and we have, at the moment Sanjaya, who you all know filled in two of the roles, looking after both services and technical. Gerard is looking after communications. The business area manager position is vacant and I expect will be filled during the year and Geoff, of course, is the chief scientist. That is the macro structure.

Now I won't go any deeper than that for the time being but we will have some area reports coming up at least for services communications and technical, and you will hear more about what is going on in each of those areas.



I would like to move into the next report about the member survey. In our original agenda it was a bit later in the day but there has been discussion about the member survey just over the course of this week. There seems to be quite a lot of interest in what we learned from the latest member survey. I'm going to give a summary now of what we learned.

I'm pretty much reporting from the report of the member survey. John Earls of KPMG who conducted the survey was intending to be here and present it but, unfortunately, he couldn't make it so I'm presenting his information.

What is going to happen from here on is the EC and Secretariat, who just really quite recently received this information, are going to be having a look at exactly how we respond. As we have done in the past, provide a report or response to the survey that gives some idea of how we interpret the results.

This is the fourth survey we have had. These are quite formal serious surveys conducted independently from APNIC, APNIC staff, by KPMG, the international firm. So what we achieve through contracting KPMG is they are completely independent of APNIC, guarantee the confidentiality of the respondents so the report is written, any information which comes through the report is anonymised so it can't be sourced back to anyone. That is pretty important for the most open and frank sort of feedback that we can get.

We did three surveys previously in 1999, 2001, 2004 and now it is 2007. So we seem to have a pattern, it is not exactly fixed but we seem to have a pattern of doing this every three years or so.

The latest survey was just launched in November 2006 and completed, just received about a week ago, in fact, from KPMG.

In preparing for this report John Earls, in particular, was interested to know what we had done with the previous reports. If you look at the survey website you can see all the records of the previous reports, the introductory letters, the survey reports, the responses written by the Secretariat.

But John was also asking what we have actually done internally and how to demonstrate the effective response to the surveys received. He conducted his own survey of the APNIC staff to look in detail at what items from previous surveys have been actioned. He took some time to do that and he has written his own report from that, which is included in this current latest survey report. What he found was that 90% of what had come out of previous surveys has been actioned, 39% is completed work, 51% is ongoing and he gives some commentary about how and why work would be completed or ongoing, etc. It is quite a useful and important step prior to the latest survey.

Here is a look at how all four surveys - including the latest one - have turned out. It is quite nice to see that there is quite a sharp, ongoing increase in participation. The latest survey, 2007, had 316 responses I think and they came from 33 economies or so. It comes from each survey, which increases the value we receive from the survey. It demonstrates, I think, some ongoing interest and satisfaction of the survey process and it is good to see. The survey report is on the website now.

I'm going to give you a summary of what the results look like, but the report and its appendices are pretty substantial documents. Please take a time to look at them in detail, so please look at the appendices in particular.

These surveys have been all stakeholder surveys. So members, non-members and anyone interested has been able to participate with the confidentiality guarantee.

This time the survey was completely online. Previously we have had, the survey process started with John Earls doing a lot of travel and talking to stakeholders directly. He has found the process is quite well understood and it is certainly more economical to do the surveys in an electronic format. We had an online form, we provided alternatives so people could fax or email and only one person faxed it in and two emailed.

We provided the facilities for non-English responses, but we didn't get any. We didn't have to spend any money on translation. It is entirely the choice of the respondent, of course, but we entirely prepared to do translations.

One thing KPMG does is validate the original survey in the first place. In August last year a draft survey was sent to 50 members, who was selected by John Earls, to make sure it was representative. It provided feedback on the form itself to make sure it was clear enough and covered what seemed to be the right issues. The survey was conducted and launched and we had the result recently. A good spread across all membership categories. 35 or 50, I suppose were non-member responses. That is the no answer and the non-member responses add up to 50 and otherwise a good spread across the membership categories.

What John also asked was how long the respondent had been a member. We had 16 who had been members for more than 10 years but, again, a good spread of responses indicating we see quite a wide range of membership and different types of perspectives represented.

The survey had four parts, 44 questions in part one, relating to APNIC's performance to date. You were asked to rate from 1 to 10 the various aspects of APNIC's activities and performance.

The second part allowed people to allocate resources, 100 points, with a set of three questions with six options. There was opportunity for free-form input and we are looking into the future to do mini surveys. And to avoid continually spamming the membership, I suppose, we were asking for volunteers who would be interested and got a good response from people who would like to be involved.

I don't expect you to read this, this is a sauntered view of all questions. On the rating scale, the minimum rating was 6.06 and the maximum was 8.45. It is a good spread in terms of overall appreciation for the services. Please have a look at the report.

What I'm going to do is have a look at the top 10 from the list and the bottom 10 from the list to give a flavour for what is most appreciated and what we may need to work on a little bit more.

I'm going to go quite quickly through the top 10. At No.1 in fact, 8.45 or so felt the involvement with DNS root server operations is important.

The next was APNIC publication of statistics and other reports about Internet development.

APNIC support for Internet development throughout the region.

This is a little bit of a mixture between general areas and specific services. The next one is a specific service, saying simply email is the effective and efficient way to contact APNIC. The Whois database operates satisfactorily. Services and servers generally are well maintained and available.

The next one is about meetings saying technical content, as opposed to policy content, is an important part of APNIC open policy meetings. The helpdesk provides a good service. We make good use of email and mailing listing and at the top 10 is just the overall services provided by APNIC are satisfactory. As I say, there is a lot more detail in terms of what people have said, additional comments to be contributed to any of these questions and other analysis as part of the reporting. There is a flavour of the top 10.

The bottom 10 - and I'll stress here the bottom of the bottom 10 was 6.06 out of 10 so I think, to me, it doesn't sound too bad but it certainly indicates that, relatively speaking, we have a bit of work to do in collective areas. Some of the things are related, in the policy development process in particular. People didn't think the policy development process was fair nor easy to understand nor that APNIC policy documents are easy to access and understand.

On the service side of things, phone via VoIP is not necessarily seen as effective or efficient as email, which appeared in the top 10.

The process and requirements for obtaining resources are clear and straightforward. The value we get from APNIC justifies the cost. APNIC learning is easy to find. Phone via the standard telephone network is effective and easy. The role of the NRO and the ASO are understood. APNIC training - easy to attend and the open policy meetings affordable and easy to attend. That is the lowest of the low and that one being whether meetings are affordable and easy to attend in person.

As I say, we need to do more analysis to draw conclusions from this and to report back to the members what the plan is. This is normally a plan that will come from the EC as well as the Secretariat to say what will be areas of focus or our response to the focus.

Part two is about future resource allocation.

Again, I have sorted these from top to bottom and you can see which areas were seen as the most important for the allocation of the most resources. I'll just go through the top 10 there.

The top here, for future allocation of resources was research and development activities such as DNS measurements, debogonising, 4-byte numbers etc. Streamline resource requests is an area for future resource allocations and it equates to the low ranking of ease of access to the resources.

Increasing accessibility of APNIC meetings reflects that down on the bottom of the list.

Four, representing the needs of the ISP community followed by expense of training activities, improving website, supporting ISP education, deploying more root servers, resource certification and, finally, expanding external communications. And below that, a number of activities that weren't seen as so important.

It is - I'm finishing up with a couple of ways of interpreting the data. When we look at section one, the general satisfaction with APNIC activities, it increases steadily from the smallest to the largest membership categories.

It is a clear trend there and likewise for member duration. We have quite a substantial increase in satisfaction as members have more experience with APNIC and it would probably equate to the size of members as they grow over time as well. It might give us some interesting insights into how we can improve and for whom we need to improve aspects of APNIC's operation.

That is the survey for 2007.

Just a summary and, as I say, we have got more work to do on this and it will come up on the website. But if you would like to see the full results of the survey, they are on the website at that URL. So are there any questions?

During the end of the day there will be a number of points during which questions can be asked or comments made. Participation can happen. Please, if you have got any questions ask them now, save them for later. That is all from me on the Secretariat activities.

The next part of our agenda is to be hearing from our area managers, Sanjaya firstly, and then Gerard about specific areas of APNIC.



SANJAYA: Good morning, everyone. I'm Sanjaya, currently wearing the Services Area Manager hat. I have two hats today, so I'll start with the Services Area Manager. As Paul said, this is the focal point of APNIC services, while the other area is supporting this area, because this is where we really deliver our values to the members and the stakeholders.

In the Services area, we have four main units or functions, the first one being the Resource Services. These are the people who hand out IP resources or ASN. And then there's the Member Services that handles the member relationships, helpdesk and so on. And the Training Services, which is obvious, they deliver training throughout the whole region. And Online Services is a small function, but very important, and is going to grow very fast in the future, because our region is so large that a lot of things we have to deliver online.

Right, I'll start with the Resource Services. What I'm going to do is to report what happened last year and then what would be our priority next year - this year, in 2007.

In 2006, the Resource Services Unit received new IANA delegations. We received three /8s for IPv4. We have very big /12 of IPv6 from IANA and also about 1,000 AS numbers, the 4-byte AS numbers. We did not receive the 2-byte AS numbers because we still have some in stock.

We made about 827 IPv4 Allocations, a total of 3.09 /8s, so we basically distributed all that we got. 41 IPv6 allegations, a total of 3,226 /32s. We did 533 AS assignments and there were 108 IPv4 assignments - special assignments for the critical infrastructure, Internet access points and multihoming.

For this year, that is our team members, led by Guangliang Pan. Guangliang, can you stand up. This is Guangliang, our Resource Services manager. He has five people reporting to him to deliver - to do the allocation and assignment services. What we are going to do in 2007 is we - I think, taking the feedback from the survey, we realised that we do still need to streamline some of our procedures, so Guangliang is going to work hard on streamlining the procedures to make it easy for our members to manage their registration data.

We will also start doing IPv6 portable Assignment Policy. Hopefully this will increase the take-up of IP version 6 in this region by allowing multihoming organisations to request an IPv6.

Realising that the IPv4 address space is going out fast, we will also start to prioritise our work around the recovering the unrouted historical resource, so expect to see more activities in this area.

Also, quite importantly this year, NIR processing improvements. NIR is APNIC extension, they are the partner, and we are going to do a lot of things together with them to improve the processes.

And, last, but not least, is the resource certification service planning. If not the end of this year or early next year, we expect to see some real pilot issuing of the resource certificates to the members.

Right. Now on to the Member Services. This is the team that handles the members' relationships and helpdesk operations. It was established - this is a new unit, established last year. Basically to provide a one-stop shop for membership support. So all inquiries into APNIC would be gated through this unit. We maintain the helpdesk operations there. We receive over 2,000 calls, 11,000 e-mails and if an increasing number of online chat. I think online chat is a very - I would really recommend you to try our online chat. It's very easy. The communication is written. You can cut and paste things, you can, you know, show URLs, we can give you pointers to get you the right information that you need. So have a look and please try our online chat service.

We have George Kuo leading the membership services. I don't know if George is here. He's busy at the registration desk. That's part of his territory. So George Kuo leading has five people reporting to him, basically consisting of Member Services administration as well as the helpdesk that does more of the technical stuff. So there's two groups under him. One is doing more administration and the other one is doing more technical support.

What are we going to do next year - this year! - in 2007 - membership process streamlining. We are improving the whole life cycle from new members coming in to, you know, the maintenance of those members throughout the years, including the access process.

George's team is going to focus on developing a knowledge base. We feel that there's a lot of common questions that people ask in the helpdesk, and I think building a knowledge base would be a good thing for people to sort of self-service their inquiries.

We are also going to implement the Clients First project for fast and easy account opening, for automated processing, for an integrated and very simple resource request form. And we will also do the enhanced membership support for the new members - expect to see more training and events attendance offered, probably giving discounts for them, incentives for them to come in and participate in APNIC training and attendance. And for the existing members, we are going to launch more value-added services.

On to the Training Services. These are the road warriors of APNIC - you can see them all over the region - led by Cecil. Cecil? Yep. The man over there. He has four people reporting to him and they just flew all over the region. You almost never see them in the office.

Last year, we had 38 training events over all those red dots on the region. So you name it, we've been there. Cecil is going to develop more new material in IPv6 and security topics - that seems to be very hot topics that is needed by our members. So we will develop new material there. Also we will develop eLearning and introduce to APNIC resource requests.

Oh, sorry. That was actually last year. It's done. Not 'going to'.

And also Cecil has created this training lab, thanks to donations from Cisco. And I heard that Juniper is coming soon. We will have a training lab that actually we could share in the region. Expect to see more exciting offers from the training department on that.

Right, so what are we going to do this year? The priority is we will continue to increase our training coverage. I know it's a tall order but I think we can do that. We will increase our training coverage, by actually Cecil did a lot of work, preparatory work last year as well to build partnerships with countries and economies to increase the coverage.

We are going to do a comprehensive curriculum development. We will analyse what our membership needs, we will provide the structure and build more new content. And to deliver those trainings, we are going to have a blended deliveries strategy, which combines face-to-face classroom, eLearning, virtual interactive classroom, so if you can't do any APNIC training in each of the economies, you can always use the online options. But it would be best to just follow everything and have this blended training experience, which I would say would really give you all the knowledge you need in the industry.

Online services - the youngest of all. It's not exactly a unit. It's just a function. It's now being manned by one person, and that is Sunny Chendi. He is mainly now in charge - the two main portals that we maintain, the two gates for our online services - one is through MyAPNIC and the second one is for a more broader audience to the ISP community, to the online specialists, called ICONS. MyAPNIC is targeted for members and ICONS is for more general stakeholders.

Last year, we released two releases of MyAPNIC - Release 1.5 to focus on improved response time and Release 1.6 had some new functions, which has just been released last year. Some improvements in the resource management interface, Whois updates capability in there, voting enhancements, as well as a nice small tool in the technical section called the prefix history. I would invite you to just log in to MyAPNIC and see for yourself what those enhancements are.

In ICONS, last year we focused on the content development and this year we are going to do two releases again for MyAPNIC. We will try to do two releases in MyAPNIC, always just before the member meeting so you basically can immediately see the enhancements. And we will plan ahead what main features would go with each release.

So 1.7 will see more service integration, better navigation and some new features. And Release 1.8 later this year, I expect to see some multi-account support, which is requested by some of the members already, because we have members that have an ISP that covers several countries and they want to have a multi-account support facility there. Expect to see that later this year.

In the ICONS community expansion we have also already been to be able to make ICONS owned by different organisations. So at the moment we are working with AfriNIC, SANOG and APRICOT. These communities and APNIC community will - basically there's a lot of overlaps within them - could share the network knowledge, that network knowledge through this single portal. So please have a look at icons.apnic.net or icons.afrinic.net and start sharing your network skills through that portal.

We also have some social networking features - always useful to have that in any portal.

Other than the normal day-to-day operation in services area, we have one person, Frank Salanitri, leading the key projects that matter, that go across areas. Frank has just completed Apstats. If you read the latest Apster being distributed to you today, you can see that Apstats is completed. This is actually a direct answer to one of the feedback to the EC from the members survey to provide more statistical information.

Almost there.

Frank will also lead the Clients First this year, the stakeholder management system by implementing software culled SugarCRM, and he is going to keep on improving the APNIC resource management system, heading more IPv6 assignments in there and he is also in charge of the APNIC events management system that is being used by APRICOT and APNIC meeting and training too for participant registration.

So, in summary, what we are going to focus on in 2007 is we want to simplify processes and procedures. We are going to introduce new services, we are going to do more training, cover more territory and add more facilities for training. And we will do more community support through ICONS and through our events management system. So I hope that gives you a glimpse of what we are going to be focusing on this year.

That is all. Thank you.

You want me to do the Tech?

PAUL WILSON: You might as well keep going.



SANJAYA: OK. Wearing the other hat now for Tech Services.

Technical Area. This is where we provide the infrastructure for APNIC, both internally to support internal technical needs, as well as the external technical needs.

After the restructure, we have four units and functions in the Technical area. The first one is the network and operations, led by Terry. There's research and development by GGM and security and software.

This is Terry's team. This is Terry Manderson, our Network Operations Manager. We've been busy last year. One is the Voice over IP. Now, we realised from the membership survey that this seems to need to improve this service, so we are going to make some enhancements to make it more useful. And Terry has been working hard on reverse DNS architecture. As you know, at the moment, if you're doing updates to your reverse DNS record, it will need about two hours to reflect in our nameservers. With this new architecture that Terry has designed, it will be almost instantaneous. As soon as you update the data, a few, well, minutes, one minute? OK. Two minutes, alright. Two minutes, he said, it's going to be there in our nameservers. This is just the architecture. We haven't installed it yet but it will be happening this year.

We did a lot of root server updates. We didn't deploy new root servers. Our coverage is already quite good. But the first root server was installed, like, four years ago, so it's time for us to upgrade some servers, so we bought some new Junipers and Ciscoes for Seoul, Auckland and some other places.

Rob Bailey, the guy on the lower left there, is deploying a SecuriKey, for our laptops and desktops. If you see them now, most of them have a USB dongle. This is actually a statement to ensure to you that whatever information, your information that is kept at APNIC, is kept secure. The reason why we want to do this is because privacy becomes more important. We have decided to go all the way to the desktop and APNIC laptop to make sure that the security level is brought to that level. Siamak and Darrin have been working on the community service. Some of our partner websites are hosted here so, if you do have a need to host something and it's serving the whole AP region, please take to us and let's see if we can help make your presence through one of our community servers and Andrew Gray is, of course, focusing on the webcast technology. Keeps on improving it from one APNIC meeting to another.

In 2007, learning from probably the Taiwan earthquake that disrupts the network, we think we are going to focus on service replication, making sure that our services are redundant everywhere. And this year is the time when we are going to implement two-minute updates through our reverse DNS system. We are going to do some machine room improvements, probably not a Major oar thing for you. VoIP enhancements as I told you and this is getting more and more headache for us so we are going to seriously look into spam mitigation technology. I've heard there is already a solution out there that we should probably start to evaluate seriously. And a new backup system. That's what we could do this year.

Research and development is now managed by George Michaelson. That's the guy. Last year we completed the ip6.int deprecation. Apstats is also George's work with Frank. And George also spent a lot of time preparing the resource certification work.

So this year expect to see more resource certification work. We are also opening our new network in Japan, thanks to the Japanese community to agree to host our research network there. This is again in response to our members' feedback for us to do more research and network on behalf of the community. We will also do log and audit retrieval, develop a log and audit retrieval system. As time goes by, and people realise that IP resources are a key ingredient in their business continuity, we will see more and more dispute cases that APNIC needs to mediate and resolve. So that's the reason why we develop this system. And this year George is also going to look at us deploying the CRISP and jwhois pilot. CRISP is, as you know, supposed to be the Whois replacement. jwhois is a single Whois server that can reply and proxy all the RIRs' system. So if you send it to the jwhois system, if it belongs to, say, the RIPE region, we will grab the data from the RIPE database and show it. If the range belongs to ARIN, we grab it from ARIN and show it to you. So it's quite an interesting project. It's probably similar to the global Whois that you probably have known already.

Siamak is not here but he is in charge of security. Last year, we did an external security audit. We actually paid someone to attack the APNIC network and see if we have any weakness. I'm glad to report that there's no major weaknesses that we have in terms of network and operations, so we are OK there. But they did make some very good recommendations that we are now following through to even improve our security system.

In 2007, Siamak will work with GGM - sorry, George Michaelson - on the log and audit retrieval. He will also establish more security procedures as well as the monitoring and compliance and also continue to promote security awareness among the community.

Software engineering. This is quite a big team with Byron leading the team. Last year, we did reverse DNS web services development, so while we will deploy this year, the code has actually been developed last year and it is being tested by our key partners. They have added more features to the events management system. We added the software to handle 4-byte ASN. We also improved our billing system. Raga is working on MyAPNIC. We're working on the APNIC resource management system and Robert Loomans is working on creating the resource certification code library.

Next year will be pretty much the same. We will focus more and more on developing a code for resource certification system. We will keep on improving the events management system, adding web services capability in front of MyAPNIC and ARMS, so allowing you to do more automation from your system. And also working on software infrastructure. So, in summary, this year, the technical area will provide more ways to access and update your data through either interactive website or system automation. Higher availability work - facilities upgrades, resource certification, back-up systems and new services in the form of resource certification and some research and monitoring work.

That is what we want to do this year.

Thank you.

PAUL WILSON: OK. Thanks, Sanjaya.

So you've just heard two area reports, both the Services area and the Technical area. And Gerard is going to be giving you the Communications area report. We are running a little bit late. We'll try to break on time. There may be some things moved to after lunch or this afternoon.

Thanks, Gerard.

GERARD ROSS: Thank you.

So you'd like me to go fast, Paul.

PAUL WILSON: That's alright. Take your time.



GERARD ROSS: OK. Hello, everyone. I'm Gerard Ross, Communications Area Manager for APNIC. I've been at the company for a little while now.

But not everybody has.

I'll step through the staff that we've got in the communications area. We've had a recent restructure and things have changed round a little bit so this is what the communications area looks like now.

This is Vivian Yang, who is Events Manager. She is probably running around busy somewhere. She is responsible for APNIC meetings. Within the Policy Unit we've got Son Tran and Samantha Dickinson. In marketing and external relations, Nurani Nimpuno, Kapil Chawla, James Lemon, Chiaki Kanno, and Yun Jeong doing graphics and Vania is as new as they get. Her first day was this week at the APNIC meeting. That's a pretty good baptism of fire. Hiding behind the trees over here in the Documentation Unit is Donna McLaren and Tina Bramley also with them and James at their first APNIC meeting. I'd like to thank them for getting through this week so well, putting in so much work and not freaking out.

A few highlights from the Events Unit. Last year of course, two APNIC meetings; one in Perth with the APRICOT meeting, one in Kaohsiung as a stand-alone and, of course, here we are now. As you can see, I normally only get out at night at APNIC meetings. It might look like I get out early in the morning but that's from a previous trip here on holiday. I hope the rest of you have been seeing more of Bali than we have. But not today because you've got to pay attention.

How is the network going?

OK - upcoming meeting, which Paul will probably talk about in more detail later, APNIC 24, we're excited about. That will be our first meeting in combination with SANOG in New Delhi in India later on this year. And then at this time next year, we'll be combining again with APRICOT of course in Taipei. Also at the meetings that we've had and the meetings coming up, we will continue our normal services of remote participation options, which includes text streaming transcripts, so this will be on the web for those of you who don't know, audio casting, webcasting. I'll just mention as well that with the webcasting that we've also used that in a few other ways as well so providing some content to different technical groups around the region to allow them to see some pre-recorded training events. That's been quite useful and it's been another way of spreading our services to audiences that wouldn't normally be able to make it to the meetings.

The Policy Unit. In 2006, there was only the one policy implementation, which was changing the IPv6 size to critical infrastructure. However, there was a lot of other policy work that went on. So the policies that are listed down in 2007 there - I won't go through them because that's for another session today - but they were all being developed throughout 2007. They were endorsed then and they're all now either implemented or in the final stage of implementation. So that's been quite a lot of work for the policy team.

The policy team is also doing some development work, as Paul noted before in the survey results, people are still a little bit unsure about how the policy development process works. The policy team is working hard to help with that. One of the things that you might have seen during this week if you've been in the SIGs is a document they've been working on, a draft guidelines for the SIGs and that lets people know what the SIGs are all about, how they should be conducted, it gives processes for electing the chairs and the co-chairs. It explains how new SIGs can be established and charted, how SIGs that are running out of steam might be dissolved if necessary, and there's also information there of what consensus is because, of course, that is the way that we do things here is by consensus. So I'd encourage everybody to have a look at those SIG guidelines. You'll find them linked from the program of each of the SIGs on each of our meeting websites this week.

The Marketing & External Relations Unit has been doing a lot of work on getting innovative with the way that we get our message out there. They developed last year an interactive CD, which many of you will have seen. This has multimedia presentations on there explaining the addressing system, the RIR system. There's a lot of other training resources that we have on there, the basic training modules are all on there and a lot of other resources that - particularly for those who are in low bandwidth areas might be difficult to get to, you'll be able to get them off the CD a little bit more efficiently.

Other presentations and brochures and informational materials that the Marketing & External Relations Unit have worked on have, in recent times, been focused on the Internet governance area, trying to spread the word about what it is that we do to people who aren't normally moving in our community. So, for example, late last year, there was an ITU Telecom World held in Hong Kong. The Number Resource Organization, of which we are a part, combined with a few other organisations, such as ISOC and ICANN, to have an Internet pavilion and the Marketing & External Relations Unit provided a lot of material for that. We put together, again, a few more multimedia presentations and brochures.

Alright. The Marketing & External Relations Unit is also responsible for web development. Some of you this week might have been involved in doing some web useability testing, which has been going on here. The feedback I've been getting from Nurani and James is that that's been really useful. There's been a lot of people giving some very interesting feedback about our website. It hasn't had a major overhaul for quite a long time so it is definitely due, and we'll be collecting a lot of ideas in the coming short period so that we can start fixing it up to a great deal as the year progresses. And I really encourage all of you, if you have any ideas about what to do with our website, any good suggestions for improvement, things that you hate or love, come and see us. Nurani or James in particular will be happy to take your comments. So will I.

We also continue to work a lot with operator groups around the region. There's a few listed there. We have a presence at those NOG meetings. We have more than a presence at some of them; we help provide content for their tracks. We have agreements in the form of memorandums of understanding with various other organisations, quite a few ISP Associations across the region - ISOC-AU, PICISOC in the Pacific, and NIDA. With those agreements, we participate in their events in some of their outreach activities and also help to run trainings in coordination with what they're doing. We also have another little set of photographs down the bottom here.

Now Kapil, I already showed you, was within the Marketing & External Relations Unit. His full-time position is South Asia Liaison. But Son's major position is in Policy, but he is also doing liaison work for South-East Asia. Elly is doing that for the Pacific and, again, hiding behind the trees, Guangliang is doing liaison in China. He's not hiding behind the trees in real life. He's very accessible.

The Documentation Unit is responsible, amongst other things, for APNIC's publications.

I've put Apster at the top here, again referring to the survey. One of the things that concerned me in the survey response was that a lot of people don't seem to be aware of Apster. We put a lot of work into it and I'm proud of it but I'd like to promote more awareness. Can I just get some feedback about how many people here read Apster? Or know Apster? Put your hand up if you know Apster. Keep your hand up if you like Apster.

Would anybody here be interested in contributing articles to it or suggestions for other things you'd like to see? Yeah? One good hand to see up the back there. We'll have to speak later on. And I encourage anybody else if you're working on any interesting research to, you know, consider getting in touch with us about putting something in Apster about that or if you have ideas for things you think you would like to learn about and you would like us to find the articles on, come and see me.

Annual report - another publication, which you should have on your table or in your meeting pack now, summarises last year. I also want to mention that, with Apster and the annual report, we've previously sent them out automatically to the whole membership. We have a new subscription policy online, in line with the ecoAPNIC policy, which you'll hear about later today. We will bring printed copies to the events. If anybody wants a printed copy, ask for it and we'll send it to you. However, by default, these documents will be produced in electronic form and we'll send out links to the PDF for people to download. That will be the default but, anybody who wants a printed copy, we'll make it available for you. And we print them on recycled paper.

Also within documentation, translation is an issue. This is something that's a little bit difficult to do, getting good quality translations and also identifying the right things to translate. Previously we've looked to translate more information documents. I think we want to change focus now and look more for functional material. So the first step in doing that is our IPv4 request form. This has now - we've had the translation done. We're just ironing out a few bugs in how the flow through will work and making sure everything's corrected, but we should be launching that live in seven languages quite soon. So look out for announcements on that.

Documentation Unit will also this year be conducting a very large review of all our public content. So going through the website, updating that, that's in conjunction as well with the review of the functionality of the website. Again, we've been informed by the survey that there's probably too much information, too much confusing maze of information, on our website and we hope to navigate a better path through that and also to come up with a better way of delivering our website as well.

Finally, the advantage of doing the presentation myself is that I can put everybody else's photos in and just have a little green man for myself, so that's what I've got. If there's any questions, I'm happy to answer them. Otherwise, enjoy Apster and everything else.

PAUL WILSON: Thank you very much, Gerard.

That concludes the area reports just for the moment. It doesn't. I'm sorry. We do have a financial report to be presented by Kuo-Wei Wu, Mr Treasurer. Kuo Wu is presenting the report as Treasurer of the APNIC EC.

Now, we are running a little late. We started about 20 minutes late. We're running about 30 minutes late. He will take one minute and we'll break for morning tea shortly.



KUO-WEI WU: This is the first time for the APNIC EC Treasurer to give the financial report. Somehow we made the decision just a few days ago. So I try to do my best.

There is a couple of reasons - because the financial report basically goes through the EC meeting to verify the whole budget, to verify the whole financial result. So the EC recently decided, discussed that, and it should be the APNIC EC Treasurer to give the report here.

And this is the financial report on 2006.

First of all, we have a complete audited annual accounts and the operating profit is roughly about US$134,667. As you maybe know, the US dollar and Australian dollar exchanges is growing and I think it's very - with APNIC staff's help we try to control in a very conservative way to make sure we are not making a loss in operations. And I think that is a lot of effort from the APNIC staff to do that.

Second of all, I think it's still good news. During the year 2006, we still have 205-member increase, and total roughly about, you know, 11% to 12% increase of the membership and up to 1,362. Compared with RIPE with 5,000 membership, we've still a long way to go. And if you have a friend, relative, whatever, or your kids, son, daughter, please...

LAUGHTER

As I mentioned, we tried to run it in a very conservative way on the financial activities, tried to limit expenditure and revenue below the budget.

Here is the membership status. You can see that we have extra large, very large, large, medium, small, very small and associate. And, year by year, you can see this growing is still keeping the trend roughly about 10% to 12%.

And the financial statement for expense - you can see that, in the budget of 2006, the original budget is US$6.19 million but, actually, after the operational end of the year, 2006, our financial result is US$5,938,870. And roughly run the budget below about 4.1%.

At the same time in the revenue, we kind of barely meet the budget. Originally the budget, which we expected to receive about US$6,174,958, but actually we received more than the budget, so there you can see it's US$6,249,308. Unfortunately, the exchange rate kept growing in Australia. Maybe in some day, the US dollar growing, then we have a much better result but, because our membership fees are based on US dollars. So in the financial exchange, the currency exchange, we have lost about US$94,854. So the budget is a little bit below the budget, 0.3%. So actually, this is maybe in the last three, four years, is a much milder loss from the exchange rate. We look around and it's actually the worst case is in 2004/2005.

And looking at the operating profit, and looking at revenue and expense, we still have about US$215,584 profit. Compared with the budget, it's a little bit, you know, below the original expectation and then, after the income tax, you know, we have a kind of income tax of US$80,917 in the tax. So now we have an operating profit of US$134,667.

And the balance sheet for the 2006, by the last day of 2006, the year end, we have current assets of roughly US$8.5 million and non-current assets of roughly US$3.5 million and total assets of over $12 million. And total liabilities and the total equity, I think we have about a similar number.

So this is what is APNIC assets right now. If you want it look at the detail, I think in the handout booklet, they have detail about the items, so you know how much of the assets is in equipment and something else.

From the annual financial analysis, actually this chart, you already saw it yesterday in the fee structure when Paul Wilson presented it. Of course, on Paul's slide, one more thing was currency change. If you look at the currency change it actually is really affecting our operations at the start of 2003. So you can see that, actually, after the 2003, until 2006 today, last year, that APNIC is really running in a very margin, you know, and I think it's very nice to work in, you know the EC member and the APNIC staff, they're working very hard, in the worst case, and we still try to maintain a very margin in the income and the expenditures. And I think we should thank the APNIC staff to do the best to keep the operation not in the red, but maybe to come out, have a budget plan, in 2007.

I think Paul will give in there and that might be the first time we need to have a negative budget plan for 2007. And, of course, Paul will give some of the reasons for that.

Priorities - basically, first of all, is continuous improvement, tracking overdue ageing accounts closely and improve the fee collection procedure - that means we try to collect every penny we can find - and we also try to, you know, to control our expenditure and, based on the critical matter. And enhance integration between accounts and the members' data and update the budget management system and procedures, and implement the new payroll systems and the payroll system - we're still thinking about what is the best way we can reduce the risk of money exchange rates.

The next one, of course, and we had a very long discussion yesterday in the morning and we thank Randy and Dr Laing for giving the workshop in the fee structure. It was a very heavy discussion about that. And I think we all gave our ideas and open up to discuss what is the situation, how we can overcome the balances between NIR and RIR and make sure we have in the future, the fee structure can make everybody at least a little bit not complain too much.


So this is a review of the fee structure and of course, the final voting for the fee structure will go to the member.

And to ensure the financial stability, maintain a one-year operational surplus. I remember yesterday that Randy said he thought two years was better. If two years is better, then we still have a long way to go to keep this operation with a two years' cash reserve.

So this is my report. Thank you.

PAUL WILSON: Thank you very much, Mr Treasurer.

I would like to break now for morning coffee until 11 o'clock. We will, after that, continue with budget and EC reports, and then the RIR reports.

Now, there are a couple of other reports from the Secretariat, which I will shuffle through to the afternoon, I think. We do seem to have ample time to do that. So thanks very much. Let's have coffee and come back in 20 minutes please.

Thank you.

(End of session)


APNIC 23

APNIC Member Meeting - Session Two

Friday 2 March 2007

1100-1230

PAUL WILSON: Welcome back, we will get started now, if we are all ready to do that. It is just after the hour.

I would like to move on from the financial report for last year, which was presented very kindly by Kuo-Wei Wu, the treasurer, and move into the budget for 2007. That will be followed by Akinori Maemura who will give a report of the activities over the year. The time for questions about the financial reports and EC will be after Maemura-san, and then we will move into the RIR reports.



Here is a summary of the budget for 2007.
In deciding the budget we have some projections and guesses each year about membership growth, which is fairly solid at the moment, but still fairly erratic at what it is doing. It looks like it is on an exponential path and then it slows down. Probably the more erratic parts of the budget are the per-allocation fees, in particular, and the non-member fees, which just tend to be quite unpredictable, particularly in terms of when they arrive during the year, but also in terms of total amount. Those issues are actually fairly fundamental to APNIC's financial future and will be discussed some more this afternoon in the fee structure session.
Expenses are more predictable by a long shot but they are affected very strongly in the financial reporting by the exchange rate.

As we, I think you will know, APNIC fees are paid in US dollars, because we are based in Australia, then the majority of expenses are in Australian dollars, so the US$-AU$ exchange rate affects us very much in terms of what the expenses look like in US dollar equivalent. We have interest and inflation rates but the primary issue we deal with is the foreign exchange rate.

In putting together the budget, we look at pessimistic and moderate and optimistic forecasts. There is a process that has gone on for some months, the first draft of the budget was presented to the Secretariat in November, there has been discussion since. We have been trying to bring the process forward because, as you all said, to be discussing the budget for 2007 when we are in March of 2007 is a little late.

We bring it forward so there is full opportunity to decide on the budget in the year prior and who knows - we may, at some point, be able to approve and publish a budget before the end of the previous year. That would certainly be the aim.

I think we may have been close to it this time, if not for a number of issues about the budget that needed extensive discussion and additional work by the Secretariat in making adjustments and so on.

On the expense side, the most important part, I think, of this spreadsheet is the second row from the top, the exchange rate. The forecast exchange rate for 2007 is nearly US 79 cents to the Australian dollar, which is higher than we have had for some time as an annual rate. We closed last year at 79 cents as the spot rate and the forecast is about the same for the entire year. It is considerably higher than we have had before.

So it does mean that some of these expenses, which are Australian dollar expenses, namely most of these, do end up being somewhat higher.

So the breakdown to the normal level of detail is provided here. It shows in a number of major expense lines what the actual expected expenses are to be. The percentage on the right is just the total for each of the lines.

If I just look behind the trees I will confirm the biggest one is the salary expense, which is at 45% of the budget. I'll note that under operating expenses we have got some other personnel expenses, recruiting and associated expenses, which are related to salaries as well.

The major increase in this budget has been in salary area. We have got about a 20% increase across the board in salaries, which seems to be quite a lot. That is about $600,000 in US in additional expenses in salaries.

There is a couple of reasons. One is we are expecting some ongoing recruitment, there will be three or four new positions in the organisation. That is less, in fact, than the Secretariat had hoped to be able to afford because there are quite a number of areas where we could do with extra help. One of the positions is the business area manager, which I would like to recruit, if possible, but maybe not in 2007.

The other reason for salary increases from year to year is just normal CPI, salary, performance bonuses and so on. For the last three years we have held them at about 5%.

SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: What is CPI?

PAUL WILSON: Inflation, Consumer Price Index is what it is called at home. Sorry about that. So we have got, as I say, just a small number of expenses, 5% as the increase from year to year. But on top of that, during the last year, and for about the last year, we have seen an increase in staff turnover at APNIC and we had the largest number of positions depart and having to be replaced during 2006 than we have ever had.

In investigating that, it did look as if one of the primary factors behind that was the level of salaries paid at APNIC so I think as the market shifts and with say, capping our year-to-year growth at 5%, we did find ourselves having, appearing to have the possibility of being under the market in salary payments.

So that was a guess which led to bringing in the Hay Group, which is an international consulting firm on salaries, position descriptions, benchmarking and so forth. One reason for selecting the Hay Group is RIPE NCC has used them very successfully across the board. They found the Hay Group was able to understand the particular circumstances of the RIRs. We do have a number of unusual positions, both in terms of not really finding host masters terribly often and also be an international organisation, or an organisation with international aspects.

The Hay Group had also helped us with individual assessments. The Hay result was a bit of a shock. It turned, out across the board, the majority of APNIC positions were under the market.

The overall cost of bringing them up to market and the market expectation or the policy I have proposed is we have APNIC salaries set at the Q3 or 75th percentile level which means someone in a given position in APNIC is paid more, at a rate that is more than 75th percentile of the market, less than 25%.

That is a policy decision but one where, obviously, if you are setting yourself too low then you lose not only staff and experience as turnover continues, but you also lose considerable amounts in the recruitment process year to year.

Long story short - to achieve a Q75 would have taken a 25% increase in the overall salary budget. We have budgeted 20% increase instead. It won't be possible during the coming year to achieve that level, but I think that is fair enough. We have got to move in a transition towards a new salary policy.

As I say, about $600,000 extra in salaries. That is one of the primary - the major factor in producing the bottom line that we are expecting for next year.

On the revenues side, the exchange rate doesn't affect our revenues for the purpose of this report so much because this report is US dollars, of course, and the income is in US dollars. We are expecting $6.6 million in total, US, in total revenue, which is pretty much a moderate projection forward from our previous fairly long history of revenue tracking.

It is always difficult to say, as I said, particularly in a couple of the line items, per allocation fees and non-member income to project forward. I will say we have been fairly accurate, however, previously in projecting revenues forward.

The bottom line for this budget then is we have expenses of 7.1 and expenses of 6.6 million, which presents a reasonable loss for 2007. It is the first year, in fact, we have projected a loss of this magnitude. Last year, as Kuo-Wei Wu reported, we projected a loss of US$100,000. In the last year we were $250,000 better off at the end of the year than we expected to be. It had to do with the exchange rate.

We found, consistently, the exchange rate forecasts which are official figures - and not being money market forecasters ourselves, we can't really do anything but use official figures - but we found the official figures have been pretty pessimistic in our terms. The exchange rates as forecast for the year have turned out to be higher than projected. It happened last year and turned a loss to a profit.

Without looking into a crystal ball, we can't tell what will happen here and the best we can do is produce the budget and manage it as best we can during the course of the coming year.

In summary, the operating loss has been projected due to increasing services. I mean, this budget does include the normal forward projections for the increases of standard service, expenses, operating expenses as we have experienced over the last few years. APNIC, as I say, the membership is growing, we can look at the activities under way and they are growing, both routine, operational and project activities. So our increasing services do incur ongoing increases and expenses but, as I say, the independent salary review is the biggest single factor. The high, currently high, US dollar exchange rate is also a big factor.

We have discussed already just in the last report that the goal that I have as Director General, given to me by the EC, is to make sure we have 100% of the following year's operating expenses in reserve. We need to ensure the cash reserve can support APNIC in times of change. You might see, and a lot of us would see, the loss forecast for the following year is exactly what the capital reserve is for. We are eating a little bit of the capital reserve but we were to have a deficit of $500,000 in the next year, it would make a relatively small dent on that capital reserve.

The projected cash flow is here. For those who are not accountants among you, you might expect this to look similar to revenue and expenses but it is different because of the way we account for both income and expenditure. It is what the cash flow looks like.

The purpose of providing it is because at the end of the year we expect to have $7.8 million in cash reserve. If we assume an increment of next year's budget of 115%, which is pretty conservative, but it is the annual figure you use, then our cash reserve is equal to about 90% of that budget.

We, obviously, set the budget and it is quite some way away, a year away, but we can set the size of the next budget according to circumstances at that time. So, starting to get some to some work here.

That is the presentation on the budget. I think most of you have the printed form of the 2006 budget and the budget of 2007. We didn't print enough for everyone but the documents will be on the website as they always are.

I would like to hand over to Akinori to report for the EC. If there are questions about finances or EC activities, they can be asked after that, thanks.



AKINORI MAEMURA: OK. Thank you, Paul. Good morning everyone, my name is Akinori Maemura, the chair for the APNIC Executive Council and I will make my presentation to report the activity of the APNIC Executive Council.

EC members, we have seven members, from they are listed here. Please, stand up to show your face to the membership.

OK. From the left hand, Kuo-Wei Wu from Taiwan and next to Kuo-Wei Wu is Hualin Qian from China, and then Che-Hoo Cheng from Hong Kong, and Vinh Ngo from Australia, and Billy Cheon from Korea and myself from Japan.

We are had all happy to talk to you about any issues of the APNIC business, thank you very much.

These four people right now in the blue letters are now expiring their office terms. They are to be re-elected. So that is for the EC election today. It is for the renewing these four people.

Main functions of APNIC EC is basically represents the memberships for this kind of activity. Interim decisions between member meetings, oversight of the activities of APNIC and considering the broad Internet policy issues for APNIC's strategy and to establish the basis of the budget for membership approval, and just Paul has just presented and then other major job is to endorse the policy consensus towards the implementation.

We have seven EC meetings to now since APNIC 22. Right now, we EC teleconferences right now are over VoIP and contributes the cost saving for the APNIC business.

But because we - APNIC has a lot of things to do, for example, the fee structure change and very balanced budget and for coming projects like Internet governance, we feel like we need more and more face-to-face meetings.

Financial status.

In the year 2006 we had actually slightly negative budget, but it has recovered, thanks to the effort by the APNIC Secretariat.

But still, that is just balanced result for the year 2006.

The year 2007 is just as Paul reported.

We have the monthly review for the financial records. The cash flow, expenses and asset status.

APNIC Secretariat right now is concerned about the new office for saving the rent expense and some other reason.

Membership fee discussion.

For maintaining the stability of long-term financial situation and we have some problems with the NIR fee structure and we have some very-difficult-to-handle situations with features charged to the NIRs and also something to fix, something, to fix that balance.

That is, as you know, we had fee structure session yesterday.

Also, that is to be presented today.

As I stated in the fee structure session, this fee structure discussion should be done by the membership and Secretariat is, of course, the Secretariat is quite keen to do for this issue, of course, but their main job is analysing the facts and the figures into making some plans, something like that and have a very good reference for the business. But decisions should be done by the membership.

So APNIC Executive Council is now, I think, about increasing our activity to doing that, representing the membership to work with APNIC Secretariat. So please, your participation in this discussion would be highly appreciated.

Policy endorsement.

We endorsed these four policy consensus from APNIC 22.

IPv6 assignment size to critical infrastructure, amending APNIC's lame DNS reverse delegation policy and IPv6 portable assignment for multihoming and end-site assignment policy for IPv6.

ICANN NRO issues. We have some discussions for the contract between ICANN and NRO, which is the equivalent of RIRs, is still going.

NRO incorporation, which we have been working for a couple of years is still going.

Also, we have the three council members from the APNIC region and we have good cooperation between EC and AC, we regularly have the on-site meeting at this kind of opportunity at APNIC meetings and also we have the mailing list to discuss about the issues among EC and AC.

Also, EC appoints one number council member out of three who is from JPNIC for 2007.

Online voting, it is applied to the AC/NC elections at APNIC 20.

But we see that not so many members are using this on line voting function.

So I would like to invite you to use more and more this online voting.

APNIC 23 at APRICOT 2007, of course, held here in Bali, Indonesia, but we had a big concern for security because the many advisors said we need to take care of the security here in Indonesia. But we, together with APIA have been monitoring the security issues here closely. We, APNIC, made the advice, providing the information for this issue for the membership to consider about the participation for this but we think we had a very good participation from membership. Thank you very much.

24, APNIC 24 is to be held in New Delhi in September 2007. It features - it will be hosted by the ISPAI association in India. It will be held with SANOG 10 so that is a very good chance to have both meetings at the same time.

APNIC 25, at APRICOT 2008 is determined to be held in Taipei in late February 2008. Thank you very much for the Taiwanese community to be generous to the host, this is the first time?

KUO-WEI WU: Second time.

AKINORI MAEMURA: Third time effort. Membership survey is just completed. It is already reported by Paul and thank you very much for your participation and it would be very, very helpful to consider about the APNIC business. Report to be done by APNIC Secretariat later today is wrong. It is already done.

Thank you very much. EC meeting minutes is publicly available on the mailing list and the website and I am happy to answer your questions if you have any.

PAUL WILSON: Thanks, Akinori. Perhaps before you stand down, we will see if there are any questions about the reports we have heard.

RANDY BUSH: Randy Bush, IIJ. Of the EC members, how many are NIR staff? Staff or executive committee etc? And how many are just normal APNIC members?

AKINORI MAEMURA: OK, myself from the JPNIC Secretariat, Kuo-Wei Wu from TWNIC board, Hualin Qian, Billy Cheon, Ma Yan, Vinh Ngo and Che-Hoo Cheng.
RANDY BUSH: It is about 50/50?

AKINORI MAEMURA: Kind of. Thank you very much. Good clarification, I think.

PAUL WILSON: As I have said, the meeting will provide more open-mic opportunities later on, so let's not labour the point now and move on to the next set of presentations which are our RIR friends who will be presenting up dates of activities in the other RIRs. The first up will be AfriNIC. So we will give Hisham just a minute to come up to the podium to present for AfriNIC.

I would like to put this little reminder up because our friends from the other RIRs have come from long, long distances to give quite brief reports and quite interesting so I would challenge us all to close the laptops, even. That is a challenge! Close the laptops just for four brief reports. I'm sure e-mail can wait for that long. Thanks very much. The APNIC minuters and the stenocaptioners are excused.



HISHAM ROJOA: I thank you both. I'm from membership and communications department, I would like to thank APNIC for hosting this meeting here. Unfortunately for me the weather is very similarly to where I come from.

A quick update on AfriNIC, now that we have gone through two years of incubation, the first objective would be to sustain one year for operational budget reserve, which we budget 25% of that in 2006. To put in place continuing to put in place good management processes and to ensure sustainable growth and minimising our taxes, we have tax exemption from Mauritian government. Membership growth is increasing.

In 2005 we have 65 new members so the membership compared to RIPE and APNIC, ours is even much, much smaller. Last year, 75, so the total membership at the end of last year is 284. As you can see, the growth is increasing which is very good for us.

The impact that the new membership has on the allocation of resources. We are getting more and more resources in our region both IP and ASN.

We have started focusing on IPv6 since last year. We have done quite a few training with the help of Jordi and Philip within our region. This is to continuing in 2007, trying to have more and more awareness of IPv6 training, hands on experience. The map shows where we have had IPv6 training and where we have allocated resources.

The policies being discussed in our region, first one is IPv6 PI assignment for critical infrastructure. The next one is PI policy proposal and the third one is changes to the existing IPv6 address allocation and assignment policy.

The fourth one is to change the allocation and assignment period to 12 months to align with the other RIRs. We are actually 24 months and trying to the 12 months now. The last one being discussed is the IPv6 provider independent assignment for end sites.

We are continuing our cooperation with other organisations AfNOG. We hold a meeting together with AfNOG and help people with fellowships to attend the meetings. Last year five people attended a meeting in Nairobi. Also starting to work with other organisations like the AfriNIC association of universities, AfTLD, the AfrISPA and continuing active participation in other activities.

Some other projects that we are working on right now is the MyAfriNIC. The pilot testing is going to start soon. We have asked NIRs in our region to volunteer for the testing. We are also doing some service fee analysis, that is quite important for us to see how we can increase and optimise our membership.

We have now looking into information and statistics for the AfriNIC region. We are planning to have the IRR before the end of this year. We are also looking at what is happening in the RIPE and APNIC region and Internet resource certification. We had a work shop last year in August, with Stephen Kent.

Last public policy meeting, the picture not Bali but from Mauritius. We had the IPv6 conference training, we had the policy discussion and also set up an anti-spam working group and showed the 6Mandela project.

We had the IPv6 conference, hands-on training, the AfNOG meeting at the same time. That is all. Thank you.

APPLAUSE

PAUL WILSON: Thank you very much.

Any questions for Hisham before he steps down?

Thanks.



LESLIE NOBILE: So most people know that Canada and the United States are part of the ARIN region. What most people don't know is that a large portion of the Caribbean is also included in the ARIN region. In fact, out of the 29 territories in the Caribbean Sea in that Caribbean region, 23 of them are included in ARIN, in the ARIN region. So, as part of our first outreach effort to this area, we held a workshop in St Thomas Virgin Islands, the US Virgin Islands, in February and basically it was an opportunity for us to go and meet with folks there and let them know about ARIN, the policy process, the policies themselves, etc, and to learn about these folks and about their particular needs. We held a couple of workshops. It's an informative exchange of information. We found that people don't really know about ARIN, the registry system, the policy process, anything about us.

So we had a really good exchange of information and ideas with these attendees.

We plan on continuing, you know, our outreach efforts in this area in the future. We hope to see a lot more participation from these folks.

One of the first things we're going to be doing - one of the first opportunities that they're going to have to participate in the process is at the next ARIN member meeting in April, which is going to be held in San Juan, Puerto Rico. We will have a few first-timer events about ARIN and what to expect from the meeting. That will happen April 22 to April 25 and everybody is invited to attend. That's typical of all ARIN meeting.

I have to cheat and look at my notes.

One of the things I want to talk about is ARIN and NANOG. ARIN typically attends NANOG meetings, participates in NANOG meetings and in fact we hold one joint meeting each year with NANOG, much like APRICOT and APNIC and what you will be doing with SANOG, I guess, this year. What we haven't had is any kind of a formal presence at the meetings so this time we set up an ARIN booth, information booth, and registration services helpdesk, and this was in an effort to reach out to the operator community, which is typically really silent at ARIN meetings. We had a great traffic, great participation, we had a lot of people come see us and we answered a lot of questions about the registration services area in particular. So this is something we do plan on continuing in the future, at future NANOG meetings.

Let's see. What else do I have?

Maybe one last thing. ARIN has not done Flash presentations in the past. We've decided to concentrate on producing a few ones. One will be about ARIN's Whois, how to use it. One will be about the Internet evaluation policy process in the ARIN region. We hope to have them ready by the next member meeting in April. We're working on them now.

That's all I have.

Any questions.

BRAJESH CHANDRA JAIN: Good day to you yesterday you were discussing about IP address conservations. And some of the IPs are allocated but not used. May I have your views that are there addresses in your region, which are not being used? Is there any method? What is being done to recover those addresses? Thank you.

LESLIE NOBILE: At this point, there are a lot of addresses in the ARIN region that are not routed and used. The legacy space, a lot of the legacy space, came from the ARIN region. At this point, we have no plan to recover them. That is something the community would decide to do, to recover resources. I believe that topic will be approached in the next ARIN meeting perhaps, or over the next year. I know our board of directors is interested in this, particularly with the shortage of v4 space. I think we will make an effort in this area.

BRAJESH CHANDRA JAIN: Thank you.

PAUL WILSON: Thank you very much, Leslie.

APPLAUSE



RICARDO PATARA: I will try to give you some information about what is happening in LACNIC.

Some numbers about LACNIC. We are currently 40 persons on the staff, but we have been growing since the beginning of 2002. And basically the area that has presented the most growth was the administration and external relations, which is regarded to policy and meetings and external relations to our members and community in general.

Also about membership, talking about members, we have currently 434 members and the great majority are small and micro-small. This is a new section. It is something new but was very necessary in our region. We also have some members in the medium category.

About our allocations. We have four /8s and two IPv6 blocks. One is the most new one, the /12 that was allocated by IANA to five RIRs and we have two sets of ASNs at, the 4-byte ASN that was also allocated to all the RIRs last year.

Now some numbers about the form of allocations we have. This graph only shows the amount of allocations, not exactly the amount of IP addresses being allocated but basically to show how many requests, how many approvals we have. It's something clear that we - this is also growing in the region. It's nice because it represents the Internet market in the region that is growing.

And here we can see some other graphs but here we actually see the number of /24s being allocated in the case of IPv4, the number of /32s being allocated in the case of IPv6 and ASNs as well, so we can also see some growing, especially in IPv4 since 2004. That was very important.

About policy. During the last meeting, which was the LACNIC IX, we had four policy proposals approved - the resource recovery - so the idea is to recover IP addresses that have been allocated but have not been used for one year. After one year they have been allocated at least. And the allocation period, we also changed that, because there was some concerns about the period of time we request information about the ISPs planning to use the others. And this is only for additional IP address. If the ISPs provide additional requests, they can provide a plan for one year in case to make us more aware of their necessity for this period. And also, ASN32 bits and the HD-ratio for IPv6 we changed from 0.8 to 0.94.

Some policy discussions that didn't reach consensus - Whois privacy, IPv6 assignment size, IPv6 assignment to end-users, the assignment size from the ISPs to their customers, and this micro-allocations for critical infrastructure - we already have this policy but the idea is just to rephrase some points of the policy which is not very clear because of the words used, so there is a special Working Group just to study that.

And also other things that are not especially related to policy, but to our membership. Actually, the board approved a fee reduction for not-for-profit organisations, so they have a 50% discount in their fees. Have increment of relationship with stakeholders. We try to contact them every year. As we have a small number of members, it's easy for us to do that. We can try to contact them by phone, making them aware of our meetings, our reports, some other publications we have. And also LACNIC is trying hard to be in contact with other organisations, like LACTLD, e-COMLAC, IPv6 Working Groups and we start with contact with the Internet Exchange points community and the security community as well.

And during 2006, we held a lot of meetings, internal meetings, to have our strategic plan, so we define our vision and mission for 2007 until 2009.

For LACNIC X which is our next meeting - I'll talk about that later - there will be some discussion about IPv6 assignment for end-users, additional IPv6 allocations - there are some ISPs concerned about their initial plan that might be not so good because they don't have much experience about how to use IPv6, so there are discussions about that but nothing concrete so far - and also some concerns about the announcements they are making to the Internet, so they are starting to discuss the possibility to deaggregate the announcement.

And, as I said, there is editorial working group trying to review the words we use in our policies that cause slight confusion.

Other aspects of LACNIC - they are trying to promote the IPv6, doing some IPv6 promotions, like being the secretary for IPv6 Task Force, IPv6 Forum, we try to invite them to be in our meeting to have joint meetings, workshops. We also have this project we call +Rayces. There are three anycast roots in the regions. It's joint work with ISC. Have anycast roots in Chile, Argentina, Venezuela and we will have in Panama and Ecuador as well. The idea is to have these servers installed this year. As I said, we are working together with other communities, like security and IXPs, we just implemented in our last meeting and we will have also in this next meeting, LACNIC X.

We also have a new house. Usually in the past, we start - our office used to be in a leased house. We bought, because the market was easy for us to buy a house. It would be better to just lease it. And it was opened in December, last December. We had members from the region, we had a little opening reception. We received members from the region, some authorities and also people from other regions that attended this opening reception. I know it's not a very nice picture but it's the only one I have, so it's just to give an idea.

And also about the next meeting - this is not Bali. It's an island in Venezuela called Isla Margarita. It's where we'll have our next meeting and you are invited as well.

If you have any questions, I am finished.

Thank you thank you

APPLAUSE

PAUL WILSON: Thank you, Ricardo. There was one detail that Ricardo omitted from the story about the small opening of their office, which is that it was only attended by the President of Uruguay and numerous quite high-level dignitaries who came. It really looked like a very, very well-covered, respected event. For a little opening, not bad, Ricardo.

The last of the non-CEOs to report from the other RIRs here is Paul Rendek from RIPE NCC



PAUL RENDEK: Good day, everyone. My name is Paul Rendek and I'm the head of external relations and communications at the RIPE NCC

I'm going to be giving you a short, brief update on the RIPE NCC. I realise that we're a bit pressed for time. If you look at this picture here, here in the corner, if I can just get the pointer, so this is the building of the RIPE NCC in Amsterdam and we actually have one of the canal houses adjacent to a very large building but, over time we have grown and taken over parts of the building adjacent. Now, the larger building you see here is the Queen's Palace and I fear that if we grow any more, we're going to be taking some space from the Queen, so just to let you see where we are there in Amsterdam.

We've had an exciting year in 2006. As you know, we've heard from APNIC, they've had some reorganisation. We also have had some reorganisation at the RIPE NCC. We had an external body come in and help us with some of the changes, walking through the re-org that happened at the RIPE NCC actually happened at all levels. We made sure that we included staff and received their feedback in reorganising the company in the way that we think it will function well.

So the focus now that we have finished this in 2006 and we're putting in, you know, our goals in place with all of the new areas that have been formed. The reorganisation actually has just moved staff around the RIPE NCC. There hasn't been any great hiring of staff or anything. It's just kind of put us into teams that we feel will let us work a little better. So I'd like to introduce, actually, the Customer Services Department, which is a new department at the RIPE NCC. Again, that department is made up of a few staff from various service areas that we've pooled together into that department. We have a DNS Department, an Info Services Department, a Business Applications Department and a database group.

And actually, out of this whole re-org, I will show you some graphs that walk you through what we look like now. We have a new chief and that is the Chief Operations Offer, Andrew de la Haye. I'd love to introduce you to him. He was here but I think he's taken off back to Amsterdam on a plane. I apologise that I can't introduce you to him in person.

This is what we looked like before. We had the managing director. There was a Chief Scientist, Daniel, next to him there was Angela, who runs our HR Department. Then there was myself, my colleague, the CTO, Andrei and our chief financial officer, Jochem. And these are the areas that we were roughly responsible for. I'm going to flip through these because they are very detailed.

These are kind of the areas that we were responsible for in the organisation. So that's what we looked like before the re-org.

Now, looking slightly different. We've actually changed our senior management team. Daniel has come out from being an adviser to Axel and has become part of our senior management team. The new projects group has then - we've done away with the new projects group. We now have a science group and that group is probably made up more of contracted staff than staff that we would have at the RIPE NCC.

We have the Information Services Department, DNS Services, IT Services. I'm just going to flip through these because they are very detailed. This is what we look like now. We had the introduction of Andrew de la Laye. He's taking registration services, customer services, business applications services and I have moved out of the operations area and remain with Training, External Relations, Policy Outreach, Comms, and Andrei will remain as the CTO running our technical services.

As you probably heard this week from APNIC, they're busy with the certification project. We also at the RIPE NCC are quite busy with this. This is something we brought forward to our membership last year so this is driven by our activity plan. Our members have agreed to put the funds forward for us to actually go forward and investigate certification.

As with anything we do in the RIPE region, we do like to have explicit input from our community in moving forward so as far as adopting certification or how this is going to affect our business process, we are actively looking for participation from our community there. So what we've done is set up a member task force. We have six community - they are actually members of the RIPE NCC but they are also members of the RIPE community, in this task force. They're set up from various pockets of our region, which is fantastic. We wanted to have the breadth of people from our area. They're looking at prototype installation and integration. One of those task force members is actually here today, Nigel Titley, who is also a board member. You can approach Nigel or myself and we can give you an idea of what they're doing.

They had their first meeting in February in Amsterdam. We had a lot of work to do to prepare these people for the documentation of the areas we felt that would change because of changes in certification. A preliminary report is due at RIPE 54 from that task force. And then a little bit more of an extensive report that will be given at RIPE 55 in the fall.

In the area of membership liaison and enhanced cooperation, at the RIPE NCC, we're actively working to make sure that we have better cooperation with governments, dialogue with regulatory bodies and other stakeholders and new industry players that have come in. What we have done in so far as the membership area is that we hold regional meetings in various pockets of our region that we feel we have not in the past had good reach to. This would probably be the more eastern European side and the Middle East part.

Last year, we had a regional meeting in Moscow and we also held one in Manama, Bahrain. In 2007, we will be going back to Moscow again in September. This has become an annual event, attracting about 150 LIRs to that meeting so it's quite large. We have 600 LIRs in Russia alone. As you can imagine, it's a very large group we need to look at. It's great to get them all together into a room and see what we can do for these people as far as enhancing the services that come from the RIPE NCC.

Same goes for the Middle East region. We, on average, pull about 100 to 120 LIRs to these meetings, so that's also a nice figure for us.

Naturally part of the plan there was to get them to be a little bit more active in the RIPE community. That's a little difficult. I think the travel and what have you. But initially that was what we wanted to do because we obviously want these people to be part of the process within RIPE.

As far as reaching out to governments, the RIPE NCC has something we call a round-table meetings and we target regulatory authorities and we target governments with this. We had a meeting recently in Amsterdam, the 12th of February. We had about 12 governments present there, about 30 participants came from various areas outside the RIPE NCC and 12 governments so we felt that, alright, we're finally trying to make some - break some ground there. As many of you - if any of you are working with governments, it's very difficult to coordinate with them. It's very hard to build a relationship with them, so we're seeing that. I think that the meeting we had in February came at a good time because it was a time that we had the DDoS attack and also the proposal for the IPv4 countdown came through and when these government representatives came to this meeting they definitely had questions for the RIPE NCC and we were happy they came and we could answer that for them. Another round-table meeting - I just found that out because I've just been on holiday - my destructor has planned another for September.

We've done another thing that we hope will attract government participation - again, it's slow in getting it going - and that is that we have some sessions dedicated at the RIPE meeting for governments. And this takes place on the Monday afternoon at RIPE meetings. It has done traditionally. It will again this time. We haven't had - you know, we've had a few governments come in, but we've found that they prefer to speak to us at round-table meetings together with other governments, and not in the RIPE Community. It's difficult. They prefer not to speak out in larger forums which is quite hard but, again, if any of you have worked with them, you can probably realise that that's how they prefer to function.

Membership survey. Like APNIC, I think it's that time again for the RIPE NCC. We were quite happy to see the results of what APNIC got. We also work with John Earls for our surveys in our area. We take them quite seriously and we really appreciate the feedback we get. Somewhere at the end of the year, we'll probably start to conduct another survey.

The last slide I've got is to welcome you to - we're the only one this time that's not taking you to an island, OK? The RIPE 54 meeting will be in Tallinn, Estonia from the 7th to the 11th May. Hopefully it won't like that photo in May and we'll get a little more sun there. Naturally, I welcome you all, as always, to come to our RIPE meeting.

Any questions?

JORDI PALET: It's also on the seaside.

PAUL RENDEK: Seaside. Not an island though.

PAUL WILSON: Thanks very much, Paul.

PAUL RENDEK: Cheers.

PAUL WILSON: In view of the time, I'm going to bump you, Leo, into the after-lunch period, if that's OK. Because we should make sure that we move on into the EC election preparations.

So I'll do that straight away at this time.



Today is the day of the annual EC election and there are four positions being filled today. We've had, as you probably know, online voting happening during the last week. That closed by a deadline a couple of days ago and we just have a paper ballot to conduct today to allow members who are here to have their voice.

So the EC election form is in the packets for all APNIC members who are here.

If you have been nominated to exercise a proxy, carry a proxy, for another member, you will some forms corresponding to those votes as well.

Unusually we've got 11 candidates in this election and you'll be asked, as a member, on each of your ballot paper, to particular four boxes, up to four boxes, to indicate which candidates you'd like to select. Now the ballot box is open and will be open until the end of lunchtime. We need to close it at two o'clock sharp this afternoon. What I'd like to do now is invite any of the candidates for the election who would like to speak, I'd like to invite you to do that now.

So I'll call the names in the order that they appear on the ballot paper. If you would like to speak, I'll give you a couple of minutes to do so.

The first one, Imtiaz Ahmed. Is he here?

SANJAYA: I'm not Imtiaz.

PAUL WILSON: I know you're not.

This is not a candidate. This is Sanjaya.

I'm just informed that one of the candidates has sent a statement by e-mail. I'll bring that up.

So Mr Ahmed? Or anyone who would like to speak on his behalf?

If not, moving along to Rishi Raj Dahal. No sign of him either.

I know that Ming-Cheng Liang is here. Ming-Cheng, would you like to say a few words?

This is Ming-Cheng Liang.

MING-CHENG LIANG: Hi. This is Ming-Cheng Liang from TWNIC.

Actually, I wear two hats. I am the CEO of TWNIC. But I'm also a professor in the National University of Kaohsiung, working on the network communications area.

The purpose I run for this election - I think that's no secret - I have two purpose. The first purpose of course is because of the fee structure. I try to do my job, OK. But I think, thanks to Randy, it seems to me that there may be a good solution. I think the second thing is I think I may, because I've been working with these nasty students and all these different factors, I might be a good addition, you know, to working with these other people and try to make APNIC a more harmonious between the NIR, LIR and APNIC. So hopefully I will have a good contribution to that. And before that, I think there are 11 candidates here, so I wish everyone good luck.

Thank you.

PAUL WILSON: Thank you.

APPLAUSE

So the next is Hakikur Rahman. Or anyone who could speak for him?

Jichen Thinley. Philip. OK, just while Philip is coming up, I'll mention all the details of the candidates, their nomination statements, their supporting information, is on the website. Of course, you can review that if you would like. Philip.

PHILIP SMITH: Thank you, Paul. Jichen asked me just to say a few words on behalf of his candidature. He apologises for not being able to be here this week because of family bereavement.

So Jichen has been chair of the SANOG core committee for basically as long as SANOG has been functioning within South Asia. He is basically the manager of the largest ISP is Bhutan. And, as a person, I have known Jichen pretty much since 1999, he's always been very active in bringing the Internet to the less developed parts of that region of Asia. He's very interested in the wider role of those parts of the world in APNIC processes and certainly would like to see better representation from South Asia within the wider Asia Internet.

PAUL WILSON: OK. Thanks, Philip. You may have noticed I'm going down the list from top to bottom and left to right, so the next one, according to that order, is Kuo-Wei Wu.

KUO-WEI WU: I'm not going to spend 30 minutes.

Yeah, I'd just to introduce myself. I think most of you already know me. I was in APNIC since 1996 till now and also on the EC since 1999. This is my fifth term to run the EC again. But it's the very first time for me that I run for EC and I'm not representing the NIR any more.

In 1984 I worked in Cray Research in University of Minnesota, supporting my clients. I was also one of the people working on the Taiwan Academic Network since 1999 and even now.

And I was actually a founding member for TWNIC in 1995.

I also participated in conferences since 1985 and the APTLD conference and also participated in APRICOT meetings since 1995 and 1996 in Singapore, until now, and also the APNG and ISOC meetings and ICANN meetings, since the meeting in Geneva.

And also the Asia Operators Symposium and you can see the activities located in the Asia Pacific region and also worldwide.

And I also participated in the Asia Pacific Forum and I was a vice chair in the forums and I am working in the information security management system. If any one of you wants a consultant in security management systems, I can help.

And I am an ISOC individual member since 1996 until now.

I was also in the management experience for a long time. The very first is I was in charge of the scientific library development in the Cray Research from 1996 until 1999 and I was a deputy director for a company in Taiwan since 1990 to 1998. And then also a senior vice-president for a digital company that is one of the major companies in Taiwan. And after that I was the vice-president for Asia Inc in developing their new business. And then, now, I was running for non-profit organisations as a foundation, it's called LLIAPA and our three major businesses - one is Internet governance, one is information security and also, we also do kind of water resources business too.

That is my experience.

I think for the next term of the EC there are several issues that are important. I think I have full experience, can help to find a balanced point, particularly between the NIR and RIR, particularly with the fee structure. I think that's very important, to make all the members of the NIR and LIR working smoothly together with APNIC. Of course, I am not only one person; we have seven together. Together with APNIC staff, we need member participants in this fee structure and make it really good for the APNIC long-term developments.

So that is basically introducing myself and hopefully I will have a wonderful new term in the EC and working in the future. Thank you very much.

PAUL WILSON: Thank you, Kuo-Wei.

Next is Billy Cheon.

BILLY CHEON: Hi. Good to see you, everyone. My name is Billy Cheon from Korea. Hopefully you have achieved what you want during this week and enjoy this place.

It's been already seven years since I joined this community, starting my job at KRNIC, which represent the Korean community. And during that time, I believe KRNIC and APNIC have done their responsibility of developing the region. I also enjoyed my EC term for the last two years and certainly I can support my role here with your support. Thanks.

PAUL WILSON: Thank you, Billy.

The next on the list is Nick Hannaford. He has joined us on the webcast and he has provided, sent by e-mail, a couple of slides in support of his nomination, so I'm just going to display those to you for a half a minute each and I'll give you Nick's contribution.

That's the first slide.

(Pause)
This is the second.

The next on the list is Ma Yan.

MA YAN: Good morning, everyone. Mine will be quite simple.

Thank you for your previous support to running the APNIC EC. I have been working for APNIC for two terms already. So thank you for your previous support and also thank you for your future support. I would like to still make my constructive contribution to the successful running of APNIC and also for the sustained development of APNIC in the future.

Thank you very much.

APPLAUSE

PAUL WILSON: Next is Kusumba Sridhar.

KUSUMBA SRIDHAR: Thank you, Paul. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.

I'll start by saying India is emerging as a rapidly growing market, as you're all aware, in the Asia Pacific region at this moment, which is also evident from the current growth that you've already seen. The same as the case with the neighbouring countries such as Nepal, Bhutan, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, as you're all aware. There are peculiar issues in this region, which are very specific and very particular to this particular region. These issues assume significance and attention and importance from everybody at this moment. Towards this, it becomes essential that the views from this part of the world be heard and addressed in this August gathering under the APNIC ambit. My association, that is Internet Service Provider Association of India, has decided unanimously to field me as the member for the Executive Council election for this year of APNIC.

The aim of our association is very simple; it is benefit of Internet for all. Since I have been honoured to be here in front of you as the nominee for the Executive Council election, let me tell you a little bit about me.

14 years of experience in the Internet industry. I have been instrumental in setting up various networks, large networks and service providers in this region. I own and operate myself a business as an Internet service provider in India and also an Internet telephony service provider in India, having a large network. I am happy today that several initiators of mine have turned out to be big enterprises in India. That was after a brief stint as a marine radio officer that I quit in 1992 and joined the Internet community.

It actually started with a dream, my career, to be in the Internet world and I am happy to be in front of you as the nominee for the APNIC elections.

I have been experimenting with various radio communications technologies, being a hand radio operator myself and have participated in various disaster and emergency communications, and also been instrumental in recent tsunami community in the region. Hobby flying is something that I enjoy and I build a lot of simulators connected on the Internet around the world. That's something I've been doing for a long time.

I've been working very actively on the various policies, technical and other issues as an Executive Council member of the ISP over the years and I stood for ISPAI previously. On the EC would be able to frankly bring the views of my region to the table and seek the assistance of the APNIC Executive Council to form policies and frameworks, which are of mutual benefits for all the members and APNIC.

I will strive to be worthy of conducting the APNIC activity that will stand as an example for other Regional Internet Registries. A situation that is accepted by both the members and National Internet Registries will be my goal while I am working as an Executive Council member at APNIC.

A lot of good work has been done by various service providers and various members across this region, and all that can be used in the region that is currently unrepresented in the APNIC EC for a very long time and I feel it is very important at this moment for this region to have representation in the APNIC Executive Council. And ultimately I seek your support in making this happen and I feel that we all can work together to make things better. Thank you so much.

APPLAUSE

PAUL WILSON: Thank you. The last candidate on the list is Mao Wei. Is he here?

MAO WEI: Good morning, everyone. My name is Mao Wei. I am director-general of CNNIC and deputy director of computing Network Information Centre of China's Academy of Science.

I hold a degree in networking from China's Academy of Science. I am also the professor and adviser of graduate students in networking. With this position, I am honoured to witness the birth and growth of China's Internet. I have been involved with APNIC since 1997. During those ten years, I focused on Internet naming and addressing process. I used to be on the Number Council and NRO and an NIR member of APNIC. Now the confederation has more than 200 members.

With my experience, I think I can contribute more to APNIC society. Thank you for your support.

PAUL WILSON: Thanks to all for your brief speeches and thanks for keeping to time.

We're just coming up to lunch but we do have one important aspect of this voting process, which is to ask for some volunteers who can count the votes. Normally we have some volunteers who are not part of APNIC staff or the membership who kindly come forward to count a number of ballot papers and announce the results.

OK. We have quite a number there. That's great. Thank you.

What I'll ask you to do is, please, if you could gather up at this end of the room when I call for lunch, then I'll let you self-select how many you think you need to be. I'll tell you now, I think there are 1400 papers to count.

LAUGHTER

PAUL WILSON: At least. Which brings me to another point - that we do have online voting and it was assumed that the online voting would start to replace the in-person voting and I think with this number of ballot papers and with a continuing reasonable but not outstanding participation in online voting, I predict that we might need during the course of the next year to just adjust the system a little bit in terms of the number of ballot papers which are being cast.

So, as I've said, just finally, have you a collection of ballot papers, you have one ballot paper per vote which means that some of you may have 32 or more ballot papers to fill in. You need to fill in each ballot paper with your choice. You need not fill in the same choice on every ballot paper. It's entirely up to you. The ballot box is outside. It needs to be supervised during the coming period, preferably by a volunteer from the crew who will bravely put themselves forward.

That ballot box needs to close at 2pm sharp, in order that the ballots can be counted. If anybody has any doubt about the voting process, please feel free to approach an APNIC staff member or one of the volunteers.

I think that's all that needs to be said right now. Is lunchtime now and we'll come back at 2pm to start the meeting again and you will need to post your ballot papers by 2pm sharp or you will miss the opportunity.

Thank you very much.

(End of session)



APNIC 23

APNIC Member Meeting - Session Three

Friday 2 March 2007

1400-1530




PAUL WILSON: We are getting ready to start again everyone. Benny is just calling the crowd in now.

Thank you all for coming back. I guess there is a few to dribble in but we better get moving again.

I would just like to say thanks to you all for the respect shown, in particular, to the visitors from other RIRs who, I think, enjoyed a pretty good sea of faces, actually taking note and listening, which was great to see. So thanks very much for that. We will continue with this policy and I'll try and challenge you all to keep it up.

RANDY BUSH: Conducting an experiment at a meeting about three months ago where we looked up and saw everybody with their face down into their laptop and we said, "How many of you are listening?" And about 90% raised their hand.

PAUL WILSON: Well, I have got a couple of kids and if they are in that state you just have to say, "Ice-cream!" Maybe if I say something like, I'll say "iPod" or something and see what happens.

SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: Ice-cream will do.

RANDY BUSH: Say "/8".

PAUL WILSON: If you don't like the big, red cross through the laptop, there is another way to do it which will stop you working. It reminds me of a book we had at home for a while which was called "101 Uses For A Dead Cat". We will move into the agenda with a few adjustments, Leo has been kind enough to be delayed for after lunch and so the first presentation will be Leo with the IANA report followed by Hyun-joon Kwon with a review of the voting system and then an extended session for the APNIC fee working group and discussion. Leo, I'll hand it over to you.



LEO VEGODA: I'm Leo Vegoda from ICANN and I have the highly prized just-after- lunch-food-coma slot. I'm going to try to go reasonably fast so the interesting items for discussion coming up next have as much time as possible.

I would like to point out if you want to stop me midway through and ask a question, please do. If you don't want to ask a question now and want to send me an email, please do - that is my email address.

So, this is an update of IANA, this is what IANA does.

It is basically resource management, looking after IP addresses and AS numbers with the RIRs, looking after protocol parameter registries with the IAB and so on. We look after the registries for .ARPA and .INT and run them as the registry and registrar. We look after the root zone and maintaining top-level domains and that sort of thing. Basically, we do what we are told to do by the various communities.

When we look at this slide here, you can go and see the structure where IANA sits within ICANN and, actually, try with this laser, you can see that these three boxes here represent the three key communities that IANA serves.

It is me, looking after the relationship with the numbers community here; Michelle looking after the relationship with the IETF; and Kim looking after the relationships with the names communities. Barbara is making sure all the routine administrative work gets done of course. So that is the structure of the department.

One thing that is also very much worth noting is we have got Simon here, he is basically making sure that all our tools are going to be good tools and that is quite important because we are really making an effort to improve the level of services and the ease and access to the services we offer.

Here is a look at the projects that we have got going on at the moment. The first of these is looking after the registries.

I have been talking with a few of the RIR staff this week about improving the IPv4 address registry. We actually made an update to the quality of the registry data in the last week or two with the help of ARIN and we hope to be making significant changes and improvements to the quality of that in cooperation with the RIRs over the coming weeks and months.

We are also doing things looking after the RFC inventory to make sure we have got all the registries created that are meant to be created. We have something like 500 registries. I'm not sure of the exact number because they get created and deleted every now and again, but it is on the order of 500.

We are converting to an XML data structure. At the moment they are plain text, which is not very good for a couple of reasons.

Obviously, it is not very easy to pass all the registries from a computer but also not so good for storing internationalised names. So if you have a name that doesn't fit nicely in ASCII it is not very easy to stick it in our registries. Once we have it in an XML data structure we will improve it a lot.

We want to provide a Whois service for IP addresses. We don't do it at the moment. We know we need to. It is going to be happening soon.

We have also got another set of things that we are doing, administrative, looking after documents. We have redesigned the website, got some fiddling and changes to do and it is sort of like the next two or three months and, hopefully, the website that you saw over the last few months at testiana.org will be launched and it is significantly better than what we have now.

The other things we are trying to do, when there is a process that is currently manual and it could be performed automatically, we want to perform it automatically. When there is a process that currently requires something to be done by us because of security and access, then we have been trying to make sure that people can do that true a secure log in kind of system. That is like the PEN, the private enterprise numbers - also called OADs. We want to automate that. It is on the books and it is being worked on.

We have got the eIANA, which is almost ready for release and it is basically going to provide an interface for ccTLDs to change their name servers and that sort of thing and they will be able to do it with a secure login and it will be very similar to the sort of thing that you have with MyAPNIC.

Here is some numbers about numbers.

This is the aggregate IPv4 for all the RIRs. I have called it a trend, I'm not sure if you want to call it a trend or not but by the end of February 2007, we allocated half of what we allocated all through 2006, make your own mind up.

In this slide here, you basically see the same data but broken out so that there is a separate line for each of the RIRs. It is nice to have, you know, multiple colours. It makes a much more interesting slide.

OK. The status of the remaining /8s, green stuff there, is that is the class-E space. I suspect no-one is really going to ask for that. We can allocate it if they really want to, I guess, but probably no-one is going to ask for it.

We have got some stuff here which is protocol, that is things like 0 /8, reserved by RFC 3330. And a couple with unclear status, things where they are registered as IANA reserved in the registry at the moment and we know that they are used and they, well, they were bits of history and they ended up being IANA reserved after something else and so we are working on that as part of the clear up.

That leaves about 48 /8s available. Well, that is what we are working from.

This is a slide which has a slope going - Geoff wants to ask a question.

GEOFF HUSTON: I do, as the number gets smaller and smaller, 48, the accuracy and your records verses other people's interpretations of precisely the status becomes a critical question. Does ICANN have, or IANA, any particular activity on their agenda to actually look at least four of those /8s where it appears the information in the IANA registry is incorrect, or at least some people believe it is?

LEO VEGODA: I have had on my agenda to go through this information and I have been talking to people from the different RIRs this week and I understand that the RIRs are actively working on this as well. So I'm hoping for some real movement to basically get real major improvements to the quality of the registry information we provide. We have already gone and changed 55 /8s in the last couple of weeks. I want to make improvements to all the data that was accurate at one time and is no longer accurate.
GEOFF HUSTON: Possibly seven /8s, some folk might have noticed other presentations from the RIR community tend to say it is 49. As I said, there is a little bit of difference in the status of three or four right now, which is why the number is different.

LEO VEGODA: Yes, you are absolutely right.

GEOFF HUSTON: Thank you.

LEO VEGODA: Yesterday, Marshall presented his proposal for a change to the way multicast assignments are made so that eGLOP assignment can be made by the RIRs. One of the statements he made was the current procedure is inefficient. I have to admit the procedure has been fairly inefficient for a while. It has got significantly better over the last few months. You can see there is a downward trend.

The way things work, the IANA side of things is now going significantly faster. But there IANA has the easy part of the bargain. The hard part of the bargain is the work done by the designated expert. When I pulled the statistics I did read through some of the tickets and I looked at some of them and thought, "That is a toughie." Generally, if you see high line there, certainly towards the right-hand side of the graph, if you see a high line, it is a toughie. Yeah. Maybe the eGLOP idea will go and give the RIRs the toughie questions instead.

So, near-term future activities - signing .ARPA. We want to put DNSSEC on .ARPA. We have got hardware in place and software and we are developing procedures. That should be happening soon. We will be making sure that everyone knows before, knows when it is going to happen before it happens.

We are also working with John Earls, or will hopefully be working with him in the near future on a customer satisfaction survey. He is known well here and in RIPE NCC land. He will do a good job for us.

On-the-horizon activities. Well, the possibility of setting up a certification authority. We want improved authentication mechanisms so when we are talking to one of our various customer bases we make sure we are talking to the right person.

Root zone management by EPP will be appreciated by quite a lot of people. As I mentioned earlier on, we are putting the registries in an XML format. We can then make them available through various others means, BEEP or XML-RPC or SOAP.

It would be useful for people from the community use the data and say, "It would be helpful to me if you made it available like this", and then we know. Because there are a lot of mechanisms we can use and can only develop one or two at a time. Knowing where to focus our attention would be useful.

In summary, we allocate and maintain registries, basically we do the administrative bit, other people do the policy or the standards development, we keep track of where the numbers or names or protocols, or whatever, where they are registered.

We have increased our staff quite a bit over the last year and a half or two years. That, obviously, means we can provide more service and a higher quality of service and we definitely are trying to do that. We are quite busy at the moment and we are looking for input on ways, things that you want us to concentrate on if you want us to do something, then tell us. Come up to the microphone here or send me an email or send David an email and we will do our best for you.

And if anyone does want to come up to the microphone?

RANDY BUSH: Just to note, I go to many - as someone who attends many RIR meetings and hears many times the IANA presentation, I wish to note that over the last six, nine months, we have not had to hear the registry asked IANA for space, waiting for six months, etc, etc, I believe it is worth notice that as far as the registries seems to be concerned, IANA has become functional. I think that is worth noting and thanks.

APPLAUSE

LEO VEGODA: Thank you very much.

PAUL WILSON: Thanks, Leo. Yes, Leo has not been at IANA for too long, I think, a few months and most of you may know that he was the registration services manager at RIPE NCC so he does know what he is talking about in the IP addressing area