Annual Member Meeting, Friday February 27, 9:00am-10:30 am PAUL WILSON: Good morning. Welcome to the APNIC annual member meeting for 2004. My name is Paul Wilson. I'm the director-general of APNIC. I'm here in Kuala Lumpur with quite a number of other APNIC staff, who are almost all identifiable by their APNIC shirts. So, if you haven't met any - all of the APNIC staff by now, please feel free to do so during the rest of the day. We're all here to help and to make this meeting as successful as it can be. The meeting seems to have been successful so far, judging by the attendance at the APNIC SIGs, the trainings as well and the other events, and I'd like to thank you all very much for taking the time to come to the meeting and to participate so well and I hope that, so far, it's been very valuable and this last day will also be very valuable to you so thanks very much. We do have APNIC members and friends from many parts of the world, some new participants from Bhutan for instance, from the Pacific, also our friends from the other RIRs, ARIN and RIPE NCC and also LACNIC and so today, to all of you, our thanks very much. JPNIC is one of the silver sponsors for this meeting and the sponsorships are very useful, very helpful, in keeping the costs down and so thanks very much to JPNIC for that generous sponsorship and also to TWNIC. JPNIC and TWNIC, of course, are the APNIC National Internet Registries for Japan and Taiwan, so thanks very much for your support. Today, we've got - well, the usual APNIC annual members' meeting. It is an open meeting so, of course, you're welcome to be here and to participate, whether or not you're a member of APNIC. This is a meeting, however, that's directed mostly towards the interests of the APNIC membership. So we're going to be starting the day with reports for the first half of the day. Firstly, I'll be presenting the APNIC annual report and the forward plan for 2003 and also the forward plan and budget for this year. Akinori Maemura will be presenting the APNIC EC report. After the coffee break, we'll have the RIR reports and integrated global statistics of IP address and IP resource allocations. We should have time for an open discussion before lunchtime at 12:30 and, after lunch, we'll be having the SIG and BOF reports. Our thanks to the Chairs and organisers of those sessions. We'll also have an Address Council update and a report by ICANN/NRO and also the WSIS activities. More time for open mic before we announce the APNIC EC election results and the next meeting. Now, there should be plenty of time for open microphone for general comments and contributions of any kind that you'd like to make during the meeting. Feel free to ask questions at any stage during any of the reports and I hope that the meeting will be as interactive as possible. There are a lot of reports and I know that that requires more listening than talking on your part, but please do feel free to contribute, ask questions, make suggestions of any kind at all. By way of agenda bashing, is there anything I've missed? Are there any questions or suggestions or comments about the agenda which I've just described? After our coffee break at 10.00 am and 3:30 pm, one-and-a- half hours for lunch which, of course, is part of the program today and we'll be finishing by around about 5.00 pm. So, if there are no questions or suggestions of any kind, I'll get on with the report of APNIC activities for the last year. That is for 2003. We have published the APNIC annual report in paper format, so that's available with the registration kits. And also, this report will be available online, if not right now, then within the next half an hour or so I'm sure. One thing I should mention - I think, I understand that a few of you walked straight into the room without registering, which is fine, but it would be useful if you would register, perhaps at the first coffee break - you can pick up the kit of information that's available and also so that we can record the fact that you are here for the purpose of the meeting records. So feel free to dash out now if you like or to register at the break. OK, so the APNIC Annual Report, as I mentioned, it's available in the meeting kits. It's got a yellow cover this year. And I'm going to be following, to some extent, the format of that report with the major headings hereby - membership and resource status, the Secretariat, APNIC member services, policy developments, major projects and financial reports for the year of 2003. APNIC membership is increasing a little more rapidly these days, over the last year. This chart shows the growth of membership since the beginning of the membership structure in June 1996 and, in the last year, 2003, we had a net total of 112 new members, which is the largest new membership for three years and that indicates a slow acceleration, a slow increase in the growth of APNIC, which is quite good after this flat period, particularly last year, where we had 68 member. And, if you're not familiar with this chart, it shows the seven membership categories which APNIC has within the membership structure. And, of course, the new categories of associate, very small and also extra large were added during - well, at the beginning of about 2002 and so those categories are appearing since then. The membership growth here is shown, both in terms of the new members joining APNIC on a monthly basis and members leaving APNIC, canceling or having their membership cancelled for various reasons. And mostly, those reasons are that the members become a non-contactable, probably because they go out of business without us actually being advised and, in those cases, any resources allocated are, of course, withdrawn. We had, during that particularly slow period last year, we had quite a sustained rate of membership cancellations. And we still have a fairly regular rate of cancellations which are certainly higher than during the dotcom boom era but we also had a gradually increasing membership per month. Australia now accounts for 24% of members. Hong Kong, which used to be neck and neck with Australia, if you remember, a few years ago, we had basically the same type of industry environment and membership levels there but Hong Kong dropped back quite seriously in the last, well, one or two years ago. India also fairly stable now after having increased a few years ago as a result of deregulation. Now, of course, these figures don't show the levels of participation in the APNIC process. Each of the NIRs registers as a single membership in these charts. We can see a little bit more bit mother about what membership has occurred. In the year 2000, we had a relative boom in APNIC membership, a slow period in 2001, 2002. 2003 was better. We can also chart here the factors that I've just mentioned, such as the increase in membership from India in 2000, also in Hong Kong in that year, Hong Kong having slowed down while Australia has, for instance, continued, with a fairly regular and steady rate of new membership. And just, the final slide on membership distribution, is how the distribution looks around different parts of the region and the United Nations defines South East Asia, south-central Asia, Oceania, East Asia. We also have members in the Africa region, three members at the moment, and also we have 29 regional members and those are the memberships which are generally multi-national companies outside of this region and for which we can't attribute a particular economy. Down in the bottom right here - I'm not sure if you can see if terribly well - is the breakdown of the economies according to those regions. There are 25 economies in the Oceania region. Most of those, of course, the Pacific island nations. Five economies in the Africa part of the region, in terms of APNIC's territory, let's say. OK, now, moving on to resource status, this is where we see a little more accurately what the actual, let's say, the industry activity levels are in the Asia Pacific region because, of course, IP addresses are being deployed to ISPs for use in developing Internet infrastructure so they do represent the size of those infrastructures and the distribution of those infrastructures a little bit more accurately than the raw membership numbers do. We've seen, in fact, a very steady linear slightly increasing rate of IP address, IPv4 address distribution for the past several years, since the year 2000. Even the dotcom crash didn't really affect the distribution of IP addresses so much. It seemed that, although many of the dotcom companies had gone, the IP addresses still continued to meet demand for Internet services around the region. The colours in this chart represent the different /8 blocks we have received from the IANA, a total of 12 of those blocks so far are under APNIC management. IPv4 address distribution looks quite different from the membership distribution and Japan is now in the lead with 32% of all addresses distributed by APNIC in this region. And so that, as I mentioned earlier, does represent more accurately, the status of the Internet infrastructure in Japan, whereas the membership figures were really quite low on account of JPNIC providing most of the services in that economy. China now has 28% of the addresses distributed. Korea has dropped down a little bit to 19% and so on and so forth. The distribution of addresses within the region in particular areas of the region looks quite different from the distribution of membership. So although we have members all around the region, the East Asia area accounts for many, many more IP addresses than anywhere else. So although we have, for instance, quite a number of members in Oceania and South-East Asia, they really don't account yet for terribly heavy IP address utilisation or distribution and South Central itself is still also quite small. Now, moving on to IPv6, we've had also a steady increase in IPv6 allocations over the last several years. The actual rate has dropped in this - in this year, particularly if you compare this area of rapid growth during 2002. 2003 was steady but slower and we'll actually see a contrast there with other parts of the world, the other regional registries, later on when we look at global statistics, where the rate has accelerated more rapidly outside of the Asia Pacific. And the IPv6 distribution is still largely similar with Japan holding around 50% of all prefixes, all blocks allocated, followed by South Korea, Taiwan, China, etc. Autonomous system number distribution is slowing down a little bit. This is not something we normally place great emphasis on because of the lower priority or lower challenge in terms of conservation, particularly now, in these days, not terribly many ASNs are being distributed, they're not being distributed nearly as rapidly these days as they were a couple of years ago. There is still discussion about having a 32-bit system for autonomous system numbering and that's coming along but it's not an urgent priority at the moment and, of course, APNIC continues to distribute according to a fairly simple set of policies and in accordance with need. And ASN distribution around the region gives yet another picture of how the Internet registry is developing. As you recall, Japan held 32% of all IPv4 addresses. It holds 19% of all ASNs, while South Korea is in fact, in the lead, so to speak, in terms of ASN distribution. The status of our resource pools and so forth. A few more details now about the Secretariat and activities. Just one chart here showing APNIC staffing during 2003, there were five additional staff added bringing us to a total peak during the year of 40 staff. That's growing fairly steadily as you see across the last few years, although the curve is leveling out and the plan for the coming year is only two or so staff increase, so we may be - we should still be in the low 40s by the end of this year certainly. In the member services area, we have now a very well established help desk system with a telephone hotline that anyone is free to call. Unfortunately, that is still a call that you need to make at your own expense. International reverse charging has been considered but it's a very expensive option still and what we're looking at as an alternative there, of course, is VoIP, which is something that has been suggested really infrequently in fact, considering we're all using IP and we could actually use VoIP very efficiently. It's something we hope to introduce this year. The help desk takes on a physical presence from time to time in terms of taking staff members, mostly APNIC hostmaster help desk staff, to other meetings around the region. So the APNIC help desk has appeared at the SANOG meeting, for instance, the South Asia Network Operators Group meetings, and they are welcome to receive training and other services from the APNIC staff who attend. The help desk is consistently achieving a one-day turnaround time on all the requests these days. That of course, in terms of an IP address is not to say your IP addresses would be allocated within a day. There are often a number of questions and responses that are required there. But in terms of how quickly you can expect to receive a response from APNIC, it's within a day and that's a result of a lot of hard work and high efficiency on the part of APNIC helpdesk hostmaster staff. There's also a well-established system of account management where, among the total team of eight hostmasters at APNIC, we have four teams of two and these teams were allocated to a group of accounts, of APNIC accounts, in accordance with workload and also with language abilities because we have a number of different language and national backgrounds in APNIC staff and we're able to provide service in your own language, if that's required. That, of course, is on the telephone hotline as well within the constraints of staff availability and so forth. We're hosting exchange, staff exchange and training visits from APNIC NIRs, in particular JPNIC and KRNIC during the last year. That's something that will be an ongoing activity. Now, training is a very important activity as well. 23 courses were held during 2003 and, in fact, some of those were cancelled and shifted during the SARS times in April/May last year but we did manage to reach a total of 1,081 trainees during the year. The training courses these days are structured in two major cores, that is IRM - Internet Resource Management I and II. They're two separate courses with the second one being more advanced topics. The essentials one is designed to fit into a single day and is a cutdown of the two together. We are working quite hard in the area of DNS workshops and that's something for which there's been a very high demand and the training team have been working very hard to structure, to design and to deliver this workshop ably assisted by workers from around the world in RIPE NCC and Internet Software Consortium as well. That's something that will be continuing with the DNS advanced workshop, a 4-day workshop in the course of the next year. There's also an Internet registry tutorial with a hands-on lab. It seems that we cannot possibly supply enough training to meet the demand and that, of course, would be a fruitless goal, let's say. So collaborations in the training area is particularly important and, of course, with the NIRs, we work together very well and have actually attended and provided training at the NIR meetings of APJII in Indonesia, of CNNIC and TWNIC as well. We've done some work with the WIDE Project and the School of the Internet Asia, SOI-Asia project, which is an on-line video training system, delivering training interactively, particularly in South East Asian nations via satellite. The AIT in Thailand has a new project called the intERLab, which is an Internet training laboratory. They will be attracting trainees to quite extensive workshops in Internet engineering and related topics and we'll be helping out with that. As well as working with AIT, in fact, on training and administration support, they're helping us out under a contract to help with the administration of the courses which APNIC runs around the region and that's working very well so far. There's a list here of training conducted in 2003. This list is also included in the annual report. You can see there's really quite a variety of locations and also hosts for these events and, in general, they've been very successful. Moving on in the services area. MyAPNIC is now a major delivery mechanism for APNIC services to the APNIC membership. There are well over 500 individual users registered for MyAPNIC now, which is pretty good in terms of the total membership size of around 900. Version 1.3 is being launched during this meeting. It's got a new technical menu, which includes a looking glass that allows you specifically to track where your resources have been in the routing table and looking at the last sites, history of announcements and so forth. That's helpful, we feel, in allowing you to double check, to cross check where and how resources are being actually used in the routing system. There's an ISP online request form now, finally, where the existing web-based form has been integrated into MyAPNIC with preloading of data which helps work on the part of APNIC members submitting requests. Importantly, also, MyAPNIC version 1.3 features online voting. Now, as you'll hear later on in this meeting, we haven't had an application yet for online voting, but it is expected to be used during the next APNIC meeting, for the purpose at least of the Address Council election, and that will allow any APNIC member to vote through MyAPNIC, to exercise the number of votes that they are entitled to according to their membership category and so forth. Now, bulk data upload and download makes it easier to interface with the Whois system and integration with the particular system so, internally, APNIC is using the RT system which is the request tracker system and, if you've sent e-mail to an APNIC address, such as hostmaster, you'll see the response from RT which gives you a ticket number and so forth. You can now see those tickets through MyAPNIC as well so all of the outstanding tickets under your account are listed there and you can see the content and status of those tickets. It's becoming a very well integrated delivery mechanism for services overall and the uptake rate that we see does indicate that it's being well used and well accepted. MyAPNIC is a secure system which is based on an X.509 certification system, we issue certificates to APNIC members. There's now a hardware security system that's been purchased, which will generate the certificates that provides a higher level of certainty and security in terms of the actual issuing of the tokens and certificates themselves. That's becoming more important because the IETF is looking at securing the routing system using certificates. There have been drafts that have been published which specify how address allocations can be signed by digital signatures by the registry which has allocated those resources. That system, really, when it starts being deployed, will add a great deal of security and integrity to the overall Internet routing system which is something that's becoming more and more important. So, of course, this whole APNIC CA system has been designed not only to support MyAPNIC as a membership security system, but also in anticipation of this kind of routing system security development. There are a couple of screen shots here of MyAPNIC. If you haven't seen it or used it, I would really urge you as an APNIC member to do that. As I say, it works very well and allows you to do almost everything that you need to do in your interaction with MyAPNIC. There's a shot here of the online voting system as well which gives you an idea of the type of interface you see where you're advised that according to your membership size you're allocated number of votes. There is a permission system within MyAPNIC so that the individual user of MyAPNIC who's entitled to vote is given their vote. Voting is not automatically available to everyone who has registered as a MyAPNIC user for a particular membership. We've got a very talented team at APNIC who have been able to put together this demonstration of MyAPNIC which you may have seen running during the meeting this week. Not only are the graphics fantastic, on account of Yun's talents as a webmaster, but we also have a soundtrack that was authored by an APNIC staff member. "It can help you manage your organisation's Internet resources and relationship with APNIC. In this presentation, we'll look at MyAPNIC's main features, including security..." That will go on for about five minutes or so, I won't go on with it now. But it's available on the website as well. Moving on with Secretariat activities, there is, in the communications area, of course, we have held two of our major meetings during the last year, 2003. In Taipei during the last APRICOT and also in Seoul during September last year. We have been trying to increase the mechanisms available for participation in the meetings and it's hard for many people to get to the meetings so in APNIC 15, we introduced multicast. We also had live interpretation and the onsite notice board which also featured in APNIC 16, along with the captioning system, which is what you see on the right-hand side here. We have real-time reporters who, believe it or not, are typing exactly as I speak. This is not machine interpretation. But it's something that's worked extremely well and we've had a lot of feedback. This captioning, of course, is going out over the Internet as well along with the multicast feed. Now, we're going to have to work a bit harder to get more awareness of these facilities. Although they've been demanded and suggested for some time in the past, we're not yet getting the online participation that we know is possible. So that's something for the coming year. Of course, the other communications tool that we have is Apster, the APNIC quarterly magazine and there's been the latest copy of Apster released at this meeting and it's available on PDF online and that's what I'm showing you here. You'll see updates from other RIRs, MyAPNIC new features and so on and so forth. There's an interesting article about the CRISP system, cross registry information service protocol, as well, which is something I'll be mentioning just shortly.. Now, in the policy area, firstly, during the last year, a new APNIC policy development process was introduced. It was proposed during a meeting during 2003 and it was approved during 2003 as the new process. It's not terribly different, let's say, from the way policies used to be handled but it's a little bit more formal. When a new policy proposal is being presented to APNIC, that it should be posted to the relevant APNIC mailing list at least four weeks before an APNIC Open Policy Meeting. In the case that that policy proposal is accepted by a consensus of the meeting, then there is another 2- month period in which the policy can be reviewed online on the appropriate SIG mailing list. And that was felt to be an important period of time for review of the policy to make sure that, just in case any serious technical or other issues have emerged, then they can be exposed during that review process. There's a 2-month window in which any major objections or problems can be identified. If any problems are identified, then the policy can go back to the following meeting. If not, then the APNIC EC is asked to endorse the outcomes of the policy process and so the policy can become formally adopted. So, from APNIC 16, there are a number of EC decisions which - or EC endorsements given to policy decisions. The first of those, was, in fact, the policy process itself. So the first policy to go through the new policy process was that policy process. And it was endorsed. The remaining, the other policies, we came through the same process were some adjustments to the documentation policy, lame delegation cleanup in the reverse DNS, the support for historical resource transfers - transferring historical resources into the custodianship of APNIC members - the proposal for the protection of privacy and customer assignment records, a proposal for IANA system of IPv4 resource request process. A proposal for requesting resource records using maintainers in the APNIC Whois Database and also some aspects of an IXP assignment policy were also endorsed. New proposals have come up at APNIC 17. Those new or modified proposals. And these have been discussed during this week and they will be - we'll have some reports on these later on during the day today. Now, major projects which have been undertaken - one of them that you will be hopefully well aware of is that APNIC has embarked on the distribution of services through APNIC points of presence in different parts of the region. So, in each of these APNIC POPs, as we call them, we can deploy DNS services, Whois and other APNIC services and we can also deploy instances of root servers under agreements that we have with some of the root server operators. And root servers are anycast mirrors of primary root servers, in particular F and I are the root servers and the root servers ISC and Autonomica, are the ones we're working with at the moment. I won't go through the details of the anycast method but these were discussed quite extensively during the DNS SIG during this week. So far during 2003, we deployed root servers in Hong Kong, Korea, China, Taiwan, Singapore. Earlier in 2004, a server in Australia. Coming up very soon are Hong Kong and possibly Thailand and we have expressions of interest from quite a number of different economies, Malaysia, India, Singapore, Cambodia and more. Now, the actual level of activity that we undertake - there's certainly a lot of demand for root servers and there's been a lot of positive feedback from the ISPs who rely on these servers for stage delivery to their customers. The level of root server activity that we continue is hard to predict. It's constrained, obviously, by budgets but it's enabled by the level of support that we receive from vendors and we've had a lot of support from Cisco. Juniper are interested in supporting this project. Some of the root servers themselves are sources of funding for hardware and so forth. So APNIC has been seen as a coordinator of these activities in the region, not necessarily as the host or the funder of every one of these root server instances. Of course, the costs would be mounting up quite seriously if we were. Another project during the year was the redevelopment of APNIC's event registration system. Of course, with our APNIC meetings and with the training events, we have a need for efficient management of the registration payment system and so forth. We had a system that had evolved a little bit, as they do, software systems, and we reengineered that during the year and, in particular, we made it available to APRICOT so, for the first in quite a number of years, APRICOT had a sort of stable and working registration system and it worked very well and it was very good to be able to support APRICOT with this system which, of course, will serve APNIC's purposes as well. Another major project during the year in the technical area has been the ERX project, the early registration transfer project which is bringing into APNIC management the records of resources, primarily IP address that were allocated in America, basically, before the RIR system was established. So, of course, pre-'93, pre-the RIR system, there was one registry, it went by different names, IANA, InterNIC, etc, and allocations were made by those registries in the Asia Pacific region. In order to better serve the APNIC region and also to take a reasonable responsibility for address management in this region, we’ve been receiving the transfers of those resource records. The chart here shows the - in blue it shows the resources we've been allocated by APNIC address pools. The purple colour shows the resources transferred to APNIC and the years in which they've been transferred. This process is around 50% complete and already we have nearly three /8 blocks added to APNIC's address management pools. We expect to double that approximately. In the early days, IP addresses were distributed fairly easily and liberally. A lot of the historical space has not been well managed or tracked and so there are quite a lot of cleanup activities which are required to both improve the accuracy of those historical records and, as we discussed during this meeting, to recover unused address space and so forth. And there'll be a bit more about that during the reports from the special interest groups later on. It's been an interesting year, primarily because of the system we used for managing the exchange rate and the different currency which are used. APNIC being located in Australia has to keep its financial records in Australian dollars for the purpose of taxation and audit. But traditionally we report those figures in US dollars. Additionally, around 90% of APNIC's income comes in US dollars but a significant proportion of expenses are in Australian dollars. So we are very subject to the exchange rate, particularly between the US and the Australian dollars. We started off the year with an exchange rate of 0.58 and we ended the year with an exchange rate of 0.75. So that resulted in an unexpected increase in expenses because the expenses are in, primarily in Australian dollars, nearly 20%. That's a very hard thing for anyone to cope with in terms of managing a budget. We did manage, however. We adjusted the budget during the year, as you'll hear later. The APNIC EC keeps quite close oversight and inspection of APNIC's monthly finances and so we adjusted the budget during the year and managed to have a balanced budget at the end of the year. So a statement of expenses is shown here. The total expenses budgeted during our revised budget during the middle of the year were approximately $3.9 million and the actual expenses were kept slightly under that. Whereas revenues were approximately equal to the budget, which is not bad forecasting, considering the budget was produced during mid-year. So we ended the year with a slight surplus, as you'll see. One thing which always causes some queries here is that our revenue figures show a foreign exchange loss of quite a large amount of money, $573,000. That's something that the EC has spent quite a lot of time discussing and pondering. I'll give you a brief explanation of why this happens. It is, in fact, a reporting loss rather than an actual loss. It's a reporting loss that, as you see, appears in the revenue statement. So it is a reporting loss that appears to reduce the amount of revenue received by the organisation. The fact is when, for instance, a US $10,000 sum is received by APNIC, it's booked in the APNIC accounts in Australian dollars. So, if it's received when the rate is 0.66, then it will be entered into the books as a AU $15,000 sum. Later on, that money is spent and, in this case, we imagine it's converted, that entire sum is converted to Australian dollars, then it would be converted at a different rate. If the rate is higher than the value we get from it will be lower and, if the rate happens to have dropped, then the value we get from it is higher. APNIC benefited in reporting terms by foreign exchange gains last year. In this year, because the US dollar has been devaluing, we disbenefited by foreign exchange losses. So, when you later convert that money that was booked at $15,000 but was later actually converted into local currency, it's worth less in this case. If the rate were 0.75, it would be AU $13,333 and we'd actually made a loss in the books of $1600 and we'd actually made a loss. That's where the loss comes from. During 2003, seeing the US dollar decrease in value quite rapidly, a large amount of the APNIC capital reserve, which had been held in US dollars, was translated into Australian dollars and hence, because of the fall in currency, the large foreign exchange loss is reported. OK, so the operating surplus is budgeted here. We ended the year with a $60,000 surplus, so close to a break-even position. In terms of a financial position, this is influenced heavily by the US dollar again. In spite of having a surplus of $60,000. It's an interesting position to be in that the value of the capital reserve, of the total reserve increased from $6.7 million to $6.8 million. That, again, appears to be a nice position, to increase the reserve by that amount during a break-even year. Again, the reason is that translation, or transfer of funds from US into Australian dollars. We did that at the right time, well before the US dollar had got as low as it is today, so the capital reserve, while staying the same value in Australian dollars, has increased in US dollar value. So the actual benefit of that apparent gain is actually offset, of course, by the fact that our expenses are increasing correspondingly, so I wouldn't get too excited about that particular line in the reports. OK, that's the end of the annual report for 2003. Now, I've reflected a lot of the detail that's in the printed annual report that you have access to. This report, also, if it's not already, will be on the APNIC website in a fair amount of detail. In fact, both reports - the slides that I've just presented as well as it's PDF of the paper report, are both on the website for your review. I'll mention as well, as it states in the annual report, that the financial figures, as well as the report itself is audited voluntarily every year by the APNIC - by auditors appointed by the APNIC EC and so that's a voluntary audit, it's something that is not required by law or even by the APNIC bylaws but it's been a tradition within the APNIC governance structure, let's say, that the books are audited each year. OK, I'll be happy to answer any questions or hear any comments about the report. We're going to move on after this, after this question period, to the EC's report for the year. Akinori-san - are you available to... this is not your last chance to ask questions about the APNIC annual report. There'll be a further question time during the break. APNIC EC members, who I think will be identifying themselves during this next report and myself, as well as staff, will be available if you have any questions during the breaks. AKINORI MAEMURA: Good morning, everyone. My name is Akinori Maemura. I'm the Chair of the Executive Council of APNIC. I'd like to present you the activity of the Executive Council. The current Executive Council members contains seven members, myself and, please raise your hands, these gentlemen, Che-Hoo Cheng from Hong Kong. And Hualin Qian from China - he's already gone back - Geoff Huston from Australia, Yong Wan Ju from Korea is not attending this meeting, Yan Ma from China. Kuo-Wei Wu from Taiwan - he's already gone back to Taiwan. EC meetings from 2004 - one onsite meeting. That's held this week. We take a monthly, regular teleconferences. We had it in January 16 and February 16. Responsibilities of the Executive Council is the - generally speaking, the oversight of APNIC in the interest of the membership for financial operation of APNIC and policy adoption and other activities of APNIC to oversee and also, we have the responsibility to appoint the director-general of APNIC. Financial status - as Paul reported, we are taking - we are having a monthly report in every EC meeting, monthly EC meeting, and the main, the biggest issue is the currency exchange that is there, as mentioned by Paul. The APNIC financial report is reported in US dollars but the actual activities, almost all activity expense is happening in Australian dollars. And the currency change has a significant impact for the financial on just the reporting side. So it is a very big issue for the EC also. And, in the policy adoption, also mentioned in Paul's report, we endorsed eight policy consensus to implement in APNIC Secretariat and the one big issue was that the interim clarification notice for the APNIC- 089 definition. This is - I talk in policy SIG about that and I'll just present to you briefly. The APNIC-089 is for the IPv6 address management policy and has the ambiguous expression like "IPv6 connectivity by advertising of IPv6 addresses aggregated". So, in this article, it is not so clear if it allows not-connected networks or not. So we had a discussion in the EC meeting and issued this interim clarification notice to direct the Secretariat to interpret it as including not-connected networks. So, of course, this decision is after observing the various circumstances around this APNIC-089 policy document. And this member meeting, first, the amendment for the APNIC-089 to ask include this interpretation is already reached to a consensus. So this will be the going on, the policy process of APNIC and then implemented in APNIC Secretariat. Other operations - this is also from Paul, implementing on-line voting. Consequently, we don't have here the eyeing item for the member meeting but in assumption to have some voting issues, we wanted clarification for how the on-line voting should be done or how, you know, how the operation of the on-line voting should be. Reporting - yes, this is a summary report to the member meeting here and minutes of the Executive Council is on the APNIC website to report from you. This is website is very site - www..apnic.net/ec. That's all my slides. Do you have any questions or comments? I'm happy to respond to you. Thank you very much. PAUL WILSON: The presentation slides from that report will go up on to the APNIC website shortly. I'd like to spend a few minutes now to look at the APNIC forward plan of the budget for 2004. Now, this forward plan is not one that features a whole lot of new projects and new activities and directions for obvious reasons. The financial situation of APNIC at the moment is break-even sort of situation. We don't know what's happening over the next year with the exchange rates so we need to be quite careful. At the same time, however, we do see a lot of room for development and improvement within APNIC and we have - within the APNIC staff and management team in particular - undertaken a cyclical strategic planning process which involves an internal review of activities and projects and so forth. And it's a regular process which will be undertaken on a 6-monthly basis from now on. And the approach is really one of continuing improvement of APNIC Secretariat services across the board. Particularly in terms of operational and service issues. So that's what I'd like to spend a bit of time describing to you now so you can gain an understanding of how at least from the staff point of view we see the Secretariat's priorities shifting over the next year. This is one area in particular where member and community input is very important, where I appreciate any comments you might have about this presentation. And it's also - I know it's possibly quite difficult to provide a comment spontaneously about something like this, but it's going to be the subject of a further APNIC membership survey which will be conducted during the next year. In terms of project activities, no major new projects are planned or new activities, but there are many ongoing projects and you've heard about some of them such as MyAPNIC, such as numerous policies that need to be handled. We will have quite an active program of project activities in addition to the operational activities. In terms of direction for the Secretariat, it's one of continual improvement on what we are doing as an overall strategic direction. Training and education is extremely important. We hear that all the time through the training activities we conduct, through the previous member surveys, through numerous channels. Communication and outreach is something that's clearly important. An area that we call Member Care, which is one of clearly addressing member concerns as primary concerns of the Secretariat. And relevant to that are services quality management. Streamlining and simplifying the procedures of APNIC and the facilities, website documentation, policy process, etc. We feel that increasingly the integrity of the registry itself is of key concern. Historical address space coming in, needing to be updated as well as current records. The resource policy process. And certain collected activities. In the training delivery area, we will, of course, continue training activities. There will be 24+ training courses this year. We're not expanding that radically. But we do actually cross-skill staff within APNIC, so there are more APNIC staff such as hostmaster staff in a position to conduct training and who are helping out with training in the appropriate places as the training team moves around. So it's approximately two training courses per month. They'll be incorporating more and more the DNS and Internet routing registry workshops and they'll also be held either alone or in conjunction with regional forums and meetings, such as the APRICOT meeting, such as the Pacific Islands Telecommunications Association, the SANOG meeting. Also in conjunction with organisations such as AIT inTERlab projects. Also try and increase the reach of training through collaboration. Developing new training content will be limited to the DNS and routing registry workshop which will be commencing development of a specific routing workshop to give more assistance in the area of routing engineering. This is an area that came up yesterday in yesterday's routing workshop, routing SIG, I'm sorry, where a presentation was given about the level of aggregation of address space announcements in the routing system. There's obviously a certain degree of training and education that could help in that area. Other collaborative activities in the development area as well such as such things as course content development, translation, delivery through the SOI Asia area. There is likely to be one more trainer recruited during the year. As I mentioned also, the hostmaster staff are multi-skilled and are becoming, some always have been, but all of them are becoming very good trainers these days. OK, moving on to communication outreach. This is something where integrating APNIC is becoming important. The demand for information about APNIC's responsibilities and APNIC's activities is continuing to increase. It's a demand that's coming from numerous sectors, the education sector, the Government sector, not to mention the membership and the wider Internet community. So, integrating the information that's on our website and within publications within the documentation system, are the translated documents, the activities around the meeting - training and other seminars that we conduct. As well as media - the announcements that go out to either media or the general community through Internet channels. The better integration and efficiency of all those areas is becoming more and more important. I don't think we're doing too badly in that regard but we can certainly do better. Stakeholder relationships in the area context. We've had Pacific Island specialists for the best part of more than a year now and we're getting a South Asia specialist coming on board. There is no NIR currently active in either of those particular areas of the region. Another is - it just happens to be the industry circumstances. Possibly the lack of general training and Internet community channels which exists. It has been very successful so far in the Pacific and it seems to be a distinct need in the South Asia region. Other areas may follow in the future. Those two are the priorities and there's not another area planned during the course of this year. As I mentioned, to conduct another stakeholder survey is important. We've had two quite successful and comprehensive surveys conducted. One was five years ago, the other was three years ago and it seems to be time to undertake by some means or other, yet to be determined in detail, but it seems to be time to undertake another survey of some kind. Possibly in conjunction with meetings that are happening and more on written answers to questionnaire style of form. Outreach events, seminars and presentations are also an ongoing activity. There's a plan for this year to get back into something we used to do more regularly which was to combine seminars of activities of wider meetings with particular Internet communities with existing training courses going on. When a training course is happening, there's a very good opportunity to call a wider meeting, involving Internet operators, particularly those who require training, but who are nevertheless very interested in what APNIC is doing. All of these things, if we can integrate them better together, I think it will have benefits in terms of efficiency and productivity of those activities. Member care - the member and stakeholder surveys are going to be conducted this year. We think our quality management of services is still very important. We, in the previous survey three years ago, there was a mixed response on the question of 'formal quality assurance for APNIC services'. A lot of people were wary that would be an expensive process to go through, a certification activity which tends to add to bureaucracy. But measuring activity levels better and measuring quality better mesh effectively is one of the other areas. Streamlining and simplifying processes and services that we have - the documentation store on the website has done that. There's been a website BOF during this week in which Gerard Ross was able to receive some feedback about what are the expectations of the website, particular problems. And pros and cons of the current system. In streamlining and simplifying, there's hostmaster procedures, there are let's say work- flow aspects which are being improved already through MyAPNIC, so that members can actually see a more sensible streamlined and simpler approach to interacting with APNIC which we feel is very important. And I'm sure members do as well. And multilingualism, ongoing document translation I think better accessibility for documents - translated documents in the website. We do have quite a store of translations but that may not be well known to many who could use the documents. The localisation of APNIC services or at least of APNIC responses to issues and concerns. So particular through the area of liaison officers we do understand the Pacific Islands had a different set of concerns to South Asia and also through the NIRs. We understand that that particular country or economy might have different concerns. The more technical area of integrity of the registry is mentioned here. The consistency of our internal systems, the external service systems, namely MyAPNIC and the Whois database is critical. If we've got a lack of consistency among those, we've got problems as a registry. It is our responsibility, as APNIC both as the Secretariat and the community to make sure the data is complete. We've been working to improve that aspect of our operations quite consistently with database clean-up, with both reporting historical records through ERX process and ensuring they're correctly registered within the various systems. That's something that does need to continue. And will continue. Presentation of registry data is important. We still don't have a comprehensive global Whois and that is seen as a failing of Internet registry system globally. We are working with the CRISP group in the IETF, looking at issues such as the use of XML, various other mechanisms which using let's say more modern technology than we have in the standard whois database might provide us with a better mechanism for providing better services. The certification of resources is becoming more important. The IETF is paying particular attention through PKIX and RPSEC, for how exactly can the routing system be certified through having the routing system - how can it be secured through certification of resources. You've heard about the policy process. The policy process has been revamped and is now the new process is now under way. The ongoing implementation of policy changes is, of course, an area of very high priority activity at the Secretariat to respond to the changes which are being approved through these meetings. Also to facilitate that policy process as much as we possibly can without, I might say, nominating it or trying to impose too much on it from the Secretariat point of view. But to facilitate the capture of policy concerns. It's very important, I feel, to be in a position to provide good research and analysis to support the policy process. There's been a specialist research position in place at APNIC over the last year which has produced some quite outstanding results which have been recognised around the world, in fact, that will continue next year. We find that issue of response to needs in a particular economy or area of the region, there are policy implications when we hear that particular ISPs in a particular area are having difficulties. Some of the policy proposals that have been made come directly from that kind of channel, for instance, the HD-Ratio for IPv4, which hasn't been approved but that is a direct response to the particular concerns of very large ISPs that exist predominantly. Likewise, the reduction of the minimum allocation from a /20 to a /21 which was approved at this meeting is a response to concerns from particular areas of the region. OK, and APNIC meetings are a very important part of this resource policy support and I think that goes without saying, as you'll see during a bunch of reports today from the SIGs. And finally, Internet operational support. APNIC points of presence are a way of helping through replication and resilience to failure and through close proximity to service users. And so APNIC POPs are springing up around the place and will continue to do so. Our rootserver deployment will continue as well. I have said here three to six or more sites depending on support. As I mentioned before, the budget, of course, is and should be limited for this kind of activity. It's not the sole responsibility of APNIC to provide every rootserver that might be used in the APNIC region, but more to categorize and facilitate. We are relying on ISPs, Internet exchange points. Depending on the amount of support it's given, we will certainly deploy a number of new rootserver. Statistics publication is something we've worked quite hard with the other regional Internet registries over the last couple of years. So that anyone who is interested in analysing resource consumption, for the sake of either making policy proposals or other conclusions, academic purposes or whatever, those results are available and so that statistics format has been established. But we can also help with analysing those statistics and providing support to operators through sensible conclusions or helping to draw sensible conclusions from those results. And ERX is an ongoing activity which is an operational support activity because by helping to bring resources that are managed, which exist within this region under the APNIC management banner, they then can be managed through MyAPNIC and managed consistently through our reverse DNS structure and these things can be less of a headache to the ISPs who might have resources up until this year at least in multiple registries. So in order to support this plan of work, the budget is proposed accordingly. As I mentioned, it's a budget that's certainly conservative in terms of any new substantial expenses that might be expected or required for new projects. And the reason we've got to be conservative is because there are numerous external factors. Firstly, the number of new and renewing membership members of APNIC is a very important factor. Membership fees comprise a great proportion of APNIC's income. Of course the APNIC Secretariat, the APNIC structure is reliant on that. We've got a fairly good indications at the moment of an upward trend in APNIC memberships which is a good sign. But in creating a budget we do look at a number of scenarios in terms of new memberships and membership renewals and anticipating downturns in those rates or accelerations. There are other income lines in our financial reports, there are allocation fees, these are the per address fees which NIRs are subject to. Non-member fees as well. There are expenses of course, affecting our budget, or the expenses follow the budget. But importantly is the financial environment. So the interest and inflation rates are fairly steady at the moment but the foreign exchange rate is all over the place, frankly speaking. So we've got to be quite careful about how that may affect our budget if it goes strongly one way or another. Projected expenses are higher than last year but primarily because of the exchange rate. So the average rate during the last year was still less than 0.67. And the protected rate for this year is 0.72 and it may well be higher, in which case these expenses will go up. But the expenses as expected are shown here. APNIC salaries, Secretariat salaries comprise 42%. If you add our professional fees which are for various projects which are not staff positions, it's just over 50% of the budget are salaries for which you'd expect for this sort of organisation and it's comparable with other RIRs as well. The other expenses are largely projections directly forward from last year activities. A fairly steady level of activity for all the reasons that I've mentioned. Revenue projections are provided here based on those projections I mentioned for membership renewals and new memberships and other fees that are part of the APNIC structure. That's provided in this slide. And the operating surplus in this budget is projected at $1,000. After a period, as you would remember if you've been to these meetings for some time, after a period of growth and transition in APNIC, in terms of quite substantial staff growth, growth in activities and so forth, we seem to have, we seem to have reached a fairly stable year-to-year position and I hope we can maintain that for the sake of stability of the Secretariat and its services and in terms of your expectations of APNIC. The cash flow that comes out of this budget - we're fairly well-balanced in terms of cash, receipts and disbursements. There is a reduction in the total cash holdings on account of capital expenditures. The budget, however, does accommodate at the end of this year, a capital reserve which is equal to the next year's operating budget. And in calculating the next year's operating budget, it's a little far away to be fairly specific, but we're anticipating a 15% increase on this year. That may be, we may not be able to afford a budget increase of that much, but again, the exchange rate fluctuations might change that if they continue. That concludes the work plan and budget plan for 2004. Are there any questions? Strangely enough, I'm right on time for coffee break. If there are no questions, that's actually the end of the first morning session of the meeting. And thanks very much for your attention. It's not easy to sit and listen to nothing but reports all morning. It's not easy to do nothing but give them either. But I'm quite happy to do that and also quite happy to answer your questions. So, during the break, after the break, later on in the day, if there's anything of concern or interest, in any of these reports, please let me know. We'll take a coffee break now until 11am and come back for more reports from our RIR friends. Also firstly from Son Tran, the resource services manager at APNIC, who will be talking about the joint statistics, giving an overview of the global allocation. Thanks very much.