______________________________________________________________________ DRAFT TRANSCRIPT APNIC Member Meeting Session 1 Friday 3 September 2004 9.00am ______________________________________________________________________ PAUL WILSON: Good morning. Thanks for being on time. I'll get started. This is the last day of the APNIC open policy meetings and it's the APNIC members' meeting. We should probably call it the open members' meeting because the meeting is open, of course, to members and anyone else who takes an interest. So that's probably a better description. But the day is intended generally for business and topics that are of most interest to APNIC members. I'd like to move along by thanking the meeting hosts once again, Telecom Fiji and Connect. Also CNC - China Netcom Corporation, which is the gold sponsor for today's meeting. And also the silver sponsors for today's meeting - CRR, TWNIC and KRNIC for sponsoring today's meeting. As you probably know by now, the meeting web site is up and available. From there you can go to the onsite notice board which has all the information about the meeting. I think on the web site you'll find the web casts from all sessions up until last night. The help desk is still available today. So please come and have a chat with APNIC host masters and others. Have a look at the MyAPNIC demo or anything you might need. Feel free to approach any of the APNIC staff. We're all in uniform today - most of us anyway. That's what we call the 'Star Trek' shirt. So you know who we are by now, I hope. The terminal room will be closed after lunchtime, I'm afraid, for packing up. The wireless will stay on until approximately 5:30pm today. So don't forget the last minute download, upload, if you need to do that while listening to the proceedings of the meetings, of course. Moving right along, the agenda for today, the morning is consumed with reports. Firstly APNIC's update and financial report. The APNIC EC report and the APNIC stakeholder and member survey report launch. So this is the first public open viewing of the APNIC stakeholder and member survey, which will be happening this morning. That's the third survey, in which some or many of you, I hope, will have participated. After morning tea we have reports from our colleagues and friends at ARIN, LACNIC and RIPE NCC. Adiel Akplogan from AfriNIC reported during the plenary and he's had to return home. This meeting is meant to be as open as possible and as interactive as possible. We've had feedback in the past there needs to be more time for discussion among the participants so at any time please feel free to ask questions. There's also an open discussion half-hour slot at the end of the morning before lunch. Lunch is provided as usual in the Verandah restaurant. After lunch we'll have the reports and discussions of the SIG and BOFs. There will be at least one consensus decision to be endorsed here at this meeting. If you're not sure how that works, it will be explained when the time comes. We have other updates after the afternoon tea break finishing by 5:15 or so. Agenda bashing time. Are there any questions about the agenda or suggestions for the agenda. Have I forgotten anything? Any administrative announcements that need to be made? OK. Moving along into the morning's agenda, APNIC update and financial report for the next half an hour or so. I'll be reporting on the membership status, the resource status, the developments outstanding in 2004. The member survey will be incorporated in this part of the report, then APNIC meetings and finances. APNIC's membership is now approaching 950. We may or may not reach 1,000 by the end of the year. We're not projecting to do that according to the budget that we have, but we'll be close. The chart here shows the membership in different categories and proportion of members in different categories. So some of you may not have seen this chart before. It shows over the history of the entire membership structure for APNIC how the different categories have grown. It shows in around the beginning of 2002 the introduction of some new categories, the colours - the orange and yellow colours at the bottom - which are the associates and very small categories and at the top the extra large categories. There are seven categories of membership. Where you fit in the membership tier structure is determined by your IP address holders. IP members will know about that. The distribution of membership among the different economies of the region has changed over time. The top 10 economies by membership number are shown here. The economy that's been growing quickly in terms of number of members over the last few years fairly steadily is Australia, which is the greenish colour down the bottom. There's been slower growth in the other major membership economies. You'll notice that the 'other' category is fairly significant - there's about 130 or so members in the other category. They're spread across around 40 different economies. So there's far too much detail available to show in one chart, but we have many economies with just a small number, one, two or three members in them. The growth of the membership per month is a useful indication of the state of the Internet economy, I think, across the region in general. We can see in the middle of 2000 more or less the peak of APNIC membership growth - just as the dotcom economy had started to crash. We never went into negative growth in the APNIC region. We continued to have positive growth throughout the entire period of that crash period, but our membership cancellations, which are shown below the line, increased for some time and they're still fairly high as we see a lot of membership mergers and still some members going out of business, disappearing offer the map, so we are unable to contact them. But the membership growth just continues reasonably steadily upwards, as you can see in this overall chart here. So we're fairly confident of projections at the moment in terms of membership growth. You'll see in the budget how those forecasts will affect the finances for this year. Moving on to resource status, IP address allocations, v4 address allocations have tended to accelerate in this region. There are now 12 /8 blocks which are being allocated. The most recently allocated blocks - I should have a laser pointer with me - if anyone's got one I wouldn't mind using that. The most recently allocated blocks are actually 59 and 60, which are just visible towards the bottom of the most recent months there. We've been allocating from those blocks very, very rapidly, since the beginning of the year, well more than /8 in total. I'm just talking about this region here, where the 60 /8 block has been largely consumed already - 59 is just starting. We consumed the 222 block - or most of it - over about the last year or so. Where has that distribution of IP addresses been happening? Predominantly, as you can see, in mainland China and in Japan, where the allocations have been really quite substantial and ongoing each year for at least the last three years. The interesting thing here is that this figure is to the end of August. So these are current to last night - or, sorry, Wednesday. And we've allocated nearly as much so far this year in the first eight months of the year as we did last year. So by all accounts we'll see quite a high rate of IP address allocation for the entire year. Another thing to note about this chart is that the 'other' category - which accounts for, as I mentioned, about 40 economies in which there are members - really is a relatively small amount of IP addresses. So we have a very different scenario, particularly in east Asia - that is, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, mainland China - a very different scenario there than we have in, for instance, the Pacific or south Asia. Another way to look at that same chart is the overall economy rankings, with Japan holding more IP addresses than any other economy. Mainland China has substantially over 3 /8 blocks allocated to date. This, of course, puts paid to the rumour that we hear time and time again about the MIT having more addresses than China, et cetera. Now, I wouldn't claim that three /8 blocks for such a huge, substantial and important country against one /8 block for a university is fair either, but let's bear in mind that that old myth about China having less than one /8 is no longer true and hasn't been for some time. The colours here indicate the year in which the allocations were made to those countries. It also indicates what I said before about the top four economies in this region being in east Asia. Just to give you a picture of the relativities with other RIR regions for IPv4, these are the figures for RIPE NCC, LACNIC, ARIN and APNIC. It's based on full /8 allocations based on the IANA's figures. Once again, the last few years, APNIC has been allocating more address space than the other RIRs. It looks like that's continuing with this significant very large ongoing demand in mainland China and Japan. ASN allocations on the other hand in this region are very slow. The total ASNs allocated is still less than 3,500. The rate of allocation is actually slowing down. We're not sure why, but that's what the figures are telling us. ASN distribution is here. I haven't provided the historic year-by-year split as I did in the previous chart for IPv4, but showing once again that Korea and Japan are holding the majority of ASNs. Australia has many ASNs as well, followed by the other economies. Mainland China, for instance, isn't listed here at all. What's reflected there is that in mainland China you'll find a small number of very large networks, not so many independent autonomous systems or multihomed networks or multihomed private networks - smaller networks, I'm sorry - so far. On the Whois queries we traditionally report what we're serving in terms of Whois queries. What we're seeing here is we had some very rapid exponential growth for a while. Around the beginning to middle of 2002 we introduced rate limiting and started tracking the number of denials. We've successfully done that. We're starting to look worrying potentially the way these figures were going. It was obviously reflecting some address grazing or access to the database in large quantities. We also in some cases have provided access to the bulk Whois data under an acceptable usage policy for research institutions who are doing non-profit educational research studies on the Whois data. That is not including the private Whois data, of course. HTTP Whois queries per month - this is divided into standard web queries and also queries that are for the purposes of accessing the Whois interface and for a reason not explained we had a large peak for a few months around the beginning of the year. But that has tailed off now. I'd like to move on to Secretariat activities. The staffing is now 43 staff. During this year, three staff in total have been added in the communications, admin and training area - one in each of those. The chart shows the different departments at APNIC and how many staff have been in those. It also even shows the size of APNIC Ltd, the Japan-based APNIC company which is where APNIC started. The staff growth, as you see, is slowing down as I think efficiencies are introduced and even though our address based demand is going up. Many activities are increasing, most notably in the training area. But the staff growth I think is quite moderate all the same. Starting with member services, we have the help desk well operationalised at the moment. One-day help desk turnaround on telephone and email. We're being assisted, I hope, by MyAPNIC's success, with well over 60 per cent of members signed up. You can have a look at the demo which has been on display at the help desk during this week and today. That demo was entirely authored by APNIC staff, including the music. So it's an entirely home-grown product. We're doing some planning in the member services area. Some of this relates to the recent APNIC third member survey. But it has also been on the planning for this year. Possibly most important will be Voice Over IP access for the help desk. We're finding that the help desk is being well used by the Australian membership community because of the price. It's better used by the south Asian community as well. But anywhere that requires international phone charges is obviously disadvantaged and the calls are coming in at a much lower rate. So VoIP access fully integrated into the APNIC phone system and so on is something we'll be working on during this year for delivery during - definitely during 2005. We also have extended help desk hours to 7pm local time at the moment but that's still a bit early in the afternoon for south Asia so we're looking at extending that. The other project is to provide more ISP support materials on the APNIC web site. That's where the project will be run under Son Tran's management. It's something that our members have been asking for for quite some time. It's also highlighted in the survey. We've supported the second area liaison officer - Kapil Chalwa - he's responsible for the south Asia region. I think some of you will know Save's work and how successful it has been in many areas. I think the participation from the Oceania region in this is good evidence of that. We had a combined meeting with APT Communications and PITA. APster is the newsletter published four times a year. The latest issue is at APNIC 18. It's also on the web site. The APster is not targeted really for the community as such. It's meant to be a publication of much broader interests. But we take all feedback seriously and would be very interested in any feedback and certainly any contributions to the content of APster. So if anyone would like to volunteer something, please feel free. Translation is ongoing. There's quite a number of APNIC brochures available in multiple languages. The annual report from last year has been under translation for some time. It's coming soon. Hopefully in future years we'll get that done earlier. But it will be available shortly. In the communications area there's been a lot of liaison as well. It crosses over with technical and other staff at APNIC. But the liaison over various standards process through IETF and IAB has been intensive. We have had numerous IPv6 developments, most of which have been reported on, IPv6 6to4 and ip6.int, the ULA and HD ratio et cetera - these are all areas of tight liaison and exchange between APNIC staff and IETF and IAB. Technical services. I think we are aware of the project under way in root server deployments. The map here will show where the deployments have been happening. So the cities which are named are the sites which have been supported by APNIC with both F-Root and I-Root. We have formal agreements with those organisations to cooperate on root server deployments in the Asia-Pacific. We're also working with K-Root and planning to host K-Root in Australia soon and are watching developments with K-Root in Japan. In two of these sites outside of APNIC, there are APNIC POPs, points of presence, with certain services deployed there. That project is going to be ongoing. Before the end of the year, there will be a few more place holders marked on this map with additional root server deployments happening and under way right now. Other developments in the technical area - MyAPNIC development is ongoing. As you've seen, there's regularly new services being rolled out there. MyAPNIC also has to be developed consistently with policy changes. Some of the work is going on in that area as well. Sanjaya is the project manager for APNIC and has been doing a fantastic job there. Not to mention that the programming staff who support the project as well. Also largely hidden to the community are internal administrative systems developments which are making life easier in many respects - allocation and member management systems. There's some work being done on the registry database and re-engineering to make consistency easier to manage and policy changes easier to manage and that sort of thing. So it's an internal activity that's taking up time at the moment. The certification authority has been upgraded with strong cryptographic hardware and procedures to do that which provide better security for the CA systems. This is in preparation to some extent for the likely use at some stage in the future of digital certificates in securing the routing system, which is something that we did anticipate in the development of the APNIC CA, so at some point we're going to see that sort of development and the basis at APNIC of a strong, properly authenticated certification process is really very important as the basis on which to build that routing security. We also have developed a meeting registration system which all of you, I think, would have experienced in the online registration that you undertook in order to be here. That was completely redeveloped to cover all APNIC's training and meeting needs. It's also been provided to APRICOT, to SANOG, to APAN and the AP* Secretariat for their use. The feedback from APRICOT this year was very good, that we helped one of the difficult areas of APRICOT's operations. It was possible to deploy this system because it was well planned, to deploy it to these other locations without too much work. It's improving APNIC operations. You see APNIC staff using that system from this end of the process. In the technical operation area, there's plenty of service provisioning work going on, extra nameservers, internal systems upgrades, this sort of stuff. It's quite a common activity to have brief downtimes in the APNIC office while servers are upgraded and so forth. Root server activities are occupying some of the staff with coordination and liaison, and installation support. This is what we do to help root server deployments going. Early registration transfer is something you've heard about a little. It will be complete by the end of this year. The major remaining challenge is what we call the swamp, particularly the old 192 old C-class space which has more than 700 records to transfer. Some of you, if you hold those records, will have heard from APNIC regarding the transfer process. As I say, that will be completed at the end of 2004. There's a set of activities which involve almost all staff at APNIC - member services, technical training, communication, administration. Every time we have a new policy we need to do policy implementation work which can involve substantial changes to systems. So we've been working recently on implementation, either complete or under way, for lame delegation clean-ups, for historical resource management - transfer and protection of those resources - not to mention the transfer from ARIN to the APNIC database. The implementation of that public or hidden database attribute, unused resource recovery, lowering the minimum allocation. Many of these involve updates to request forms, documentation, training and administration procedures, so it's an ongoing area of activity in the Secretariat. Moving to training, to summarise where we are with core courses or the overall curriculum that APNIC offers. There are three core courses - the IRM 1, 2 and 3 or essentials. Also an additional DNS workshop, two days, and an advanced DNS workshop launched more recently. The IRR tutorials. The technical training team are developing workshops on technical aspects of IPv6 and routing workshop. The routing workshop was presented by Phillip Smith during last week as part of the PITA-APT meeting, so that was by all accounts an extremely successful workshop with a number of people from around this region whose expenses were sponsored by ITU-T to come to the workshop. That was hosted in APNIC's name with our coordination. Of course, the fantastic contribution from Phillip. Thanks, Phil. Training to date, 2004 - we've had around 30 sessions. Here's the map of where they've been and approximately when they were held. There's also an indication there of which training was held with DNS workshops and with routing registry tutorials. The entire period of 2003 we had around 24 trainings - around two per month. But we've managed to conduct 30 sessions so far this year, including sessions held in Fiji here. That's partly because we've got more content and we tend to run more than one training event in one place at one time, which is, you'd understand, more economical and provides a better service. Also just simply because of the very hard work of the training team who are on the road for a significant proportion of the time, sometimes waiting home for weeks at a time. Thanks to the training team. Our feedback on training is consistently high. The feedback we receive on the need for training is consistently high. That varies around the region. But you'll see in the member survey summary that it really is a highly regarded APNIC service that's being given ongoing priority. Meetings are another important area, as we all know. That's what we're here to do, in fact. Regular features of the meetings now include the multicast and webcast, simultaneous translation, where needed. It hasn't been provided in this case because of the language - the predominant language of the local region. Real-time reporting is happening right as I speak and it's also going into jabber, where transcript is available live to anyone who wants to see that. We're holding meetings in other venues. As you know, APRICOT is the standard host location for our annual meeting each year, but we're holding a sort of an APNIC meeting in conjunction with SANOG on a regular basis now, most recently in Kathmandu, only last month. Since which time, of course, Kathmandu has been in a little bit of strife, which is most unfortunate. I'm very happy that that meeting was able to be carried out successfully before any trouble started there. There are various new features to the APNIC meetings which are becoming operationalised and they seem to be working very well. The policy lunch, the newcomers' breakfast, which some of you will have participated in, also the fellowships, so we're regularly now allocating part of the sponsorship money that comes into the fellowship program. Softbank BB provided a silver sponsorship level for the fellowships this year. The other sponsors contributed part of their funding to fellowships. Another new one was that we held a special CEO session at the beginning of this week. That was an effort to involve more of the CEOs or senior management of ISPs of our members and of other organisations with an interest in APNIC. I think it was relatively successful. We're hoping to develop it in future with perhaps a new format or some different styles in order to really try and get the best out of people who are coming to the meeting. But I think what I saw in that meeting was that some of the senior people who attended really didn't know what went on at APNIC meetings, didn't understand the value of the meetings for their staff. So it seems from some of the conversations that I had, while those individuals might not come back to the APNIC meeting, they certainly see the value of sending their staff and they've got a lot out of both the CEOs' event and this week's meeting. More on meetings - the new meeting registration system gives us the opportunity to collect better statistics about the meetings. As of this morning I was able to access the system and find that we had a total of 161 registrations for this meeting. The total attendance was 138. Total attendance for the member meeting today was 102. That is a pretty good turnout for APNIC meetings. It's up there with the best. And it's good to see. These are the figures I've just mentioned. We're also able to report on meeting attendance by economy. I'm not sure this is completely legible at the back. We have 28 from Australia, 25 from Japan, 18 from Fiji, 11 from mainland China, 10 from the USA, 6 from Korea, 5 from Taiwan, et cetera, et cetera. All the economies listed on the right-hand side are those with a single representative, but it's quite a good spread. It's nice to have these figures out of the registration system. By area within the region - Oceania sent 61 people to the meeting, east Asia 59, Africa one, south central Asia 5 and South-East Asia 12. I think this is a very good indication of the value of taking the meeting around the region. I didn't think we would ever have had 61 or such a high proportion of members or participants from Oceania nor from the numerous Pacific island nations which are listed here. Attended before - interestingly, for more people this was their first meeting than not. We're also asking about industry sector and reporting on that. So we had 29 staff from regional Internet registries, 18 from national Internet registries, 41 from Internet service providers, one from ccTLD, et cetera. This is the first time we've collected this data but it will be interesting in planning future meetings. We're also asking about staff roles who attend the meeting - managers, hostmasters, CEOs, et cetera. We're also asking about connectivity needed. About 85 per cent bring their own laptop and wireless card. Financial status - expenses at the moment, a budget that was updated mid-year with the consent of the EC, the APNIC executive council. We're running a little bit under that budget. These are US dollar figures, of course. The budget for the entire year is about $4.7 million. We're running on a pro rata basis about 4.4 per cent below budget, managing the budget conservatively because we're running on a very even budget at the moment, as you'll see. Expenses and revenue are projected to be much the same. We're never sure till the end of the year approaches so tend to be fairly careful. The revenues are running 3.2 per cent below budget before foreign exchange effects and 3.2 per cent above budget after foreign exchange. There's quite a lot of fluctuation at the moment between the US and Australian dollar values. Most revenue comes into APNIC In US and the majority of revenue is spent in Australian dollars. The foreign exchange plays quite a role, if not havoc, with our budgeting. The overall surplus for the year budgeted around $200,000 surplus. Year to date, however, we're in a loss of about $50,000, so we'll see how the rest of the year pans out. And the financial position year to date running fairly stably in terms of just the total assets, liabilities and equity position of APNIC. Around about the same as the end of last year. Note however the exchange rate plays a role here. The exchange rate has dropped and the value of the Australian dollar has dropped since the point at the end of last year. We have a substantial amount of assets in Australian dollars and that accounts for some of the relatively loss in value of the total assets, but we are running quite level taking into account these fluctuations. So that is the end of the status report update for the APNIC Secretariat, covering operational and financial aspects. I'd be very happy to take any quick questions. We're running about on time and the next report will be the EC report. While Maemura San is coming up to present that in his role as the chair of the EC, are there any questions? This report will be available on the APNIC web site very shortly. MAEMURA AKINORI: Good morning, everyone. My name is Akinori, chairman of the executive council of APNIC. Here I present you the report from the APNIC executive council. Let's have a look at current members of the executive council. Almost all EC members are here, so please stand up and have everyone see your face. My name is Akinori Maemura, the current chair. Right now Secretariat. Kuo-Wei from Taiwan. He is the treasurer, but he is also back because of some meeting conflict. Che Hoo Cheng from Hong Kong. And Qian Hualin from China and Ma Yan from China and Vinh Ngo from Australia. The 7 current executive council members. These three are called officers, these three officers are elected by mutual vote, so it is a one-year term to have this officer position. Two-year term. The main function of the EC is the oversight of APNIC in the interest of membership based on the by-law of APNIC. It's like the activity list here. We had monthly conferences for the executive council and when we have these onsite meetings we have an onsite APNIC meeting we have also the onsite EC meeting. We had meetings in February, APRICOT and also, Fiji. Also the monthly teleconferences are quite vigorously heard. One of the measures of the function is the endorsement of the policy after that is approved - no, there is consensus reached in the SIG and approved in APNIC member meeting. After that, in the current policy process we have to have a review term on the mailing list, two months. Is that correct? (Nods) And after that the online consensus seems to be reached, then the EC finally endorse the policy to be applied in APNIC Secretariat. Here is the rest of the policy endorsement from the executive council. Almost all things are from the previous APNIC meeting. This is the list - proposal to lower the IPv4 minimum allocation size and initial allocation criteria in the AM region. proposal 15. IPv6 allocations to organisations with existing IPv4 infrastructure. Recovery of unused address space, and protecting historical records in the APNIC Whois database. As you may know right now we - the RIR communities are working on very hard to have NRO, number resource organisation and also the relationship with ICANN. one of them, the most important thing is establishing the memorandum of understanding (MoU) for the ICANN ASO. That is right now under the review at the ICANN. And we are waiting for the signature for that. One of the problems is the AC, address council election, address council will be handed over by two number council NRO but we need to wait for the new ASO MoU to be established. So regularly, this summer APNIC meeting is the meeting when the AC election will be held but at this time the AC election is just different. And waiting for the MoU to be established. This time Kenny Huang will explore that, he will still keep his position until then. He will keep this position until March 2005 at the longest. The executive council through that monthly regular meeting check the financial status of the APNIC Secretariat. Also, before - on the annual financial report was presented in member meeting, we confirm the contents of that. Also, the big change in this period is that we had a change - the currency rate for the monthly financial report from US dollars to Australian dollars. Of course, as you know, the annual financial report and that annual report is just done - I mean, the financial report is based on US dollar, but to check the day-to-day operations, using the US dollar is a bit inconvenient because US dollar, currency rate is varying and almost all operational cash Fiji's held in APNIC Secretariat is Australian dollar. So we decided to have the monthly financial report in Australian dollar to check the accuracy more precisely, then official financial report to be done in US dollar. Other operations. As Paul introduced in the previous presentation, we had a member survey and I think you have in front of you the member survey report which was conducted by KPMG. Also, the other thing is online voting. The online voting is done through MyAPNIC and we are now checking the online voting is working properly. Or preferably, anyway. OK. And now I am reporting to you the EC activity. Also you can have a look at the executive council minutes on the APNIC web site at www.apnic.net/ec/. If you have any comment I am free to respond to it. Thank you very much. PAUL WILSON: Thank you very much Maemura San for the report of the EC activities. At this point I'll report about the stakeholder and member survey. This is a brief summary of the survey which, as you can see, is quite detailed. The survey report details the responses, including comments received on every one of the 60 or so questions. It provides some numerical analysis which I'll summarise here, but this report is quite fresh and there's quite a lot of work to be done on taking the results and incorporating them into current operations and forward planning at both the Secretariat and EC level. We'll be looking at the report certainly in a lot more detail and using it for the next year or two in planning and operational management activities. The survey is likely to be a biannual event - an event carried out every two years. So the next one you can expect in a couple of years' time. It's the third survey we've conducted or to be more correct, that KPMG has conducted on our behalf. As you may know, these surveys are not carried out by APNIC staff or EC. They're carried out contracted to an independent expert group that is KPMG, who will guarantee the confidentiality of the responses for a start and will provide us with an independent result, independent report, not including recommendations. The recommendations and response to the survey is up to APNIC and the APNIC EC in particular, but KPMG has certainly provided some useful analysis for us. The surveys that we've carried out so far, three of them, were held in 1999, 2001 and 2004. The result is shown here in terms of the number of responses and the economies from which those responses came. It's quite good to see that in each of these surveys the number of responses and the number of economies involved has increased from survey to survey, so the latest was the result of the latest report was the result of responses from 245 respondents in 27 different economies. This survey was conducted slightly differently from previous surveys. In the past we've sent the consultant, John Earls, on quite an extensive regional tour of face-to-face consultations with groups of members and stakeholders, with individuals, to carry out face-to-face surveys to take a qualitative approach to the survey process. This time for budgetary reasons and also because it seems to be appropriate now to go into a final level - finer level of detail, we accepted Dr Earls' recommendation to conduct a written survey. This was a survey based on a survey form, two forms, in fact, that were completed by survey respondents and sent in by email. The survey form was tested, let's say, an initial version, draft version was tested in three economies with more or less focus groups who looked at the draft forms and gave some feedback to Dr earls on the utility and meaningfulness of the first draft forms and the forms were substantially revised before they were sent out again. That's an important part of the process of conducting a survey, to make sure that the respondents actually do consider the questions to be relative, important and easily understood. I think the result of this survey is again well founded on a good process from an authoritative source. As I've mentioned the confidentiality of the identity of the respondents and of the source of specific comments has been absolutely protected. The survey is available on the web site along with the two previous surveys so you can see here a screen grab of the survey web page which shows you - and this information will stay on the web site as it has for previous surveys - the survey report. A formal response provided by the APNIC executive council. Also for the record the survey announcement, the introductory letter and as I've mentioned the results of previous survey as well. The survey in 2004 involved two separate forms. Or two separate sections of the form. The first section was an assessment of present services where respondents were asked to rank the performance and the satisfaction level in connection with a lot of different aspects at APNIC services in the policy, services, training, technology, information, coordination areas. On this section of the form, as on the next section, the rating was given as a score from one to ten. The average rating in this section was 6.8 out of 10 with a standard deviation of 0.5. That's the statistical analysis that we've been able to do. The second section the assessment was made a priority for APNIC to allocate resources in future. These questions were divided into sections on policy, meetings, services, training, technology, governance, membership and funding. The average rating was 7.2 out of 10. The point of the distinction between the first and second areas is firstly to give an independent assessment and an objective assessment of APNIC's performance in detail in various areas to look at where improvement may be needed and the second section to assist with forward planning to assess how members and stakeholders in APNIC actually assess or how they regard possible future services that we - and the developments that we may carry out. The point of this, of course, has to do with the resource allocation. Interestingly, - I think you'll see the result in a second. So this is a very brief analysis. Firstly, what I'm going to have a look at are the positively rated aspects of APNIC services and future activities. In this case these services and future activities are being rated in terms of the distance above the mean, the average. It's not necessarily to say that they're objectively good or bad, it's just that they rated more highly than others. In this listing, any results that are higher than one standard deviation above the mean, sections 1 and 2 are combined. So we're really looking at the relative importance both of particular service or the relevant rating of both particular services that we are currently offer and of potential new services. The highest rating answer was to the question - should APNIC evaluate member need and demand for additional courses in the training area. That's highly rated. I'd note that doesn't necessarily mean the training itself is highly regarded but just that it's widely suggested that APNIC should be evaluating needs for additional courses and certainly we do intend to do that, certainly base the development of additional courses on what is perceived to be the need and demand for those additional areas of training. Second rated is - should APNIC provide training on Internet issues for policy makers. That's strongly supported. Next one - should APNIC continuously work for policy simplification? Now, there are quite a number of policy-related questions which are highly rated either positively or negatively. This is the highest positive score in the policy area and it's a call for simpler policies and we certainly take that on board. The accuracy and useability of APNIC database services is rated highly, as is the suggestion that APNIC should have proactive involvement with root server installation in the region. That is as distinct from - should APNIC become a root server operator, which was rated less highly, not in the top ten or for that matter in the bottom category either. The other questions - should we maintain Internet penetration statistics, should we be acting as an information repository for ISPs, should we provide Internet resource management training, is the web site information adequate and useable and is APNIC successful in general problem solving for member issues. These are all highly rated, positively rated questions in the survey. This is quite detailed. It's difficult to say that at least in the short-term, that APNIC will take very specific actions on this. I think as the APNIC survey response points out, there are many resource issues here, many operational issues, but you have my guarantee and the commitment from the APNIC AC that these will be taken into account in future planning. On the other end of the scale are the activities and the services which were negatively rated. This list is in continuing in numerical order so the bottom of the list is the most negative, is the most unappealing question of the entire survey. That is - should APNIC increase fees to support new services? Nobody seemed to like that idea. Not mind you that it was being suggested but it's quite an important question to ask nevertheless. Moving back up that list - some policy issues. Is the time taken to develop and deploy policy change acceptable? No, it's not. Is it easy to participate in the APNIC policy development process? This was rated not so well. Should APNIC services be for members only? That's not agreed in by this survey, so we're looking at of course no restriction of APNIC services to members or no unnecessary restriction. The next one - is it easy to apply for resources under current policy. Is APNIC participation in regional infrastructure development adequate? Apparently not. Not sufficient. Should APNIC attempt to generate a surplus from training activities? Apparently not. Does APster meet your needs? The member survey was answered - the member and stakeholder survey open to both members and others was answered exclusively by members. We didn't have any non-member responses. I think this answer regarding APster relates to the fact that APster is not targeted as a member resource only. It's targeted for the much wider community. As such I suppose that it is consistent with question 2.13 - should APNIC services be for members only. It's definitely a service that's targeted at the wider community. Which is not to say it's perfect by any means, so once again, feedback on APster is always appreciated and we'll try to do some work to make sure that it's relevant to all who may receive it. And the last one here is on this list at the top of the list - is the present membership fee structure acceptable? That is rated more negatively. This is also very interesting. I think if we welcome the positive end of the list we should also welcome the negative end and treat these issues with as much, if not more priority. I would note that with the average of this survey being approximately high 6 out of 7, 6.8 to 7.2 out of ten, the rating of minus 3 is three standard deviations below the mean, that's approximately - you can see in the survey result what the rating for that question is. I think it's maybe just under five or around 5. 5 out of ten is still not a very negative score. It's only relatively at the bottom of the list. This is the sort of thing on which we need to do more analysis as I've mentioned to make the best use out of these results. OK, that's all I've got for you on the member survey. The complete report as we received it from KPMG is available to you in your meeting kits, the printed version and it's available for download from the APNIC web site. Please do read and consider that report yourselves, particularly as APNIC members. It does concern you greatly, I think. It concerns the performance of APNIC and how APNIC in future can allocate resources which after all are contributed by members. So I couldn't stress the importance of the report highly enough and I'd also like to thank you on behalf of the EC and the Secretariat for your contributions to the survey. It does seem to be a very useful result. So we've now come to coffee break time but I would like to invite any questions or comments that you may have. RAM NARULA: I am Ram Narula from Thailand. As a small ISP in Thailand and as I have been in the Internet business for about five years, in Bangkok, I noticed the disparities in the membership fee structure between members in developed countries and developing and third world countries. For example, in Thailand and I think the small membership size and if it's been compared relatively to other countries, for example in Australia, comparing the salaries of an engineer, I could hire basically one more engineer. I believe that a more fair - I wouldn't say cheaper or more expensive, I would say a more fair fee structure should be applied for different countries that have different - this is just an opinion and a suggestion from my side. Thank you. PAUL WILSON: Thanks for the suggestion. It's not the first time that that issue has been raised. It is of course a member fee structure issue which is an issue for members to vote on. It would require a formal proposal in order to make some change in that area. Thank you. Any comments on that issue? If making the fee structure more fair means lowering the fees for some members then it means in these days of a balanced budget it means either reducing APNIC activities or increasing the fees for other members of course. So it's quite important issue with an effect on positive and negative, on all members. So not a trivial issue by any means. No comments on that? Comments on anything else? Going, going, gone... OK, let's break for coffee. The coffee break is half an hour. We'll see you again in - at 10.45. Thanks a lot. Coffee break Time: 10.15 am