______________________________________________________________________ DRAFT TRANSCRIPT Session: APNIC Member Meeting Date: Friday 3 March 2006 Time: 11.00am Presentation: AfriNIC report Presenter: Adiel Akplogan ______________________________________________________________________ PAUL WILSON: Next, Adiel, are you ready? Thanks. Adiel Akplogan is the CEO of AfriNIC. ADIEL AKPLOGAN: I will start this presentation by giving some quick statistics about our first year of operation. As you know, we became a full registry in April last year and, since then, we have noticed a very interesting steady growth, both in our membership and in allocations we made. For instance, this year, we got 64 new members, which is more than 140% growth compared to the previous year, which is very encouraging for us. And that growth is also shown in resource allocations, both IPv4 and ASN. When we launched our RIR, one of the challenges we had was awareness. In our region, we have very few network operators which were really aware about what an RIR is for and how they can get their IP address. So one of the things we have done last year is to put in place a training program to train our members on how they can request IP address, how they can request resources and what is the process and what is the policy. We have also developed this training program both in French and English, because we have a bunch of our members who are French-only-speaking countries. We run last year eight training in different countries, so you have in orange all the countries where we had training last year and we are planning to have our own 12 training this year, 2006, the new training plan is available on our website. And what we have also new this year is that we add IPv6 training in our training module, so we have some training which is two strands of training. First part is common engineering LIR training and second day is full-day, hands-on IPv6 training. Our members have requested in April, during AfriNIC-2 in Maputo, more awareness of IPv6 so this year, we formally include IPv6 in our training plan. We have also now released in Cairo during AfriNIC-3, training material on CD-ROM which we give to all our new member and all members when they requested the CBT is also online for those who cannot attend physical training. They can learn how to interact with AfriNIC through the training material. We've conducted last year, two public policy meetings, one in Maputo and another one in Cairo. Most of those policy meetings was to discuss generic policy. There is no really new improvement because we are new, new RIR. So we are still validating our basic policies, like all the other RIRs have. In Cairo, we had discussion on the temporary assignment. It's especially for meeting, experimental and other short-period use of IP address. So we got consensus in Cairo on that policy. We also had a discussion on the direct assignments to end-users. We also got consensus on those policies (refers to slide). The four policies where we had consensus was policy which has been proposed a few times before AfriNIC-2 meeting in Maputo but our policy development process required that the policy has to be sent to the mailing list at least 30 days before the face-to-face meeting. So it doesn't meet that criteria in Maputo so that's why in Cairo we have them again for discussion. So then we had also another policy proposal to change the criteria for AS number. Previously we don't have to be a member of AfriNIC to get AS number assignment. Now we have changed to make AS number assignment to only members. We also discussed the global IPv6 allocation policy from IANA to RIRs. We got consensus on this policy and they have been sent back to the mailing list for the 15 days' discussion and now they are - they will be moved to the board for ratification. We got also a policy on 4-byte AS number. That policy was sent less than 30 days before our face-to-face meeting, so the policy is still under discussion. And you can participate on that discussion on our policy mailing list. Some activities: Registration service. We started cleaning up our database after the transition where we got information and registration data from different several RIRs. We start cleaning up the information and making them consistent with what we have in our whois and the new membership forms we got from our member. Engineering point of view - there is a lot we are doing but, among those, we are trying to find a solution for spamming. Several measures have been taken since then to fight the spamming and now we are testing the greylisting. We also are trying to make our membership process very simple and easy. And, for that, we are developing also a membership portal for our members, which will improve the membership itself and the management of the resources, which we will call MyAfriNIC. We also are working on a whois server to adapt it to our policy and make it more consistent with our policy and our internal procedure. We also start our disaster recovery centre set up in Egypt. As you know, we have our operational office based in three different locations, so Egypt is our disaster recovery centre and we have also started deploying our infrastructure over there. On the financial side, we got income tax exemption in Mauritius as a not-for-profit organisation. It has been something we started negotiating since the beginning of last year. We got it in December, which is good news. We invoice our members for 2006 at the beginning of the year. So far, we got a very successful collection. We are at 60% collection rate now but we are still working on the collection and contacting members for payment. We also start the accounting auditing for 2005 accounts as requested by our law. Staffing. When we become a full RIR, we had three working at AfriNIC. Today, we have five, plus one trainee, which is a hostmaster trainee. Four are located in Mauritius and two in South Africa. The new hostmaster is located in Mauritius. And we have two in South Africa, including our new engineer, Frank, which is here too. This year, we are planning to recruit three new staff this semester - a system engineer, a database manager and a membership liaison, which will allow us to improve our relationship with our members. Along all of those, we are also trying to build a strong collaboration and relationship with other organisations working in Africa in the networking and Internet area. We have signed in December with AfNOG a memorandum of understanding to support our activity and conduct some training and awareness activities together. We are discussing with other organisations such as AfrISPA, and ITU-D to see how we can support activities because in our continent there is a lot to do and we need to be able to support each other to be able to achieve those goals. We have also, on the instruction of the board become ITU member in 2005. This allows us to be closer to discussions on Internet government at the ITU level and also be able more easily to raise awareness to government body or policy about Africa. As I was saying, we have included IPv6 training in our training plan. This is part of a global awareness project we have on IPv6 awareness. We had our first IPv6 meeting in Cairo in December during the AfriNIC-3 meeting and we, we are working on a more extensive project on IPv6 which includes providing to our member to be more ready and prepared for the IPv6 transition and the project is known as the 6Mandela project and we will be launching it in during AfriNIC-4 in Nairobi. That is all. Our coming meeting is 16 to 17 May in Nairobi, Kenya. That meeting will be held back to back with AfNOG as we have every year one meeting back to back with AfNOG and, at the end of the year, we will have our fifth meeting in Mauritius and the date is 27 November to 1 December. Thank you. APPLAUSE PAUL WILSON: There are some questions. DAVID CONRAD: David Conrad, IANA, ICANN, whatever. I was just wondering will the AFTLD folks be meeting at the Nairobi meeting? ADIEL AKPLOGAN: Yes. There is a project to have a half a day meeting with AfTLD in Nairobi because we encourage them to be more - to formalise the organisation and be more active. So there will be a meeting of AfTLD in Nairobi. The agenda is not released yet. But yes. PAUL WILSON: OK. More questions? No.