APNIC 22
Annual Member Meeting - Session One
Friday 8 September 2006
09:00 - 10:30


PAUL WILSON: Well, good morning. And thanks for coming to this, the last day of the APNIC Open Policy Meeting, the 22nd APNIC Open Policy Meeting. This is the APNIC Member Meeting, which is the last day of the meeting and it's the day in which we discuss business of particular relevance to APNIC members. There'll be a few reports from the APNIC Secretariat, also from the meeting. There'll be a few demonstrations of some new developments at the APNIC Secretariat and there'll also be time for open mic and for any general discussion, contributions that anyone would like to make.

I'd like to thank, firstly, the silver sponsors for this meeting - KRNIC of NIDA and JPNIC, both of them National Internet Registries within the APNIC system. So thanks very much to KRNIC and to JPNIC for generously sponsoring the meeting. It's very important to have these contributions to the meeting and they're very welcome.

I just mentioned a few things about the agenda. The full program for the morning is here. As I mentioned, some service reports and demonstrations in the morning. Before breaking for morning tea, we'll be having a look and I'll be explaining the NRO Number Council election procedure. That's going on today and everyone should have - every individual in the room should have a voting slip, which is like this one here. Now, I think the voting procedure is quite self-evident and you can - by following the instructions on that form, you can find out quite clearly how to cast your vote in the Number Council election but I'll be spending about 10 minutes before the morning tea at 10:20 approximately to explain this form and also to give any candidates who are here the chance to make any statements about their role, their candidature for the election.
So, if you want to vote now, you can do that but if you want to delay voting until you've heard from the candidates, then please feel free. And the voting is going to close after the lunch break.

The second half of the morning is going to be reports from the Executive Council on and Address Council and also the SIGs and BoFs and the APOPS session that happened during the week. There'll be an introduction to the APNIC member survey before we break for lunch. Some of the afternoon is going to be taken up by the discussion of the APNIC fee structure, which is an ongoing issue that we're all interested in, I'm sure. There's going to be a proposal here for the new non-member fee structure, or for some changes to the non-member fee structure that I suppose we'll be spending most of the time in that session talking about the APNIC fee structure itself for members and I'll be asking the chair the APNIC EC, Akinori Maemura, to join me to chair that session.

We have some colleagues from the other RIRs here and they've come a long way to come and be here and be part of this information and also to present a bit of information about what's happening at the other RIRs. We'll be doing that before the afternoon tea. We also have travellers from IANA and from the NRO, again Axel again, for reports in the afternoon and the last part of the afternoon will be the election result and also we have a couple of prize draws for the end of the day as well. Now one of those is going to be for the eLearning demonstration area. The other is going to be for the meeting evaluation form. Some of you may have this evaluation form but if you do, you can feel free to fill it in now. If you haven't picked one up yet, then they will be distributed around lunchtime. We're really interested to hear any suggestions that you have for the meeting.

As I've mentioned already, this meeting is now a slightly new and changed program with a new extended APOPS session and we'd be very keen in the APNIC Secretariat to hear from you about what you think of that program and whether it's been successful, because we will continue it in future if there's good feedback about it. As I mentioned, if you don't have this form, you'll have a chance to pick it up during the day. We would appreciate it if you fill that in. There will be a lucky prize draw at the end of the day, to give you just that slight incentive that you might need to complete that job. Thanks very much.

Now, another change we made during this meeting is in terms of the APNIC Secretariat reporting - we've got some of the APNIC departmental managers who are going to be giving a series of service reports about what's been happening at the APNIC Secretariat. And so these are in order - first, Gerard for communications, Son Tran for member services, Sanjaya for technical, Irene for finance and accounting and Cecil, the new training manager, will be presenting the report about training.

So what I should do before we start that is ask if there are any questions or any suggestions for the agenda. Is that Randy approaching the mic? It is. Great. We should do a bit of agenda bashing so, please, if you've got any suggestions or questions, line up behind Randy.

RANDY BUSH: Randy Bush, IIJ. Just when you're doing your thanks - the network service here has been fantastic.

PAUL WILSON: Thank you, Randy. That's great to hear. There's a couple of guys up the back of the room there who are looking after the network service - that's Andrew and Terry from APNIC. They've been not only looking after the network service but they've been acting like those guys you see at the back of concert halls with the panels of buttons and they've been controlling the microphones and the cameras and sort of all of the stuff for the webcast.

I shouldn't forget the webcast either, actually. We've got full webcast video session as well as the broadcast of the transcripts going on here. So if there's anyone on the webcast at the moment, I'd like to welcome you to the meeting and thanks very much for joining us. There's an opportunity through the Jabber chatrooms, which are also part of the remote participation services, as an opportunity for anyone who is dialling in remotely to ask any questions or make any contributions. So APNIC staff are monitoring that and if there's any questions or contributions that come through, we'll certainly add those to the agenda as well.

So any final questions? Have I forgotten anything?

OK, I'll hand over now to Gerard Ross, who is going to deliver the report for the communications services of APNIC.

Thanks, Gerard.

GERARD ROSS: Hello. Thanks, Paul.

OK, I'll start by running through the communications - it's not an area just yet at APNIC. You'll hear more about that later. Currently under the banner of communications, we've got a few different functions.

I'll start with the woman who brought this meeting to you all this week. Vivian is in charge of events, also has had quite a lot of help in recent times from Miwa, who takes us down to training there. In training, we've got my what, Sall'ee, Amante and Champ and our brand new training manager, Cecil. In outreach and liaison, Nurani and Kapil have been working hard to spread the message. In my team, there's Tina, Yun, Chiaki and Chris and a very young-looking photo of myself as well. Splendid.

Some of the highlights of APNIC communications recently - we've been doing a lot to support Internet development around the region. One of the ways that's been happening is with the involvement we've had with quite a few of the network operator groups, particularly PacNOG, SANOG and NZNOG where we've really established now a tradition of having quite a good involvement in the meetings that they have and providing content to those meetings, really trying to bridge that gap out across the region.

We've also, along similar lines, been building the relationships we have with other organisations such as the ISP associations in South Asia, ISOC-AU, PICISOC and NIDA. We strengthen those sorts of relationships often by forming cooperative memorandums of understanding which are non-binding but encourage the organisations to mutually work together for training, for other sorts of outreach events.

As Paul mentioned, we've been improving the meeting services. For some time now, we've been providing the live transcripts that you see, as well as video casts. We've now added audio-only podcasts to that list as well. We've improved the chat interface for other people who want to try and participate in the meeting remotely and I think we've seen some evidence of that working at this meeting where there have been quite a few comments coming through from the chat service, people asking questions in the sessions and that's great to see.

In terms of awareness, we've been continuing to develop the resources that we use. You should have all received a pretty swish-looking interactive CD in your meeting kit at this meeting. That represented an awful lot of work within the Secretariat to get quite a lot of useful resources together. We've been continuing to develop other multimedia projects which have been quite useful at various events where APNIC has a presence. And we've also put together quite a few new banners and posters, which you may have seen tumbling from these non-stick walls regularly during the week.

In terms of our general house style, we're updating the look of APNIC, trying to bring a more consistent look throughout our communications. Apster, our quarterly newsletter which you all receive you might have noticed v has a restyled front page. We're now printing that on recycled paper, of which you will hear more later.

Some of the priorities we've got coming up for communications - continuous improvement of everything we do is one of the things we need to work on, particularly our websites. We're embarking on a major review of the content of the website. There's a fair bit of aged stuff on there. We need to strip that back and make it a little bit easier for people to find their way around the website and get the most relevant information.

Because we have people who are out on the road at these meetings and other RIR meetings, at the operator group meetings and all sorts of training events and other things that are happening around the globe really, we have a great opportunity to get a lot of feedback on what we're doing. Paul will be talking a little bit more about surveys later, but we also receive feedback from helpdesks and from those other things and we're trying to formalise the way in which we fold that back into the way that we try and improve our services.

Localising content is something we hope to show you a bit more of by the end of this year. We've recently released a brand new IPv4 request form on the website and we're currently negotiating to have that localised into a variety of different languages, so you should see that by the fourth quarter of this year and we'll hopefully also take that as a pilot for localising the entire MyAPNIC website as well. We'll keep you posted on that one.

Also, a lot of you might have seen the ICONS website, which is a portal for holding thoughts, experience, the ideas of anyone within the region who's interested. And we're encouraging people to use that as much as possible. The website does support different languages and we certainly encourage people to contribute articles in their own language to that website.

Other priorities - to keep on building stronger relationships with various others around the region and the world. We're doing some work on the systems back in the office to improve the way we can manage those relationships, trying to streamline the way that we send out mailing announcements, trying not to be bombarding people quite as much. We've developed - Sanjaya's team has developed a very good system in-house for improving the way we send mail. There'll be improvements to the set of sponsorship options that we offer for meetings and training events. And, again, to continue looking for opportunities to enter into MoUs with other organisations of like mind.

And finally, the reason I'm standing here I guess is the former director of communications at APNIC, Anne Lord, a familiar face to most of you, has recently left us. She did an enormous amount of work in making APNIC what it is. She's just left us to move on to another phase of her life, but we may see her, you know, from time to time as we pass. I'm sure she'll pop up on the occasional mailing list. Again, maybe not.

That's all I have.

If there are any questions, I'd be happy to take them. Otherwise, I'll hand over to Son.

Thank you.

PAUL WILSON: It would be fine if anyone has questions at the time but I'll also give an opportunity in these reports for any other questions that any of you may have. The next is Son Tran, who is the manager of resource services, that is the hostmaster department.

SON TRAN: Good morning, everyone.

Going through my report, I would like you to meet the team. As a group, we're interacting with the members every day, so we recognise that it's very important to understand the cultures in the region and also be able to speak the language, so we spend a lot of time improving staff, you know, across the whole region. So you can see from the photos here that there are people from different economies within our region. And the languages that they speak.

The services and activities that we have tonne for the last six months - if we look at the helpdesk, we launched the chat service a few years ago and we've seen the increased demand in the use of this service. Also, to make the service available to our members, we also recently launched the Voice over IP service so that our members can contact us easily without the extra cost on their telephone. We also try to make the service available as much as possible to our members by working on some of the public holidays in Australia that are not being celebrated across the region.

With resource services, we are - our main focus is trying to provide the best service for our members. So we try to improve in many areas by looking at the procedures and processes. The recent activities that we have done is we improved the internal registry manager software for the host masters to manage the resource and also the launch of the IPv4 request form, which makes it easier for new members to request resources.

We are also very busy implementing policies that we have to do. One of the policies is the resource recovery policy. We have been doing this for the last 12 months. And also, because of some of the new policies affecting historical resources, we spent a lot of time doing this as well.

Let's look at the numbers that we have distributed for the last six years. The data for this one is for 2006, up to the 20th of July. So, as you can see, we almost distributed nearly two /8s to the end of July. So following this trend, we might reach the same level as 2005. IPv6 is almost the same trend as well. You can see the number of prefixes there. With ASNs, not much change either.

In response to one of the services that our members question to debogon the new /8 that we received from IANA because of routability problems some of our members have faced, before I go into detail, I wish to thank the RIPE NCC staff for their support to make this task happen. I don't think we can do it without them and we are looking forward to working with them more in the future.

Just to give a brief outline on how this one worked for those who are not familiar with the project, is that we're announcing a couple of prefixes from a known /8 that we know is routable as well as prefix from new /8 from Amsterdam Internet Exchange and we observed the route from beacons of different regions and compared the results and determined whether the new prefix is routable or not.

We also make the first host of each prefix available for ping or trace route so the community can also test.

In summary of the activities that we do for this task is, once we announce the prefix, we publish them on the website, then we announce that in the community across the globe so they know it's a project so they can, themselves, look at the result. We are also being proactive in contacting some of the ASNs that consistently might be filtering some of the prefix so advise them that they might like to check their filter.

We observed that the routability of the new prefix improved over time but they are not much different in terms of results, even if APNIC intervene.

In our future plan, we are also planning to extend the testing to IPv6 as well as historical resources that we have from the historical resource policies.

As Gerard mentioned, we have new version of ICONS website, which is very useful for the community. We continue to improve the features on the website so that it will benefit for the community and also for members.

Priorities and future outlook for resource service - we will continue reviewing our procedures and processes so that we can streamline the procedures and improve the service for our members. For helpdesk service, we will try to continue to improve the quality of the service, especially because we are dealing with quite a lot of historical resources so we need to improve the complaint handling and escalation process for the issues.

For the online service, we will continue trying to improve the ICONS website and make it more useful for the community. And for the MyAPNIC, we continue to add more features to make it more useful to the community.

That's all I have.

PAUL WILSON: Thank you, Son.

Next, Sanjaya is coming to present the technical report.

SANJAYA: Good morning, everyone. My name is Sanjaya, I'm the technical services manager. The technical services department's main work is development. We develop tools to support our operations. We also integrate - if we find a software that could help us do things better, then we would obtain that software and integrate it to our system. And we also operate all the APNIC technical infrastructure.

In a typical day, we have about four and a half people doing the developments, about three people doing integration work and about four and a half people doing the operations day to day.

In the past six months, in the development area, we've been pretty busy with the resource certification project. We have made a few reports this week as well about this project. Basically, we've completed the specification and we have developed some tools for issuing, validation and storing the certificates.

We also made a significant improvement in our resource management system. The primary tool that is being used by our host masters basically better inventory management. We manage resources - IPv4, IPv6 and ASN is our inventory and now we have a much better system to manage this inventory.

Also a very exciting project we have embarked on, that has been reported this week as well, is the reverse DNS web services. We see this web services technology as the future of our delivery service, online delivery to our members and we will start with one of the most critical services we have and that is in the reverse DNS management. At the moment, our existing update will take about roughly two hours from our members submitting an update before it gets reflected in our nameservers. With the new system, we are expecting it to be within one or two minutes.

And we have also developed various software tools like the billing reminder, which will probably be reported later by the finance team, and also the new IPv4 address form.

In the integration world, we have completely replaced our PABX system with a VoIP system. So with these two tasks you can use your VoIP software to call us. It's cheap.

Later on today, George will explain to you an exciting data analysis and charting tool. It's all O3. I have no idea what it stands for. It's actually from a company in Latin America. This software has been used by LACNIC and we like it so much that we adopted it in this region as well. You can basically analyse the growth of the IPv6 deployment in this region.

In the operations area, we've been busy upgrading our equipment. We completed US and Japan nodes in the past few months, basically to improve performance and service delivery. And we have also completed ip6.int deprecation, which is a globally coordinated work with other RIRs and NIRs.

It's with regret that, in the past year we actually have been facing some serious issues with our reverse DNS service. This is mainly caused by the complexity of a shared zone management policy that we implemented and our existing system turned out to be not that well designed to handle the shared zone management. So we ended up with a complex system with too many sources of data and points of failure and therefore a few problems happened in the past one year, probably six in total, caused by failures in monitoring critical problems. Whenever we found this, we would implement additional monitoring, so we keep on improving this system. Some of them were caused by data verification and validation errors and human errors as well. And for that, the whole APNIC technical team extends our sincerest apology to all affected parties.
But, in a more positive note, we are replacing the whole system with a much simpler and faster reverse DNS management system and we are looking forward to implement this new system in the future.

Right, for the next six months, in the development activities, we're thinking of deploying more web services functions, allowing you, the other members, to easily report their assignments and utilisation. We are also thinking of providing secondary DNS services, so using MyAPNIC you can just, if you want, nominate one of our nameservers to act as the secondary domain and of course we will continue to work on the resource certification. We would also still like to further simplify the forms - more customer-oriented services. We want it to be easier for people to request resources from APNIC. Of course, with the proper considerations. It's not like we are going to give away the resources, but I mean it should be more helpful to people so they can fill in the required information as needed.

And we will be doing preparatory work for MyAPNIC multilingual support.

In the integration world, we are looking at using a content management system software that you can find in the market plenty of them, so it's a matter of finding which one is most suitable for us. We are also thinking of getting a customer relationship management system so better capture the needs and wants of APNIC Members and other stakeholders.

In the operational priorities for the next six months, we will be doing audit on our network and systems. We are confident that our security is quite good but you can never tell until you actually hire someone else to have a go and see if they can find holes in our system. So that's what we are going to do after this meeting, with the aim of better protection of information that our members have entrusted to us, and making sure that our service is delivered to the right... or to the genuine user instead of a spammer.

We are also going to set up our second data centre in Brisbane, basically moving more systems out of APNIC's office to a data centre for seven-by-24 hours availability and redundancy. So hopefully you will see a better availability of APNIC services when we have deployed this data centre.

That is all from me. And the next will be finance update from Irene. Thank you.

IRENE CHAN: Hi. I'm Irene from APNIC. Good morning, everybody, I'm Irene Chan, finance manager of APNIC. I would like to update you on the finance status of APNIC for the first six months of 2006.

First of all, I would like you all to meet our finance team.

Some of the highlights from our Finance Department is we have implemented online payment systems, we accept payment via major credit cards online. Automated billing reminder system by tracking the overdue ageing accounts more closely. We have start sending invoice via e-mail. However, upon request, we also send out the hard copy of the invoice.

Financial status for the first half year of 2006 is we continuous have the membership growth, reaching 1,250 members as at 30th of June. You will see the status in the following slide as well. We maintained the financial activities conservatively. Our expenditure and revenue are below budget.

This is the membership status. You will notice that membership has grown quite steeply for the last few months of 2006, which we are reaching 1,250. We are now actually close over the 1,300, now reaching 1,306 members at the moment.

Here is the membership distribution across the economies. Majority of members are from Australia, consists of 24%, followed by India and Hong Kong.

Profit-and-loss statement. Here is the first six months of the financial status as compared to the budget. We are operating 15% below budget. In fact, quite a lot of our expenses actually are incurred for the last six months of the year.

As for the revenue, we are at 7% below budget before the impact of foreign exchange. After the impact of the foreign exchange, we will be 4%.

Overall, we are at the operating profit of $409,000 for the first six months of 2006. However, for the year - for the 2006 budget, we are budgeted for the loss position.

Here is the balance sheet as at 30th of June. We have 7.9% increase in total assets as compared from the year end of 2005. Having $11 million of total assets.

Our priorities is continuous improvement in our department, simplify the membership application, continuous improve our fees collection procedures so that we can reduce the ageing overdue accounts and we will maintain the financial stability of APNIC in consistence with the financial management principles which maintains at least a one-year operating reserve, to ensure the ongoing stability and ongoing stability of APNIC.

Thanks.

I'll pass on to Cecil, our training manager.

CECIL GOLDSTEIN: I'm not a Mac person.

Well, as you can see, I'm new to APNIC. I've got to get used to the technology as well. I'm a PC person. The transition to Mac is going a bit slowly.

As Paul and Gerard have already indicated, I'm Cecil Goldstein. I recently took up a position at APNIC. This is my first meeting and I'd like at the outset to say how much I enjoyed meeting many of you and I appreciate the feeling of welcome that I've been given and I hope I'll still have the opportunity to meet others. For me it's been a tremendous learning experience and will certainly help me in progressing with my work in APNIC.

Let me just again introduce the team. I know, again, Gerard has mentioned who are members of the training team because we're part of the communications group but this is a slightly enlarged picture so you can see them more closely. But I'd also like to mention that three of the trainers are here with us at the APNIC meeting. I'm sure many of you already know them and of them. Champika, Sall'ee and Amante and I would also invite you to take the opportunity to chat with them if you'd like to. Part of our role is to be aware of what our members need and this is an ideal opportunity for communications.

Miwa is back in Brisbane, so is Arth and Arth is a new member of the training team, although not a new member of APNIC. He's a part-time trainer and he will be shared between the hostmaster resource management group and training.

Well, highlights this year. A new manager appointment. I hope indeed that will be a highlight. As I indicated a moment ago, Arth has also been appointed as a part-time trainer. Part of our efforts is to improve our standard of training material and to ensure that our training material is current, up to date and in line with what is necessary out there in the industry.

So we are collaborating continuously with experts in the field and the work that we've been commencing, we've commenced this year has been collaborative development of material, particularly in IPv6 and in security. So we'll be launching in the very near future training modules focusing on those two areas and with the support of the experts in those areas.

We've also conducted a pilot webcast of APNIC training and this will be an area that we'll continue to use in the future. We've completed the eLearning pilot module. Some of you had the opportunity to look at the demonstration. The launch will be officially made shortly. Has been a major undertaking of the group and I would like to commend Sall'ee in our eLearning development office for the work she put in to getting this off the ground and going. It doesn't only involve the production of the eLearning module but also the integration of the eLearning software, the eLearning environment into our working environment. She's done a tremendous job and I would like to thank her.

Part of the training group's responsibility is also to ensure that our Secretariat staff are also aware of the items that - or the things that APNIC is involved with so we conduct induction training or orientation training for new staff members and this relates not only to matters pertaining to actually working in the Secretariat but also very definitely with regards to the technical areas that APNIC's involved in and also the various tasks that are involved in areas such as hostmaster and so on.

Of course, our core business is the delivery of training and to date at the end of August we have delivered had 24 training courses throughout the region and this has drawn the attendance of some 760 participants. We still have some 16 courses scheduled until the end of 2006 and we're already planning for the end of 2007. At this point I would like to invite those of you who feel you would like APNIC training in your area to speak to us. We try to be proactive but it's crucial for us to be aware of what your needs are and to hear from you when you need training so we can discuss with you when, how, what and so on.

Just to point out the locations where we've conducted training and we have until August conducted training in Mumbai, Perth, Wellington, Zhengzhou, Bangkok, Karachi, Delhi, Hyderabad, Manila, Surabaya, Kaohsiung and Apia and we've got training scheduled for Ulaan Baatar, Manila, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Singapore and Kuala Lumpur to go ahead this year.

Now, priorities and initiatives. We've got an ambitious plan and some those are more urgent than others and some of them will be put in place sooner than others. Again in this area, we invite your feedback, your comments. We did have a training BoF yesterday afternoon but this is a larger audience so again I'd like to reiterate that we do need your feedback. We want to develop a more structured and responsive curriculum, a curriculum which perhaps will flow from basic to the more advanced and will enable us to maintain contact with participants in our training in terms of updates, refresher courses, support and so on. When we talk about responsive curriculum, it will be adjusted to deal with changes in the technology, to deal with changes in the way APNIC operates within that environment.

We want to deliver more training for the APNIC member economies. This is important. It's a large region. We want to reach out to as many of our members as we can and we are trying to work on methods and methodologies to do this. Our focus in teaching and development of materials will be on understanding. We believe that, through understanding, you will be able to conduct your business more effectively, you will know what to do more accurately and you will be able to adopt the best current practices in that regard. The eLearning has been a major step forward in leading towards the development of a blended delivery environment. By that we mean integrating eLearning together with face-to-face training. I should stress here that our face-to-face courses are not disappearing.

ELearning is another methodology that we are integrating so that we can, a, make our training more accessible, more readily available and more widely available and also use various eLearning technologies and methods to integrate so that we can provide, as I said earlier on, a more structured and more continuous form of education.

In addition, we want to foster collaboration with educational and professional organisations. In this respect, we want to be able to work with them to ensure that the kinds of material, the kind of information that is passed on to students who are graduating or people who are involved in training is current and relevant, not only to what is happening out there in the Internet but what is happening within the local areas as well.

So our aim over the year is to inject or to help inject information, knowledge and to guide them and to work with them in being able to support and - support Internet operational matters and Internet development in their regions as well.

We want to build partnerships with members and associated groups to help advance Internet development, local learning. One of the mechanisms that has been suggested in this respect has been the training or the working together with local tutors, so collaboration with you is something which is important to us. Working with local knowledge can help us be more effective when we provide our training and when we plan our training, again, it points to the whole question of communication and, indeed, we do see it as very important to improve our feedback mechanisms. We will be working in this respect to be able to draw on your comments more readily, more often and to greater effect.

Our fee structure - when I talk about fee structure, I'm not referring to the APNIC member fee structure but rather to the training fee structure - is something which is under constant revision. We do want to examine this to ensure that, when we do deliver training, the fee structure is relevant and appropriate and reasonable for those areas where we will be going and, once more, in this respect, we do need your advice and your guidance.

Timely, we believe that for participants to come into training and participate in a training event and then disappear and remain static is not possibly the best outcome and we do want to encourage course participants to continue with their professional development and once again contact with us and the utilisation of our eLearning environment will be a major component in this effort.

That's really all that I wish to comment on. Thank you for your attention and if there are any questions...

PAUL WILSON: OK. Thanks very much, Cecil.

We're moving on-to-now to a set of reports about specific services and activities. I think Gerard is taking his laptop here so I'll take the opportunity to say thanks to Gerard, Son, Sanjaya, Irene and Cecil. Also welcome to Cecil as the training manager at APNIC. I think he's made a great start. Training has always been an area through membership surveys and other feedback mechanisms that we have, it's always been an area that is seen as important as an area that we need to keep developing. So it's great to have the training area in such good hands these days. Of course we're going to continue here with - on the training theme, introducing another relatively new staff member at APNIC, Sall'ee, who's been appointed as the eLearning officer and has done some work which is going to be demonstrated.

The eLearning corner has been set up as a demonstration area for those of you who are interested. I've always felt that possibly the people who would be most interested in eLearning are not likely to be in this room, because we're trying with eLearning service to be able to reach out to people who are not quite as easily able to travel and to make APNIC training and education available, well, to make it, as the slide here says, to make it ready when you are. So once again to those people on the webcast, I'd encourage you to also make use of this online facility to improve your understanding of and your interaction with, APNIC. Sall'ee.

SALL'EE RYMAN: Thanks, Paul. My name is Sall'ee Ryman and I'm the eLearning developer for APNIC.

And I'm just following on from some of the things Cecil's been talking about developing a blended learning environment.

Firstly, it's important to understand that training is fundamental, is a fundamental service to our members. And, as Cecil has mentioned, it helped develop a number of capabilities. ELearning is an extension of that and we'll be able to reach more members and make our training services more accessible by more people.

Alright, why did eLearning come about? There was the issue of making training more accessible to more people but, in December 2005, there was a remote access survey where 86% of respondents supported the development of eLearning. However, only 31 had attended online courses previously, so part of our job is also to teach people how to use eLearning and what eLearning is.

As Cecil has already stressed, it won't replace face-to-face training. It is designed to complement face-to-face training. At this point, we're looking at providing eLearning as basic skills that people can learn before they actually attend a face-to-face seminar and learn more practical skills.

Why use eLearning? It's currently free of charge. It's more accessible. It allows you to manage your own learning. So you can choose what you want to learn, which skills you would like to acquire and do them in your own time.

It also will give you virtual access to trainers and one of the key ingredients of eLearning is actually building a social - a learning society, if you like, a learning community. And one of our aims is to build learning communities where we facilitate people who come together to learn and to discuss issues and we will be asking member s and people from the APNIC community to perhaps sponsor some of those learning societies.

Currently available is the Using eLearning, which will show you how to navigate the lessons and the ISP Address Why request, which has been released in conjunction with the new form for requesting IPv4 address space. And it will be help you build an application. Now one of the key ingredients of eLearning is that if you are doing an eLearning course, you should be coming out with something that is useful to you. So in this particular one, you will be receiving assistance in building your request.

Now, most important is your feedback. Because we want to facilitate these learning communities, it's really important that we get feedback as to what you quo like to see happening in eLearning. We're trying to be as responsive as we can to your needs.

Alright, so who is eLearning for? It's for member organisations and other interested people, new staff of member organisations and anyone who is wanting to update or refresh their knowledge of Internet operational technologies or APNIC procedures and policies.

What can you expect in the future from eLearning? It will be integrated into the training environment, as we've mentioned. We will be developing a blended learning approach, building learning communities and the learning communities will be built around those electronic modules that are currently available. It will incorporate webcast events. It will incorporate forums and live web seminars. And it will also be used to develop material that can be used in face-to-face training.

Right, so how do we access eLearning? If go to the APNIC website, there is, in fact, a link on the homepage. When you get to the homepage, there is a 'using eLearning' module that you can do straight away just off the page, which I will show you in a minute. This will show you how to enter and register in eLearning. And once you have entered and registered, you are then ready to do whichever of the modules that you choose to do.

Right, if we have a look at the webpage, the eLearning webpage - the first thing up is the 'using eLearning module', which, as I just mentioned, shows you how to enter eLearning. There is an eLearning calendar on the webpage and this will show you what modules are available. Some modules will be available all the time. Some modules will run for only a short period of time. This is to help motivate people to actually complete those modules. If you know there is a deadline by which you need to complete that module, then it will be done and it will help keep people on track.

If you click on the links for those modules that are available, it will take you to a page that explains what that module is about, what skills can be gained from completing that module, what the key topics are, if you should be doing that module, if it's right for you and is it a prerequisite for face-to-face training.

The incorporation of learning communities will involve a number of live events. Now, those live events will be advertised in eLearning news giving a date and a time and also information on how to access that live event. It will also give you information as to the purpose of that event, what is it that you are going to get out of attending that event.

And then lastly is the 'enter eLearning' button and this will take you to the eLearning learner management system.

Right, to register, it's very easy. You create a user, you create your own user name and your own password that is unique to you. And this can be anything so long as you can remember it. Once you click that button, it's fairly self-explanatory, it will guide you through what you need to do.

Alright, when navigating eLearning, this is just a quick look at what the lessons actually look like themselves. Down the bottom is the navigation tool so, that will take you forwards and backwards through the lesson, it will give you a menu of topics within that lesson so you can go back and look at specific things that you would like to know more about.

Into each eLearning lesson will be incorporated three key activities. The first one is the option to view a demonstration of whatever it is that you're learning about. So, for instance, the ISP address request module will show you the form and it will provide a demonstration of how that form is filled in. The second key activity will be an exploration activity, where you will be able to explore the object that you are learning about, you will be able to interact with it, click on it to get definitions, click on it to get more information, click on it to get help and assistance. The third key activity is to actually do it yourself so there will be an option where you can actually practise that skill.

These buttons over on the right-hand side of the screen are the ones that are actually - more general buttons. The first one is a help button and it will show you how to get help and that is your access to the trainers. That might be through forums, it might be through e-mail. Your choice. You will be given a number of choices to access the trainers. This button is the discussion. This is the entry way to the learning community where you may discuss what you are learning with other participants and trainers will also be involved in those communities. And lastly the home button which takes you back to the beginning of the lesson.

Alright, we did have an eLearning corner happening this week. There will be a winner announced this afternoon who will win a bluetooth headset and I think that's at the end of the meeting this afternoon.

Alright, if you haven't already had a look, please go and have a look at eLearning and please send us any feedback so we can use that information that you give us to help us develop our future modules. Thank you.

PAUL WILSON: Thank you, Sall'ee.

Are there any questions before the next presentation is set up?

Thank you. George Michaelson is going to be presenting the O3 service, the online interactive statistical reporting service, which is based on the O3 software. It's also based on a service that was developed at LACNIC, using software that comes from Latin America that is quite unique and powerful and I'd like to say thanks to LACNIC for the support that we got from them in putting together this new service.

GEORGE MICHAELSON: Hello, everyone.

OK, I'm going to present on a new service we're actively doing which we're calling the APNIC statistics portal.

So this activity was driven by something that was put into the APNIC strategic plan. We've been aware that we do a lot of reporting of information on utilisation of resources, aspects of membership and process, but we wanted to try and improve this and get more information out to the community. Something we thought of was to find a way to expose the information structures inside our databases and let you construct views of this data that were more useful for you. We wanted that to be as consistent as possible for stakeholders, for us doing internal process and also for the general public.

So it's aiming at a graphical interface, but we are aware that there are people who need to get the data downloaded into their own computer, perhaps to do further analysis or to drive research projects or planning or inputs to the policy process.

The implementation is based on a product called 03, which is a development of a company in Uruguay called Ideasoft. This was deployed in LACNIC, I think it was about two years ago, Paul, or three? It's a very deployment that they did and for some time we've been talking to them about the ideas behind the deployment, how this worked in practice. This was the Siari project. You may well have seen demonstrations by members of LACNIC community at our meetings or perhaps at their meetings. It's a java-developed web service using the JBOSS web server. Now, this does have quite a large overhead. We have dedicated a rack-mounted server to this project and it has a large memory footprint, so you do have to put some resources behind it. But, having done this, it's a very nice self-managed system. It was extremely easy to install. It's quite a good example of the things that Sanjaya was mentioning that we're now quite actively looking at external packages that are complete and can provide solutions in accessing our technical solutions for the community.

This uses the JDBC to make a bridge over to MySQL and that let's us access the MySQL database inside APNIC. It's a web portal so when the service is made publicly available you're going to see things through the web browser. You can do menu pulldowns and stuff to see the queries we're making available.

Sorry, the text is fuzzy here. When I go into the actual download, it might be easier to read I mope hope.

The basic views is a left-hand bar that let's you construct different aspects of the view, perhaps change the arithmetic of the view, what's on the X axis or on the Y axis. You can select different criteria from a men-up of choices available and then you have a view window that shows you the data. But you can see the data as the law figures. If you want to do something to look at the tabular information that lies behind the graphs. You can change from 3 D presentation to say a stacked view and get a different sense. You can do selections of data to measure. You can do selection of resources. So, for instance, I can just trivially make an ASN-only count. Now this is fairly similar to a graph that you will have seen Son Tran presenting in the summary of resource allocations over the year. Previously, you would only see this information by downloading our power point slides and maybe extracting it but you've now got an opportunity to construct a view of this data for yourself.

You can also do refinements by economy. So this is an instance of graphing Taiwan and China together to provide an overview. Or you could provide a subregional view. This is an approximation of the Indian subregion as it's defined by the UN. It gives you a sense of the community. You can see it includes a sum column so you can do aggregated views of the total amount of resource.

A very nice feature is that this thing will actually do a direct export to spread sheet so you can get all of that tabular data into your own presentation material and then represent these graphs in a way that suits you for using in power point or off site or maybe doing pdf documents.

So the it next steps are that we're going to try and extend coverage, work out more aspect of APNIC data to expose. Perhaps we might put up data on attendance at APNIC meetings or training. If you have ideas of data you would like to see presented, please let us know. We'd love to hear from you. If you're interested in using this facility when we do make it visibly publicly on the network, you can contact our helpdesk line and register interest and when it's deployed there will be a URL in the public APNIC webpage. It's likely to be the bottom URL of the stats post but we're still engineering some specifics about how this will be exposed. Before I go to the demo, I would like to thank LACNIC for help with this, for guidance with the ideas behind it and liaison with the commercial supplier and Ideasoft who have been very helpful with the deployment. They're a very nice, innovative company. They've been supportive with licensing. The graphing, data modelling, ongoing analysis and management and deployment has been done by Frank Salanitri of the technical group.

So if I just shift to the browser window. Sorry about the small font size. That might be - I might be able to put that up, actually. I'm not sure if this will work!

OK, so you can drill down from some prestored queries. For example, this is a stored view of ASN allocation history. I'll dial that down again. OK, so this is one of the stored queries that we've made available and it's possible to specify changes to the graphing style. I'll make this into a stack bar chart. And this does an on-the-fly redraw of the data and then you can just tune around with it, select different presentations. I've actually stored here a particular graph I was interested in so this is an overview of allocation date into the greater China economy region. So it's China, Macau, Hong Kong and Taiwan presented as a historical bar chart with a sum column and this is showing that the total amount of IPv4 /8s is approaching six /8s in this region. That might be something of interest in a similar way for other people.

Previously, you'd have had to extract that from raw data held in APNIC but now we're giving you a tool that let's you construct these views for yourself.

That's it, Paul. Thank you.

PAUL WILSON: Did you tell us when it will be available.

GEORGE MICHAELSON: We don't have a fixed deadline for release. I'm hoping it will be done by the end of the year. That's plausible, Sanjaya? Yeah, end of year.

PAUL WILSON: We just have one more project report. Nurani is going to talk about eco-APNIC.

NURANI NIMPUNO: Good morning, everybody.

My name is Nurani Nimpuno.

I'm here to give a report from APNIC Eco group.

Like I said, this is a report from the Eco group at APNIC. Some of you might have seen the posters outside and some of the recycling stations we have. You might wonder what that is all about.

So eco-APNIC started with Paul raising it in one of the staff meetings that maybe we should think about making APNIC, the APNIC Secretariat, a little bit more environmentally friendly and thinking about how we can reduce our ecological footprint.

So it's a staff-driven project. There were quite a few volunteers who were interested in looking at the day-to-day operations of the Secretariat. So what we're doing is we're identifying ways where we can be more environmentally friendly without compromising the services we give to the community and the membership.

So why are we doing this? Well, as a lot of you might be aware, there's a raised awareness of environmental concerns by the scientific community and as an organisation, we think it's our responsibility to work in a sustainable manner.

So what are we doing? Well, we're looking at a few different areas - travel, energy efficiency, recycling and wastage.

So, as you know, quite a few of the APNIC staff travel a lot to various conferences, obviously to the APNIC meetings. We give a lot of training courses. So it's unavoidable to do as much travel as we can. But we're investigating offsetting carbon emissions. It's possible for organisations to invest in various projects that look at saving or reabsorbing carbon emissions, so renewable energy production or reforestation for example. We're looking into ways of encouraging carpooling, cycle and public transport. So that also saves costs and reduces pollution. And it keeps us all fit. I've committed to start cycling to work. So we'll see how that goes.

So recycling and wastage is another one. We're looking at both recycling the papers that we're using for example, but also, like Gerard said, we're now moving to using more and more recycled paper.

Electronic wastage is also a very serious environmental problem today. So we are look at how we can recycle electronic wastage but also electronic equipment that is still working that we can pass on to other organisations or individuals that might need it more than we do.

And then also reducing wastage. When we look at how much waste we produce as an organisation, we realise that there are a lot of areas where we can improve, both reducing the amount of paper we use, minimising wrapping, recycling toners and things like that.

And the last there is energy efficiency. When we looked at all the things we could do as an organisation, we found that there are very big things we can do but also very small initiatives, simple things like turning off equipment actually has a huge impact. There's a great misconception that if you turn off the equipment, the power surge when turning back on the equipment sort of cancels out of the power you save. But that's actually not true. Just a simple thing like a monitor that's on standby all night uses a third of what it uses when it's turned on. So a lot of small things like that that we can do.

And we're also looking into the use of natural light and airflow and things like that. We found we're looking around the office, the air conditioning keeps everyone so sold so some people have little heaters to counteract the cold. So instead of sort of doing those things, we're looking into creating a better environment without using a lot of energy.

So, a few of the things that you can do. There are a lot of small things but also a lot of bigger things you can do individually and as an organisation.

We have just now embarked on this project so we're still learning a lot and still finding out a lot of facts and seeing what really has an impact. We've also written an article in Apster that should be in your meeting packs. But we've enlarged it and printed it out so, if you're interested in that, you can read that on the notice board.

OK. Stay tuned. Like I said, we have recycling stations outside so if you're not going to use your lanyards or badges or meeting equipment, meeting packs, feel tree to recycle them. We'll keep you up to date in Apster, we'll have a regular Eco section there. We'll have more information on the website and we'll keep you posted at these APNIC meetings.

And that's it from me. Any questions?

PAUL WILSON: OK. Thanks, Nurani. That's the end of a series of reports about activities at APNIC departments and some new services and projects. Our thanks to all of the individuals who presented those reports. I'm particularly grateful because if I had to present those reports myself, I don't think I'd be talking any more. Just at the moment, I'm sure you can hear me coughing and spluttering up here. But, if there are any questions, now is the time to ask.

We'll be breaking in a few minutes for morning tea and if there are no questions, I'd just like to mention again the NRO Number Council election, which is under way right at the moment. So every individual who is in the room has an entitlement to vote using one of these forms and if you don't have a form or you didn't receive one for any reason, then please see the Secretariat staff out the front.

We have four candidates and this election is to select one of the candidates to sit on the Number Council. As you probably know, by sitting on the NRO Number Council, that person becomes a member of the Address Council within the ICANN structure and so that's the structure which provides the policy advice on IP addressing to ICANN and which is directly involved in the process of establishing global policies within the ICANN framework for IP addressing. Now we have four candidates. I'd like to provide the opportunity for any of those candidates to speak to the audience prior to the vote. So let's see if I can bring those up on the screen. We have anyone in the room who would like to speak. It's quite traditional that you have the opportunity to do so here at the meeting. So Hyun-Joon.

HYUN-JOON KWON: Thank you, Paul. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Hyun-joon Kwon from the National Internet Development Agency in Korea. Actually, I joined this Internet community, like, five years ago and I started my career from the Korea Network Information Center as a manager. At that time, I worked on the service and also I managed all their procedures and after that, I joined the international peerage team to involve the ICANN activities. So I know so many stuffs over the Internet governance and domain issues. So currently I'm the manager of the IP management team of the Korea Network Information Center.

So here I am standing again and I want to be elected to the NC. And then, if I am elected, I will do a sincere job for the Asia Pacific community. And then, I will try to transfer Asia Pacific's voice to the global policy. So I am here and thank you for listening and thank you very much.

APPLAUSE

PAUL WILSON: Thank you.

There are three other candidates who appear not to be in the room.

I'm showing here on the screen the Number Council election webpage which is easily accessible from the meeting website. And so that biographical details and nomination details on each of those candidates is there on the website for you to review.

As the instructions on the form, on the ballot paper indicate, you are asked to pick just a single candidate by placing a single X in the chosen box.

And please don't select more than one and try to avoid any ambiguous markings or anything that might make that vote ineligible. The voting will be closing, I believe, at the end of lunchtime, so you have between now and 2 pm to think about your vote and to cast the vote. There should be a ballot box outside the room where you can deposit the vote. I'll mention as well that there is online voting going on as well which I believe is still open until 2 pm. It's just been pointed out to me that the ballot box at the moment is at the front of the room in this big red perspex box here.

What we will need when the ballot closes is a small group of scrutineers, independent of APNIC staff of course, who can volunteer to help with that. So if you're interested, I'll call for those volunteers when we come back from lunch and ask you to assemble. In fact, I'll call for those volunteers, I'm sorry, before lunch, and ask you to assemble during lunch to consider how to go about the vote counting and you can get started on doing that during the afternoon and I do hope we have enough volunteers just to make that an easy task. Are there any questions about the voting procedure?

Any questions about anything that I've mentioned here?

OK, then. As I mentioned, the APNIC staff are willing and available to help if you do have any questions about this matter or anything else of course during the day and I think it's time now that we break for our morning tea for the next half an hour and, according to the agenda, we should be back in the room here by 11am please for the next round of reports so thank you very much and have a pleasant morning tea.

Annual Member Meeting - Session Two
11:00-12:30


PAUL WILSON: Okay, let's get back into it. The next report is from the APNIC Executive Council, then the Address Council and then some reports back from the sessions during the last few days. The election ballot box has been moved to the front of the room, so this is where you drop your ballot papers and you can vote now, any time up until 2p.m. at the latest. I will hand directly over to Akinori Maemura for his accounts report.

AKINORI MAEMURA: Good morning, my name is Akinori Maemura, I'm the chair for the APNIC Executive Council. I'm bring you the APNIC EC report. This gentlemans are the current EC members. Gentlemen, please stand up to present your faces to the members. I'm Akinori Maemura from Japan, Che-Hoo Cheng, the secretary, Kuo-Wei Wu, the treasurer, Billy Moo-Ho Choen from Korea, Mr Ma Yan from China, Vinh Ngo from Vietnam. In case of the name - Cheng is the first name. If you have any questions or comments for the APNIC and, especially for the policies issues or some business issues, please come to the members and the EC members are willing to answers the questions or comments.

Main functions of APNIC EC is the listed here. Interim decisions between membership meetings. Oversight of the activities of APNIC. We concerned about the policy issues and the APNIC strategy. Also, establish the basis of the budget for the membership approval. Also endorse the policy consensus towards implementation.

We have six EC meetings since March 2006 when we have the previous APNIC meeting. Actually, we missed one member, one monthly meeting in June due to the schedule of the EC members' schedule. They met in the one date, so we skipped it. We had six meetings consequently from that since previous meeting. The minutes are available on the APNIC web, so if you have any concerns or interested in the topics we are discussions about, please visit the APNIC web to browse it.

Financial status. Every EC monthly conference we have the financial reports from the Secretariat, Irene and Paul. We monthly monitor expenses and cashflow and also the asset status. This year, 2006, we are running quite balanced budget, which is presented in the previous APNIC meeting. The current financial status quite good. We have the less expenses than expected. Also, a bit less revenue than expected. But the total revenue and expenses surplus is a bit more than expected so far. We think it is quite stable situation. So we have membership fee discussion and, of course, APNIC issue is quite concerned about that. Originally, the membership fee issue was an issue for the NIRs. NIRs have to pay the fee on allocation to members. Currently we have bigger and bigger allocation size to pass to the NIRs. The fees are extraordinarily big per month, so it has a very big problem. We started to think long term and a better-fit solution. Finally, the membership fee discussion included the membership fee change and the modification also for the ordinary membership.

Right now, the mailing list at wg-apnic-fees@apnic.net. We invite you to join the mailing list to have your voice included in discussions for the fees. We are still, the discussion is still ongoing. We don't have any quite finalised proposal. So in this membership meeting, in this APNIC member meeting, later we have the fee discussion session to introduce you and present you some proposals and discussion status. So you can have the status of the fee discussion. So please don't hesitate to present your opinion. Then that opinion will be included in the discussions.

Okay, the policy endorsement is the one of the major functions of the APNIC EC. We have one policy proposal to reach consensus, which is prop-032-v002. It was reached in March, it was confirmed as a consensus and we, APNIC, endorsed the proposal in July.

ICANN/NRO status. The contract between ICANN and NRO is ongoing. Also, NRO incorporation is ongoing. Regarding the NRO, we have the coordination between ICANN AC and council, which is also member council. Every time we have APNIC meetings, we have the onsite meeting between EC and ICANN. Also we have joint mailing list for that communication. As you may know, EC appoints one council member out of three. This time, Mao Wei from CNNIC is the EC appointment for the entire 2006.

On-line voting. We already approved to go with the on-line voting and on-line voting is already in use from the previous meeting. This time, on-line voting is used for NRO and NC election from the APNIC members who are not here. Still, the number of the electronic vote is not so big so we encourage APNIC members to use on-line voting more.

Okay, APNIC 23. It is conducted with APRICOT 2007. It is to be held from February 27 to March 2 in Bali, Indonesia. So I reported in the previous meeting that Bali has the little bit of security alert, as in the case of Japan may be, as in other countries. So that is a concern for the EC members. So to ask you for your participation, because in some cases, if the security alert is raised, then business trips are not to be approved. But right now, APNIC is concerned about that with the Secretariat. APNIC Secretariat with APIA board went to Bali for the on-site check for the security situation. We have already had a report from them about that issue. Then we know that security enhancement is quite good in the meeting venue and we are now getting more and more confident for that issue. So, we will keep you informed, so please come to APRICOT 2007. APNIC 24 is to be held in September 2007 after the APRICOT 2007. Hosting city is to be announced later today. We have already determined where that is held.

Member survey. APNIC sometimes conducts the membership survey and it is, again, time for conducting another membership survey. It is agreed to do it on a regular basis. Membership survey. It is present after this. Thank you very.

I recall, I have important thing missed. Finally, we have the VoIP teleconference system for the EC meetings. That was used for the first time in August. So it is working for reducing the cost for the conferences because EC telephone conference needs to call between Brisbane, Australia to China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, and so on. So that costs much for such an international call, but VoIP IP telephone conference eliminates the costs. So it is very good. It is a very good news for APNIC business. Thank you.

So if you have any questions, I'm ready to answer.

PAUL WILSON: Okay, thank you very much. While Kenny is coming up, I would just like to say thank you, and present you with a small gift. Thank you very much. So the next report is Kenny Huang with the ASO AC report. The list of reports from now on is on the screen here. I would ask the speakers to be ready. I'll change the order here and Kenny can stay on.

KENNY HUANG: Okay, good morning. My name is Kenny Huang. I'm the representative from Asia Pacific for address council member. Mao Wie is not here. Hyun-joon Kwon from Korea and myself.

Who is the Address Council? It is the Number Resource Policy Advisory Body.

How is it organised? We have 15 members, three from each region. Two elected at large, one appointed by RIR board. RIR and ICANN observers. Terms of office in two years is staggered.

What does it do? Including advise ICANN board, select ICANN board members and also elect ICANN non-committee member. We have regular telephone conference meeting every month and also we conduct two physical meetings every year. This year including one in Istanbul and another in December in San Paolo. There are the five members from the regions, you can check it from the web site.

Some key issues including the global policy allocation of IPv6 address space. The document describes policy governing the allocation of IPv6 address space from the IANA to the regional Internet registries. The main points of proposal are the unit of IPv6 allocation. The IANA will allocate sufficient IPv6 address space to the RIRs to support their registration needs for at least an 18-month period. The IANA allow for the RIRs to apply their own respective allocation strategies. RIR have adopted a second 4 of this proposal.

Last one, in June 2006, it was submitted to the ASOAC by EC and adopted by ASOAC on 12 July 2006. It was submitted to ICANN for comments. Regarding this proposal, address council opinion is well crafted policy that fulfils the real need to govern IPv6 address allocation at the very highest level in a manner that ensures sufficient space will be allocated to all regions. Right now it is process of decision making and hopefully it will be good news to announce later.

Another key issue is to select ICANN board member in compliance with the ASOMO, RU and ICANN bylaws, the address council hereby called for nominations to the ICANN board to fill the ASO seat in 2000 TWIX. So on 3 May, ASOAC selected David Wodelet to serve a three-year term to begin in June 2006.

ASOAC procedure for processing global policy. This document specifies the procedures to be used by the ASO address council. It will guide ASOAS to deal with proposals. It has been finished. The ASOAC recommends that the NRO accepts it as a region. Other activities of ASO can be referred to the web site.

Thank you, I'm happy to answer any questions.

AXEL PAWLIK: I have read my mail this morning and David has sent a mail to the EC that the board has adopted the policy.

KENNY HUANG: Congratulations.

PAUL WILSON: Thank you, that's good news. Okay, while we are - if there are no other questions or other good news, then the next session is for the reporting back from the sessions of the meeting APOPS, SIG and BoF report. Since Kenny is here we will take the order slightly differently and start talking about the policy SIG. Sorry, Philip. But this, since Kenny is up here we will do this.

KENNY HUANG: That's fine, I can come back in.

PAUL WILSON: Well, it's a longish report.

KENNY HUANG: Okay, Kenny Huang again, I'm the chair of policy SIG. We are running the 14th policy SIG report. Basically here is the some basic introduction regarding the policy, you can check it from the web site and here just very brief introduction. Basically we have a discussion and go to the public forum for discussion. Once we have consensus, is it what we are doing right now, if we have consensus from the AMN we will call for discussion for an eight-week period. After that, it was endorsed by the council and it will be adopted by APNIC within three months. That is the policy process. So that's a list for the whole history that we run in the policy SIG. We are going to 14 policy SIGs.

Address policy SIG agenda. Starting from review action items and we have policy update and proposal-037, depreciation of e-mail updates and database. And proposal-033, modified lame DNS policy. 0-39, a proposal to improve reachability of the IANA blocks. Proposal -035, and -034, IPv6 portable assignment for end-user organisation. 0-36, proposal to allow end sites to receive IPv6 allocations. 0-33, end-site assignment policy for IPv6. -031, assignment size to critical infrastructure. Large-space IPv4 trial usage program for future IPv6 development activities update. And the last one is experiment assignment for byte AS numbers. We have 17 in Jabber chat. Total together, we have eight policy proposal that, really a lot of policy proposal and we have for four informational presentation.

We start from proposal 0-37, depreciation of e-mail updates for APNIC registry and Whois data presented by Terry Manderson. Basically, it covers the secretariat to phase out e-mail updates of registry and data. Unfortunately, they didn't reach consensus at the OPM and proposed an alternative compromise. The secretariat to call for the formation of a working group. Shin Yamasaki volunteered to chair the group.

Next one, 0-38, modified lame DNA policy proposal also presented by Manderson man. The proposal to make an editorial update to the definition of lameness for the APNIC lame.

Next one, 0-39. A proposal to improve reachability of new IANA blocks presentated by Tomoya Yoshida. Consensus reached to have the debogonising pilot project. The costs will require further investigation of the APNIC staff. The proposal covers four components, four sub-proposals, the first one making the rule on IPv6 and we didn't reach consensus of the proposal. The second, applying for IPv6 as well as v4, we have consensus. More collaboration between RIRs and ISPs, we reached consensus.

Last one, sharing the information for all RIRs, we also reached consensus. The chair to refer the relevant parts of proposal to 0-39 to reach consensus.

Proposal 035, IPv6 portable assignment for multihoming and this proposal presented by Tomama-san and we also have another very similar proposal, proposal 0-34 IPv6 portable assignment for end-user organisations presented by Jordi Palet. There are a lot of places quite similar so we just discussed together. We do have consensus for APNIC to have IPv6 portable assignment for multihoming purpose.

Starting for 035, IPv6 portable assignment for multihoming including assignment to multi homed end sites and assignment size /48.

Regarding 034, IPv6 portable assignment for end-user organisation, assignment size through, assigned to end sites, the proposal did not reach consensus.

036, proposal to allow end sites to receive allocations. The proposal to allow for end-site allocation, remove the need to have a plan to make 248 in two years. It did not consensus.

Proposal 033, end-site assignment policy for IPv6. Including end-site assignment is a matter for LIRISP to determine. If they want to continue to use only /48s, that is their decision. HD ratio is based on 56 unit equivalents. The proposal reached consensus.

Last proposal, 031, IPv6 assignment size to critical infrastructure presented by Save Vocea. Amend text of existing IPv6 policy document. Modify the statement to maximum assignment made is 0/32 per operators. The proposal reached consensus at OPM.

We have four informational presentations. Sorry, too many proposals. The first one comment from JP on end-site allocation policy for IPv6 proposal 033. Feedback from the community about these issues.

Second, IP policy update, comparative status in all RIR regions.

Third one, large space IPv4 trial usage program for future IPv6 deployment activities. Presented by Takashi-san from council in Japan.

The last presentation, experimental assignment for 4-byte AS numbers presented by Maemura-san. We have two actions, the action one, chair to refer proposal 037 to mailing list for further discussion.

Action two, Secretariat to call for the formation of a working group to further discussion proposal 033. Shin Yamasaki volunteered to chair the working group. We have two action items.

So, next step, we need to seek consensus from AMM.

PAUL WILSON: Just before we go straight into that, I will mention, as I generally do at this point, the role of the members meeting in the policy process is to accept by consensus the decisions or recommendations of the individual policy SIGs. This is a chance to review and accept, or not, the consensuses of the SIGs. So what we will do is go through each of these proposals and seek consensus.

Now there should also be an opportunity, if there is an opportunity now for questions or discussion about any of these, and I think the thing to do would be to go through them in order with any discussion, any questions and then the step of, in each case, endorsing the proposal or not, as the case may be, by consensus of this meeting.

I think we should start with the top, start at the top and that is proposal -038, which is modified lame DNS policy proposal. If Kenny - if you would like to comment on this or if there are any questions, then please let's have them.

KENNY HUANG: Actually, I have the slide, can go back to previous slide, or if have previous we can just ask question.

PAUL WILSON: In that case, can I ask for an indication of those who support the SIG on this policy proposal. The consensus was to accept the modified lame DNA policy proposal. Could you please raise your hand if you will accept and support the consensus decision on this proposal?

I would like to ask you to raise your hand quite high, if you are raising your hand just so the committee can see.

Is there anyone who will, who opposes the policy proposal?

I think we have a consensus, but not an overwhelming one, though.

So, is it possible that something about the process is not clear? Kenny, maybe we should go back to the policy process slide.

RICHARD JIMMERSON: Paul, this is Richard Jimmerson. There are a number of people in the room who are not allowed to vote as part of the membership. There is a portion of the people in the room who cannot vote, including myself, as an RIR member.

PAUL WILSON: RIR members and staff generally don't participate in the consensus decisions or our RIR meetings. Because this is the member meeting, there is a general expectation that members who are passing judgments in these cases, although I'm not sure if we have ever said that others in this meeting are not allowed to vote. I don't think it is in the rule book actually, but Richard, thanks for raising the point. The diagram here on the screen shows the steps in the policy process. Would you like to explain them again, Kenny?

KENNY HUANG: Okay, we start from the beginning. Once we have proposal policy or amendment, then we can have some discussion. We do have face-to-face discussion in the public forum. Okay. So that's how we did it yesterday. Once we have consensus, we report the SIG to the AMM and once we reach consensus, as we are doing now, call for public comment for eight weeks. So if you don't have time or you don't have comment to make right now, you have eight weeks for public comment. After eight weeks, the chair and co-chair will decide a consensus reached or not reached in the mailing list. Moving to the EC, and EC will ratify the final proposal. Once we decide the policy, it will implement by APNIC in three months.

PAUL WILSON: Thanks, Kenny. As Kenny mentioned, we are at the point, having had detailed discussions in the SIG meetings this week, the results of those meetings have been presented back to the APNIC membership for endorsement by the membership, this is your chance as APNIC members to raise any problem if you see a particular membership-related problem, a business problem, something that might not have been considered, it is your opportunity to raise that issue or otherwise to support the consensus of the SIG, which has addressed the issue in detail. As Kenny said, there is a further opportunity for members and members of the broad community to review and discuss the policy proposals as the time goes on over eight weeks before the final result is determined. I hope that is clear.

What we have is a small number of people who supported the consensus, indicated their agreement with the consensus at the SIG on the lame DNA policy and no-one in opposition. So I would suggest we have a consensus here on that particular question.

We should move on to the next policy proposal. The next one is proposal -039 which is the proposal to improve reachability of the new IANA blocks, the debogonising activity which has been under way at the Secretariat.

This was something that was agreed by consensus at the policy SIGs. Could I ask the meeting to show support by raising your hand. Thank you very much.

If you oppose the decision, please raise your hand. Thank you very much, that is clear.

The next proposal which was approved by consensus of the policy SIG was -035, the IPv6 portable assignment policy for multihoming. Are there any questions or comments about that proposal?

KAZU YAMAMOTO: If we have progress, routable increasing, I like to make expiration date for this proposal, three years or so and we don't know, we do not survey multihoming at this moment, so I would like to review this proposal after, you know, for example, three years or so.

PAUL WILSON: Okay, thank you, the suggestion was the proposal should be reviewed after three years. This is not in my mind, this is not proposing an alteration to the policy, it is proposing that some time down the track that the policy would be reviewed. I suggest that is something that happens within the normal policy process so we can continue to consider this as a policy proposal for endorsement here. Take that as a future step. It is difficult if there are actually modifications to policy proposals presented here because those modifications should really come up during the detailed discussions with the SIGs.

Sam, I trust we have not having any comments or discussions from web?

Okay, so this proposal was approved by consensus of the SIG for portable assignment for IPv6 sites. I would like you to raise your hand if you supported the consensus of the SIG. Thank you very much. If you oppose that consensus? Thank you, that is clear as well.

Moving along, proposal -033 was for the end-site allocation or assignment to be policy for IPv6 presented by Geoff Huston and Randy Bush. Are there any comments or questions about this one? This was the policy to allow ISPs to choose to make longer assignments if they wished to, longer prefixed assignments, that is, a smaller assignment than the standard /48.

Okay, could I ask you to raise your hand if you support the consensus of the SIG? Thank you very much. If you oppose this consensus of the SIG? That one also is approved. Thank you.

The final proposal, I think, unless there is another page, the last one, is to do with IPv6, the size of IPv6 assignments to critical structure, this was presented by Save. It was passed by consensus of the SIG. Would you please raise your hand if you support the policy? Thank you very much. If you oppose the consensus of the SIG on this question? Okay, thank you very much.

That means that we have, in every case of these policy proposals, they have been passed by consensus of the member meeting in addition to the SIG and they will now go to the eight-week comment period on. Consensus of this meeting can be overturned by substantial objections or problems raised on the mailing list. It is up to the chair of the SIG and the EC after that eight-week comment period to assess any discussions or objections and determine whether or not the consensus on the policy proposals in each cases stands.

So, thank you, I think that is the end of the report for the policy SIG.

So thanks to Kenny. I would like to comment that this was a very busy policy SIG agenda. We were all concerned, as it had done in the past, it would run overtime with so many proposals and so many policies to consider, but, it ran very well on track, it had some interesting discussion and in every case, and I think it was chaired extremely well by the chair. So, thanks very much to Kenny and to the co-chairs of the policy SIG.

Now Philip, it is your turn to report from the APOPS session. APOPS was given a special new role in the APNIC 22 meeting this year, it was a much longer session than usual and it contained all the operational content.

PHILIP SMITH: OK. Not quite afternoon yet. Good morning, everybody. I'm Philip Smith. I'm basically reporting here about the activities of the APOPS session, which formed part of the APNIC program.

APOPS - a little bit of background - is the Asia Pacific Operators Forum. It started off as a mailing list many, many years ago, has been a BoF session as part of recent APNIC meetings and APRICOT conferences, probably for about the last three years or so. And as an experiment, we thought we would try and include it as part of the main APNIC conference program, the idea being that we would take operational or generally interesting operational content from the different special interest groups and combine it into a single-track program which everybody could listen to.

Some of the feedback that certainly some of us had got as SIG chairs was that the conflicts between the SIGs, between the parallel sessions, meant that people couldn't go and listen to everything they wanted to go and listen to.

So to try and help with solving this, we had this suggestion of setting up a kind of single track, which covered all the operational content.

So we had basically three sessions which were the result of this merger. Before - I should say when the call for the conference went out, for the APNIC meeting went out, we did a general call for contributions to participate in the APOPS forum. Rather than Hideo Ishii, my co-chair, and myself sitting down and working through the contributions, actually the whole group of the SIG chairs participated in the search for content, looking at the abstracts for contributions and so forth. So it was very much a group effort to try and pull this event together.

As a result of APOPS happening this week, the routing, IX, DNS and database SIGs didn't actually meet and some people have expressed concern over the last two or three months that, oh, well, maybe these SIGs don't exist any more. I will assure you that the SIGs very much do exist and they will meet at the next APNIC meeting, which is part of APRICOT, in February.

But, as I say, this one was very much an experiment to see what would happen and how it would work.

So on Wednesday, the first session was pretty much an introduction with me giving the same explanation that I've given now.

Then we had three presentations on redundant Internet service provision from Kae Hsu of Seednet. Then we had a presentation from China Telecom, Shengyong Ding, about building an IP network management system for the next-generation network. We then had a look at the effects of Botnets, specifically from SoftbankBB's point of view and the impact on their infrastructure in Japan.

In the afternoon, we had another experiment. One of the things that the APNIC Secretariat and the SIG chairs have been looking at is how to improve participation from across the region and SEAMEWE-4 was a very, very big event for Bangladesh. This was a new fibre system that was installed last year. Bangladesh up to now had only had satellite Internet access and for those of you who know what that means, you can appreciate the difference that having fibre access for the first time ever will make.

So Sumon couldn't actually make it to come to here in Taiwan so we suggested that he might like to give his presentation over video. So, in fact, we pre-recorded the presentation along with the slide show and the merged result, thanks to the APNIC Secretariat, is what we presented as the first presentation on Wednesday afternoon. And I think it went pretty well. I think it was a successful experiment. And hopefully, in future APNIC meetings, we'll see other people take the opportunity of - even if they cannot physically attend, they can record their presentation for display as part of the APOPS and other sessions.

After Sumon, we had an update from Amante basically describing activities of getting a Philippines network operations group going as well as the first, I suppose, free public Internet Exchange point in the Philippines.

After Amante, Gaurab presented work that he and a including had been doing looking at AS paths or at least some of the interesting aspects of AS paths from their view of the different routing tables that they receive. Some anomalies were pointed out. I was happy to see that one of the anomalies pointed out was fixed there and then and that's an indicator to me that this is actually a useful tool for the industry. So we look forward to better things happening coming out of this research work.

Merike finished off the second session of APOPS, basically taking a walk through IPv6, having a look to see what does and what doesn't quite work yet from the perspective of an existing service provider operator, so looking at the things that are still required from an operational network point of view to make v6 deployment a reality.

The final session in the afternoon, we started off with having a look at the routing system again, so the routing certification project update from Geoff, followed by a route origination authorisation project looking at the IRR from Taiji Kimura of JPNIC. Then back into security. The morning session about Botnets drew a huge amount of question and answer - I was actually quite happy to see that. At these meetings, traditionally people are quite quiet, happy to just listen to presentations. The Botnet presentation produced a lot of discussion. I was hoping for the same thing with the final two presentations but I guess the long day had made people really tired. Merike's presentation about current ISP security practices, again, was fascinating, but nobody had any questions for her. So I guess everybody knows what she was talking about and is doing everything as she has suggested.

The time presentation about preventing denial of service attacks using IP source address spoofing from Yoshinobu Matsuzaki from IIJ, again a very interesting and useful presentation for service providers to consider.

So that was actually quite a long day for us, three sessions in a row. And from a suggestion from the floor - of course, we had a break after the APOPS before we headed into the lightning talks prior to the social event and in that break, we actually used the opportunity to have a small community discussion.

We found that, from the floor, we actually had quite good support for the new format. Everybody who stood up at the microphone appreciated what they had seen, thought it was a really good thing to carry on. Nobody said, "This was a really, really bad idea." So I'm actually quite encouraged that we made a good move with this experiment. So I'm actually hoping that this - the member meeting here will allow us to carry on with this particular format. And maybe we can use this as sombre development for the future APNIC meetings.

Some of the statistics - the first session we had 100 attendees. The second session, after lunch, we saw 60 attendees. Clearly the lunches here are very, very good, so good that people can't actually make it back into the room.

APPLAUSE

So we had that drop in attendees. 60, I guess, was the average number. The third session, we were almost back up to our morning number, with 90 attendees. And we had a total of 25 different participants on Jabber as well, which was encouraging to see also.

So that was the APOPS portion.

We then had lightning talks. This was another experiment. This meeting has been full of experiments. Are there any experiments today, Paul? I'm sure we should do some more, because we've had lots.

So this is the lightning talks. This was an experiment, as I said. The idea behind a lightning talk was to allow participants in the meeting to come up, have some time to talk about, I suppose, the hot news or some really recent things they've been working on or interesting things they've been working on that missed the APNIC conference call deadline. The deadline closed, I think, it was 8th of August. I mean that's - if you're working in the operational community, that's what? A good month before the actual APNIC meeting. But if something has happened between then and now and you want to talk about it with your peers, you've no opportunity, really, to do so. So the lightning talks is an opportunity for people with these late subjects to come and discuss them.

The presentations are short. I mean 'lightning' tends to mean 'fast'. So they're short presentations on current issues. Generally what we did for this one we said maximum of ten minutes including Q&A. Nobody used up their ten minutes. The longest presentation was six, the shortest was three. So the speakers certainly fitted into the concept.

We had said at the start no slides were needed, but people did actually produce slides and some of the feedback we had afterwards was that slides would actually be greatly preferred because we have such a mixture of native and non-native English speakers here so reading the slides would be a lot simpler. Looking at the talks we had.

Ryan Connolly from Team Cymru presented what Team Cymru get up to.

Akinori Maemura talked about the JANOG activities.

Shinji Morikawa talked about the traffic trends in JPNAP.

Xing Li talked about the IPv6 source address validation architecture that he is organising.

Gaurab gave a summary of the last SANOG conference held in Pakistan.

We had 60 participants in the room. One thing you notice about the title - it says 17:45 to 18:15. We started the lightning talks right after we had the community discussion and that's why we had 60 participants because pretty much everyone stayed on after the end of the APOPS session. That caught some people out, I do apologise, because the agenda said six o'clock and we finished about 6:15. I'm sorry about that but given everyone was here and very few people had left, we thought we'd carry on. And it gave people more time to prepare for the social event.

There were six people on the Jabber chatroom for the duration of the lightning talks.

When the talks had finished, we had a short discussion. Again, the feedback from the floor was that people were happy about this. They thought it was a good idea. I think we should probably try and do this again. Certainly from an APRICOT point of view, we intend to do this for APRICOT.

A bit of background - lightning talks were presented by NZNOG. There they are incredibly informal. People go out of the room, get a beer, come back and have a chat about something. It is highly informal. I'm not quite sure we can be quite as informal as this but I don't know - I am open to suggestions.

We also had a suggestion that it might be a good idea if the stenographers stay with us to help with the lightning talks. One of the advantages of the main meeting is the slides are all prepared beforehand. But when people have one slide and talk for ten minutes, it's probably not useful for the non-native English-speakers which most of you are. So I agree with that comment. I'd like the stenographers to be available the next time around.

And that's my report. Thank you.

PAUL WILSON: Thanks, Philip.

Any questions or comments about APOPS, particularly about the new program?

I think judging by the numbers, it could be considered a resounding success. So unless we hear otherwise, I think we will entrust the program committee of this meeting - that is Philip as one of the SIG chairs and the other SIG chairs - with continuing to develop this sort of operational session, the operational content of the APNIC meeting. And continuing this success.

Thank you, Philip.

Before you go... (presents gift to Philip)

Next we have Izumi to talk about the NIR SIG. After Izumi, we'll have Kazu to talk about IPv6 and then Cecil to talk about the training and education BoF. If there were any other BoFs that happened during the week and anyone would like to report on those - I know there was a whisky BoF at one point. That was an informal event. I don't think anyone will report on that. I think there's been a regular Hello Kitty BoF up in Samantha's room on a regular basis. I don't know if you'll report on that, Sam? No? OK.

OK so it's NIR, IPv6 and then training and education. Thanks, Izumi.

IZUMI OKUTANI: Good morning. My name is Izumi Okutani and I'm going to report about what we discussed in NIR SIG which was held yesterday afternoon. And I chair this session with David Chen from TWNIC.

And for those of you who are not very aware of what our SIG is about, it actually initially started as a BoF to discuss about NIR-related matters and it used to be participants used to be close to NIRs as well as APNIC. But some people mentioned that they might be interested to, you know, participate in these kind of sessions, even if they're not NIRs, so it became a SIG and so the name itself might hake it sound as though it's specialised for NIRs, but it's actually open to everybody.

And just to give you an overview. It was initially planned for - the session was initially planned for 1.5 hours, but we always have really intense discussions and it was extended for 30 minutes. So we had the session for two hours.

The attendees was roughly 35 people. It was quite small and a nice number to discuss. It would have been nice if we had more participants this time because we discussed about NIR activities as well as APNIC - as well as the review on the APNIC fee structure. So the agenda this time was three updates from NIRs on their activities and four presentations on the review of APNIC fee structure. And you can see the detailed agenda on the URL listed here.

To introduce how the updates were - we had updates from CNNIC, TWNIC and IDNIC and CNNIC provided some statistics on their membership and the allocations they make within China and also regarding the ERX historical address space. They are starting to take this procedure to transfer the membership from APNIC into CNNIC to, you know, make the management of those historical address space better. And also because of the trends in IPv4 address exhaustion, CNNIC has made some estimations on how much address space would be needed in China in the near future. And, according to the estimates, they expect it to require about 10 to 15 - oh, sorry. Somehow I've listed /15 here, but it's supposed to be /8s by the end of 2012. It's a quite huge number.

And then we move on to an update from TWNIC. And TWNIC introduced that there are two new staff in IP department and David Chen, who had been working in IP department, has now moved to - became the director of international department, but he will continue to be with us and chair the SIG. And TWNIC also introduced about their own Open Policy Meeting, which was held in June this year. And they - it consists from the policy SIG and routing SIG.

And then IDNIC introduced that they have changed their name from APJII to IDNIC and then introduced about their OPM which they have held five times so far. And also they are planing to start an agent service for small multihomed assignments.

Then we moved on to the discussion on the review of the APNIC fee structure. The discussion was based on what's been - well, it's not a formal proposal but the proposal document from the APNIC Secretariat. 'APNIC Membership Fee Structure Proposal version 1.1' which is posted on the agenda. And each NIRs have presented their positions, comments, questions, for this paper. And in addition to this, two other alternative models of fee structure other than this one presented by the APNIC Secretariat has been presented. One is an idea from APNIC Executive Council and the second one was from JPNIC. And I believe the details will be discussed later in this session on the fee structure - APNIC fee structure discussions at AMM, so I won't go too much into details here.

But the major comments we received on the floor regarding the fee structure was that a consideration for the discount on the developing countries which was mentioned on the mailing list. And if the discount will be applied, to what extent? As a lot of the economies in the AP region will be categorised as 'developing' economies. So if we give too much discount to all those economies, then, you know, we need to balance out the revenue of APNIC. So this will be an issue to be considered.

And then, the second point was that one of the reasons for fee revision this time was to take into consideration fluctuations in exchange rates and inflations and a suggestion was made that the new fee structure should be somehow able to absorb these changes and that should be reflected into the fee structure. Otherwise, we will probably need a revision in the fee structure in a few years again.

And the third point was that - I think this was a comment for one of the slides that was introduced at the session, comparing the expenses - no, what NIRs pay to APNIC compared to the regular members and the address holdings of NIRs and the APNIC members as a whole. And it seemed to reflect that NIRs pay a smaller portion of the fee than the APNIC members, while they hold quite a large portion of address space. And it was pointed out that NIRs' operational cost is not reflected in this graph, so this should be taken into consideration when designing the fee model.

And the third point was that - maybe this is a little bit too much into details for the rest of you, but NIRs' pool and NIR members' pool is categorised separately in APNIC, what's been drafted, so that shouldn't be considered separately and it should be combined together as the same fee category.

And the outcome of the discussions were that, since they were not formal proposals, they from were just discussion papers for, you know, for the sake of discussions, and several models were presented, so no conclusion in particular to support a single model. So we will try to continue discussions on the mailing list. And there was a comment that, although we do already have a fee working group mailing list, there's no-one to chair and drive the discussions. So a suggestion was made to call for the volunteer at AMM later today to chair for a fee working group for the fee working group. So APNIC Secretariat will call for this later. And that's an action item from our SIG.

That's all.

And then, although this was not presented in the SIG, I felt that, you know, we had discussion in NIR SIG but in the last APNIC meeting, we had a BoF called 'special session for APNIC fee review' or something like that. So it might be good to have some continual BoF or session in the next meeting, specialised for the fee session so that people will be easier to participate, rather than NIRs. That's just an idea.

And that's all from me and, well, thank you very much for all the presenters at the SIG and those who participated in the discussions.

PAUL WILSON: Thanks, Izumi. Are there any questions?

There is a special session about the fee structure after lunch so there'll be some more time for questions and discussion if you'd like to think about it between now and then. I'm sure your contributions would be welcome. And thanks, Izumi, for the SIG chairing.

APPLAUSE

Next we have the IPv6 SIG.

KAZU YAMAMOTO: Hello. This is Kazu Yamamoto.

Since my notebook is broken, it randomly shut down, so I asked Fujisaki-san to use his laptop. OK?

Now, the APOPS committee received many presentation proposals on IPv6 and some of them are purely informational, so we decided to have IPv6 Technical SIG.

Let me present what happened yesterday.

First, statistics - about 50 attendance and eight people in the chatroom, OK? And we have no action items. And we had six informational presentations.

OK. First presentation was from George Kuo, APNIC. This is a semi-annual report from APNIC and he showed us statistics and IPv6 allocation keeps growing. That is very good. And also this time he provided a new survey from APNIC members of what are the obstacles against IPv6 deployment. And one of the answers is there is no application as we can guess.

The second presentation from Geoff Huston. He talked about phasing out of the 6Bone. Roughly speaking, 6Bone phaseout succeeded but some routing information still remains, unfortunately.

Next two presentations were about the multi-prefix environment. Marla talked about multi-prefix, multi-linked environment. And she is looking for solutions and she needs input from the community. So if you have any solutions for multi-homing, please send a message to her. Probably the things we discussed in the Policy SIG could be a solution.

Next presentation from Kanayama-san. He talked about multi-prefix but single-link environment. And he showed a solution for this environment which, you know, showed a source address section and next-hop search and that is very good.

Well, last two presentations is about deployment status, one is in Japan and one is in Taiwan. And in both countries, there is good applications are coming, so that is very good news.

OK. That's it.

PAUL WILSON: Thanks, Kazu.

That's the end of the SIG reports. And I think we appear to have just one BoF report and Cecil will be talking about that. It was a special training and education BoF for those of us at this meeting interested in that particular topic.

CECIL GOLDSTEIN: Better luck with a PC.

OK, at this meeting, we thought that it might be a good idea to hold a session where we could essentially discuss training and training needs. And the most appropriate forum that seemed available for this was to hold a BoF.

The background to this is that our objectives were essentially to communicate, to present training proposals and initiatives and receive feedback and discussion and of course also to use the opportunity to demonstrate our eLearning and to go into more detail and then we might have had the launch in other forums as well.

Unfortunately, I think the BoF suffered from the problem of being scheduled at 8.00 to 9.00 on the Thursday evening, by which stage I think most participants were fairly worn out. Participation was low. However, I do appreciate the effort that those people who made to attend did make and I hope that they benefit from the discussion, even though there wasn't a great deal of perhaps interaction, I think part of that was due to the fact that we held it in a very large venue with a small number of people.

However, as I said, there were questions. And they raised some concerns, which we will hopefully be able to explain and to allay.

The timing of online teaching events was queried, bearing in mind that there are time differences and of course in this respect we are aware of it and we will time any eye vents to coincide with the appropriate time period at the venue or the location where this is intended for. If we were to deliver at a number of venues simultaneously, we would obviously look for an optimal time that suited most people. This might be relatively inconvenient for us but that's all part of the service.

The availability of APNIC introductory information was asked about from a new member and that reflected, "Where can I find information about APNIC processes? About APNIC itself?" and we were able to point them in the right direction, also to point out that one of our core units or one of our core course that is we deliver is in Internet resource management which covers to a large extent what APNIC does and how APNIC does it.

There was a question with regards to any fees that might be levied for eLearning and, at the moment, there are no fees that are going to be levied and, again, as Sall'ee mentioned earlier on, it might be revised depending on the direction that we take.

I'll say more about this in a moment, because it was also some suggestions were raised from the floor with respect to this.

People want today get a little bit more information go how to access eLearning forums in particular, that is the online live events and online live events that are available through eLearning. And there was also a request regarding what needs to be done in order to obtain training from APNIC. And we, obviously, explained the process, which is really one of communication with us letting us know what you need and hearing from us what we can provide.

Now, again, the meeting was fairly low-key, I would have to say. We did have the opportunity to go into detail as far as our proposals go. Immediate response was not perhaps given at the actual BoF itself but in one-to-one conversations and in subsequent and prior discussions, there was a lot of interest expressed in collaborative projects and we will respond to those because I think people are very interested in working more closely with us in serving their particular communities. A common request was for more training events and again this is one of our intentions to the extent that we can provide this. There was also a suggestion that we could help particularly ISPs and NIRs in supporting their clients, which means in trying to work with them in providing some guidance as how to they - as to how they might, sort of, provide information, configuration information, best practice information to their clients.

And the eLearning options that is not really the models that would be available on eLearning but also the concept of web classes, web forums and so on were also raised. One suggestion came up was that access to eLearning should be restricted to members for advanced modules. In other words, we should not go to a great deal of effort and expense to make these facilities available and then have it open to everybody. The suggestion was somewhat moderated in so much as that general modules, modules that reflect what APNIC does and who APNIC is should be generally open and more available but the more advanced modules that focus on technological access should be restricted to access by APNIC members only.

In conclusion, I strongly feel that a meeting of this nature is an ideal forum for communicating and getting some information, feedback, knowledge about what goes on with - in member areas and what members need and what they might request. Perhaps the BoF in this structure is not the most appropriate means. Maybe we should consider a smaller forum which would provide us with a greater level of interaction, perhaps some level of preparation in advance could be of help. Some people would come with ideas and know what ideas we were going to be discussing and how they might be able to respond to this.

So, once again, I do wish to extend my appreciation to the members of the training group who were present and the participating and to everyone else who participated and who have spoken to me about training and their training needs and I sincerely hope that we will be able to respond.

Thank you.

PAUL WILSON: Thank you, Cecil. That's very interesting.

I'm sorry that I wasn't able to come to the BoF but I have to assure you that 20 people at a BoF is pretty good. It's rare they get bigger than that, actually. So I think it's a good start.

CECIL GOLDSTEIN: Well, I'm glad to hear that. Thank you.

PAUL WILSON: On the agenda for this morning there was one more item which is to do with the APNIC member survey. However, we have just hit lunchtime so I think we've got some slack time this afternoon. Perhaps after afternoon tea, to present just very briefly about the APNIC member survey, particularly the next survey that's being conducted. So this time, it seems we're at lunchtime and so I think we can break for lunch now and resume here at 2pm. I'd like to remind you again about voting that it will close sharp at 2pm today so please come to the front desk here where there'll be APNIC staff looking after this red voting box and put your ballot papers in here before it closes at 2 pm. The - I'm thinking allowed here but we also need to have some scrutineers for the vote counting so just before breaking, could I possibly ask for some volunteers, please, to do the counting of the votes for the NC election?

Axel, thank you. Ed, thanks. And Richard. That's ample, I think. You'll have a printout from our online voting system to reconcile and a number of votes here. It shouldn't take too long.

OK, so let's break. I'd suggest that you scrutineers get together outside the door at the beginning of lunch just to work out how you're going to proceed. Let APNIC staff know if you've got any questions and we'll see you back here at 2pm.

Thank you.

Annual Member Meeting - Session Three
14:00-15:30


PAUL WILSON: The election, you last chance to deposit your paper if you haven't put it into the box. If it is now 2pm, then the ballot is now closed.

I'll start off again just with an announcement and some details about the dinner tonight. I know the closing dinner, the informal closing dinner has become a regular feature of APNIC meetings and it is happening tonight as usual. It is an informal event open to anyone. There is cost and if you don't have a ticket you can see APNIC staff for tickets. It is at the Ambassador Hotel. Meet in the lobby at 6.50pm, and there will be a whole batch of taxies to take people to the Ambassador Hotel. The taxies have been paid for already, there is no need for you to pay your taxi fare, unless you need to get it from somewhere else. Please, if you are joining the dinner, please be sure to have a ticket and meet in the lobby at 6.50pm. I'm sorry, I won't be able to attend the dinner, I will be returning home, but I'm sure it will be enjoyable.

For the rest of the afternoon, as discussed, the fee structure session structure session is going to proceed for the next hour, including a proposal regarding allocations to non-member service fees. Then I'll be presenting, again, the proposal about the APNIC membership structure. It is a proposal for discussion, not a proposal for voting.

It was quite consciously brought to the meeting as a possible proposal that might be presented in future but not for voting at this meeting. The reason for presenting it is to look at the types of models we could choose for the next fee structure. Maemura-san will be sharing the session. Then we will have a report about the coming APNIC member survey and, of course, announcements of the election results, a couple of prize draws and things before we close, hopefully prior to 5.30 this afternoon.

There is an open-mic session at the end of the day. But please, feel free to make any contribution and, particularly, the session coming up on the APNIC fee structure is one that should encourage some discussion.

I would like to hand the chair over to Maemura-san.

AKINORI MAEMURA: I have been asked for joining this session. As the program says, first we have Save Vocea to present his proposal for proposition 040, which is for the non-member account management something.

SAVE VOCEA: Hello, my name is Save Vocea. The proposal has been a combined effort of the resource manager and the finance manager, dealing with experiences from handling this account holders.

The motivation is for APNIC to adopt a clearer - to make clearer the service fee interpretations for future requests from the non-network account holders and to reduce the secretariat staff workload administering the non-member accounts.

By definition, non-member account, they could be organisations that have allocation from APNIC but not wanting to join as a member.

Also, as a resource historical resource holders, they do justify the historical resource holders, they sign the statutory declaration and a non-member agreement. By historical resource we mean IPv4 space, ASNs originally obtained from registries such as InterNIC, AUNIC. The registration of these resources have now been transferred and managed by APNIC. There are some who are in the category of having received resource distributed by APNIC before any form of agreement was in place before 1997.

So what was the problem here? Inconsistent fees were charged to non-member account holders, increased staff time administering the billing of 500 plus accounts, and these accounts are increasing. There have been various interpretations on how we will apply the fees. The area of fee collection, if you are offering a service you like to collect fees. There have been insufficient penalties to deter those who are defaulting.

It became a time-consuming process for both the people dealing with the accounts, like the finance department, and also variable bank fees because of the regions, different banks sending in the fees, there were deductions made on that. There was no rewards for early payers of the fees. For some non-member account holders, they received it historically.

There should be some consistent fees applied.

Under the existing framework - we have three columns here. A column for historical resource holders, service and APNIC resource. Currently, the account maintenance to historical resource holders is $100 a year. For the APNIC resource holders it is free because it is part of the IPv4 address maintenance. The ASN maintenance currently charged for historical is $100 year, per maintainer. If they are an APNIC resource holders, it is $50 ASN per year.

Under the IPv4 address maintenance, historical resource holders did not have to pay for any account maintenance, but for APNIC resource holders they pay $819.20. There is another component of the fee, which is the reverse DNS delegation. It has never been applied but we had $50 per zone entry.

What the proposal - what we want to propose is to introduce consistent fees. We have free services on account maintenance if you're historical resource holder pay $50 a year, and for APNIC resource, they also pay $50. It could be settled by credit card and also MyAPNIC access to all accounts. For the service of IPv4 address maintenance, historical resource charged $50 and no charge for APNIC resource. Also, the fee including DNS reversed delegated, historical, $50 per assignment and no charge for APNIC resource. What we propose is no longer have new assignments of new assignments to non-members. The service will be gone.

Another component is to revoke and reclaim resources from defaulters. It is currently done for members if the member doesn't have an opportunity to reclaim the resources.

Effect on APNIC members: no direct effect to them. In the implementation stage, if this is does receive consensus, we would like to implement this as soon as practical, if possible, once endorsed by the executive council. It will also mean modifying the fee level specified in the current level for historical Internet resources. To summarise: the secretariat seeks endorsement to introduce the consistent fee structure in incorporating account keeping and a fee for resources and revoke and reclaim resources from defaulters who do not pay. That is my proposal.

AKINORI MAEMURA: Thank you. Any comments?

GEOFF HUSTON: Did I hear you correctly? No fees to allocations to non-members? In the past, I certainly recall the fact we had services to non-members because, at times, the agency or entity requesting resources was not in a position to execute a membership contract. It was quite willing to abide by the terms conditions and so on of holding a resource under an APNIC allocation, but formally executing a membership agreement was beyond what they could do. This typically applied to agencies inside government spheres. I was wondering if the constraints had disappeared in the interim? It seems a subtle shift, but I'm not sure you can accommodate such agencies in the future if you have an over-arching rule that says non-members don't get new allocations.

PAUL WILSON: The change that is included within this proposal is to do IP addresses only. We have, and will continue, to provide services to non-members and the primary non-member service that is frequently used mostly for the reasons you mentioned is the ASN allocation or assignment service. The IP address assignment service is one that has a rather strange and bizarre fee structure which is rarely, if ever, used at the moment. It is quite out of step with the current approach to non-members. Within, speaking optimistically now, if we are able to establish a new membership fee structure, that makes sense in this regard, then I would suggest that non-member allocations can be made under the same fee structure, but we really do have substantial problems at the moment with consistency across the board of the non-member fee structure that we have. At the moment, it seems easier to defer or to disallow a non-member.

GEOFF HUSTON: Could I point out a bit of history: in making a privileged position in this region of being the address distributor, there is, I believe, an obligation to be able to service requests from anyone under agreed terms and conditions.

The real question here is that even in the interim, where the membership is an onerous constraint that would, in effect, preclude the ability of some parties from obtaining address resources they otherwise could have. I'm just slightly concerned and, again, it is an historical concern, but also a concern about APNIC in this region that approving of a policy that precludes, even in the interim, allocation of resources on the basis they cannot execute membership might be less than wise, and we should carefully consider if there are alternatives, even in the interim, that will allow it.

AKINORI MAEMURA: Thank you very much. Any other comments? No?

I like to make sure that this my first, this is the first time to have proposal in AMM. Is this proposal should - should this proposal follow the policy process for other proposals to the SIGs.

PAUL WILSON: Not the first time a proposal has come to the AMM member meeting. It has been, a precedent was previously for fee-and-membership-agreement-related proposals to come directly to this meeting. But they are still presented with the same leave time in accordance with policy process. This proposal was submitted to the mailing list to have the appropriate comment period.

KUO-WEI WU: I think it is also basically affect the membership interest. I would suggest it still need to go through the whole process. I think it would be better for more discussion issues.

PAUL WILSON: It has done, and will go through the process.

AKINORI MAEMURA: Should they ask for show of hands?

TOSHIYUKI HOSAKA: Toshiyuki Hosaka from JPNIC. Can I a question to you? Can I understand that APNIC is going to charge all addresses in the APNIC database, is that correct?

SAVE VOCEA: That is the intention. Yes.

TOSHIYUKI HOSAKA: Okay, that means if the organisation, if APNIC cannot, the organisation has address resources, what are you going to do? Okay, if you can't contact the organisation who has the historic address resources, what are you going to do? Can you charge the organisation?

SAVE VOCEA: If we haven't been able to contact them at all, then there is no framework within APNIC, as yet, because once the historical resource holder comes to APNIC to seek service, then only there is some process in there that enables them to sign declaration and then we can provide service. But as of now, existing, if they haven't made contact with APNIC or where APNIC has not been able to contact them, kind of in limbo.

PAUL WILSON: I would also point out, Toshiyuki, that we have had a policy in place for some time that is being pursued for reclamation of unused space. Any address, which is historical, some is unused, we are actively pursuing recovery. The question of chasing up historical addresses for which we don't have contacts will applies to addresses which are in use. It would be possible for us to pursue the address holders via the upstreams which are routing their address base, for instance. We are not currently doing that and, I think, I would suggest it is a business decision as to the efficiency of doing that and the cost of doing that with relative success. We should start the process of trying to contact address holders for who we don't have Whois or other contact details for that mechanism, trying to update the records and internal APNIC records and also in the process apply the policy.

SAVE VOCEA: Thank you for your clarification.

MING-CHENG LIANG: I just have a question, because in this proposal you have, for the existing framework, it seems to me, can you go back

to that page. It seems like for existing holding historical resource or holding APNIC resources, pay a certain amounts, you propose why - why is it proposed something like this? The third item, say, 800 something, but the new proposal is completely free. Is that correct?

SAVE VOCEA: In the proposal, there is going to be no change to that amount. I think what I need to clarify here is that the $819.20 is for the non-members or for the organisations that do come to APNIC to apply for resources but do not want to take the formal membership of APNIC, they opt to take non-member account because they just choose not to join APNIC as a member.

AKINORI MAEMURA: Any questions or comments?

AHMAD ALKAZIMY: Can you move to the proposal? About the months of the historical resource, one-time fee charge or will it be annual?

SAVE VOCEA: These are the annual service fees.

AHMAD ALKAZIMY: All of them, APNIC resource will be annual?

SAVE VOCEA: That's right.

AHMAD ALKAZIMY: Thank you very much.

AKINORI MAEMURA: Any other questions or comments? Okay, I would like, I ask you for show of hands. Those who support this proposal please raise your hands.

Those who support the proposal, please raise your hand.

Those who support this proposal, please raise your hand.

Okay. Let me try from support. My "support" should be heard as "opposed". That's completely different. Okay, again, I am asking you for raise your hand if you supporting this proposal. Please raise your hand. Who is in favour?

Higher, please. Sorry.

Okay. Thank you very much. People who are, who do not support this proposal, please raise your hand. People who oppose the proposal, please raise your hand. Thank you very much.

What do you think about it?

Can I have a number for the supporters?

RANDY BUSH: Randy Bush IIJ. May I suggest what we see is the need for more Discussion, and not a decision.

AKINORI MAEMURA: I would like to ask you again to raise your hand if you think this proposal needs some more discussions?

RANDY BUSH: I guessed right.

AKINORI MAEMURA: Thank you very much. So needs -

JOHN SIHAR SIMANJUNTAK: I have another opinion. Could we just maybe, since we have also the same problem in IDNIC, the allocation, my question is that are we able to make a determination, maybe we can invite them to join and to make some discussions with them.

AKINORI MAEMURA: Thank you very much. So, now, I like to move on to the fee structure discussion. I ask Paul to present his proposal and also the summary of the discussion yesterday, we had in our SIG.

PAUL WILSON: I'm, excuse me - I'm quite able to present the membership fee proposal that I did yesterday, but I'd suggest that maybe one of the chairs of the NIR SIG should present a summary of the discussion, or possibly the others who presented yesterday could add their views by presenting or by commenting.

AKINORI MAEMURA: Where is Izumi? Can you do that, with the SIG we had yesterday?

IZUMI OKUTANI: I haven't prepared any slides, but I can do it verbally.

AKINORI MAEMURA: Can you do that?

IZUMI OKUTANI: Yes, sure.

AKINORI MAEMURA: Not for here, but for after the discussion.

PAUL WILSON: This is giving me a sense of deja vu. It was a proposal that was presented for the first time at the last meeting and presented twice, once at the NIR and once at the special SIG on fees. In this case, at 22, it was presented yesterday in the NIR SIG and now today.

The content of the proposal is largely the same, although in some ways, in some respects the feedback received since APNIC 22 has been incorporated. So I'll give you some background on the proposal and that's basically the same background as you have probably heard before. But more recently, that includes feedback received both since APNIC 21 and also since this proposal was posted publicly just a few week ago.

I will be reiterating the principles of the fee structure, the impact and the discussion topics we might still need to look at. The background is the fee structure was established in 1996. So 10 years go, APNIC formally established a fee structure and policy. It involved three membership tiers which were actually voluntarily selected by the members. It was a principle at that time that members should be asked to volunteer in accordance with their capacity to pay, their capacity to provide funding to support APNIC.

At the same time as well, there was a $1,000 per member fee for the members of NIRs. There were some adjustments over the following years. We found the per-member fee wasn't working and per-address-member fees were introduced in 1997. We have lived with them and complained about them ever since.

We also, in 1999, found that the voluntary selection of tiers was not resulting in a very fair distribution of funding responsibilities, so the tiers of membership were then tied to the IP address holdings of the members concerned.

This was not - this was seen as another way to implement a sort of capacity-to-pay principle on the assumption that members with larger amounts of address holdings would be larger ISPs with larger networks with a greater capacity to pay.

As time went on in 1999, 2001, additional tiers were introduced to cope with the largest categories of ISPs and also the smallest. That was done in two steps.

Throughout this entire time, there have been a few problems, some of which have been addressed by some of these changes and some of which have been enduring. In the latter category is the NIR fee structure itself, which was first raised for formal discussion in APNIC 12 five years ago, and again in Taiwan, it was. Since then we have had numerous discussions within the NIR working group, special interest group within the meetings about the fee structure and, in particular, the NIR fee structure. It was presented as a candidate model for a fee structure revision. The model that is being presented today is very similar but with the latest figures included.

By way of background, there is a look at the annual financial results, with the blue bars representing revenues and the red bars expenses. While the expenses have been growing in a linear fashion, the revenue has been up and down for a number of reasons. One being exposure of APNIC to changes in the value of the US dollar. The currency fluctuations have been dramatic. There has also been the ups and downs of the industry itself.

During those early days, particularly during the boom times of 2000, and so, we were making quite large surpluses, handsome surpluses which were quite important at the time of growth to ensure the capital reserve of APNIC would be growing each year.

That capital reserve has been held by a policy of the APNIC NEC to being at least one year's operating expenses. It is an idea and principle shared by a number of organisations. The idea is to ensure some stability and robustness, sustainability of APNIC's operation.

The thing that is quite distinct here, particularly in the latest year, 2006, for the first time we had a budget for a deficit in this year. While the expenses have grown in a linear fashion, the revenues have been up and down. In this year we predicted a loss. It may be we won't make a loss in this year, because once again the foreign exchange rates and fluctuations have been favourable to us. It is the first year we budgeted a loss.

The need to budget a loss was an alarm call on the APNIC EC in particular. There may be some issue to do with sustainability of the operations at the expense level or the revenue level either of which could be reviewed to ensure that the budget looks positive in future.

I have added this slide, taken from Irene's report this morning since yesterday's presentation. It shows while the expenses of APNIC have been going lineally, we have been experiencing a slightly exponential growth in membership in recent years and it does explain, in an operating sense, increases in staffing and activities levels that have been necessary within the secretariat.

At the same time, while keeping on top of the budgets and keeping things more or less at a break-even for the last few years, we have also undertaken numerous new activities. These activities have, in many cases, been called for by the APNIC member survey process or by proposals which have come to the membership to the EC or which have been required by circumstances. In the latter category we see some of the more political influences on APNIC in recent years, for example, the governance forum and things that require a bit of time and staffing and resources in travel.

But we have also had increases in training activities with elearning being delivered, meeting participation, web cast, pod cast, etc, the ongoing development of MyAPNIC, the deployment of route servers. These are activities that have been absorbed by the budget over recent years.

I suppose where people ask, "Are there efficiencies being experienced within APNIC as the secretariat has grown?", I think the clear answer is yes, because we have had a linear expense growth during a time of exponential membership growth and activity and at the same time absorbing numerous developmental activities for which the costs are, obviously, fairly substantial.

Okay, the current fee structure and other current issues. I think we all understand the current fee structure as a membership, as an annual-based membership structure based on the IP address holdings of the member concerned.

So there are fixed tiers. An increment between each tier from one to the next -the fee doubles, but from one tier to the next there is a provision for 8 times the amount of IP address space. A reduction of 3 bits in the prefix you hold results in an increase of 100% doubling of your annual fee and your voting entitlement. That is the basic structure that we have lived with ever since 1999, when the fee level - the tiers was linked to IP address holdings.

Also since 1997, we have had this NIR per address fee. That fee is quite different from the fee that is normal members pay, in that it is a once-only fee, a per-address fee, a flat fee, according to the actual number of addresses that you receive. That fee reduces for the largest members and, in fact, for NIRs most are in the extra-large category and pay the lowest cost, 2 cents per address.

However, 2 cents per address results in very substantial one-off payments which have caused problems to NIR budgets in the past and which are very unpredictable for APNIC.

So NIRs have, in the past, been charged US$8,000 or more for single addresses. These are charges which APNIC cannot predict, or it is difficult to predict because they are such large once-only charges. For instance, in this budget we have predicted a US$700,000 income from that source, but from year to year it is difficult to know.

The allocations from NIRs contribute to their tier assessment. Additional addresses don't incur any ongoing expense for NIRs or revenue for APNIC. It is the one-off allocation. There is no voting right that goes to the recipient of the address space, the voting rights accrue to the NIR and they don't increase in the case of extra-large members at the top tier.

Another slide I have added since yesterday, for the sake of clarification, is to look as how the NIR has changed in recent years. When first established, APNIC made address allocations directly to the NIR who held a pool of addresses that were distributed to members. It produced all sorts of problems in terms of aggregation of subsequent allocations for those ISPs. From APNIC's point of view, a situation accepted at the time is we had little or no idea to what happened in the pools. The Whois records don't pertain unambiguously to addresses more to a membership identifier or anything like that.

So, more recently, we introduced what is called the direct-allocation system and it applies to all NIRs these days where a request for address space is made to APNIC on behalf of a non-member and it is a specific request for a member for an organisation. It allows for APNIC to make the allocation to NIR for the member but allows us to identify the member and improve aggregation in subsequent allocations in particular, which is a great improvement on the aggregation performance of address base within the NIR system.

I'm illustrating this because what we have at the moment ,in terms of APNIC's view of NIR address space, is that we have pools of address space which are still held by the NIRs which are kind of black boxes, as far as APNIC is concerned. We only know that NIR has historical, in a sense, pool of addresses that it has held and subsequently allocated. We also know the NIR has within its system a number of direct allocations that have been made and which APNIC has the details of. This introduces some complexity in working out how the addresses should be charged for and how they contribute to the fee structure and in tier assessment and so on. You will see what I mean in a second.

I did use the term "historical" to research to the NIR's pool of addresses. It introduces confusion. The NIR's pool is historical, but let's not call it historical, let's call it the NIR's shared pool of address.

There are a number of issues with the current fee structure, as I mentioned. Most of them are well understood. This graph illustrates what some of the disparities are within our system.

This chart shows a breakdown of the number of APNIC members, the number of NIR organisations and the number of NIRs' members in four categories.

So the first bar shows the number of organisations in that particular category, I'm sorry, the top is not very well readable, what it shows is that conventional member 861 - NIRs number six and the members of NIRs that APNIC is aware of, 535. They are the numbers of organisations.

The next is the amount of IPv4 space held by the organisations. 6.78 have been calculated to APNIC members. 5.00 have been allocated to the pools and 3.65, this number here, is the number allocated under the direct allocation system to NIR members. So you can see the spread of where the IP addresses in the Asia Pacific region have gone. You can see the corrective holdings is around 55%. The allocations to the rest of APNIC membership is about 45%.

Here we see where fees have come from. Fees collected in the last, fees which are theoretically collected, the current assessment of fees based on oday's current address holdings are 85% percent coming from APNIC members. About 55% percent, less than 10% come from NIR organisations and about 15% from the members of NIRs through the IPv4. That is the amount for this year, $700,000.

It is not easy to say how much revenue APNIC will ever receive from the source, because these are unpredictable transactions. The last element is the voting distribution. In this case, NIRs organisations themselves share a total of 304 votes and the rest of the membership as over 7,000. The members of NIRs have no votes at all. There are all sorts of differences here, different balances of privilege, responsibility, of consumption of APNIC resources, consumption of IP Internet resources.

I'm not you can draw various conclusions from this, but it doesn't make much sense that concensional APNIC members have received 45% of all IP addresses but are responsible for 85% of all fees paid to APNIC. It doesn't make sense that NIRs have been contributing, or are contributing, nearly 20% of revenues but only have a tiny voting entitlement and so on. It represents the current system is rather dysfunctional.

The other issue that has been raised is that of fairness. Because of the tiered system where you have a multiplier of 8 for a multiplier of 2 in annual fees, we see there is an effective cost per IP address which varies dramatically from 0.2 cents, a fifth of a cent US, per year, up to 0.6 of a cent for an IP20. It represents quite a difference in the cost and benefit of IP addresses for ISPs in those categories.

We can look again at a similar chart where we look at the different categories and membership from extra large to small. The number of members in the category, the fees paid by the members and the number of addresses held. In the top two categories of large and extra large, we have 10% of the membership falls into the category. They pay around 15% percent of fees and they hold nearly 80% of all IP addresses.

It is another illustration of where we are with the tiered structure. It provides a great discount to the higher levels of membership.

The fee structure needs revision and I think we have agreed on that many times. It helps to examine some principles under which the fee structure should be revised. One of the principles is that APNIC should be sustainable and ensure revenue maintenance, or an overall sustainability of APNIC itself.

One of the issues that seriously threatens that is with the prospect of new NIRs forming, we have the prospect of very large subgroups of APNIC memberships suddenly switching their status from being direct APNIC members to customers of NIRs and in that case, paying potentially a much, much lower revenue level. Whether that is correct or not, there is certainly a problem with sustainability and the fact we are subject to that risk.

Another proposal is to adjust the overall revenue levels for APNIC to adjust, to some extent, for the changes of foreign exchange and inflation over the past 10 years. I have proposed a relatively modest increase of at least 10% to 15%. The formulas I have here, I presented here in slides to come, are a bit higher than that, but I have proposed to the EC membership that some increase is reasonable to account for inflation, foreign exchange, particularly under the budgetary situation I have outlined. I think we will carry on structuring the APNIC fee structure around annual fees and based on address holdings, reflecting the size of organisations and their capacity to pay.

It would be irresponsible to rewrite that element of the fee structure so far. No-one has proposed it so far.

The proposal here proposes a change in the attitude and situation of members of NIRs, in that fees charged to NIRs should be based on the regular APNIC member fee structure. The reason being the economies, as being a direct member of APNIC, it is very difficult to compare the situation of the two ISPs in terms of the fees they pay, when, why and how and the effect of those payments on the APNIC bottom line and revenues.

The structure, as I have shown with the bar charts before, is quite dysfunctional in terms of comparing the members of ISPs in those two situations. One of the principles here is a fee structure for NIRs should be based on the regular fee structure of members. So it is quite clear the relative fee structure of an ISP that chooses to be a member of NIR or APNIC. That is a principle on a more equitable basis.

There is a principle also that has been articulated that members of NIRs should be entitled to a greater say in APNIC itself, in that 304 votes out of more than 7,000 do not provide NIRs communities with a sufficient ability to participate directly in APNIC decision making.

The structure that was presented at APNIC 21 - and you will see it is quite similar to what I will go into in some detail, there has been some feedback since then. There wasn't consensus, but an agreement to continue discussion. There were some comments that the highest tiers in that structure represented too-large an increase, IPv6 needed to be considered as well. The impact on NIRs wasn't clear.

These have been addressed in the latest proposal for the fee structure, which I will go into right now. The fee structure that we have is something that we can parameterise. The model is quite consistent. We can look at the parameters that make up, and are used, to calculate fee levels at the moment. Those parameters include a minimum-address space level of a /22 that is considered within the structure, a corresponding fee level.

There is a fee increment of two times per tier. This is a simple set of four parameters that provides and creates the table of fees that we are all familiar with. Under the proposed structure, the idea is to tune the parameters to make them different, to create a different set of fee levels that address and comply with the principles that I have outlined so far. The proposal is to reduce the minimum fee level to $160 and it would correspond to a /24.

Since APNIC 21, an extra tier was added. The tier doubles but the address space increases from 3 bits to 2 bits. It tends to flatten out the fee structure in terms of the overall fee structure. There is still very substantial discounts on per IP address, effective cost and the highest levels.

Those parameters include this structure, where the tiers are numbered no longer small, large, medium etc, but just A, B, C, D up to the top level of I. X is the one with no IP addresses at all. That is the structure that was proposed or presented for discussion at APNIC 21, with the exception the J level was removed and the top tier was anything bigger than 10.

It is possible to calculate directly the impact on members and on APNIC's effective revenue, that is the revenue that we would expect today based on the current distribution of members and the fee structure. The figures have been updated to two days ago, showing what we currently have.

This is the new fee, what their current fee is. As you would expect, if you take into account the principles outlined before, there are fee increases for some members and those fee increases are concentrated in the larger categories of members and there are fee decreases in the smaller category. That is for regular members. For NIRs, the six NIR members we have we can calculate the impact on those members as well and for members of NIRs who have received direct allocations from APNIC, we can calculate the impact on them as well. The idea of the fee structure proposal is to impose - apply a consistent fee structure to members of NIRs as well and to apply discount to those fees to recognise the contribution of NIRs in providing service to them.

So we put all of those together, we look at members of APNIC, look at members of NIRs, and we get this current profile and impact on the APNIC budget. A total of just over 1800 organisations served. The expected revenue there increases, as I mentioned, by 18%. That is something that can be tuned with the parameters that have been outlined. The majority of increases apply to NIRs and members of NIRs. Here you would expect from the principles that were included in this fee structure proposal, the increase in membership fees for conventional members is 2% across the board.

So there, this fee structure was presented, something very similar at APNIC 21 and also included in the paper that was circulated a few weeks ago. There has been some feedback, some questions about why the reason for an overall revenue increase, I have discussed the reasons why here now and also the APNIC EC, but whether or not we do have a fee structure for the overall increase, we can choose not to, by winding down the base level.

Some other feedback was a question as to why the tier level is capped when the highest levels are heavily discounted anyway. Historical addresses, not NIR pool addresses, but historical pre-RIR addresses should be included. Country economies should be considered.

Also, the tiers can also be abolished completely.

At the moment we have a system which does provide very large tier brackets and so many members will receive addresses without jumping from one tier to the next. If they are on the boundary, they might receive a /24, and they jump in fees.

There was also a feedback that NIR members should not be counted, that the voting and fees collect are too complex and the role of the NIR should be respected. I think it is a fundamental issue.

One of the principles on which this fee structure was put forward was to equalise and make comparable the members of NIRs or direct members of APNIC. It is a fundamental philosophical issue for APNIC. It does involve counting members of NIRs, applying fees to those members, although I should mention this proposal is about how fees to be calculated and assessed, but not collected.

There is nothing here that implies APNIC should collected fees from NIRs, but rather, it can be determined by this set of formulas. That is the feedback received.

There is obviously further work to be done. There were some counter-proposals that were raised on the list. Specific questions raised yesterday, some observations as well. I won't try to represent the observations because I think they have come into the SIG where we have SIG chairs from the membership who can report on those.

I will just finish off with a couple of things on the further discussion topics. I have done some further work on the proposals that were raised. One is the idea of a continuous formula, where you get into a bit of mathematics. In this case, rather than having a tiered structure where we calculate the number of addresses that we have, we then work out what tier we fit into and assess the fee accordingly. We can actually take the number of addresses, determine what is the exact prefix, fractional prefix that applies to that number of prefixes, then send a log formula or a power-of-two formula to calculate the fee from that.

That is a bit of maths there, but the message is: don't panic, use APNIC. We could use a calculator that tells you what your prefix level and fee level is now, both now and in the event you receive another allocation. You could have a what-if button. "If it is accepted, what would it do to my fee payments from APNIC?"

What we see if we actually have a look at this, though, at the continuous formula, a scenario, instead of having the brackets, we are able to calculate fees according to the number of addresses. I will show you the formula I have chosen corresponds where you have a single prefix, a whole-number prefix, corresponds exactly to the brackets that were proposed. ISP with 256 addresses has a /24, fee factor of one and $360 is their fee. Similarly, with 1,025, it is the $720 level. If it had one more address and the prefix is calculated accordingly, they pay a little bit more for the address. That is not realistic because you don't get one address from APNIC.

If they were to receive a /24 or a /16 plus a /20, then instead of jumping up to an extra level that might be double the amount, they get an extra charge according to the additional address they have.

I can easily apply this formula across the entire APNIC fee structure, and by doing so, what I see is quite a large decrease in revenues for APNIC because of the rounding factor that we have at the moment.

It is of great benefit to the member that a slight bit of extra space does not double the fee, but of course, that has the responding effect that APNIC revenues go down. If we were to apply the formula, we would be adjusting the parameters in a slightly different way to achieve the revenue goals.

Another suggestion made during the discussion was discount for developing economies. There were many associations, non-government organisations, even events and conferences, services like training and even books and publications which provide discounts in recognition of the economic circumstances of people in developing countries.

They can be classified in different ways, but normally there is a UN or a World Bank scale particularly at the low levels of memberships, according to the World Bank scale. I have done an analysis on the UN which has least-developed countries. Again, we have a similar sort of set of bars as I showed you before.

We have, in the least developed-countries category, we have approximately just over 10% of APNIC members paying just under 10% of fees but actually holding a very tiny amount of IP addresses.

The developing countries are a little bit less dramatic, in that the developing-country group in the Asia Pacific region is very big and includes China, India and Indonesia. These of course, we have many members in these areas. It would be possible, and this is something suggested for consideration to look at the situation of least-developed countries, there are 14 of those in the APNIC region, responsible for a fairly minor proportion of address activity and provide some sort of discount for those economies.

This is something that could be factored in to the equation. I haven't done any other calculations accordingly but it is one of the factors that could be taken into account. I think it is difficult under the circumstances we see here to look at discounts for developing economies. They are by far, the majority of economies in the region.

We could certain discount but other economies would be carrying a substantial load. That is really a matter for the membership, but is why to explain my thinking, that is why the discount is suggested as being only for least developed economies. The other questions pounder discussion, caps on largest fees, single members or a fee structure to the NIRs. Something else I haven't really explored is the question of what size of discount should be applied. All the formulas have been based on an assumption of a 50% discount. That figure was plucked out of the air as a possible figure. If we were to actually choose one, it could be based on the cost models of NIRs as opposed to the cost of APNIC, it would be a more accurate reflection of the difference in value delivered by APNIC and NIRs themselves to existing NIR members.

Voting entitlement, do we have a formula based on annual fees at the moment? Under the current structure you would receive one vote for $360 instead of one per $2,500, which is the current system. That gives very dramatic increase in voting influence by the large were members of the APNIC community. Several thousand votes or at least a thousand votes held by the largest members and only one by the smallest. Another issue of fairness and appropriate structure for APNIC.

Somehow I think this discussion is getting more complicated and not less. Issues around the basic fee structure proposal that is being presented here, these issues have come up more recently than the discussions in APNIC 21.

They have come up from, I think, sincerely felt and often very useful points that have been made in the discussion. Of course, the discussions also involve counterproposals from JPNIC and others. I suppose I should finally stop talking after quite some time.

AKINORI MAEMURA: I like to have some comments or questions for, within the session. We have only run out of our time, but still, we need some comments for here.

Okay.

KENNY HUANG: Kenny Huang. What I say is very complicated formula. I have some feedback, especially from Korea. They suppose member should have more time to think about proposal and should have more clear understanding regarding implications of proposal. So what I suggest is not a good forum for this kind of discussion. I'm sorry to hear proposal is to keep going so many years already and keep doing your homework. So what I suggest is probably institutionalise the process, have some proposal identified so we can see how things going and some action item so we can, rather than discussion without any clear action.

KUO-WEI WU: I mentioned in SIG, I think this is not a very good time to discuss the detail in the AMM.

We should have a fuller discussion, because the whole structure, I think is rolling around, most of the time in our group, when the fee structure is changing, I think the re of the members will be affected. So we should be going to the more general for a detailed discussion. I don't think it is a good time for discussion on the AMM. Maybe we can finish the discussion in the midnight.

RANDY BUSH: Randy Bush. I'm normally a little confused, but now I'm exceedingly confused. If a fusing of the membership is not a place to discuss the membership fees, what is?

KENNY HUANG: The policy process going through a different stage. What I suggest is we have some early discussion and also pass through some sort of special SIG or policy SIG for extensive discussion. After more detailed discussion we go to AMM for final ratification.

XING LI: Xing Li from China. I really appreciate APNIC's effort trying to include the service. I have some suggestions. The first is actually probably APNIC could put some reference what's the activities in other regions, so maybe comparison it for the data is the first thing. Which I learned in this APNIC meeting, probably IPv4 address is limited. So I talk to Geoff and I think that's the global collaboration, not regional SIGs. I understand actually there is no NIR SIG in the other regions, but as a reference to compare. The chart actually, you have a very nice chart, comparing the fees, the resources. However, I suggest you should add two more columns - one is actually what is the service cost, because actually, NIR also provides services. So even, that's something probably need to add to compare. And the second thing actually, the NIR, the current voting is not big. However, I believe that votes different from the ordinary votes because NIR have some kind of proxy voting so actually they are quite consistent voting, either individual members, they have much more votes, however, they can not have a platform to discuss the things. So maybe, the effective votes, that's the thing I like to mention.

Basically, I think three things we have to keep things consistent. The first thing is the cost related to the service provided and the second is because IPv4 is a limited resource. Later, as Geoff mentioned, go to the 3G market, there are some kind of fee structure for that and the third thing is the votes. That's the political thing I believe. One danger is if change the structure and if someone has dominated votes, they can propose a policy in the past, in that case, it will be a single superpower and no way to do things correctly. Thank you very much.

AKINORI MAEMURA: Thank you very much.

MING-CHENG LIANG: This is the first time I attend an APNIC, the proposal, I understand some of the problems you are facing, but if we are going, in this proposal, my point of view, the NIR law is not very clear. Accept that we maybe paying something more or less than the others. But I would suggest if we are going to have a working group on this issue, maybe we should improve not only the fee, but maybe include some of this activity related issues. Thank you.

AKINORI MAEMURA: Thank you very much. Any other comments or questions?

IZUMI OKUTANI: I think it is related from an earlier comment. I think generally, NIRs we are happy to pay the additional payment so long as it's reasonable and justified. It is not clear why they need a 10% to 15% percent raise, with these figures. I think Paul has already explained that APNIC is expanding activities and things like that but maybe we would like to check more details why it is not 5%, not 10% to 15%, it would help us understand the reason why APNIC needs to do this raise.

DEEPAK MAHESHWARI: Deepak Maheshwari, ISP association of India. Currently India has more than 120 members in APNIC, but the factors in India, we have more than 150 ISPs alone. Some of the members are finding difficulty in getting membership of APNIC, not for processes, but the resources. In that respect, this thinking of setting up an IR in India also. At the same time, the ISPs would continue to have their own membership as well. On some of these proposals, discussed, we shall have further debate in the country.

AKINORI MAEMURA: Thank you very much.

MASARU AKAI: Why this kind of discussion?

I think similar job, similar activities, so we compare RIRs financial report, so we can find big difference. Why APNIC needs only?

PAUL WILSON: I didn't understand the question? Why APNIC needs...

IZUMI OKUTANI: Just correct me if I'm wrong, I think I understand what Mr Akai said, compared the budget of each RIRs' activities and looked for to what is activities of, I don't know, WSIS-related activities and then felt that the budget of APNIC is not that different from other RIRs. He wants to know why it is only APNIC who needs this fee raise and not the same kind of discussions are not raised in other RIR issues. Is this right?

PAUL WILSON: I could suggest that the other RIRs don't have NIRs.

If someone wants to present some other differences, let's hear what they are. But that is a big difference. The other regions do not have NIRs. You can see from the charts that I have displayed here that the distortion in the costs, the benefits, the ability to compare and to measure the situation of ISPs in different parts of the region, is difficult if not impossible. I'm not playing NIRs for this. The NIR fee structure is not good for anyone. The first discussions of the NIR fee structure, first real impetus to change it came from the NIRs. The NIRs themselves have been very unhappy with the fee structure. But that is, if you want to know the difference, that is the difference in my view.

GEOFF HUSTON: I was looking around for Axel Pawlik.

AXEL PAWLIK: What was the question?

GEOFF HUSTON: What is the difference?

AXEL PAWLIK: We have that fee discussion every year. As we do it and you keep in mind that we don't have NIRs, of course, in our region. In on a yearly basis we present our plans to our membership in the form of a draft activity plan, and present a budget. The memberships' representatives, the executive board, for two or three years, has the authority to agree on the budget and activity plan themselves, however, the budget isn't worth much if we don't get the money. So what the members do everything year in the general meeting is to approve a charging scheme that basically lays out how we get our income to spend on the budget and on the activities. That's scheme, as such, hasn't changed much over, as long as I can remember, and I'm only there since 1999, basically how we derive our fees is we have a somewhat complicated formula, but not terribly complicated that gives weight to the allocations that our members hold.

It weighs the allocations received in different years differently. So allocations that members received a long time ago are not as heavily weighted as those that are, have received this year for instance. So basically, that seems to work, we have had discussions about this, we have twisted the formula a little bit, now of course, we also include IPv6 allocations but it works. You can have the discussion every year, but as it happens, our members seem to be fairly happy with how it goes and our fees go down. It's not always down, we had a significant increase four years ago, five years ago. When the bubble burst we made a loss of 2.5 million euros. They like stability.

SAMANTHA DICKINSON: It's Sam Dickinson. I have a Jabber chat query from Rupesh from Nepal. "What plan does APNIC have for least developed countries. As Paul mentioned in the statement, he wants to provides discount to least developed countries, it could be a considerable effort on the part of APNIC to bridging the divide. That is why it needs to be discussed in specifics rather than a passing remark as it would really do something for the least developing countries."

AKINORI MAEMURA: Thank you. Right, we running out of this session.

Izumi, maybe 10 words or 20 words.

IZUMI OKUTANI: Regarding earlier comment about NIRs, you know, the fact that we have NIRs in this region is the difference between RIRs, but I'm not sure why we need this fee raise at this stage, we have always had NIRs. Unless APNIC is having some extra cost or activities related to NIRs, I don't think it still explains why we have to have this fee raise at this stage.

PAUL WILSON: Perhaps I misunderstood the question, it would be very easy to one change cell on a spreadsheet that I used to produce a 0% change in the expected revenue, and I will do that on the mailing list to then gauge if that is the issue or not that we are talking about, I did think it was more a question about the over all need for a fee structure revision rather than the proposed increase in revenues.

IZUMI OKUTANI: Okay, thank you.

AKINORI MAEMURA: Thank you very much. As you may know, we have the mailing list, which is focused on the fee structure discussion, the name is wg-apnic-fee. We have a program at the meeting. We have no chair for that discussion group on the mailing list. I would like to ask you for some volunteers if you think you can do the chair, of that discussion meeting.

PAUL WILSON: For those who may not know about the mailing list, there are some prominent links on the APNIC web site. On that page of mailing lists, which you will find under the quick links selection, you will see special interest groups and working groups mailing lists and the wg-apnic-fees is there. You can easily locate and join it from that location.

AKINORI MAEMURA: Ming-Cheng Liang, can you chair? Thank you very much. Randy, can you co-chair? Okay. Thank you very much for the volunteers.

RANDY BUSH: If I was in other people's way, I would withdraw. I don't, I'm just doing it because work needs to be done.

AKINORI MAEMURA: Okay, then,

GAURAB RAJ UPADHAYA: There has been some activity on the mailing list, and neither the chair nor the co-chair have contributed. I think the chair for the mailing list or the working group should be someone who contributes to it.

AKINORI MAEMURA: Any other comments? It is already 3.30.

Member meeting - Session Four
1600-1730


PAUL WILSON: OK. We're going to need to get started again and move straight on into the RIR reports. So there'll be reporting from AfriNIC, ARIN, LACNIC and RIPE NCC.

If Frank is in the room - he's not.

I might take this opportunity, then, to talk about the APNIC member survey. It was an item from this morning which was deferred. So, as any long-term APNIC member and participant knows, there've been three previous APNIC surveys. These are all available on the APNIC website and you can look at the URL here to see the details of three previous surveys performed in 1999, 2001, and 2004.

These were performed by KPMG, the big top-five or top-four accounting and consulting firm and by an individual, Dr John Earls of KPMG and they were performed independently of APNIC staff and EC, which is a critical part of KPMG's method for doing this sort of survey.

The three surveys that were done provide ad lot of incompetent put into the APNIC Secretariat and the EC about directions and priorities and so forth for activities and, of course, they were used as a main source of guidance in planning over previous years. The last survey being done in 2004 - it seemed appropriate that we should be preparing for another survey. They seem to have been successful and welcomed. It has always been presumed that the survey would go on.

But prior to starting a new survey, it seemed it would be useful to have an overview of our performance in the last three surveys. Dr Earls was asked to interview APNIC staff member, to review activities, to talk to the managers responsible for those activities, to have a look at what has been actioned and what might remain to be actioned from previous surveys. So he's provided a report, which has gone to the APNIC EC about the general proportion of activities and requests from previous surveys that have been actioned, which ones are completed, which ones are ongoing. The remainder - his conclusion of 9% of issues not actioned. He hasn't looked at how or why these things haven't been actioned but I think the useful thing here is that the results of this review can be used in the next survey and so this month we're launching the next survey to be conducted by Dr John Earls again.

In this case, it will be an e-mail response survey, but, once again, involving Dr Earls and KPMG, guaranteeing the anonymity of respondents. And after the survey, a report will be provided to the APNIC EC, I'd say as usual there will be a response from the EC and/or Secretariat to the survey result.

So the schedule is that this will kick off during this month. A draft of the survey questions will be produced during October. It will be validated during November - that is there will be a subset of members selected by KPMG to review and provide some feedback on those questions. There will then a final survey circulated by the end of November with a month proposed for response. This is the schedule provided to me by John Earls himself.

The idea is there should be a report ready for publication before the next Member Meeting. So I think we've discussed quite a few things today, in particular the fee structure and some of the issues and principles behind the fee structure, some of the philosophical issues that were identified. These were the sorts of things which would be very useful, I think, to gauge opinions on in this survey. So anyone who has a particular interest and a particular motivation to provide some input into the survey, you will have the opportunity to do so. That opportunity would be provided and you will hear about it during this current month. That's all I have on the survey.

Frank is here ready to report for AfriNIC. While he's setting up, are there any questions about the survey?

OK, we'll be moving on into the RIR reports then. Richard is here and ready and I think Axel is here and ready. First is Frank from AfriNIC.

FRANK NNEBE: Good afternoon, everyone.

I'm just going to give you a brief update of AfriNIC activities.

Registration services in the past few months have basically been focused on ensuring continuity and an acceptable service level. We've had more than 1,300 requests over the past 12 months and that's excluding spam and DB requests, with an average of 55% of requests being approved.

We've had strong growth in our membership, 140% growth between 2005 and now. As a result, we've also had growth in resource allocation over the past year.

We've focused on IPv6 awareness in our community through training and conferences. This has led to more interest in IPv6. We've had IPv6 training in all the highlighted countries - Egypt, Sudan, Kenya, South Africa, Mozambique, Nigeria. And we have CBT, which is computer-based training material available in English and French online as well as on CD.

In terms of policy development, we've had several policies that have been adopted, including temporary assignments, direct/PI assignments from AfriNIC to end-user organisations, criteria for assignment of AS numbers, global policy for IPv6 allocation from IANA to RIRs. Several other policies are open and in discussion, including 4-byte AS number policy proposal, change of HD-ratio for IPv6 subsequent allocation and IPv6 PA Assignment Policy.

Financial health - we are basically working to achieve full sustainability after the two-year incubation period which is basically ending at the end of this year. We're working to achieve one year's budget reserve and I think we're going to, we'll probably achieve about 70% of that by the end of this year.

In addition, we are putting in place good governance processes to ensure sustainable growth and that includes, like, organisational and control processes as well as auditing our accounts regularly. We have also got a tax exemption from the Mauritius Government.

And this is basically the 2005 audit report by Ernst & Young.

We are building partnership and collaboration with other organisations, including AfNOG. We've signed an MoU with AfNOG during AfriNIC-3, that was in Cairo, at the end of last year. We participated in funding AfNOG for the AfriNIC-4 meeting and sponsoring five people to attend AfriNIC-4.

Ongoing discussions with other organisations including the Association of African Universities, AfTLD and AfriSPA. We are also actively participating in NRO activities, including the EC, ECG and CCG.

AfriNIC has become a member of ITU-D to be better able to participate in Internet governance-related discussions in our region and raise awareness among policy-makers. AfriNIC was identified as one of the ARAPKE project partners. AfriNIC also represented the NRO at the I TU reform consultation meeting in Geneva and participated in the WTDC meeting in Doha in Qatar and participated in ITU-D WSIS follow-up discussions. It participating in the African Regulators Forum where AfriNIC's presentation led to the recommendation from the forum to call on regulators to play a facilitator role in Internet governance issues and increase their participation in Internet governance fora. Now we have to follow up these discussions related to the IGF, where the NRO was represented by AfriNIC and LACNIC in the meeting advisory group.

Other projects. We currently have the MyAfriNIC which is a portal to allow LIRs to interact with AfriNIC and manage their resources easier. We're developing a tool to evaluate the routing status of resources allocated by AfriNIC as well as overall statistics on Internet resources in our region. We will be activating the routing registry some time next year. We are actively following the Internet resource certification project, which is being spearheaded by APNIC. We've actually - we had a workshop organised in Pretoria at which we invited Stephen Kent, who I think some of you are familiar with, to our offices in August of this year.

Staffing and HR. We are a very small team. We've grown from four in 2005 to six today. And these are some of the people - Harish, Ernest, me, Manoda, Radha, Adiel. We come from four countries - Uganda, Nigeria, Benin and Mauritius. We're in the process of hiring a system administrator, database manager and membership liaison and communications officer.

Our next Open Policy Meeting will be held in Baclava in Mauritius from the 27th of November and the 1st of December this year. It will be held back to back with the IPv6 conference, IPv6 hands-on training, AftLD meeting and INET 'Indian Ocean meeting. These are some pictures of the event, nice beaches and so on. So we invite all of you, if you can come, to our meeting.

Thank you.

Does anyone have any questions?

PAUL WILSON: Thank you very much, Frank.

If anyone has any questions for Frank regarding his report or for any of the reports from other RIRs, then please feel free to ask now or later on during this last session.

Next is Richard Jimmerson. He'll be reporting for ARIN as well as LACNIC. LACNIC at the last moment was unfortunately not able to attend this meeting.

RICHARD JIMMERSON: Hello. I'm Richard Jimmerson from ARIN. I'm going to give you a brief update about ARIN and, as Paul said, I'll follow that with the LACNIC report. These are the three things I'll talk about today. I'll try to be brief because of the time on the schedule. I'll go straight into it.

Here from ARIN this week, we have one member from staff, myself, and we also bring to our meetings, to the RIR meetings, members of the elected bodies in the ARIN region. And in this case we have three members from our Advisory Council, Marla Azinger, Alec Peterson and Suzanne Woolf and one member from the ASO AC in the ARIN region, Sandy George.

These are some of the activities that we're engaged in, aside from the day-to-day operations of the registry itself. Just pull out a few of the things here. We are doing a service fee analysis, much like is going on in the APNIC region. And we'll be having a discussion with our membership likely here in the coming months at the Member Meeting there.

We're continually improving the election system and doing some other projects here.

The recent policy activity in the region - we have three that were just implemented last week - the IPv6 PI assignments is one of them - I've got a few slides to describe that and I'll do it briefly, because I have had a few people ask me about that policy this week so I figured I'd just highlight some of the points of that policy to you in this presentation. Some of these other policy proposals you'll see are similar to the ones discussed in this and other regions. I'm sure you're all familiar with them. If you'd like to see more detail, you can visit the ARIN website and find that information there.

Now the IPv6 PI Assignment Policy in the ARIN region - and this comes straight out of our number resource policy manual - is that ARIN will directly assign IPv6 address space to end-user organisations in order for an organisation to qualify for this assignment, they must not be an IPv6 LIR, not an ISP basically, that's qualified or can qualify under the general policy. And they need to qualify for an IPv4 assignment or allocation from ARIN under the IPv4 policy currently in effect. That's the criteria. So basically, it's saying that if you're an end-user organisation that would be able to justify an IPv4 assignment from ARIN, then you automatically qualify for the IPv6 assignment under this policy.

The minimum size of that assignment is a /48. And it's stated in the policy that the assignments will be made from a distinctly identified prefix and shall be made with a reservation for growth of at least a /44.

We will be - we can make subsequent assignments under this policy as well. A user can come in, get their assignment and come back after some time and receive another one. It's not a one-time deal.

Some notes on this is we implemented it last week on August 30, 2006. The source prefix for assignments under this policy will be published on the ARIN website. We're working with the IANA right now to get that prefix. Once we have it, we'll post it on the website so that the community knows where we're making those assignments from and in the first day or first week of this new policy implementation we did receive two requests.

You've got two upcoming processes in the ARIN region that you'll see. These will likely be discussed in October at our next meeting. One is the ARIN contracting process. There is a contracting process that we will be putting into place that will set a dollar figure for which we have to follow a process to find contractors. Also there will be an ARIN consultation process. This is a process that individuals or organisations can use to bring issues to ARIN to be considered and follow a formal process that are not policy proposals for number resources.

Our next meeting will be ARIN XVIII in St Louis, Missouri. This meeting will be in conjunction with NANOG. NANOG will do a Sunday through Tuesday and ARIN will do Wednesday through Friday of that week. So it will be a full-week meeting. The ARIN portion will have all of the usual items that fit the agenda that you're familiar with.

And something different that we're doing - this is my last slide before I move on to LACNIC - is we are doing something very new that we've not done before and that's we put together some ARIN superheroes. We're having a comic book actually. The first edition of the comic book will be released in the coming months. I encourage anyone who goes to the ARIN meeting a or has an opportunity to pick this up to pick it up because something like this is going to be either very successful or fail miserably and no matter which of those two scenarios plays out, it will be quite a valuable first edition. So make sure you pick up a copy.

With that, that's it for the ARIN presentation. I have a question from the floor. Gerard, yes?

GERARD ROSS: Richard, I was wondering if you're wearing one of those suits underneath what you have on now?

RICHARD JIMMERSON: No, I'm not.

GERARD ROSS: Will you be hanging around any phone boxes?

RICHARD JIMMERSON: No.

GERARD ROSS: Come on!

RICHARD JIMMERSON: We might have somebody donned in cape or something like that in October but I assure you it will not be me.

I will move on to the LACNIC presentation. If anyone has any questions about my presentation or the LACNIC presentation I'm happy to take them during this meeting in the hallway after the meeting, whichever the case. PL OK, for LACNIC, these are the allocations they've made to organisations measured by semester dating back to 1998 and you can see that there's a steady increase in the number of allocations that they're making and the amount of address space that's being allocated with those allocations over the years.

And note that that last bar in both of these graphs here only represents partial data for the last semester of this year.

These are the IPv6 allocations in the LACNIC region. Take note of the 2005 figure - that was quite large compared to the years previous to that. There's some information that might explain why that happened in a following slide here but basically what's happened is they did a promotion program in 2005 and it yielded more requests for IPv6 address space in their region.

They have 384 members.

Now, LACNIC and the information society - I'll just pull out a few things from this slide. One of them is the RAICES project. That stands for multiple roots, the way that I've heard LACNIC describe it. And what they're doing is working with other organisations to set up anycast copies of root servers in their region and here's some information about that. They've got some stuff going on in Chile, Argentina and later in Venezuela and Panama.

And the FRIDA program - FRIDA is a program where they support research projects in the LACNIC region. They have supported 26 research projects through funding and they're also setting up a new round of funding for this coming year.

Now, there was a regional conference of governments in Latin America in 2005 and in that they talked about the information society in Latin America and they came up with 70 goals for that in the Latin American region and it's been determined that 25 of those objectives or goals fall under the work that LACNIC does. So LACNIC is a very big player in this effort in Latin America.

Now, some of the policy issues that were discussed recently or are being discussed now on the mailing lists in the LACNIC region you'll find familiar to the policy discussions taking place here and in the other regions. Another activity that they have ongoing is that a working group was created to review their policies, to unify concepts to avoid ambiguity, to basically go through anything that's been there over the years and see if there's anything that needs to be changed in the language or cleared up in the process to make things more clear in policy.

Some things that happened during their last meeting - they approved their annual report. Had discussions about fees for non-profit organisations in particular, where they reduced fees for non-profit organisations only. They talked about setting up a security forum in the LACNIC region and the LACNIC meeting is more and more every time they have a meeting becoming a place for Latin America for other organisations that are also playing in the Internet to come and meet and join together. And some of those organisations are LACTLD, e-C OMLAC, the Latin American IPv6 forum, IXPs and things of this sort. More and more organisations are choosing the LACNIC meeting to come together and have their very own meeting at the same time.

Their last meeting had 180 attendees, I think that was the largest attendance they ever had at a LACNIC meeting. 69 people were LACNIC members. 111 of those attendees were there for the first time and 20 countries were represented at the meeting.

The final few slides here - the LACNIC staff has grown quite substantially over the first couple of years of their operation and they've outgrown their current facility. They have people sitting next to each other in very small, crowded places inside their current facility and they're moving. The top picture is the facility that they recently purchased. It's a very large house in the Montevideo region in South America. And the bottom picture is a picture of it under renovation right now. And this is a picture of what they plan to have done by December of this year, where they'll move their staff and then be able to start expanding again. Because they pretty much had to stop bringing new staff into the facility because they've run out of space and this new facility is going to allow them to continue to grow.

And the next LACNIC meeting, LACNIC X will be in Venezuela and I'm sure if German were here, he would extend a very kind welcome to all of you to attend that meeting. So if there are any questions for ARIN or about the LACNIC presentation, I'll be glad to answer them for you in the hallway following the meeting.

PAUL WILSON: Thank you, Richard. Axel will now present the RIPE NCC report. I think I'll ask Axel to stay on and do the NRO report afterwards. Thanks.

AXEL PAWLIK: Right. So the update from RIPE NCC this time comes with an updated picture as well. If you had a look at our website over the last few weeks, there were quite a number of vacancies there. We have heard one or other comments on the mailing lists what were we doing. That was not the reason we should move in this big picture in the centre is the queen's Palace and we're the tiny red roof by the canal side. That's where we live. That's where we work. Some of us live there as well.

All right. A quick update on registration services. As usual more or less, our documentation is get better and better and we are never going to stop to work on this. You can see the plain English style we've gone through inhouse to clean things up, not use lots of passives and things like that.

We've just received a number of /8s, three of them actually.

Looking at the policy update - I won't go into any detail, that's basically the set of policies that are currently being discussed or reviewed or in last call. I think Save has talked about all of them yesterday. I think

ENUM update. You might know that the RIPE NCC, apart from being an RIR, also does some other things. One of that is that we're acing as a Tier-0 registry and we did that on request of IAB. We've done seven delegations there in the last half year. None of them have been objected to by the ITU, which is a good thing and we've improved the whole set-up of the ENUM registry in terms of automation and the like over the last few months.

RIPE NCC eLearning centre, it's great to see Cecil arriving at APNIC. We are looking forward to working with you quite a bit over the next few months. As you know, we are working on eLearning, actually we have sort of started it together with APNIC quite some time ago. I am somewhat aghast at having to say that a number of courses are still in development. We had planned to have them out and done by now but, as life is, things go a little bit slower than you would think originally. So if you come back to the website from time to time, you can have a look there and see what we have out there now.

OK. Membership liaison and enhanced cooperation. You might know that we do regional meetings. The idea is not to duplicate RIPE meetings but to have RIPE NCC meetings which particularly reach out to our members in the more faraway regions, especially in Russia, as Russia is the biggest country in our service in terms of membership. Also the Middle East is always a very interesting place to go and there are lots of very, very thankful members there to receive us. So for the third time we'll go to Moscow at Middle East region this year.

We've done a number of round-tables with governments and regulators. The idea here is to run this WSIS effort to reach out to those audiences. We have been hearing comments that this is all very good but it's a shame that they are nots - those events are not at the RIPE meetings. So we're trying something new at the next RIPE meeting. The Monday afternoon, the second half of the afternoon, is a dedicated session where the governments meet the RIPE community. Like that. I think the title is a little bit different from that but that's basically the idea. But the governments, the governmental representatives to give a presentations on things they think might concern us and also the other way round. So we'll see how that goes. We're looking forward to that quite a bit.

Corporate governance - having talked about Russia being the biggest country in our service region with regard to membership, you see our executive board and the new guy in the right is our new board member since May who comes from Russia, Dmitri Bourkov.

Some of the things as I said a few moments ago, we are regular liaising with our members in regard to planning what should we do the following year so currently this has been done in-house for 2007. The documents to support our plans are out since yesterday and the URL is at the bottom of the page. I put that in there for you if you are interested to look at how we are doing things with regard to budgeting and the like.

We are putting forward this time to grow our FTEs a little bit by actually five people, looking at a customer service department that we are setting up a new first-level support for all of our groups and also we want to step up our efforts in the certification arena so that's where we think we'll put up some more FTEs. The overall budget increase for next year is about 3% and just slightly over 11 million euro there.

The charging scheme - as I said, that is the amount of money our members have to pay us in various layers between very small and very large. That will be discussed again and hopefully approved by the membership - the idea here is that we assume a membership growth of 9% for the next year. That would lead to a fee decrease of also 9%. We are also aiming at a one-year operational reserve, that's more or less the standard here. We have by far exceeded that by now, by more than 50% I think. So we think it's about time that we do something about this. We don't want to aggressively decrease our fees because that might lead to an increase again next year or the year after and that is not so popular with our members. So what we will do next year is, if everybody agrees with it, to give out 2.5 million euro as a rebate to existing members. That's the first that we do that.

Alright, the next RIPE meeting coming up in four weeks' time. You will be very welcome in Amsterdam. And when I received this slide from Leo, he put in the temperature in Kelvin to make it look warmer. It won't be that cold really. We hope for blue skies and not much rain.

And if you are looking really forward, you are also of course invited to the RIPE meeting after that. That will be in May and the pictures shows lots of snow, just to show Leo. We don't think there will be any snow in Tallinn at the time. It's May next year, so note that down in your agendas.

If you have any questions, I will be available after the session.

PAUL WILSON: Where is Tallinn?

AXEL PAWLIK: Oh, that's somewhere on the Baltic. Far East up there, I think. Is it Estonia? OK. We thought it would be an interesting arena - area to go to because it is so on the eastern side of it so we expect lots of Russians there to come as well. On the other hand, it's one of the relatively new Baltic states which promises lots of excitement and it's the first time we go there so it will be interesting. But, again, that will only be next year.

Right. I will be available after the session for questions.

You said I should do the NRO thing as well, right?

PAUL WILSON: Yes, please.

Thanks.

AXEL PAWLIK: If I can find that.

PAUL WILSON: Axel is giving this presentation for the NRO, the Number Resource Organization, which, of course, is the cooperative association, let's say, of the RIRs. But I'll let Axel explain that.

AXEL PAWLIK: Well, we've said that before.

The NRO has been formed in 2003 by the RIRs to formalise their cooperative efforts. The NRO is there to protect the allocated number resource pool in principle and on a day-to-day basis to promote and protect the industry, self-regulation, the policy development process and to act as a focal point for the Internet community to the RIR system. I think you've heard that before possibly.

The structure - there isn't much to it. It's a lightweight, not yet incorporated organisation. We have a Secretariat, an Executive Council and a Number Council and the Executive Council looks after some coordination groups that report back to the EC. The coordination group - and I think Frank mentioned them - it's the ECG, the Engineering Coordination Group, and the CCG, the Communications Coordination Group.

The council is basically the CEOs from the RIRs and I think you do know them. I didn't put the photo in. I would be too shy for that but on the other hand, I think we are just too pretty for God to let us die any time soon. Actually, we don't meet each other in the full sense regularly so this might have been the last time actually, I think about two years ago at an AfriNIC meeting.

We do meet by tele-conference using the plain old telephone system but also increasingly more exciting things like Voice over IP or just plain old Skype as well and that leads to lots of complications but the meetings are run and they are run efficiently as well. We do get things done there. The minutes are available if you want to have a look what we are talking about and what we are planning and have been planning. It's all on www.nro.net.

OK. The Address Supporting Organisation you know as one of the supporting organisations of the ICANN. We have signed an MoU with ICANN already two years ago - time flies - to define the or redefine or review the Address Supporting Organisation now is defined as basically the NRO's Number Council acting as the ICANN Address Council which works quite well. But we've heard about that earlier. So I'll just skip over this I think. We've seen something like that a little bit earlier. The coordination groups I mentioned. They are chaired by staff from the NRO Secretariat. So this year they are all ARIN people. We also have a legal team which is not formally a coordination group but it is coordinated and that is by Steve Ryan, ARIN's legal counsel.

The main topics currently - also we have seen this before. Procedures for the ASO. The charters for the coordination groups, although I think that has been done so far. A very big point is this Internet governance debate. We are preparing to go to Athens. We have succeeded in getting two EC members into the IGF advisory group. They are doing very good work there and lots of work as well. We are also exchanging or have exchanged a set of letters with the ITU to formalise our relationship to the ITU without being a member but to have some liaison formally with them.

We make a point of going to ICANN meetings and giving a regular presentation to the governmental Advisory Committee of ICANN and also we will go to Hong Kong in the ICANN meeting week which I think is in December this year, November/December, and we will put up a presentation there, a booth together with our partners in Internet governance in a way, the Internet society and I think also ICANN, basically to show case the Internet coordination as it functions. There will also be quite a number of regional groups on the Asia Pacific being represented there, at least in the form of brochures, information material. So, yeah, the idea is to be there, have a focus for people to come to us and talk to us and explain how things are really working.

Another one is one of the big topics coming up that we are already working on I, which is certification and we've heard a lot of detail there from Geoff earlier. We think this is a very important thing for the RIRs to do jointly or at least in a very, very coordinated way. And I think there are members of the community who would agree with that. Right, Randy?

OK. The IANA services contract is being negotiated and I think we might actually make a step forward there in December at the ICANN meeting. At least I hope so. And we are also still looking at incorporation of the NRO although, as I said, it's a very lightweight organisation, or non-organisation really. We don't put any specific steam on that currently.

Well, you know those URL s, hopefully, in your dreams already and that will be it for now. Thank you very much. And I will be available for questions.

PAUL WILSON: Before you go, as a representative of the NR O coordinating among the RIRs, I'd like you to accept one of these and deliver the other two to our colleagues from AfriNIC and ARIN.

AXEL PAWLIK: I shall do so. Thank you.

PAUL WILSON: The next report is Barbara from IANA.

Now, we did invite your old friend and mine, David Conrad, to present this report. He wasn't able to come. Barbara is one of the staff at the IANA and I'm sure will give us a good report on what's been going on at the IANA.

BARBARA ROSEMAN: OK. Yes, David wasn't able to make it. He's actually attending a different meeting today. So...

I'm just going to go over a few things. This is a very brief presentation. Our current IANA staff is 10 people.

When we tried this at lunch it worked.

GERARD ROSS: Turn the mirroring back on.

BARBARA ROSEMAN: I didn't turn it off.

David reports directly to Paul so there's a direct line to our senior executive staff. And beneath him we have what's listed as a vacant position, the IETF liaison. Michelle Cotton, who has been doing that work for a number of years, will be appointed to that position when she returns from her maternity leave. Then there's me aspirations manager, Kim Davies who has quite a bit of experience in the ccTLD as a names liaison. We have a position open for a numbers liaison to work directly with the RIRs and then we have a software consultant working for us full-time right now. We will be opening a position to fill Michelle's project specialist role as she is promoted up.

OK, so as you know in the past this is more what our charts look like. This is what we're aiming for.

These are the v4 allocations that we've done since January of '05. You can see there was a little cluster in June of '05 and since then we've only done two IPv4 allocations to the RIRs and one was the one that axel just mentioned in last month to RIPE.

That one only took us two days so we're happy about that.

For v6 allocations, again, these are spread out quite a bit since April of '05 and the last one took us a little while because there was issues of who was responsible for filling the request so we had already assigned it but not communicated it to the appropriate people.

The IPv6 global policy governing allocations from IANA to the RIRs was approved at the 7 September ICANN board meeting and we're now moving to implement that.

We have a proposed IANA homepage, a new website, that should be easier for people to navigate. We invite you all to go take a look at it. This will be implemented shortly, so, if you do have comments about it, we'd love to get the feedback but we're moving quite a bit ahead on getting this in place.

By the next meeting - and this is sort of by the next ICANN meeting - we intend to hire two additional staff, a numbers liaison and a replacement for Michelle as a project specialist, put our automation projects into production, clear the current request backlogs - we've actually cleared all of the current request backlogs, we do have some outstanding materials going back to 2001 that were never entered into our ticketing system and so we're gradually getting through those - we're updating and publicly documenting the allocation-related processes. That's part of a process where we're signing basically service level agreements with our different constituencies. We're publishing the IANA research allocation performance data. Well, we hope to. It's actually been a slow process to get that online. And we're completing migration of the historical ticket data. We had two ticketing systems at one point and we're trying to merge them into one and again publishing the revised IANA website.

Any questions?

If not, thank you very much.

PAUL WILSON: Thank you.

APPLAUSE

Now, that brings us to the end of the reportings scheduled for today, the end of the major content of this meeting. So we've luckily caught up some time. We've got a few announcements to make here. I can see Richard's ready as the chief scrutineer of the NRO NC election. Can I ask if there are any - before we move on to that, are there any questions or comments? Questions pertaining to the reports we've just heard? Comments or any other contributions?

OK, Richard. I think you have the election result there. I'll ask you to announce it then please, as the scrutineer.

RICHARD JIMMERSON: OK. We met in a room and counted the votes following the close of voting. So we counted all of the onsite votes as well as the online votes and the winner of the election is Hyun-joon Kwon

APPLAUSE

PAUL WILSON: Thank you, Richard. Congratulations to HJ. And thank you very much for your service and your continued service on the Address Council.

HYUN-JOON KWON: Thank you.

PAUL WILSON: We have - I have some statistics here about how this meeting has gone. I think generally it has been a well-attended meeting with some interesting content and some - a few new innovations, a few surprises and hopefully we'll be able to go on improving the meetings. One way that we can help to do that is to gather a few statistics about how the meeting is going, who is coming to the meeting and so on and so forth. So I'd just like to summarise those for you.

We had 204 registrations for the meetings overall and 157 of you have attended the meeting, from a good range of economies - I won't try and count them here but we had the most from Taiwan, of course, then from Japan, Australia, the US, mainland China, India, Singapore, Malaysia and then quite a few others as well. So a nice range of people here and I would like to say thanks to everyone who has come from as far away places as, well the US is quite far, but logistically I'm sure that the delegates from Fiji for instance, the Netherlands and Vietnam and so forth have also gone through some adventures and some trouble to be here. So thanks very much.

For 35% of you it's your first meeting and it's always nice to have some new blood and to know that there are new people coming along to the meeting to learn about APNIC and to participate in the processes.

We ask about connectivity so that we can continue to make sure that the services offered here are appropriate. There are fewer and fewer people using the terminal room but 9% of people opted to use the terminal room so that's something we will go on doing.

We also ask about the industry you come from and of course most of Internet service providers and quite a few from Regional Internet Registries and also from other organisations, national registries, Internet hosting and applications providers, ccTLD and vendors. I guess there are a number of others and also possibly some who didn't answer that question.

The role that you all play - many managers and CEOs this time. Quite a few host masters and network engineers. We've got 23% of others, who we will probably try to break down a bit further in future to give us some more information. And that's all.

But we find it quite interesting and important to gather that information so that we know in preparing for the meetings coming up, we know what to prepare for and how to improve the meetings ongoing and I hope you find that useful as well.

I think I should open the microphone again before we really start winding this meeting up.

Well, it will stay open until the end of the afternoon.

Now, the feedback forms have been available for you to complete and it is another very useful way that we have of gathering information at the APNIC staff level as to how this meeting is going and how well you are all enjoying it and benefiting from it. So I think we have a box full of feedback forms but maybe before drawing the lucky winner of a prize, I'll just ask has anyone who has still got a form to submit... no. OK. Ah, one more. Che-Hoo.

CHE-HOO CHENG: Is there an iPod?

PAUL WILSON: It's not an iPod. It's a mystery gift. It's another media player of someone kind. Anyone else?

I'll hold the box and ask Connie to draw one out.

And the winner is Akai-san.

MASARU AKAI: Thank you.

PAUL WILSON: Thanks for your feedback.

And we have another prize draw. This is from the eLearning corner. We had a number of visitors to come and check out eLearning and I think you were dropping your business card or registering your name somewhere so we're going to draw out a name for that as well. So Sall'ee you have the name.

SALL'EE RYMAN: We had 20 people register through our learner management system during the meeting. We had a good attendance. Our winner is a newcomer. Timothy from Fiji has won the prize from the eLearning corner. Is Timothy here?

APPLAUSE

PAUL WILSON: Congratulations.

Thanks, Sall'ee.

OK, well this is end the end of day five, the last day of the 22nd APNIC Open Policy Meeting and there are a few final announcements and thanks to give. I think you know now about the closing dinner. 7 pm tonight. It's an informal event. You're asked to buy a ticket for it if you haven't already and you want to come. There's still time so see the APNIC staff and meet at the lobby at 6:50 tonight for taxis.

Next meetings. This time it's unprecedented that we can announce not one, not two, but three future meetings coming up. So the next APNIC meeting, APNIC 23, is going to be in Bali and that's, of course, alongside APRICOT 2007 in February-March next year and there are plenty of details on both the APRICOT website here and on the meetings website, the APNIC meetings website. That is going to be an exciting event in a very nice location. So I think we're all looking forward to that and I hope that you can all come along.

The 24th APNIC Open Policy Meeting has been decided. The successful proposal was from New Delhi from India and it will be the Internet providers Association of India who will be hosting that meeting in New Delhi in September. That will be crucially held in conjunction with SANOG 10 and we're looking forward to having the first ever meeting in South Asia and the first meeting that we've held with SANOG 10. So I think you're invited to say a few words and we'll hear more about what is in store for us in one year's time at APNIC 24. So please come and join me.

AMITABH SINGHAL: Good evening, Paul. I'd like to start by thanking APNIC for inviting us here. It is our privilege to host APNIC 24 next year. APNIC 24 will be held from 3rd to 7th September 2007 and you are I would like you all to make a note of that and plan for visiting India in that time.

I, with my colleagues here, would like to send out an invitation to everyone and I would also like to express thanks to the local hosts. It's been wonderful to be here in Taiwan over the last week. Thanks to TWNIC and I'd like to take an opportunity to congratulate them on hosting such a great event and my best wishes to them on the success of this event.

As Paul said earlier, ISPI is one of the hosts for you in New Delhi. There's also going to be held in conjunction with SANOG 10. The dates for SANOG 10 have been decided. It's going to be held between August 29 and September 6 2007. Please be there for that too.

Delhi is a special place, lots of places for you to visit and see and explore and I would suggest that everyone who is planning to be there could take a few days before or after the meetings and explore around. There are places like the Taj Mahal that everyone knows about but beyond the Taj Mahal there is a lot to do in and around Delhi. Connectivity from any country in the region to Delhi is not a problem. Have many flights coming into Delhi from all over the globe. And I think I can take questions later on, on any questions you have on what to do when you're in Delhi. I will try and run a clip for you on the images that he has for you to get you interested. And I think with that, I would like to thank you all again, thank you APNIC and I think it will be a wonderful time next year.

PAUL WILSON: OK. Thanks. Do have a short video, don't we? We'll just get that up. Sorry for the technical difficulty.

AMITABH SINGHAL: Delhi is in the north of the country and north of there you have the Himalayas. You can trek up to 18,000 feet where we have the highest routes in the world. OK?

On the western side of Delhi, a few hours' drive away, you can get to the desert. You can go down south to the sea, maybe a couple of hours of flying time away.

So you have all the places you can explore while you're there.

PAUL WILSON: Sorry. We're just taking a technology break here.

NEW SPEAKER: It is a shopper's paradise and offers cuisines from all over the world thanks to a large expatriate population. In fact, it is one of the most happening cities in South Asia.

Delhi is the ideal launching pad for visits to some of the world's legendary destinations. The Taj Mahal and the mighty mountains are just a few hours' drive from the city.

Delhi opens a window into timeless India.

PAUL WILSON: OK. With technology like that, I'm sure it can only get better for the meeting in Delhi. I'd like to say congratulations again and we look forward to being there in a year's time.

I did promise a third upcoming APNIC meeting announcement and that of course will be again with APRICOT in 2008 and we will be back in Taiwan in 18 months' time for APRICOT 2008 in Taipei and more details about that meeting - it's quite some distance away, but more details will come up on the APRICOT website. That meeting once again is being hosted by TWNIC and I'm sure you'd all agree with me that with the job that TWNIC has done this time and also on previous meetings where we've come to Taiwan it's going to be a very good meeting again. So thanks to TWNIC for having us back in Taiwan yet again.

The 26th meeting in August/September 2008 is something which we can all look forward to. It's some time away but we'll be asking for proposals. If there is anyone even at this early stage, if there's anyone who is interested in discussing the prospects for APNIC 26, if you have some interest in bidding for it, please come and talk to us.

Now, I would like to say thanks again to the sponsors of today, that is the silver sponsors, NIDA KRNIC and JPNIC, who came to support this meeting at the silver sponsorship level. And I've got a couple of certificates of appreciation for those two sponsors if we have a representative of KRNIC and JPNIC, I'd just like to present you with a serf appreciation from APNIC. So please come on up and, while you're getting yourselves ready, again, thanks in particular to the gold sponsors of this meeting, being the hosts, TWNIC, the Kaohsiung City Government and Chunghwa Telecom for their strong support and again I have a couple of expressions of appreciation here for you so if I could ask you all, please, to express your thanks to all of these sponsors and supporters of the meeting whose efforts are really appreciated and critical to keeping this meeting go, so thank you very much.

APPLAUSE

And to all the other sponsors of the meeting - we had quite a few sponsors including Sparq, Seednet, Asia Pacific Telecom Group, Yahoo! Kimo, Price Waterhouse Coopers, Cisco, Ring Line Corporation, NeuStar and Hubert Hsu and Associates and that line at the bottom is a local company who have supported the PCs in the terminal room.

I'd like to say thanks to all the speakers and the chairs of the APOPS, BoFs and SIGs, the stenocaptioner from the Australian Caption Centre, Lorraine, who we all know, and this time Rebekah this time as well, who has had a trial by fire trying to listen to about 55 different accents and versions of different languages.

Thanks to the APNIC EC and staff who have come to support this meeting and to our colleagues from the other RIRs.

Thanks to all of you for coming to this meeting and supporting this APNIC meeting. We look forward to seeing you at the next meeting, which will be in Bali. See you there and then.

APPLAUSE

PAUL WILSON: I must apologise sincerely to our other colleagues from the other RIRs, you will have your chance immediately after the break, we are looking forward to hearing from you with your reports. I think we have enough time this afternoon to conclude the meeting, more or less on time, so let's have a coffee break now and come back at 4 o'clock.

(End of session)