ARIN 53 Public Policy and Members Meeting, Day 3 Transcript - Wednesday, 17 April 2024

Opening and Announcements

Hollis Kara: So good to see everybody back today. Appreciate folks sticking through ‘til the end of the meeting. We have a few internal updates this morning before our break. When we come back, after the break, we will have our RPKI Deployathon.

But let’s get through some announcements first, because I’m getting ahead of myself. First of all, let’s thank our elected volunteers: Board of Trustees, Advisory Council, and Number Resource Organization Number Council for all the hard work they do. Thank you so much. We couldn’t do it without you.

Real quick, once again, sing along. For our virtual participants, chat is there for you to converse casually with your other remote attendees.

We have a virtual host in there to help you. If you’re having trouble finding anything, we’re happy to get you pointed in the right direction. When we come to portions of the session where there is question and answer or other discussion, please use Q&A to submit your comments and questions, leading with your name and affiliation.

If it’s taking you a minute to type things up, you can raise your hand so we know to wait for you. The Virtual Help Desk will be closing at 9:30. This is your last chance to log in and pop over there I tell Des what a cool job he did on the design if you don’t have any questions.

And for in person, once again you are welcome to join the Zoom if you’d like to talk to our remote participants in the chat. We just ask you make sure you’re disconnected from audio and muted when you do so.

And for everyone, we will be managing, moderating the queues from the stage to include our remote participants. So we will be jumping hither and yon. If we get some lines, that would be cool.

Remember to speak slowly and clearly for the benefit of the transcriptionists, particularly when you’re asking a question.

And again, make sure to lead with your name and affiliation and get close to the microphone.

All right. Now, if you haven’t found it yet, we do have our Meeting Materials page on the website. It’s right in the top drop-down for program information, I think is the label on that, and you can find all the presentations that have been given across the last few days there if you prefer to view them locally.

The live transcript is available, and we are recording and livestreaming.

I’d like to thank our sponsors, C&W Business for our network.

(Applause.)

Our Bronze Sponsor, IPv4.Global by Hilco Streambank.

(Applause.)

And, of course, we couldn’t do it without our webcast sponsor, Google.

(Applause.)

It almost goes without saying, standards of behavior do apply for the remainder of the meeting.

You’ve been doing a great job so far. Let’s keep it up and make sure that everybody feels safe and welcome here at ARIN 53.

Now, for those of you who are here in Barbados, you’re invited to stick around after the break at 10:30 today, right back here, Brad Gorman will be running an RPKI Deployathon.

If you want to learn a little more about how to get started and actually maybe walk through the steps of setting up your RPKI, this is going to be the place to be.

As you can see, we’ve got a few internal program reports or internal department reports this morning, and then we’ll be going to Open Microphone. So be thinking about any cool comments or feedback that you’d like to give us. This will be your last chance during this meeting. Though, there are loads of other ways to provide feedback at any other time.

And again, Deployathon at 10:30. And lunch will be available at noon outside the ballroom.

Communications Update

Hollis Kara: All right. Hey, it’s my turn. Cool. Let’s go.

Here’s a report on what’s going on in Communications. Now, you heard a bit yesterday about what’s going on with training. I kind of split that out because there’s some big work happening there, but Communications actually is kind of like three or four different little departments all at the same time, and we do it with this great little team. How? We don’t know; it just happens.

So Ashley and Bev and Melissa are here with us in Barbados. Christina, Des – and John is here too. What did I just do? All right. Anyway, Craig and Des and Christina are supporting us from home. It’s always a team effort, and we’re really happy to do it, to be able to provide these events for the community.

So what are some of our key deliverables this year? I’d like to talk a little bit also about the ARIN Consultation and Suggestion Process, what’s been happening on social media. Everybody loves some stats. And what are some of the internal collaborations and ARIN events that are coming up.

So, key deliverables. Annually, we always have a first quarter obligation to update our key messaging that gets used kind of across the organization and for any external presenters to kind of help them be up to date on all the talking points, things that are important to ARIN.

We also have a requirement to publish our annual report. We’ve been working very hard on a dedicated communication plan to prepare for email template retirement, and once we wrap those things up, and get back from this meeting, we’re going to start to dive into our site audit of the website and doing some updates there while we’re working towards our LMS launch later this year.

So for those of you who might have missed it, our annual report was published a couple of weeks ago. If you want to get an overview of all things 2023, I suggest you head over to the ARIN website and give it a look-through. There’s lots of good information there.

We are, as you’ve heard mentioned many, many times with much jubilation, approaching the retirement of email templates. The decision to move forward with that was made following a community consultation held late last year.

We announced the retirement in January. We’ve been engaged in an ongoing direct customer outreach campaign for those customer organizations, and I think there are less than 80 that have been to date really still using email templates a lot. We’re working with them directly to help move them off of that, because when we turn it off, it’s off. It’s not going to work. Don’t do it.

And to help them with that, we also hosted a webinar on Reg-RWS basics. That would be taking that into the API to help them get that set up. We did that back in February. That’s available as an on-demand webinar, if anybody needs to check it out, and we are continuing to keep the community at large apprised of our progress as we move toward this goal on June 3rd.

So there’s that. The other thing that Comms kind of shepherds for the organization is our Consultation and Suggestion Process.

Now, 2023 was a busy year. We had four big consultations that were very impactful: Email template retirement, some improvements to our Internet Routing Registry, the ASN Fee Harmonization, which was completed at the beginning of this year, and then another consultation on expansions to our multi-factor authentication options for ARIN Online.

Lots of things going on, lots of good feedback from the community, it really does help direct how we move ahead. It’s really important to engage with those.

Now, the suggestion process is the mechanism – consultations is us asking you what you think of an idea. Suggestions is you telling us your ideas. And we had a lot of them.

Of the suggestions we received, seven were accepted for future prioritization, and we run a backlog or we run a log of all the suggestions we receive over time. If you scroll down, it’s quite long.

We successfully closed out 24 last year, which was a nice thing to see. But of the seven that were accepted for future prioritization – because it didn’t fit on the slide and I thought you might find it interesting – four were related to improvements to our APIs. One was another idea with multi-factor.

One was related to fraud reporting, and another was for feature enhancements to RPKI.

So a little tip, we do sometimes get suggestions that are repeats of ones that are out there. If you’re thinking that there’s a suggestion that you’d like to make, I do suggest scanning the list. If you see something, you can contact us and let us know that you are really in support of something that’s sitting in the backlog.

But a lot of times what will happen, we’ll get one that’s a duplicate, and we’ll have to come back to you and say, “yes, we know, we really want to do it, it’s on our list,” and that’s kind of where it stands. So reach out if there are things in the backlog that you really think we should be focusing on.

Now, we’re off to a roaring start this year. We completed our first full consultation on RPKI/BGP intelligence that helped to frame out our path forward. Brad went over that quite a bit in his report yesterday. We thank everybody who participated in that.

And right now there is a consultation open on approaches for adjusting ARIN’s Registration Services Plan Fee Schedule going forward. It’s been a little quiet. You’ve got a couple more weeks before it closes.

If you have feelings, thoughts in favor or against this approach, this is the time to get those submitted. You can do that by subscribing to the consultation list. It’s really, really important that we get your feedback on these things. It’s why we ask.

Suggestions. We’ve had quite a few roll in already this year. We had one with multi-factor authentication for API keys, which is definitely something that will be prioritized in the future.

We’ve had three for RPKI service improvements which actually line up with things that are already on our roadmap and in our plans, and another for IRR service improvements, which I think falls into the same category.

Now, we also conducted a full audit of that backlog, which, if you notice, is rather long and we do our best to keep it up to date. We did find four that were subject for closure that we went and got closed because that work had previously been completed.

So that’s that. Now, how are we doing on social media? Maybe this matters more to us than you, but it’s really important that we take advantage of the vehicles that are available to us to communicate with our customers and community.

Where we’re finding is right now our greatest engagement is on LinkedIn. We’re spending a lot of focus there. Our audience is continuing to grow at a healthy rate. We’re seeing good engagement.

And since we’ve started using more short video to get some of those same messages out, we’re seeing increases in views there. So, yeah, for those of you who hate video choking up your social media feed, sorry, we’re going to keep doing it.

Topics that folks seem to be most interested in are related to our events and industry meetings, our Fellowship Program, things on the topic of IPv6 and RPKI. You’ll be seeing us post on those because we know that’s what you have questions about.

We did 55 blogs in 2023. There is a recap blog. There’s a link in the presentation to that. A top 10, if you want a summary of what we covered last year and what was popular.

So far we’ve had 12 posts to date. Really suggest – it was late-breaking just before the meeting, it’s a little bit crowded right now with meeting-related reports, but we had a great update on ARIN’s RPKI and progress last year and what we have planned ahead. I suggest folks read it if they haven’t had a chance.

So everything’s better when we stick together. Comms is really kind of the glue between departments. I know, I’m me. Get used to it. We do spend a lot of time in internal collaboration to understand and identify the needs and challenges of the community and the organization in getting messages out and working to develop plans and strategies to get that information out to you.

And that affects both our work with our Registration Services Team, our engineering and technical service departments and all the way down the line. So really working to collaborate to better define those things, putting together those strategies, tracking them and then using that feedback to create an environment of continuous improvement.

So when you have opportunities to give us feedback, we’re seriously quite honest. We want to know what you think, how things are hitting, what we can do better, because we want to make it better for everyone.

We have a pretty full schedule this year of outreach events, which Amanda will talk about, but we also have our ARIN-hosted events, obviously ARIN 53 and ARIN 54 being the pillars of that.

But we also have a series of On the Road events this year. We had one in Honolulu in January. We’ve got two more coming up in just a couple weeks in Reno and Kansas City. And then in September we’ll be in Ottawa. If you’re close enough to get to us when we’re in any of those places, we’d love to see you there. Those are one-day sessions.

Finally, please do mark your calendar. Save the date. We’ll be back-to-back with NANOG in Toronto with the ARIN 54 meeting running on the 24th and 25th of October.

That’s all I’ve got. Anybody have any comments, questions? Yay, I get a question, or comment. Could be either.

Tina Morris: A little bit of a comment and a suggestion. Tina Morris, AWS. Love the suggestion list. Love that they’re published for everybody to see and review.

I actually shared that with somebody recently. They didn’t realize it existed. It would be great, rather than having to reach out to staff, which sometimes can be intimidating for somebody that doesn’t know you guys as well as we all do, or finding a path to your staff, it would be great to have a plus one and maybe a comment on each one that people can just – so staff can know that this is a really high priority for our organization.

Hollis Kara: That’s a super comment.

That’s actually something we’re looking into right now. Because of where and how that is published on our website, we don’t have the functionality to do that, but we are looking at ways we can maybe update what’s behind and underneath that to enable that kind of interaction; but, yes, we would love to have a plus one, thumbs up.

Tina Morris: Just to help you understand the community’s support for something and/or need.

Hollis Kara: Absolutely. Thank you, Tina, I appreciate that.

Over here.

Lee Howard: Lee Howard, IPv4.Global by Hilco Streambank. Thank you, Hollis. Good morning. How are you doing on simplifying the jargon used throughout?

Hollis Kara: We continue to work on it. It is very difficult. So here’s the hair we have to split, Lee, I’m going to be honest.

There is a lot of very technically dense language in this industry, and for ease of discussion, a lot of things get turned into acronyms, and that is a challenge for those who are maybe newer to it.

So we try to make sure we are following best practices of, first reference spelling everything out before we transition to an acronym, things like that. But if we stop using acronyms entirely for everything, if you think the content is wordy now – so it’s trying to figure out the best way forward with that, but, yes, it is always a continuous objective to find ways to simplify our language and make the content more accessible to everyone.

Lee Howard: Clearly you can’t redefine RPKI. That’s a term of art. That’s industry jargon. You can’t rewrite that. NRPM does not need to be a word.

Hollis Kara: You know what unpopular opinion, maybe, in this room. But I do agree with you. We’re working on it.

Anything else? One online.

Beverly Hicks: I have a hand up that somebody might be typing. So we’re going to give them a second, if you want to do another dance.

The hand is still up, but I don’t have anything in Q&A yet. I’m giving a second. We can catch them later.

Hollis Kara: We’ll take it offline. I’ll be happy to take any comments offline from online. Yeah, that’s what I mean.

All right. That’s enough for me for this morning. I’d like to invite up Brian Kirk, our Chief Financial Officer, to give the Financial Services Report.

Financial Services Report

Brian Kirk: Thank you, Hollis, and good morning. As Hollis said, my name is Brian Kirk. And I am Chief Financial Officer here at ARIN.

I’m here this morning to have a short talk with you about FSD, or the Financial Services Department, at the organization. There are just a couple of items on the agenda this morning.

First I want to introduce the FSD team. And then I will discuss some of the FSD activities that we perform for the organization.

The first thing I want to do is introduce the team. FSD is one of those teams behind the scenes here at ARIN, and the challenge that I have introducing them is that, as a whole, the team tends to want to be anonymous. I know that’s kind of surprising for accountants, but that’s the truth.

(Laughter.)

Given that challenge, when preparing for today’s discussion, we decided not to use pictures. We also decided not to use Avatars like Communications did. What we decided to do was use pictures of our pets.

(Applause.)

So I’m going to introduce the team starting on the top left and go clockwise.

First we have Tammy Rowe, Accounts Receivables Manager, and she is represented by Tink. Next, we have Cathleen Mohn, Account Services Representative, and she is being introduced with Bella and Copper. And Cathleen is actually here. She helps assist at the Registration Desk. We thank her for coming and joining us.

Next we have Tanya Gomez. Senior Billing and Service Agreement Administrator. She’s represented by Chapo and Coco. We have Melissa Scully. She’s Senior Accountant, represented by Jayce. We have Amaris Wang, Senior Collection Specialist, introduced with George.

Next is Amy Sanchez, Senior Payment Processor and Customer Service Representative, introduced with Bobo. And then you have Nala. She’s my Cocker Spaniel. And finally we have Tazzy representing Nancy Carter, the Board member and Treasurer and the leader of “Fun-ance.”

So there’s actually one more team member I need to introduce, and that is Ray Pineres. And Ray is being represented here by Stella. And I’m sure Stella is a nice, sweet cat.

(Laughter.)

It just appears she’s having a either bad day or at least a bad moment.

Now, on occasion I think you’ve heard that sometimes pets look like their owners. But I’m not saying that here.

(Laughter.)

Because Erin in HR is looking at me. But this picture does kind of remind me of Ray at times, especially when expense reports are not submitted on time.

(Laughter.)

Or if your expense report does not have the proper receipts. So, please, for the benefit of all of us in FSD, we ask that you complete your expense reports on time with proper documentation.

So like other departments in ARIN, FSD has many areas and functions to manage. The items on this slide are not a complete list of those functions, but it does give you an idea of what we do every day, and it is certainly enough to keep us busy.

One of the things that the accounts receivable team does is respond daily to customers’ requests, whether those requests are by phone or email.

This slide shares some statistics regarding the phone calls coming into FSD. The chart on the left shows the number of calls coming in each quarter going back to 2020.

Quarterly volumes range from a low of just under 600 to a high of almost 900. Phone calls are not the only way that they answer customer requests. There are many email requests coming in every day.

Unfortunately, we don’t really have a good way of tracking those volumes. It’s important to note that answering the phone or responding to email questions is not the only job that the accounts receivable team does.

They perform these activities while performing their normal day-to-day jobs. And one of those, of course, is billing the customers and our members.

This slide shares the statistics of billing activity for 2023. The chart shows monthly billing in terms of the number of invoices and the amount billed.

The month-to-month activity is usually fairly consistent, but there was something a little unusual in September and October of this year and that was in order to enable the changes necessary to support the billing and the harmonization of AS number customers with the Registration Services Plan fee schedule, we had to bill, in September, those customers who normally would have been billed in October.

For the 2023 calendar year, FSD prepared almost 32,500 invoices for a total of $28,700,000.

Unsurprisingly, or not surprisingly, some customers don’t pay. Here are the statistics regarding that for 2023. FSD prepared almost 2200 credit memos last year, to write off 577 thousand dollars that customers decided not to pay.

The number of credit memos represents 7 percent of total invoices, and the amount written off is 2 percent of total billings.

You can also see here on the slide that many of our credit memos are prepared for Org Create and Org Recovery transactions.

We have found that many customers think they want to create an Org ID or think they want to recover an Org ID but rethink that position after we bill them, keeping in mind that the cost of these is $50 and $100, respectively.

So because of that, almost 1,200, or 55 percent, of our credit memos were prepared for these two transactions.

Fortunately, most customers do pay ARIN. During 2023, ARIN received 27.3 million dollars in customer payments. Monthly payments range from a low of approximately $1.5 million to a high of 2,750,000 dollars. And in 2023, payments were made in a consistent manner with previous years. 43 percent of invoices were paid by credit card. 29 percent were paid by ACH or wire. And 28 percent were paid by check.

I certainly want to thank our members and customers that do pay their invoices and pay their invoices on time. It is very much appreciated.

So let’s shift from funding ARIN to spending. This slide compares annual non-payroll disbursement transactions since 2020.

In 2023, we did see an increase in disbursements of 118 or 9.5 percent. And this increase is actually driven by an increase in expense reports, which again explains Stella.

(Laughter.)

The number of volunteer and staff expense reports increased from 355 in 2022 to 456 in 2023.

Before going to my last slide, I want to stop and talk about something Nancy mentioned in her presentation. Nancy informed you that the 2023 audit is complete and the resulting opinion from the auditor was very favorable.

I cannot over-exaggerate the importance of the work that the FSD team does every day and the completion of accounting transactions is the key driver of achieving favorable audit results.

I continue to be grateful for the quality of the work the FSD team does and thank them for their efforts.

Here, onto my last slide, these are just a few notable items that FSD has also worked on in 2023. There was work implementing the new invoices related to the transfer recipient fee, and of course the ASN number harmonization.

FSD continues to work with CXS to plan for future automation and enhancement to transaction processing.

FSD has selected a tool to assist in the preparation of monthly financial statements. We implemented a line of credit to improve treasury management. This led to a material improvement in interest earnings during the year.

We also spent a good time – and still are spending time – working on a major upgrade to the accounting financial system.

And finally, I just want to take a moment and thank the different engineering teams. They do spend a good portion of their time supporting FSD and the FSD systems.

And that is it. Thank you.

Hollis Kara: All right. If anyone has any questions for Brian, feel free to approach the microphone.

(Applause.)

No questions. I think they’re scared of Ray, Stella and Ray. That was my insight.

All right. Moving right along. I’d like to invite up Erin Alligood, our Chief Human Resources Officer, to give an update on HR and Administration at ARIN.

Human Resources and Administration Update

Erin Alligood: Good morning, everyone.

It’s nice to see you. I was thinking the room would be a little more empty today, out on the beach.

As Hollis said, I’m Erin Alligood, ARIN’s Chief Human Resources Officer. It’s very nice to be joining all of you here in lovely Barbados. Today I’m going to be presenting some updates of our team over the last year.

So without further ado, so this is our team. This is our prom picture from the holiday party this past year. I thought it would be fun to share. We had a beautiful holiday party in December.

So this is our team, the HR and Administration team. First I’m going to introduce Natalie Harold. Natalie is our HR Generalist. Natalie has been with ARIN almost two years. And Natalie provides support by payroll and benefits administration, onboarding new employees, helping with recruiting, and then assisting with the various HR activities that we have planned throughout the year.

Next is Lori Gheitanchi. Lori is our Facilities and Travel Manager. Lori has been with ARIN for almost five years, and Lori manages our facility located in Virginia and secures travel for all the ARIN employees. And she also manages our relationship with our travel agency.

And then next we have Melissa Montgomery, who is our Volunteer Support Specialist. Melissa is here at the meeting working at the registration desk. Please be sure to stop by and say hello to her before you leave. Melissa provides outstanding travel and administrative support for our volunteers to include the Board of Trustees, the Advisory Council, the ASO AC, the NRO NC, and even booking travel for the ARIN Fellows.

And then acting as our Receptionist is Mindy Engstrom. Mindy has done a wonderful job supporting the needs of the front office for ARIN to include coordinating office events, receiving and distributing our mail and deliveries, and assisting with calendar items. In fact, she’s actually helping with a lunch today for the employees who are back at the office not in attendance at the ARIN meeting. Both Melissa and Mindy have been with ARIN for almost two years.

And there’s two individuals who don’t necessarily reside in the HR and Administration Department. And I wanted to make sure I recognized those two individuals because they do provide exceptional support for our volunteers. And they are Alyssa Arceneaux, our Executive Coordinator, and Thérèse Simcox, our Senior Executive Assistant.

So I really would like to take the time to thank that full team – Natalie, Lori, Melissa, Mindy, Alyssa, and Thérèse – for all the support they provide, both to the employees and to the volunteers. So let’s give them a round of applause.

(Applause.)

So how do we support ARIN? You can see that we handle a wide variety of responsibilities that are listed here. This gives you a very nice overview.

This includes all pieces of human resources as well as those other items such as office and facilities management and travel administration.

So moving into some of our highlights from last year. In 2023, we conducted a voluntary audit of our 401(k) plan, which better prepared us for our now-required audit of our 401(k) plan, which is actually in process right now for the 2023 plan year. And I’ll have more to report on that at a later meeting.

For some further details on our 401(k) plan, our participation rate in the plan is excellent at over 90 percent. And this is likely due to ARIN’s very generous employer match of up to 9 percent. In fact, I checked our site just yesterday and our participation rate is 96 percent. So pretty much all of our employees are participating in the plan, which is excellent. The trustees of the plan are Richard Jimmerson, ARIN’s Chief Operating Officer; Brian Kirk, ARIN’s Chief Financial Officer; and myself.

And as I mentioned in my report last year, we were in the beginning stages of securing a vendor to help us with our diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. Part of this work included the addition of the ombudsperson at the ARIN meetings.

And as introduced at the start of the meeting and mentioned by Hollis throughout the meeting, our current ombudsperson is Wade Hinton with Hinton & Company. So Wade, if you wouldn’t mind standing.

(Applause.)

Wade has been a great addition to the meetings. And because the ombudsperson and diversity, equity, and inclusion are very closely aligned, Hinton & Company was selected to help us with our diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. And this project is currently underway, and I’ll have more to report on that at a future meeting.

Our team also conducted mandatory harassment prevention training as well as diversity, equity, and inclusion training for all employees and volunteers in 2023.

Moving into some employee statistics. We reached a very big milestone at ARIN just this year, just last month. We are at our 100-employee mark. In fact, we’re at 101 employees currently.

You can see in this helpful slide that, this graphic, that we have a significant population of employees that have been with ARIN for quite a long time. A very tenured staff. This is noted in the 20-plus-year category, 15 to 19 years, 10 to 14 years and the 5-to-9-year category. I’m happy to report that our employee tenure continues to be strong. In fact, it has increased since my last report to almost nine years on average.

But at the same time, we are actively staffing and identifying new talent in the 0-to-4-year category to meet the needs of the community and the organization.

So what do we have planned for the rest of this year? Given that ARIN just reached our 100-employee mark, we will be preparing to file the required Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Component 1 filing, say that five times, which will be filed at some point next year.

Related, we will be continuing the work with Hinton & Company on our diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts to be sure that we maintain a desired place to work and provide a productive, inclusive, safe, and professional work environment for our employees.

And going forward, we will continue to cultivate a productive and safe meeting for our community by coordinating and securing the ombudsperson for all future meetings.

And as I shared earlier, we’re in the process of our 401(k) audit. And I’ll have again more to report on that in my next report next year.

We’re also in the process of evaluating a 401(k) vendor through a request for proposal. Our employees’ retirement accounts is a very important part of our overall benefits package, and we’re committed to reevaluating our 401(k) provider every four to five years.

In addition we have been and will continue to enhance our succession plan to ensure we have the proper continuity across the organization for our key roles.

And similar to other companies, ARIN will be evaluating our future workforce model based on what we learned during the pandemic and based on ARIN’s current building lease. I’ll have more to report on that item at a later meeting as well.

So these are just a few items and updates for our team. And I hope you enjoy the rest of your time in Barbados. Thank you so much.

(Applause.)

Hollis Kara: Anyone have questions or comments for Erin? OK, seeing none, thank you very much, Erin.

Alright. Next up, I’d like to invite up John Sweeting, our Chief Customer Officer, and he’s going to give the Chief Customer Officer Update. This will cover the work of our Customer Experience and Strategy – Strategy and Experience? Experience and Strategy, and our Registration Services Department.

Chief Customer Office Update

John Sweeting: Good morning, everyone. I’m John Sweeting, Chief Customer Officer, here again to take some of your valuable time and hopefully make it more valuable.

Where are those slides at? We don’t have the big slide over here anymore.

This is the Chief Customer Officer update it says, but it’s really the Customer Experience and Strategy Teams Update as well as the Registration Services Department.

Lisa and Joe Westover, which I’m sure many of you know, decided that they were going to stay back and make sure that the office continued to run the way that it needs to run. Lisa’s very important to the day-to-day operations, making sure all the customer requests and everything get taken care of.

So they volunteered to stay back and let me give their presentations. But I did want to set something that hasn’t been that publicized, but back in 2019, I was promoted to the Chief Customer Officer role. And we started to develop some organizations to start doing the product and service management role.

It was a strange thing because it was kind of done through the development cycle by the engineers and the developers and coders. And business rules, they were made up as we did the development. So sometimes they weren’t exactly kosher to what we ended up wanting to do later. In other words, the code was driving the business rules when the business rules should have been driving the code.

So we’re at that point today where we actually get all of that done. And those two teams work really well together. That’s Joe’s team and Deb’s team, who works from Mark. They work great together, and hopefully we’ll get a lot more coding done.

And then Lisa, I think everybody knows Lisa. She’s been around for a while. She is the director of the Registration Services team. Hollis has already given her report. She’s the Comms team. And Brad has already given his report. He’s the Senior Product Owner for the Technical Services team.

So Customer Experience and Strategy. So it’s weird. I was seeing these, the earlier presentations, and everybody’s got pictures and names and years of their departments, and I said, I don’t remember seeing that in these slides these guys gave me to present for them.

I went and looked and sure enough there was nothing there. So maybe they just want to stay fully anonymous. Although, with Registration Services, you know a lot of those employees.

But for Customer Experience and Strategy, we have Joe Westover, who has been there, he started the day before the pandemic hit us. So he’s been there for four years. And he’s the director.

And you have Marty McLaughlin, who is the manager for the program management; Reggie, who is a product manager. Eddie has moved in to take over the policy development. He’s our Senior Policy Analyst. And he’s here. I just don’t see him – there he is, way over there.

Jon Worley, who is pretty much a face of ARIN out on the road. He does most of the outreach events with me. Jason Byrne, who has been at ARIN for 24 years at least, maybe 25 now – 23? All right.

Hollis says 23. I’ll go with Hollis.

And Prabha, who is the customer service – she kind of takes care of all the customer issues that don’t fall in RSD or FSD or falls between them. She works all of that out.

I think I got everybody there. So the department focuses on the customer experience.

They’re designed to shape the customer service strategy and ensure the delivery of our services to the customers as you want them, as you need them, as you request them. And they align ARIN strategies with customer needs.

Registration Services Department. That’s Lisa, Lisa Liedel is the director, with 17 years. Mike Pappano is the Registration Service Analyst III. He’s been there for 18 years. Then we have a big drop-off. Reese is the manager of RSD. He’s been there three years. And the rest of the analysts there, Emily and Henry have been there two and a half years. Jenae and Allison have been there two years. Jamcy and Marco have been there a year and a half. And Shea and Tiara have been there one year.

They do a magnificent job for people that have only been doing this type of work for less than three years, and on average less than two years.

And there always used to be a saying that, hey, it takes two to three years to get up to speed to be able to a really good analyst. These guys have knocked it out of the park. They’re great analysts today. They handle all your requests and they get them done well.

I need to also mention Misuk, who until recently was a manager of the transfer team. She was moved out and she reports directly to me. And she takes care of – she was promoted into Principal Analyst and reports directly to me to take care of some special projects we have going on with some lingering LRSA tickets from last year, special requests that get done for trying to consolidate accounts and things like that.

So we saw a need to have somebody in that role, and Misuk was the one that was decided, hey, there couldn’t be anybody better than Misuk to actually handle these customers and talk with them and walk them through everything that needs to be done to accomplish what they need done with their accounts.

Okay. So now we’ll get back to the presentation. I felt I had to cover that because everybody else did. And really we should be celebrating our employees.

Anyway, so 2023 accomplishments. This is CSX. They supported and finalized fee harmonization. Actually Joe and his team have been really significant in the development and the implementation of the harmonization program that we’ve gone through with fees, membership, and everything else that we’ve gone through to level the playing field for all of our members and customers.

Let’s see. What else? Extensive community outreach. We did, I believe, a little bit over 40 outreach engagements last year. I don’t have numbers. I’ve asked the team to start keeping numbers on how many actual people we actually come in contact with. And of that, how many of them actually come in there.

I can tell you, there’s a lot that have joined ARIN. We’ve gotten tickets done that they’ve been trying to get completed for 20 years and haven’t been able to do it. They find us out on the road and they come up with their IDs and everything else to prove who they are. And we get them accomplished and we get them closed out.

Also, a recent thing was with the Advisory Council, they released a revised Policy Development Process. That was Eddie. Eddie is kind of new in this process, too. He was in RSD for, I want to say a long time – 12 years. Alright.

And because of that and how great he was in RSD, when Sean left, who was our prior Senior Policy Analyst, Eddie was selected to take that role. And we were so glad that he accepted it and did it because he’s doing an awesome job.

Expiration of the legacy fee cap. I’m not going to dwell too much on that. The basis is that there is no longer any fee cap offered to any legacy resources that are requested to be put under an agreement. If you want to go under an agreement now and you don’t have a ticket dated in 2023, you’re going to pay the full fee.

Areas of focus for 2023, there’s a whole laundry list there. Election support is really important. We have a certification program that’s going along with Hollis’s training program. So a lot of that training will end up allowing people to get certified, certified as an ARIN Online user and knowing how to work with ARIN. It could be helpful on a résumé, who knows.

Business process excellence and continual improvement in service delivery. We’re still working through all that. But like I said, they’re working really well together. The teams, it’s kind of like, well, I used to do that, but now you’re doing that, so how does this all fit together? But they’re working through the issues and it’s really shaping up.

And then we have our Fellowship community. I’m not going to talk about that because Amanda is going to be up here in a minute and I don’t want to take any of your thunder.

Real quick, Qualified Facilitator Program. This was a program that was requested by the community and some of the facilitators. Mostly the community’s feedback was why we acted.

The community would come and say, “How can I find a facilitator?” We’d say, “Well, you can look at the STLS.” And they’d look and there’s 30 people there, and some are companies, some are just people. “Are they reputable? Will they do a good job?” “We have no idea. They gave us a thousand dollars and said put me on the list and we put them on the list.”

We heard from the community feedback. That wasn’t what they wanted. They wanted a list of facilitators that had been vetted and that they knew at least they had a good chance of getting great service from.

So we put together a program where these facilitators, when they apply, they’re vetted. They’re vetted very carefully by myself and our General Counsel, Michael Abejuela. There’s a lot of questions they have to answer.

They have to have a certain level of insurance. They have to have no complaints with the Better Business Bureau. They have to have good ratings with the business world. And then they have to go through an hour interview with myself and Michael.

So anyway, that was in response to the community. We have nine Qualified Facilitators versus the 30 that we used to have on the STLS. As far as ARIN is concerned, they’ve all been vetted. They’re all reliable. They’re all experienced and they have done a lot of good for the community as far as transfers moving along.

There’s a quick list of the current ARIN Qualified Facilitators.

And now on to business processes, updates to internal processes. This is the work I’ve been talking about that they’ve been working back and forth with the development team, focusing on design, development, implementation, quality, compliance, and optimization.

Data accuracy. So we’re a registry. What’s really important about a registry? Of course, our data needs to be accurate.

We’re doing a large-scale analysis of our historic records, legacy records, REC legacy resource records, to verify accuracy, similar to what APNIC went through – yeah, similar to what APNIC went through with their legacy historic records, as they call them.

We’re going to start analyzing all of the legacy resources that are still out there after we get done with this whole LRSA tickets and getting everybody under an agreement that should be under an agreement. Then we can look at the resources that aren’t under an agreement, we’ll break it down, if they’re legacy resources and, let’s see, they’ve never had anybody register a user account with ARIN, and nobody’s ever touched that record in 27 years, and maybe they’ve never been routed, those will be the first ones we start going and looking at and trying to reach out and find somebody that may be considered a legal successor.

If we don’t find that, we will then probably pull those records or maybe we’ll probably actually look for some guidance from policy from the community and the AC on what to do with these resources that we find and we declare abandoned.

We’ll probably need policy around that. So, AC, get ready for a Policy Experience Report coming soon on that. And let’s see, all right, I think I covered all that.

Fraud reporting. Fraud is a real thing. We kind of, we’re trying to get away from the fraud part of it, we’re calling it abuse, because it’s really only fraud if it’s been tried in court and been convicted and said, “Hey, you committed fraud.” So we’re looking into abuses.

We have a report that, anybody can report abuse to ARIN. It’s on our website. A lot of the abuse today, of course, is around people trying to come in and claim legacy resources usually that are not, they’re not the legal successor for, but they try to create the illusion that they are.

We keep our legal team very busy with this, and I stay very busy with it as well.

RSD Team Updates. As you can see, big numbers. They do a great job and they handle a lot of requests. They do have a chat. The chat has been – five years now? I think five years because it was before the pandemic. We’ve had chat for five years.

We started it out as a beta doing it from 10 to 4 every day. It’s kind of stayed there as a 10 to 4 because we find that chat more than the phone takes people out of context of what they were doing.

They can answer calls easier and get back to what they were doing. If they get into a chat, it gets involved sometimes. A lot of times their chats turn into calls. We give calls back to the customers because it’s just too complicated sometimes to run them through the whole, the lead a POC, unlink a POC, add a user, link the user to the POC, link that POC back to the Org. So a lot of times it turns into a call.

You can see the numbers are – it’s quite a bit of work for the small team that I introduced.

Coverage has increased by almost 18 percent since 2015 for RSAs. We were hoping to have some further news on this at this meeting, but it’s probably going to be a little while longer before. But we’re hoping to get even higher percentage of this under coverage soon.

This is just looking at the number of /24s. That would change as well. But it’s not bad because we were – I believe in 2016 when I started at ARIN it was under 50 percent. It was around 48 percent under agreement and 52 percent not under agreement. So we’re up to 71 percent. When we cracked 70 percent, that made everybody feel really good. A lot of work went into that.

IPv4, our reserve pools, of course, 4.4 for the micro-allocations and IXs, and we’re getting close. We’re about halfway through that one. The 4.10 space for facilitate IPv6 deployment, we still have quite a bit. We have a long ways to go in that. So there’s a lot of /24s there for the deployment of IPv6.

There is some talk – some people have suggested that possibly we look at linking the 4.10 and the Wait List and the 4.4 space and put it all into one bucket and things, but that’s policy. So if you have ideas on that, see your local AC rep or submit a policy yourself.

Customer IPv6 profile. IPv4-only is still more than half of our customers, but we’re up to 45 percent that have IPv6 and IPv4 or IPv6 only.

A lot of the IPv6-only, they’re people that have their IPv4 reassigned or reallocated from their upstreams, but they wanted to come get their own IPv6.

ARIN IPv6 delegations and /32 equivalents. We had a big spike in 2023 that was caused mostly by one customer that is planning a huge IPv6 deployment over the next five years.

Transfers by year and /24s transferred. It looks like we had a lot of transfers in 2018 and other than that it’s pretty steady. I don’t see much there. I’ll leave it up for a second for people to look at.

And those are in-region. Those aren’t the inter.

And here’s the inter. You can see it’s gotten quite popular, the inter-RIR transfers. I see Amanda is getting ready to come up, so I’ll move it right along.

8.4 transfers out of the ARIN region. You see a lot of the activity is – most of the activity is between ARIN and RIPE. Then APNIC is in there kind of in the middle. And then LACNIC, LACNIC does some but not many. And AFRINIC does not have an inter-RIR transfer policy.

All right. That’s why Amanda was stalking up here. Any questions, comments, anything?

Hollis Kara: We do have one question, virtual attendee.

Beverly Hicks: David Farmer, University of Minnesota. John, you mentioned the LRSA ticket queue from last year. How are things going on draining that queue? Can you provide an estimate on the number of tickets remaining in the queue?

John Sweeting: What was the first part of the question?

Hollis Kara: The unprocessed LRSA request from last year, how many tickets do we have left?

John Sweeting: So there’s about – I would say there’s about 350 that are still waiting to be processed. And some of those are big projects.

Thanks for the question, David. It’s always nice to hear David is still there and active in the community.

Beverly Hicks: He says thank you.

Tina Morris: Hi, Tina Morris, AWS. The improved facilitator requirements, thank you for doing that.

As somebody that deals with the transfer market quite a bit, the less-trained brokers have been a little bit of a problem, and this helps us have a safe place to point people.

One thing I just wanted to add to your presentation, just for the knowledge of the people in this room and listening, is there is a way to give input if you were to have an experience that you wanted to share with ARIN in how they rate these facilitators.

I believe there’s an email address on the webpage for feedback that you can provide. So I would encourage just to share that information if anybody were to have an experience they wanted to share, positive or negative.

John Sweeting: Great point, Tina, and in the future I’ll make sure we put maybe a screenshot of where that is found. But it’s found on the Qualified Facilitators page, where they are. There’s a big thing there that says you can make that report of anything – if you think you’ve been done wrong or you know of a facilitator that’s maybe putting out bad information or anything, you can report it. We’ll get it to our legal team. And me, John, and Michael will then determine what actions we’re going to take.

Can go all the way up – they know they can be suspended for certain actions. That’s part of the program. Thank you for pointing that out.

Hollis Kara: Not seeing any further questions. Thanks, John.

(Applause.)

Last but certainly not least, I’d like to invite up Amanda Gauldin, our Project Manager, to talk about our outreach programs.

(Applause.)

Outreach Programs Update

Amanda Gauldin: Hi, everyone. Things are winding down. Thanks for hanging in here with me.

Thanks for being a part of our meeting these past couple of days. It’s been great for those of you here in person in Barbados and those of us joining online as well.

My name is Amanda Gauldin. I’m a Project Manager at ARIN, and very glad to have the opportunity today to share a little bit about various community endeavors going on at ARIN since I spoke last, in October at ARIN 52.

To start off, I’ll share a little bit about the Fellowship Program. We’re on day three now so hopefully you’ve met all the Fellows. You’ve heard about the Fellowship Program, but I will hopefully provide a little bit more information and context on what it’s all about.

So the Fellowship Program is an opportunity for individuals to learn more about the work of ARIN. And for 15 years now, more than 200 individuals from the ARIN region have been a part of the program.

So to be a part of it starts with an application process. There’s a volunteer selection committee that reviews the applications and discusses them as a group, then makes selections based on the quality of the application and how the applicant can convey their interest in being a part of the ARIN community and their involvement and interest in Internet governance or Internet number resource policy.

Then selected applicants have multiple virtual sessions to attend, obviously the ARIN 53 meeting here in person or virtually. And then they also receive mentorship from an ARIN Advisory Council member, which helps with the intense learning curve that comes when talking about topics like we’ve been talking about this week related to Internet number resource policy.

We have a very large group of Fellows for ARIN 53. Hopefully you’ve had a chance to meet with them and chat with them. They’re also joining us virtually. So 15 total represented from – eight from the United States, four from Canada, and three from Caribbean islands in our region.

And we’ve been in session since the middle of March and having a great time getting to know each other and learn together.

And the program would not be as successful without the contributions from our Mentors pictured here, our members of the ARIN AC that have volunteered to join us and guide the Fellows through discussions, answer questions, and provide general support for the program as they each have overseen a group of Fellows. So thank you very much to Doug, Gerry, and Brian.

(Applause.)

In addition to the Mentors, we’re very fortunate to have a large amount of people joining us and contributing through either presentation content or just joining the discussions. So thank you to Kat Hunter and Matthew Wilder, ARIN AC Chair and Vice Chair. They’ve been so supportive of the program ever since I’ve been a part of it for a couple of years now.

And we had the pleasure of Elizabeth and Kaitlyn, new ARIN AC members joining us this go-around for support and getting to know our Fellows.

And then also Kevin Blumberg, member of the NRO Number Council, and Eddie Diego, our ARIN Policy Analyst, join us and give presentations.

And it’s really great for the Fellows to get to know and hear from all of these ARIN community members before the ARIN 53 meeting even started.

So you’ve heard me say that we’ve been meeting since the middle of March. So what did we talk about? Fellows first received two prerecorded sessions, providing a general overview of ARIN as an organization, then a broad overview of Internet number resources, such as AS numbers, IPv4, IPv6, and routing security. Then we had a general get-to-know-you welcome session, because it was such a big group.

And then we had two in-depth sessions covering the ARIN Policy Development Process, the importance of these ARIN meetings, what is the Public Policy Mailing List, why is it important, what ARIN policies to expect here at the meeting. And then just dipped our toe into the complex world of global Internet policy.

And after these content-heavy sessions, Fellows and Mentors met in their small groups for additional discussion and question time.

We were at the ARIN 53 meeting orientation. And then we’re here either in person or online. And then we still have one more session to go next week to wrap it all up.

So if all of that didn’t scare you and you think it maybe sounds pretty cool, stay tuned for more information on the ARIN 54 Fellowship Program. That application site will open up in July for the meeting in Toronto this fall. Similar timeline as what we had here with virtual sessions leading up to the Public Policy Meeting.

And the ARIN website is the best place to find out all the information about it. You can stay tuned to the ARIN Announce Mailing List. That will go out when the application is live. Also ARIN social media, great places to know and follow what’s going on.

And if you know of any individuals maybe in your workplace or community that you feel like it might be a great fit for, then please definitely share that information with them.

So moving on, I’m very pleased to have the time to talk about the ARIN Community Grant Program. Launched in 2019, this provides financial support to initiatives that improve the overall Internet industry and user environment.

Overall, we’ve funded 21 projects that have provided valuable contributions to the ARIN community, including research conducted, resources made available, or educational platforms created.

It was great to hear yesterday from the three 2023 Grant Program recipients, with presentations from Internet2, FullCtl, and Network Time Foundation.

So I encourage you, if you missed those, to go back and rewatch those sessions. They have some great projects that they’re working on.

These three projects were selected by the volunteer Grant Selection Committee after all eligible applications were reviewed. They’ve been working on these projects since fall of last year. And we anticipate the completion fall of this year. And so by October or so you should be able to view their final reports written up and posted as a blog post. So I encourage you to check that out.

And if you’re feeling inspired, especially after those videos yesterday, to request funds for a project you’re working on, the good news is the application portal opens on Monday, April 22, and will close on June 7. So watch your ARIN-announce emails on Monday for some words on that and a link. It will be posted on ARIN’s social media pages as well. Links on the ARIN website.

On the ARIN website, you can already get a preview of the questions you’ll see on that application. Important things to note are the categories that your project must fit into, which are Internet technical improvements, registry processes and technology improvements, informational outreach or research, and then there’s examples of each of those categories noted on the website.

We only accept grant applications from organizations working on projects that are noncommercial in nature, so meaning they serve the public or achieve a public good and not for commercial projects that have the primary goal of generating profits or financial gain.

And lastly, while the outcomes of a project may be global in scope, there must be a specific benefit within the ARIN region.

I wish I had more time to remind you of the 21 projects that we have funded, but I would encourage you to visit the ARIN Blog under the Grant Program category. There you can browse those final reports and updates from all of these projects. You may find some great resources and tools that would benefit you and at the same time give you an idea of the projects that we funded over the years if you are considering submitting an application.

So just one more thing. I’ll take you on a little tour of the ARIN region and what’s been happening or what will happen during Q1 and Q2 of this year, where we’ve been reaching out to join you and meet you, the ARIN community, where you live.

You can see here we’ve been coast to coast across the United States from Honolulu, we’ll be making our way to Ottawa, obviously being down here in Barbados right now. Like I said, this is roughly through June or July of this year, and so there’s much more to come in Q3 and Q4 as well.

So what are we doing as we trek all over the ARIN region? We are giving presentations to Internet-related conferences on topics such as IPv6, RPKI, and how to achieve network autonomy. We also provide an ARIN Customer Service Desk to those event attendees to answer their questions right there, right now, like John Sweeting was mentioning, on their ARIN Online accounts or their Internet resources or other routing security or transfer questions they may have.

And if you would like to see us in your city or attend a conference that you are engaged with, if you feel like your area could benefit from an ARIN outreach event, we’d love to know. We’ve also had great success coordinating webinars that zero in on a specific topic with a specific group of people running for an hour or so. And we love to engage with new audiences or associations in the industry and would be happy to discuss a potential opportunity with you.

Thanks so much for your time and happy to answer any questions or get it to Open Mic.

Hollis Kara: Let’s see, anybody have any questions or comments for Amanda?

Rookayya Gulmahamed: Hi, Rookayya, Fellow. I wanted to ask, are there any upcoming initiatives or projects within ARIN that would benefit from Fellow participation or collaboration?

Amanda Gauldin: What was the question? Are there any other events that Fellows would benefit –

Rookayya Gulmahamed: Upcoming projects or initiatives that would benefit from Fellow participation?

Amanda Gauldin: Yes, there’s a lot. I wish I had them all outlined here. I’ll actually kick the can on that a little bit because that’s something we’ll be talking about in our last session together.

Rookayya Gulmahamed: Thank you.

Adair Thaxton: Adair Thaxton, Internet2, Fellow. This my first ARIN meeting, and I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. So I thought that the intros and the webinars and everything that you guys provided for us was really helpful in giving us an idea of what was going to happen, what we should expect to be doing, and how we should do it. So thank you.

Amanda Gauldin: Thank you.

Hollis Kara: Rayshorn, you made it to the microphone first.

Rayshorn Richardson: Rayshorn Richardson, Eknotec Services, ARIN 53 Fellow. I also just wanted to say thank you and express my gratitude for being a Fellow and being a part of this. I learned a lot about ARIN, and I’m looking forward to contributing where I can. Thank you.

Amanda Gauldin: Thanks so much.

Hollis Kara: Wonderful. Alison, go ahead.

Alison Wood: Alison Wood, state of Oregon.

I just wanted to let you know, Amanda, that I’ve been mingling about with the Fellows, and they are sure appreciative of all that you’ve done and all the hard work that you’ve put into this and that ARIN has done to give this opportunity to Fellows.

I love this program, and I love watching the Fellows throughout the years as they contribute back to ARIN.

(Applause.)

Amanda Gauldin: Thanks.

Hollis Kara: Thank you, Amanda.

Amanda Gauldin: And real quick, sorry, I was remiss in thanking Beverly Hicks and John Davis as well and really all of the Communications team, because I put a lot of names and faces up on the screen, but all of them as a division have been super helpful as well getting this off the ground and helping me out.

(Applause.)

Hollis Kara: Gerry.

Gerry George: Sorry for the late approach to the mic. AC Council and current Mentor. But I just wanted to repeat my comment from ARIN 52 that the Fellowship Program, great, the pre-sessions, good.

But I want to repeat my call to potentially increase at least the virtual fellowship primarily so that we can get more participation from the Caribbean region. Thanks.

Hollis Kara: Thank you very much.

Alright. That brings us to the end of our presentations for the morning. I’d like to invite Bill Sandiford and John Curran up to the stage to lead our final Open Microphone.

Open Microphone

John Curran: Good morning, everyone.

Microphones are open. If you have any questions for ARIN, anything that maybe you wanted to ask that hasn’t come up yet, now’s the time to approach the microphones and make your question.

Bill Sandiford: We’ll start on the right side.

Kat Hunter: Hi. Kat Hunter, ARIN AC and Comcast. We always complain that we don’t have enough participation. The participation at this meeting has been extremely helpful. The Fellows participating over the last couple of years has been extremely helpful.

So, I just wanted to thank everybody. It makes our job a lot easier when we’re trying to figure out the right thing to do.

John Curran: Good to know. Thank you.

(Applause.)

Bill Sandiford: Right side.

Peter Harrison: Peter Harrison, Board of Trustees. I just want to second what Amanda did with her presentation. Just lastly, I think it was just last week NASA decided that they’re going to try to find a way to have a time zone on the moon. And now ARIN has finally got TCP into the NTP protocol, which is long overdue and in keeping with the 21st century.

We are also – I’ve been a part of the Grant Committee for, I think, since its inception. It’s not a lot of work, but the impact, though not very flashy, it’s stealthy, but it makes a huge impact to the community in ways that we just take for granted.

If you are available and are willing to be a part of it, I strongly encourage you to be participating in it, and make sure that ARIN’s mission and vision are extended into this century as well. Thank you very much, everybody.

Bill Sandiford: Thanks Peter.

(Applause.)

Peter, I was worried there for a second because when you mentioned the NASA time zone on the moon, I thought you were suggesting an ARIN on the Road location.

(Laughter.)

All right, any comments online?

Hollis Kara: Not seeing anything.

Bill Sandiford: Last call at the microphones. Last call to get your online comments in. We’ll go to the left side of the microphones, to the man in the hat.

Louie Lee: Louie Lee, Google Fiber and Louie’s hat. Very public and sincere apology to my hat for not introducing the hat yesterday when I came up to the mic.

(Applause and laughter.)

Bill Sandiford: Okay. Wade did get a complaint to the ombudsman, from the hat.

(Laughter.)

All right, folks, seeing no others in the room – got one late, last minute coming in online.

Beverly Hicks: I actually don’t have a name. ARIN Fellow. I would like to know what programs are available to take ARIN to the grassroot efforts and how it is communicated aside from conferences?

John Curran: Could you repeat the question?

Bill Sandiford: Looking to know more.

Beverly Hicks: Happy to do so. Looking to know more about programs to take ARIN to the grassroots level and how that’s communicated aside from conferences like this?

Bill Sandiford: I think the ARIN On the Road program is, to start with, is a grassroots program where staff are trying to get out into the communities, particularly in markets where ARIN wouldn’t normally have a full-sized Public Policy Meeting like this.

John Curran: If you think about it, we have members throughout the region, but our meetings, our main meetings like this, are usually in major cities and only twice a year. The ARIN On the Road program lets us get out to many other cities.

We also do quite a bit at events that are happening all over the country. All over the US, Canada, and the Caribbean. We’ve been at more than 15, 16 conferences. So, it’s pretty easy to find us.

John Sweeting: John Sweeting, Chief Customer Officer with ARIN. Also, we will do webinars for large groups. We do it with the research and education community, Internet2, CANARIE, several others, FSPA. We go there for outreach. But we also have done a lot of webinars with these communities.

If you have a company, if you want to put, if you want us to get on an hour webinar, two-hour webinar, and go to the grassroots of ARIN and how we function, we’ll be very happy to put that together. We do have recordings of that as well, but it’s never as good as if you talk to us in person. But we will schedule that. And that all will come out of Hollis’ and Joe Westover’s teams.

Bill Sandiford: John, who would those people approach directly with regards to a webinar like that? Hollis?

Hollis Kara: I would say the easiest one would be to remember to be to send those into info@arin.net, both the CSX team and Comms monitor that inbox, and if you send in a request to find out about setting up an event or know of an event in your community that you think would benefit from ARIN’s participation we’re happy to take that back to the team and see if we can fit it on our calendar or find a way make it happen. That would be the easiest way to reach us.

John Sweeting: It strikes me I should task Hollis to come up with a nice page that has maybe its own little way for people to request on-demand webinars.

Hollis Kara: I’m adding it to my list. Thank you.

John Curran: We can do that.

Bill Sandiford: All right. Microphones are closed, with the exception of those in queue and the one online. We’ll start with the right side here.

Claire Craig: Good morning, my name is Claire Craig. I am from CaribNOG, and I just wanted to say thank you to ARIN for the support that you have always given to CaribNOG. Particularly this week, however, you hosted an opportunity for members of the Caribbean to engage with some of the members of the Board of Trustees to find out about, just, our concerns since you were here in the region.

I think this might be the first time that we have done something like this. We hope that there would be many more when you come back to the region, and we really appreciate that initiative. Thank you.

John Curran: Thanks, Claire.

Bill Sandiford: We’ll go to online and then take the last one from the room.

Beverly Hicks: Ron da Silva, Network Technologies Global. Thank you again for the great job including the online participants. Good for the community to be able participate, even when they’re not in person; it’s noticed.

Bill Sandiford: Thanks, Ron. Last but not least.

Doug Camin: Doug Camin, Coordinated Care Services and ARIN AC and ARIN mentor to the Fellows Program.

In response to the question that came in online about encouraging participation and other ways to do that. I’ve already done that. To them, if you have events or things where ARIN’s information would be helpful to get out, feel free to reach out to the teams that are here because they will send staff to come in to events and things like that.

We just structured an event with IT directors in New York state, for instance, that’s something that I’ve been involved with. So, if you have something that is specific, if you reach out and they can fit it in, it will definitely work. Great work to everybody.

Bill Sandiford: That’s a good point, Doug.

I can remember years gone by when I’d be at my own industry events not related to ARIN, but it was something that dovetailed in and reach out to the ARIN staff and they’d send some collateral, some marketing and even some swag and stuff like that to take.

John Curran: Happy to support. If you have an event, we’re happy to support it. Make sure there’s information you need and/or presentations.

Bill Sandiford: All right. I think that’s it. With that, we’ll close the Open Microphone. Thanks

John Curran: Thank you, everyone.

Hollis Kara: Thank you, John and Bill.

(Applause.)

Closing Announcements and Adjournment

Hollis Kara: All right. I know everyone is ready to head out of the room, but let’s go through a few closing messages, if you don’t mind bearing with me for just a few more moments.

I appreciate everyone taking the time to join us today. I’d like once again to thank our sponsors, C&W Business, IPv4.Global by Hilco Streambank, and Google. If I could have a round of applause for our sponsors.

(Applause.)

You should have an email in your inbox at this point or coming very, very soon – coming very, very soon. Ashley is giving me the no, it’s not there yet. It’s coming. Give it maybe an hour. It will be there.

When you get it, please, please, please do complete the meeting survey. Let us know what we did well, what we can do better, any other feedback. It really does shape how we proceed with future meetings, and it will give you a chance to win a really groovy set of headphones.

Please, if you’re here on site, do enjoy the break, but join us back in here again today at 10:30 if you’re interested in participating in the RPKI Deployathon with Brad.

Brad, wave. Brad, he’s ready. And then there will be lunch outside at noon.

For those who are Caribbean based, we will be having a Caribbean roundtable in this room that is open from 1 to 5:00 PM today. So please join us back here at 1. Anyone else is certainly welcome to sit in, but this will be a Caribbean-focused discussion. So, it may be informational and educational for others if you’re around and not snorkeling and looking at turtles.

Please do mark your calendars and save the date and join us in Toronto for ARIN 54 on the 24th and 25th of October.

That was a lot of fives and fours in there, man. And once again, thank you so much. We’ve been happy to have you with us. We look forward to seeing you at a future meeting.

We thank you for a very great time here at ARIN 53.

Please do have safe travels home for those of you traveling. We’ll see you next time.

(Applause.)

(Meeting concluded at 10:30 a.m.)