ARIN XXIII Members Meeting Draft Transcript - 29 April 2009 [Archived]

Note: This transcript may contain errors due to errors in transcription or in formatting it for posting. Therefore, the material is presented only to assist you, and is not an authoritative representation of discussion at the meeting.

Opening and Announcements

MR. CURRAN: We’re going to get settled and get started. I’d like to welcome everyone. This is our member meeting, a very important part where we discuss the operations of ARIN, how we run as an organization. So we have an agenda where we will go through and have announcements and updates from the ARIN departments. And then we’ll get to hear from the Advisory Council and we’ll get to hear from the financial report and also the Board of Trustees.

From yesterday we have a report from the ASO AC that we’ll put in here somewhere because it’s one thing we didn’t get to. So with that as the agenda, I’m going to start right in on the announcements.

Daily meeting survey. It’s time to select our winners. I have the list of people who completed the survey yesterday. If I can have a volunteer. I will take Owen. Come on up. Our system is very efficient.

I have 19 names. Choose a number one through 19.

MR. DELONG: Twelve.

MR. CURRAN: Twelve. Read me the name.

MR. DELONG: Mark Desterdick.

MR. CURRAN: Mark Desterdick, are you here? Mark? That’s true. Is he a remote participant? Because if you’re a remote participant – no, he was in person.

Okay. Give me another number.

MR. DELONG: Seventeen.

MR. CURRAN: Seventeen. Scott Beuker. Scott, you win. We’re going to send you a prize. Thank you very much.

Okay. Meeting surveys: You can’t win unless you enter. So fill out the survey. I’ll also note that the survey for the entire meeting is also available online. So if you can get a chance to review the whole meeting and how it went, some additional questions, please fill out your survey so we know how we’re going.

Consolation prize: If you don’t win anything, we’ll do a drawing on the 11th and you have a chance to win a Nintendo Wii, a great opportunity. ARIN Information Center is still open. When you have a chance at a break, go over and use the laptops there. Make use of the resources. The staff help desks are there.

The registration services, from 8:30 to 12:30, and we have billing by appointment. Feel free to drop an e-mail message if you want to swing by.

I remind everyone to be polite at the microphones. Please limit your comments to a short time. Try to put a three-minute limit on such. Make sure everyone has a chance to speak before you go up and speak again on a topic. And please make sure that you identify yourself clearly when you get to the microphones, both for the people here and remote participants.

I’d like to thank our sponsors, Time Warner Cable Business Class and Rackspace. Instrumental in making our meeting a success.
(Applause).

At the head table we have the Board of Trustees. All of them. Mr. Denton couldn’t be here. He had to fly out to make his next engagement. Afraid we couldn’t have him up here. We also have John Sweeting, our Chair of the Advisory Council. He’ll be giving a report in a little while.

So first up on our agenda is department reports. I’m going to have the registration services report be given by Leslie.

Registration Services

MS. NOBILE: Good morning. So I’m going to start by telling you who we are. We’ve got our three senior team members, Cathy, David and Jon. Cathy and Jon are both here, and then our resource analysts, Doreen, Sue, Mike, Lisa, and Giselle. And Doreen and Mike are both here working at the help desk diligently. Hopefully you’ve had a chance to see them. Very hardworking team, really tight and they do their job well.

Our ongoing efforts: We’ve been working quite a bit with engineering folks, particularly Erika on the requirements for ARIN Online web services, because many of the early phases have, of course, involved registration actions. So we spent a lot of time working on requirements on those. We’ve also been working on the business process reengineering, working with Erika and all those flow charts she showed you, to figure exactly how we do things presently. And eventually we’re going to talk about how we can do things better. So we’re spending a lot of time on that. We’re heavily involved in the officer attestation process, of course, in sending out the CEO letters, and we have recently sent out about 25,000 letters notifying POCs and admin and tech POCs about the new process, the officer attestation process that’s coming up on May 18th.

We’re also doing our WHOIS spring cleaning which I talked about yesterday, working still on Legacy RSA outreach. We finished our outreach efforts finally in January. We sent the last bits of letters to the Class C holders notifying them about the existence of the Legacy RSA and we’re seeing quite a good response to that.

Resource revocations: As billing stepped up their efforts to collect overdue accounts, they throw them over the fence and we do the dirty job of reclaiming the resources. So we’ve been reclaiming lots of resources, and I have some stats in here to show you. And then lame delegations. We’ve tried to step up our efforts to work on lame delegations per the policy. So I’m going to skip this because I talked about it and I think you were all in this room about the WHOIS cleanup project. So I’ll go right into statistics.

The Registration Services Help Desk: This is sort of our day-to-day job in addition to all the other stuff we do. But this is sort of the core business. I’m just talking in general about the total number of templates processed. I went back to 2008 and we get about close to 49,000 templates in total that we receive and process. 94.7 percent of those are auto-processed, and most of those are SWIPs, because we tried to – they’re pretty simple and we try to get them through. There’s so many that come in.

We get a lot of hostmaster mail. That’s mail we answer questions to, technical stuff, administrative stuff. It’s basically an on template e-mail. And we average about 5,700 hostmaster e-mails that we answer per month. In that, about 63 percent of it is spam, but it’s still spam we have to go through and hit delete, delete, delete. And so it’s still looked at to determine it’s spam. And phone calls, we’re getting about 1,100 phone calls per month on average.

So we’ll talk about the returned space. This is space that people voluntarily return to ARIN. And you can see we get it all kinds of sizes. And I spoke incorrectly yesterday because the largest block we have is a /10 and all the way up to /24s. We’re getting mostly /24s and /20s returned to us voluntarily. But, still, a lot of others as well. There’s /23s and /22s and /21s and the /19s. So it’s running the full range. So we’ve got right now 1.02 /8s that we’re holding onto. When we get space returned we put into a bucket where we hold it for a year so it clears any filters, if it’s been blacklisted or whatever before we start recycling it out. But we do recycle this space. One-seventh of the space that’s returned to us is legacy space. And that space we do not recycle, we hold onto. And so this went back just for four years, back as far as January 2005.

Okay. So revoked space. This is space we take back for – mainly for overdue, for non-payment of overdue fees. So during that same time period we got back a total of 81.6 /16s. And, again, the whole range of addresses. But in this case it’s mostly /20s. And that makes sense, because that space we’ve issued, that’s our typical allocation size, and people are defaulting on that. So we’re collecting a lot back that way. We also recover ASNs. People voluntarily return them, and that’s about 1,055 over the past five years. And then we revoked – particularly over this last year with the stepped up revocation efforts, we’ve revoked 3,300. And, again, those are recycled and reissued.

Lame delegation: So we’ve been working on lame delegations for about a year now. And the total delegations that have ever tested lame has been about a little over 32,000. The total delegations stripped after the 90 days of testing in the cycle has been 35,153. Right now there are 16,900 that are testing lame for 30 consecutive days. And out of that there’s a thousand that moved into the 60-day consecutive testing bin. And right now there’s 1,306 in the 90-day bin waiting to be stripped. So we’re actually making some headway. There’s not nearly as many lame delegations. We’ve stripped some. Some people clean them up. We notify them and they actually clean them up and they get out of the bin. So it’s having some effect.

Legacy RSA stats: We’ve had a total of 677 requests to find the legacy RSA. There’s been 274 signed to date. There are 48 that say not required. In other words, they were reassignments or they were people that weren’t the rights points of contact. They just weren’t the right people to sign the RSAs or authorized. 29 folks decided to add their existing – their legacy resources to their existing RSA. So they said: Oh, we don’t need a legacy, we’ll just put them under our current RSA. 326 pending; lots of work, lots of cleanup. Legacy space hasn’t been touched in quite some time, they haven’t updated all of their records, so we have to do all that and verify that they’re really the person they say they are. So we’re working on that right now.

And that’s all I have. Are there any questions?

MR. CURRAN: Leo, you’re up.

MR. VEGODA: Leo Vegoda, ICANN. Regarding the AS numbers you’re reclaiming, earlier in the week I think you mentioned a figure of 90 percent of the 32-bit AS numbers that you assigned get returned. Is the number you presented just a few slides back, does that include 32-bit AS numbers or is it only 16-bit AS numbers?

MS. NOBILE: It’s just the two-byte AS numbers that are in here. We didn’t count the four byte at all.

MR. DARTE: I think in an earlier slide when – I’m sorry, Bill Darte. I’m with the Advisory Council. In an earlier slide you presented the number of different side boundary returns and the aggregate number was 1.20 /8s.

MS. NOBILE: Right.

MR. DARTE: You don’t have a time line on any of these. Can you characterize what you think the slope of that is? Is that accelerating now because of the work that you’re doing? Do you expect that trend of returns, the same kind of number is going to go forward? Accelerate? Decelerate?

MS. NOBILE: It’s hard to tell, but I would say that many of our returns were done earlier. We’re not getting in as many right now.

MR. DARTE: So the trend is down.

MS. NOBILE: Probably slightly. Probably. Although, I really need to look at that.

MR. CURRAN: Scott.

MR. LEIBRAND: Scott Leibrand, Internap, ARIN AC. I have a question about the regular folks who signed a regular RSA. I was one of those 29. I don’t recall ARIN suggesting that I do it, if I remember right. I was like, why would I want a legacy, I already have an RSA. I knew the system well enough. Are you guys actively encouraging people to add them to the RSAs or is that something that you’re leaving up to the person who is receiving the note to suggest itself?

MS. NOBILE: That’s a good question. We’re pretty much leaving it up to people which way they want to go. We don’t want to push in one direction or the other. We are telling you I think generally if you have an RSA and we send you a note about the legacy RSA, I think we tell you that you have an option.

MR. LEIBRAND: I don’t remember for sure what you said. But I would try to make sure, because I think it’s better for a lot of organizations like ours and for the community especially if we can get it all bundled under the same contract.

MS. NOBILE: I’ll take that back. I appreciate it. Okay. Thank you very much.

Government Affairs and Public Policy Support

MR. CURRAN: Thank you, Leslie. Next, government affairs and public policy support presentation, and that will be given by Cathy Handley.

MS. HANDLEY: Thank you, John and good morning. This will go much better than the last time I did this which was in LA and I was sick and couldn’t talk. So you ought to be able to hear most of this one.

Since the last meeting, there has not been a lot of activities as far as meetings. There was an ICANN meeting November. We had an Internet Governance Forum, which is of interest and we’ll talk about later, and the ARIN Government Working Group was formed and we had our first meeting, and Bobby addressed that yesterday.

So because of limited time I’m going to scoot right past all of that. And the Internet Governance Forum was in Hyderabad, India. The themes were reaching the next billion, supporting cyber security and trust, and managing critical Internet resources. When they had these meetings there were roughly 1,200 people there. They held them in a convention center and they have various rooms where they’re carrying on dialogues of sorts. They’re not always specifically at these topics, but they try to be near the topic.

The main session, there are two panel discussions each day. The transition from IPv4 to IPv6 was moderated by Bernadette Lewis, who I think most of you know. And Adiel and Raul were both speakers at that. Hands down, not being prejudiced, it was pretty much the best panel discussion that they had. And they discussed Internet governance, which is still this kind of amorphous term that’s out there on a global, regional and national basis. And depending on who you talk to and where you are, everybody has their own definition for it.

Last week before I came here I was in Lisbon attending the World Telecommunication Policy Forum. That’s an ITU-sponsored activity, and it covered four topics. As you can see here, one of the most important ones for us was the convergence and under the guise of convergence is the making of Internet-related public policy. It was pretty monumental because for the first time RIRs actually attended. German Valdez and Sam Dickinson were there from APNIC, I was there from ARIN, and Roland Perry was there from RIPE. It was an interesting meeting in the fact that a lot of people, if you will, came out and you got a good idea where they stood. And these people would be member states who talked about the importance of the ITU getting involved in what we do. And there was a lot of support for that. And it’s growing.

The AGWG, I will skip over all of that. Going forward, what’s out on the horizon? ICANN: What is it going to mean to us? There’s a new CEO coming to ICANN. Not sure who it’s going to be or what their thoughts are going to be, how it’s going to run.

The Joint Project Agreement terminates September 30th, 2009. Many of you may have noticed that the Department of Commerce has issued a notice of inquiry. There are eight questions on that notice of inquiry that range from whether or not the four principals initially put forward in the white paper which created ICANN are still appropriate to how do you safeguard that ICANN does not get captured by, say, the ITU and enter into a government-run organization.

Most importantly, though, understand that the JPA is specific to ICANN. It does not include anything regarding the IANA function. That is a totally separate contract, and it is up September 30th, 2011. They are not connected. Anything that goes in on the JPA will only address ICANN.

Now a little activity from the government side other than the NOI. Both the United States Senate and Department of Commerce have been busy. This is a lot of writing and don’t bother reading it. But I’ve got the links come up a little later on in the presentation. This Senate bill was introduced about a month ago. And it’s rather interesting. And I would suggest, if anyone’s really interested, that you go ahead and read it. It’s very long. It’s very involved and brings Commerce and NIST into – NIST almost serves as a regulator or certifier if this bill goes anyplace. I don’t know that it will, because it’s not that far yet. But it’s something to look at. This is to establish the executive office of the National Cyber Security Advisor and this is currently in the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee. Not clear where it’s going to go yet.

These are the two URLs for both bills. Canada’s been busy, too. Oops. Did I go the wrong way? All right. Well, that’s – I apologize. The slide here, this is the link to get to the JPA NOI if you’re interested in it. One piece of advice: If anyone wants to respond to it, you’re certainly – that’s up to you. Do understand that this is a little different than most of the inquiries that are done. They’ve invoked ex parte rules which means you cannot talk to anybody at Commerce about this JPA without disclosing everything that you’re there to talk about. And I’m sure Steve can tell you lots more about what involves an ex parte rule.

MR. RYAN: The ex parte rule is a standard rule, an administrative procedure act proceeding. This is a formal rule-making of the department. And, therefore, when you go in, there will be a summary of your meeting. So if you go in and give two views that ICANN is a saintly organization that is ready to run the earth and that they no longer need the Department of Commerce as parens patriae, that will be written down, or if you go in and say they’re a bunch of incompetent boobs and need to be kept under the thumb of the government, which of course are two bipolar extremes, either of those will be written down.

So don’t be embarrassed if your views are therefore captured in the rule-making activity. This is a standard and appropriate, actually, activity given that there’s a public comment period on the public comments are obviously reviewable by everyone online. So this is an attempt to make sure that stinking lobbyists don’t go in and do something that they can get away with.

MS. HANDLEY: Thank you, Steve. Moving on to the CRTC, has issued a public notice regarding the review of Internet traffic management and practices of Internet service providers. This was shared with me by Paul Andersen, let me know about this going on, and greatly appreciate that.

So those of you who are interested, the hearing will begin July 6, 2009. The conference center in Gatineau, Quebec. Here is the URL for that piece.

Industry Canada in 1999 did a study on regulating content on the Internet. And it’s a technology perspective. They’ve updated it and posted it now. I’m sorry. These are not in order. I give up. There is a URL for it. The Industry Canada, the most important thing about it is it’s a technology report. It’s not a policy report. You’ll find the URL in the presentation when that gets posted and we’ll get it in better order. They’ve also – the CRTC has also started doing research through their new media project on broadcasting content, which has an effect on us. There we go. This is for the content report.

Now, the ITU: The International Telecommunications Union has also been rather active in looking at what we’re doing. They put out a survey to all governments in the world regarding an IPv6, IPv4 survey. It has not been sent to us. They’re not asking us for any information on it. And it’s – quite honestly, it’s very leading and it’s asking governments questions that they can’t ask, like the total number of absolute IPv4 addresses in your country. We’re working on that now to get them some of the information to help them respond. I’ve been talking to some of the governments. I did last week in Lisbon. And actually all of the RIRs are reaching out. I believe Raul spoke yesterday that LACNIC is putting out some answers and such. But one of the most important things about it is the questionnaire, it becomes very clear that they’re interested in what we’re doing. And the way the questions are asked, it proves to government they can’t answer them; that they really don’t know what we do. So the RIRs are working together to get the information out there and show the governments that we can get it to them and can help them with it.

Upcoming in 2010 is a plenipotentiary conference which is the big administrative rule-making conference for the ITU. That’s also where there’s going to be more – it’s a contribution-driven and it must be driven by government. We don’t have any say in rule-making there. And it’s another place that they’re looking to get support from various governments to do such things as IP allocation as they feel that they’re infinitely qualified because they allocate telephone number country codes. After that, we don’t know what’s going to happen. There are a lot of other things going. But we’ll have to wait and see. We have the ITF in November at Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt. We’re still working on getting that put together and what the agenda will look like there.

In conclusion, I cannot stress enough that as the free pool gets closer to depletion, we get more and more attention at what we do here. RS has said it a couple times during the week that there’s a lot of people paying attention to us. They’re subscribed to these lists, and unfortunately they don’t subscribe as “something.gov”; they subscribe for their Gmail, Hotmail, that sort of thing. So just because you don’t see a government sort of address, don’t think that they’re not there listening.

And on that, any questions?

MR. CURRAN: Any questions for Cathy? Okay. Thank you.
(Applause)

Okay. Moving on to the Human Resources and Administration Report from Mary K. Lee.

Human Resources and Administration

MS. LEE: Good morning, everyone. Go right into the first slide here. Just going to talk a little bit about the department staff, what ARIN’s been up to. And I did a little survey for the ARIN employees since I realized a lot of what I do is – I hate to use the word dull, but it’s a bit dull. It’s facility and reports and things. And then another piece of what I do I can’t tell anyone about. So I’ve done a little survey so you can learn a few things about ARIN employees.

Department staff: Thérèse Colosi, back at the office, although virtually she’s been here the entire week because she’s been taking the minutes for the Board meeting, so she’s been working as hard as everyone here. Teresa has been helping to make sure the air conditioning comes back on this week because we’ve been struggling with that. So these are sort of the real-life things that people really do. They both, of course, provide support to everyone, do travel for a lot of people in the room here, do supplies for the office, minute meetings, et cetera. And then I’m sort of the jack-of-all-trades of the small things that run in the building.

This current year, actually in December, since the last meeting, we did a Myers Briggs team building which was a lot of fun. Definitely learned some things about us. Had almost 100 percent of the staff take the survey. We’re a little different than the typical American statistics. For anybody who knows these, we have a lot of ISTJs and a lot of INTPs, and these are all kind of introverted-working, engineering-type people, which makes sense. We’re glad to hear that, aren’t we? Almost 70 percent of ARIN’s staff comes out as an introvert on Myers Briggs, which is the exact opposite of the general U.S. population.

We completed our annual reviews in December and went through all those. And some other updates and things we’ve done. Annual things. We do a total compensation statement that we send out to the staff. We did audits on our 401(k) and benefits. We moved to a new intranet site, and I have to thank Susan for all her help helping me get the HR page. It’s on the intranet site. Part two and part three of new-hire orientation have been refreshed and the new-hire packet has been updated.

So some things about employees here. As you can see, our tenure just continues to increase. We have 29 people who have been here basically almost five years or more, which was quite a bit. And then you see the other numbers up there. And we have 48 full-time employees. One part-time employee. Two full-time, long-term temps. And four contractors. So it’s a pretty full building that we have at this point and we’re utilizing most of our space.

Upcoming anniversaries: In 2009 we will have six five-year anniversaries. Most of them are later in the year, but Matt Rowley has completed his five years with ARIN. I want to congratulate him. The other two – normally I don’t announce anniversaries until after they’ve happened, but I feel pretty assured these two people will still be on Board in May. Cathy Murphy and myself will have been at ARIN for 10 years.
(Applause)

So I thought I should ask people how western they are. Here we are in Texas, San Antonio. So I gave a little quiz. The first was about boots. So I asked how many of you have a well-broken-in pair, that was 24 percent; I just bought a pair and my feet are killing me, 15 percent; not a chance, 58.
(Laughter)

Okay. Horses, horseback riding: Every chance I get, 24 percent; are you crazy, 33 percent; let’s go to the track, 31 percent; and I’d like to try that, 12 percent.

Cowboy hats: Don’t wear hats ever, 51 percent; baseball caps go better with my wardrobe of T-shirts, 31 percent – and I think there’s a few out there right now; and I own a Stetson or other western hat, 14 percent.

Movies. We had a little this, a little that. A lot of John Wayne. People through in names, Blazing Saddles, Butch Cassidy. But the overall winner, favorite of ARIN staff, is Clint Eastwood. So we’re a Clint Eastwood company.

And to songs. These were all over – I gave everyone a list of 10 classic songs to pick from and of course had some other ringers thrown in there: George Jones, Kenny Rogers, Hank Williams. Here’s some of the song titles, because these are always fun. Have to throw these out for folks. There’s a video, the top one, Redneck Yacht Club. The person who submitted that one, you can go – there’s a little clip and you can watch them sing the song. Very nice. Patsy Cline was the runner-up. She’s my personal favorite. I was very glad to see her in there. But Johnny Cash. We’re a Clint Eastwood and Johnny Cash company.

Happy trails.
(Applause)

MR. CURRAN: Any questions for Mary K.?

Okay. Next up on the agenda is the member services report with Susan Hamlin.

Member Services

MS. HAMLIN: Good morning, everyone. We’ll skip right through here. Member services staff. We are all here this week. Hopefully you had a chance to meet everyone, share your ideas with them, offer suggestions. From the top left going down: Dé Harvey, Meeting Planner; Einar Bohlin, Policy Analyst at ARIN; Hollis Kara, Communications Writer; Jason Byrne, Communications Manager; Jud Lewis, Membership Coordinator; Lawson Parker, Graphic Design; Scott Gordon, Web Designer; and myself.

Okay. Statistics: This is a comparison of membership growth from the last four years, March 31st of each year, and you’ll see we continue to grow in numbers. This is broken down by the geographic regions.

Services: These are a few of the recent products that member services put out. Probably the one you all have paid the most attention to is the new website. We rolled this out February 9th. This was a huge team effort by all of ARIN staff. All the departments were involved in rewriting content, reorganizing content. Had a lot of support from engineering in putting it out. We haven’t had a lot of feedback from the community. We are hoping that’s a good sign that you all are enjoying it. You find it an improved in terms of navigation. That’s good to see. We would like feedback any time. Send an e-mail to info@arin.net. Get a hold of us while we’re here this afternoon. The website is for your use. We will continue to improve it, make updates. So let us know what you’d like to see there.

This meeting we are welcoming the inaugural class of meeting fellows. This is a program we opened in January. We’re pleased to have three recipients here. For each upcoming ARIN meeting, we will have an application period. For Dearborn, the application period starts at the end of July. We are looking for applicants, one from each of our three regions: the Caribbean, U.S., Canada. We encourage you to take this program out in the community. Pass it along to folks. There’s information on the website. Any place you can distribute it, it would be most welcome.

I also call your attention to another program that ARIN participates in, the Jon Postel Network Operators Scholarship program. And this is for attendees to come to the joint NANOG and ARIN meeting in the fall. This is provided by an anonymous donor. I think it’s a NANOG – not program committee – but NANOG and a representative from the ARIN board.

MR. SEASTROM: Steering committee.

MS. HAMLIN: Steering committee. They select the winners. And this program is open now. Applications do close June 1st. So I also encourage you to spread the word about that.

Those of you who were here Sunday afternoon saw the debut of our new flash of the policy development process. This we will take out on the road. It will be part of the multimedia presentations that are available at the ARIN booth when Richard and Megan and others take it out. We also welcome your feedback on that. And the annual report you’ll find online. That’s available and it’s a flash presentation also.

These are the general list of services that member services staff work on. Website is the main communication tool. We also monitor mailing lists. Work on new forms of communication. And here again we’re interested in your feedback, ideas, things you would like to see us produce. The outreach support, member services is involved in document creation. You’ll see some of the fact sheets in the info center in the lit racks. We develop those kinds of materials with subject matter experts throughout ARIN staff. We also help in the strategic planning and provide logistical support.

There are several processes at ARIN that we administer, one and the most obvious that’s been – that we’ve seen here is the policy development process. We also have a suggestion and consultation process which began in 2006. It’s a two-part program. It allows for anyone in the community to submit a suggestion regarding ARIN’s services, operation. Not to be confused with the policy development process. Last year, 2008, we had 24 suggestions. We had four community consultations. So far this year we’ve had 10 suggestions and one community consultation, which resulted in the BoF that was held yesterday. So the process is out there. You’ll find it on the website. When we reorganized the website, the top level, participate, you’ll find a link to the suggestion process. We already talked about the fellowship program. And we administer the elections. Last year some of you in this room might have received a certified letter. We had a “get out the vote” campaign last year that was highly successful. We increased the number of voters both in the Board and AC election almost in each by 500 percent. So we applaud all of you who participated. We intend to continue with that campaign this year.

If you have any suggestions of how we can increase voter participation, we also would love to hear those. Related to elections, we are undertaking the DMR cleanup. DMR is the Designated Member Representative. This is the individual who is eligible to vote for your organization in the election. They are not listed in WHOIS. We have the same difficulty keeping those contacts current. But we are currently engaged in the campaign. Jud Lewis has been on the phone and sending e-mails. We’re targeting about 600 organizations right now through phone e-mail we have cleaned up 75 in the last three weeks. So we’re making progress.

Meeting planning: We will be in Dearborn in the fall. We will have two ARIN public policy meetings in 2010. We’re constantly looking for sponsors. The sponsor helps us determine the location. So if you have any interest in sponsoring an ARIN program, please let us know. We are also involved corporate document review, deals with the Bylaws ,providing support to the Board and reviewing those types of things.

And then the membership database, right now we have a separate database when people come in and get a direct allocation from ARIN, they are automatic members and we maintain that. We maintain the DMR contact through that database.

So here I was hoping to channel Jerry Maguire. We really do need you to help us help you. So these are some ways. You can provide contact at any time, provide suggestions through info@arin.net, is a mail list that comes into member services. Questions, concerns. The ACSP is a more formalized process. Your suggestion will end up on the website. We have those archived. You can track what we do with that, our response to that. And with the rollout of 2.0 soon of the web account you’ll have another interface, you can ask Q&A through those accounts. So we encourage you to let us know if there are services or things we can be improving.

As I mentioned, the next ARIN meeting in October, back to back with NANOG. Merit and Arbor are sponsors. We’ll be in Dearborn, Michigan. If you’re looking for a cheap automobile, I encourage you to come along to the meeting. You might be able to take care of that business as well as some good policy discussion.

So that’s it. Any questions?

MR. WOODCOCK: (Inaudible) staff have been doing a really good job with the website and you can find everything on it now, which is great. Try it. Just try it. You’ll be amazed.

MS. HAMLIN: Andrew?

MR. DUL: Andrew Dul, Perkins Coie. So about the DMR thing you’re doing, to refresh that, is there a plan to put that in the web interface as well so people can see that and have all their contacts and everything in one place?

MS. HAMLIN: In fact, it already is and in the e-mails we’re encouraging people to go first through their web account and update their DMR information. Thank you for raising that. Owen.

MR. DELONG: I just wanted to compliment staff on the new PDP video. I think it’s really, really well done and I’m very impressed with the speed with which you were able to produce that.

MS. HAMLIN: Well, I will ask Lawson to stand up. And she’s responsible for the graphics and putting that together. And we think she did a terrific job.
(Applause)

Anything else? Thank you.

MR. CURRAN: Moving right ahead, we now have the Financial Services report, which will be Bob Stratton.

Financial Services

MR. STRATTON: Good morning, everybody. I’m going to go over my staff and the operations we’re up to, what financial controls are in place. I’m also the contracts officer here at ARIN, so we’ll go over that and some legal activities that moved into my function.

Here’s the crew. Standing in back is Tyler, Tammy, Cathy, Val and some handsome young man in the back; and then Dawn, Amy, Amaris and Tanya. Cathy, Tammy and Dawn are here. Hopefully you had a chance to talk to them. They do a great job. I like to say that publicly.

Some operational improvements we’re up to. We’re continuing to digitize the RSAs. This lets us move the physical documents off site. It also allows us to retrieve the documents by indexing them by ORG ID. So this is a process we’re going to continue. We’re also going to put the nondisclosure agreements, put them in the same kind of format and move those off site as well. One other issue that arose is we’re going to go ahead and digitize the inactive RSAs, because you never know when we might need to retrieve those as well.

One of our goals for this year is to work on the overdue maintenance accounts. The maintenance accounts represent the $100 payments to maintain your AS, your assignment, and the net transfer. And now legacy will be added into that.

Those – in terms of absolute numbers, there’s a lot of those in terms of we generate about a thousand of those a month. They’ve been – we’ve been remiss in going after those. We went after the allocation overdues first. We’re pretty caught up there. Now we’re trying to catch up with these. Once we get these in place, we hope to work with Mark and his department in setting up a reminder system similar to the allocation reminder system that we have in place.

Which is the next item. The reminder system we have in place for the allocation seems to be working well. It helps us keep the POCs for billing up to date, because if for some reason the invoice goes overdue, we end up contacting the admin or the tech POC, which is a lot of you guys, and in doing that you then update us on what the billing POC currently is. And through the web portal project, that will be able to be done online, which will be great.

And in working with engineering, we work with Erika on business practices reengineering, which is going to help us automate some of our systems. We also are working with them on the web portal project. That’s mainly Leslie’s group working there. But we play a small part in that. And hopefully you guys will be able to administer and look at your payment history for a couple of years back. And if you owe us something, you’ll be able to do that online and administer your point of contact information in relation to billing.

We have a new support contractor for our accounting software. Sarbanes-Oxley doesn’t allow internal engineers to work on your accounting software. So our previous consultant was a little slow on the uptake in terms of getting back to us. We’re very happy with the one we currently have. So that’s a good thing.

Here are the payment types in 2008: It’s almost evenly split between checks and credit cards. However, checks are a larger amount per transaction. No surprise there. Credit cards, this probably illustrates the idea that you guys are paying the maintenance fees by credit card. One important point to make here is when we receive credit, we don’t receive credit card information. If you go online and say you want to pay by credit card, you’re immediately conveyed over to PayPal’s website, so we keep no financial information on our network. Very few wires. Those are hard to track down where they actually came from.

Financial controls: We have a lockbox in place. What this means is you mail us a check, it goes to a P.O. Box so it doesn’t actually go to us. It goes directly to the bank who has an operation right next to a post office. This allows for a quicker crediting of the money. But it also allows us to not have to touch the check at all. We then use the remittance advice to update the books and credit the account. We have a purchase and payments approval system in place. Over a certain amount we need both the treasurer and president to approve a payment or a purchase, under that amount and down to another level we need the presidential approval, and then for lower amounts we need the CEO approval – COO approval. And that leaves an audit trail for when the auditors come in as to why we spent the money and did we have approval. We daily monitor our company accounts. Credit cards seem to have a tendency to have issues. So a couple times this year we’ve had to cancel credit cards because of bogus charges on them. We also monitor our operating account. This is different times, economically. So we’re trying to keep daily track of what’s going on within our accounts, and at the same time, we want to keep the finance committee informed as to what’s going on with our accounts, both operating and investments. We’re in constant communication with both the bank and the investment advisor. And we do this to help the Board perform their prudent-man fiduciary duty.

In terms of contract with legal, we now have an in-house staff attorney, Cathy Murphy. She helps – she works with outside counsel, Steve. She helps draft and review outsourcing contracts. We are using outsourced resources to help get, to move forward on projects such as engineering. She also reviews the RSA revisions that are proposed to us. We are working on document retention policy. She’s working with Mary K. on that. There are documents that come in for requests that sometimes RSD needs to have her take a look at. And she helps respond. She does some legwork for Steve in terms of responding to subpoenas and preliminary legal work.

And with that, that’s the new addition to the Stratton family; looks like he’s having a good time.

MR. CURRAN: Any question for financial services? No? Thank you.
(Applause)

I’d like to now have Mark Kosters come up and give the engineering report.

Engineering

MR. KOSTERS: I haven’t been at ARIN all that long. I’ve been there about a year and a half. On that pie chart that Mary K. talked about, I’m kind of on the lower – one of those skinny parts, and so are a few others within engineering.

One of the things that before that I was in the audience like you guys. And I was sitting there going: You know, it’s almost 10:30. I’m kind of like – I’m waiting for this to end. And so what I’m trying to do is spice things up here a little bit. But I need to warn you: I’ve given this presentation a couple times now and the comments I received are, one, it’s tasteless; two, you’re bucking for an HR incident; and, three, there may be an issue with some sort of animal cruelty prevention league. So if you’re okay with that, let’s go on. So are you all okay with that?
(Applause)

MR. HOWARD: As a Board member, I resist anything that’s going to result in legal liability to the corporation.
(Laughter)

MR. KOSTERS: I don’t really think there is any. So let’s go on. I’ve got to push the button. Okay. That’s good. So here you can see our staffing. And one of the things that we’ve done is – we’re kind of in a surge right now. Actually there’s a lot of outstanding work that has to be done in engineering. You can see that we’ve really buttressed the engineering team with a lot of outside help. We have one intern within operations who is helping with the IRR, Internet routing registry. We have three contractors within development helping out with ARIN Online. And in quality assurance we have two temps that we actually would like to convert at some point. And in requirements, Erika has been doing an awesome job in requirements. But she’s also needed to get some help in terms of doing this business process reengineering that she’s talked about two days ago.

And here we start going on to the first furry picture. So I asked for pictures of horses and people on horses and stuff like that. And for operations, well, you know, it’s one of these dudes on a squirrel. I’m not quite getting it. So actually, I’d like to see y’all ride one of those squirrels at some point. What do you think? It’s a chipmunk. It wouldn’t even work.

MR. CURRAN: It’s obviously a chipmunk.

MR. KOSTERS: Okay. But the operations team has actually – has been really, really busy. So they’ve put together a disaster recovery site. And it is mostly operational. We’re waiting for some equipment from EMC to make it fully redundant. And one of the things we’ll be able to do is actually swing from our production facility in Chantilly to our disaster recovery site and come back and no one will know the difference.

The second thing is that we’ve had diversity now serving up the /8s under in-addr.arpa. And we only had one contract before, VeriSign, and now we’re running it ourselves and we’re planning on diversifying it some more, especially in the event at some sort of business failure. And we want to make sure that we’re protected in that case.

We have IPv6 to the desktop. When we were surfing back in the offices, actually things worked for the most part, except going to ftp.ietf.org. We have projects.arin.net, and that’s available for any sort of public source applications that you want to actually put into the fold. And it’s something that was brought up last night in the SWIP BoF about tools that people would want to share. And we really encourage people to go out there and actually start utilizing this facility. And we’ll pretty it up as time goes on. And, finally, there’s a lot of internal things that the operations team does, and over the last six months they’ve done 760 administrative requests internally, mainly helping me with my laptop.
(Laughter)

So on WHOIS statistics: the number keeps on growing, which is pretty incredible. The boxes, they’re doing quite well. We’re about ready to switch them over to new modern OS. They’ve been running some older versions of Red Hat, I believe. Now we’re moving to CentOS. And in January we saw a peak of 122 queries per second on average, which is actually not too bad for not too many boxes. Actually, the team has done quite well in putting this system together. The IRR, it still has a heartbeat. And I put the stuff in the earlier days from like ‘07. That was actually a researcher who got confused. After we set him straight. He actually FTP’d the information he needed. So the query rates actually went down. But you can see that it is still alive, and this is something that we know we need to fix. Because it’s really old stuff.
It’s a good thing it’s alive.

So here’s one of my favorite slides. And this is really dealing with accuracy of routing in terms of what’s actually in WHOIS, versus what’s actually in the IRR. Now we had a presentation by a guy from NIST who has been looking at this as well. You can see it’s really kind of a crap shoot whether or not their information in IRR is correct or not. It’s about fifty/fifty. Well, the information in WHOIS is at 92 percent. And what’s interesting about this is – going to come up on the next slide – is that it’s definitely true that the information as most recently updated to the stuff that’s most correct. We’re seeing that because the information in WHOIS people actually maintain a little bit better than in the IRR. What this means is that you probably have a better chance of validating the OriginAS through WHOIS than you would through the IRR. And this is good as we go forward. And something that many, many people are looking at in terms of how can we actually do a better job of providing route security, and what are the sort of steps that one needs to have to make a secure routing system happen.

And it goes from really sort of high technology sort of things to like resource certification has been bantered about, all the way down to tools like WHOIS and IRR to actually validate routes. And it’s probably going to be a combination of all these things going ahead. So one of the things that the NIST guy said – I’m not sure how many of you all caught that, but he claimed that the IRR, despite it only being 50 percent correct, was a better sort of validation tool than the information in WHOIS. I’m not really sure if that’s really a valid sort of analysis. The coverage is about the same. But the information you receive from WHOIS seems to be a better sort of response than you would get from the IRR.

And here you can see why, in that WHOIS has – this is a prefix link distribution list where you have validation underneath it in terms of its size, and the number of entries that are actually on that list. You can see that WHOIS has about 60,000 entries that are on /29s. Makes perfect sense. It’s reassignments. And here you have information at the /24 level, which the IRR has a lot of, but again WHOIS seems to have more. So this is something that the NIST folks and ARIN and a few others have been looking at and continue to look at in terms of trying to create a system for you to actually do a better job of validating your routes.

MR. CURRAN: Mark, do you know offhand – when you say IRR, you’re saying ARIN’s IRR?

MR. KOSTERS: That’s correct.

MR. CURRAN: Do you know the statistics regarding accuracy and coverage of other IRR databases?

MR. KOSTERS: From the work that the NIST people have done, the numbers were roughly similar.

MR. CURRAN: Okay. One of the things that we need to think about is that we need to make sure we don’t make decisions on what we do with our IRR experience compared to the IRRs of ARIN as opposed to the IRRs of other RIRs.
(Laughter)

MR. KOSTERS: Okay.

SPEAKER: Mark, do you know the statistics of correct pronunciation of RIR versus IRR?

MR. KOSTERS: Actually, I would love to hear that. So am I pronouncing it incorrectly?

SPEAKER: No.

MR. KOSTERS: So here we have the development team. I think Andy kind of wants to look this way at some point. So do we have a shirtless policy? Well, maybe –

MR. CURRAN: We do now.
(Laughter) If you’re asking.

MR. KOSTERS: So you can see that he’s actually – kidding aside, his team has actually been working very, very hard on creating a production quality system with ARIN Online. And his team – the upcoming release you’re going to see in about a month has a number of different things that you as a community can use to help communicate with us better. And there are a lot of tools that we didn’t display that are on the back side to help us manage more effectively. So you’re going to see a net result of having a more efficient system as we go through this.

We’ve also done a lot of improvements to existing systems. They have run amazingly well, but of course we keep on having some changes. That happens. We’ve of course had the website redesign, and that was a partnership between Susan Hamlin’s team and engineering. There was a lot of time on both to make sure it rolled out as best it could. And I think we did a really good job in making that happen.

There was AS plain conversion. There was this whole debate within the community, what should be the representation of a four-byte AS number: Should it have a dot? Should it have a colon? Should it just be plain? Well, it seems like plain has won out. And most of our systems – well, all seven four-byte AS numbers that we currently have – have now been converted and are available within the AS plain format as opposed to AS dot. You’re more than welcome to use that. In fact, I encourage you.

If you want, our West Coast facility is actually – we’re peering with people with four-byte ASs. And our first customer – our first peering partner in this has been ISC. If anyone else wants to peer with ARIN on the West Coast, come and talk to Matt Ryanczak in the back here and we’ll go ahead and get that set up. And it’s certainly a way to say, hey, look, this stuff really does work so let’s go ahead and make it go.

We’re also working on resource certification. I’m going to talk about that a little bit more later. DNSSEC I’m going to talk a little bit more about later. And what I’m going to discuss, focus on now is lame. So lame’s a very interesting system. And we had a policy experience report at the last ARIN meeting in LA. And the consensus of the room was to keep lame going. We’ve been very conservative on the removals. And it’s mainly because we don’t want to break people’s DNS. And we’ve been very, very conservative in making sure that the lame information that we receive is actually going to a valid contact who is receiving mail and has this notification. We have lots and lots of lame delegations that we have not touched yet because we can’t figure out who the contact is and the stuff is just bouncing. That DNS information may be working locally for them, but we’re not seeing it. And this is one of the issues that one would have for the lame system, is that you’ll never have uniform sort of coverage and validating DNS responses. And so we’re trying to be very conservative in making this happen. But it’s also fairly expensive for us to actually do this. So as a net-net, if we turn off somebody’s DNS, and it may be done in a way that actually is surprising to them, there may be some adverse negative impacts which we really don’t want to do. So we’ve been going about this very carefully. But I want to share with you some of the funny sort of stories that we received from these people in that for many of them they get the shut-off notice, they ignore everything before, DNS isn’t working for them. They get the shut-off notices and automagically the next day they claim it’s been working all the time, and at that point it does. Which is fine. But it’s just – it’s creating a pain point I don’t think we as a community really want. So we need to think about this a little bit harder, making this go. And this may be making our DNS checking a little bit less strict. And I would love to hear input from you on whether or not that’s something that we should do.

For example, right now we make sure that the answer is authoritative. Well, there’s a lot of resolvers out there to actually respond back with non-authoritative responses. And I’m sure there’s some sort of mis-configuration that’s causing that from their perspective. But it does work in terms of them issuing PTRs based on the query.

MR. CURRAN: Mark, so I’m going to try to phrase this in a way to be polite, if you want to back up one slide, back on lame.

Okay. So we could do a full 30-minute presentation on the lame checks, what we’re seeing for DNS responses, the impacts of removing someone’s records and discuss the authoritative flag and the difference whether SOA is right or wrong. However, I’m not sure the whole audience wants that background or has that experience. So to the extent that you have knowledge and interest in what we’re doing with these lame DNS server checks, I ask you seek out Mark and get some lessons learned and provide some feedback.

We are shaping this internally to make sure that we have the minimal impact on both organizationally and in terms of workload, but also to the community at large. But there may be some points that we’ll actually send something formal out to the membership and say we propose to change the lame DNS server program. So it would be good for people that have knowledge in this area to seek out Mark. Thanks.

MR. KOSTERS: Thank you, John. So let’s now talk about ARIN Online and about what sort of uptake have we seen. You can see here it’s actually not up to Leslie’s numbers and the number of templates that have been going through the system, but you can see we’ve actually had pretty significant uptake on people actually exercising ARIN Online, which is awesome.

So we’ve had over 5,000 people actually register. We’ve had just a little bit less actually go in there and put social information within their account. And when they’ve gone on to the next step they actually linked their online account with their existing point of contact information. And they’ve went ahead further from there saying, okay, I want to modify this point of contact or modify the organization, add a new organization, whatever. So all these things are actually really good things.

And as we build it out this sounds really encouraging like we’re going the right direction in making this happen.

So I’m glad to see this and if you haven’t used it – okay, let me ask you this question: How many people have actually used this system? Okay. And it’s going to be kind of like the v6 thing. How many people have not but wish they did? Okay. Good. I encourage you guys to go ahead and do this. And to actually sort of keep it going.

Sounds like we have a question, Cathy.

MS. MURPHY: Yes, Mark, we have a question from Jo Rhett, Silicon Valley Colocation: In no way should we make it less strict. Working is not maybe. It’s yes or no. This is regarding lame, I believe.

MR. KOSTERS: Going back to lame for just a second. Is that there’s really no great definition of lame to actually work off of. And when we discuss this, it’s – I’m not going to use that example. That got my previous CEO in trouble.

MR. CURRAN: No, you’re not going to use that example.

MR. KOSTERS: No.
(Laughter)
So it’s something that you can see when you see it but you really can’t define it.

MR. CURRAN: Yeah.

MR. KOSTERS: So it’s something that we need to work on. And this is something that it’s a significant – again, it’s a significant sort of – it’s a significant effort on our perspective.

Quality assurance: We’ve instituted a quality assurance team and they’ve been awesome. These guys have found bugs. Boss Hogg and Rosco P. Coltrane, they’ve actually been out there getting down on Andy’s team, telling them all the things that he’s done wrong. And it’s actually worked out very well. And actually one of the sort of shining examples of this is that “aol” went out and all these people that work in web development – it’s amazing how many differences there are in rendering on different browsers and how few complaints that we have. And I think that’s a testament to the Q&A team in making this stuff really work out well.

MR. CURRAN: A reminder to those - “aol” is ARIN Online, not that the ISP community might think that acronym was something else.

MR. KOSTERS: So this is Erika’s slide. And you’ve heard her talk a little bit earlier in the week about the business process reengineering she’s doing. She also is making sure that requirements happen. And we have this fairly traditional sort of way of going forward through our systems requirements, development Q&A, deployment, and she’s on the first part of this process. And since Andy has this stellar team working for him, she is really working hard to make sure that that pipeline is filled all the time and making sure that these guys have requirements that they can work off of. So she’s kept very, very busy.

So upcoming challenges that we have. You can see that we are working hard on ARIN Online. We’re going to have a RESCERT pilot that I’m sure we’ll be talking about at the next meetings some more about. Hopefully we’ll be giving a demo on it. But it’s a system for people to actually go ahead and issue what they call ROAs, resource origination authorizations, and actually start using that system, cryptographic system to actually help you validate routes that you receive.

DNSSEC is another thing we’ll be working on. It’s going to be done in a phased approach. We’ll start signing these zones but there’s really going to be no net effect to the community on this until we allow these things called delegations signer records, DS records, within DNS. That will happen towards the end of the year. And that will be integrated within ARIN Online/aol.

We’re also looking at replacement of legacy systems. We have a lot of old gear that we’re replacing as we go through this. We’re looking at replacing of course the IRR, updating the code in there as well. We’re also starting to participate in the whole sort of locator/address resolution split that’s going on within the community and it’s called LISP. So we have a node at our facility and something that we are playing with as well.

So I know that y’all have a lot of questions. I want you to bear with me for just one more minute. And I really appreciate all the suggestions that you have. And it’s kind of like I’m sure that many of you know that a lot of times working in engineering or in other service organizations you get all these requests in and you’re trying to make it go. It’s kind of like herding cats. Cats just go wherever they want to go. They don’t follow you like dogs.

And we found this incredible, incredible sort of commercial that we actually want to bring up here. Why don’t you go ahead and do it.

It does have sound.

(Video: This man right here is my great-grandfather. He’s the first cat herder in our family. Herding cats. Don’t let anybody tell you it’s easy. Anybody can herd cattle. 10,000 wild short-hairs, that’s another thing altogether. Being a cat herder is probably the toughest thing I’ve ever done.

I got this one this morning right here. If you look at his face, it’s ripped to shreds you know.

You hear the movies, you hear the stories. I’m living a dream. Not everyone can do what we do.

I wouldn’t do nothing else.

It ain’t an easy job, but when you bring a herd into town and you haven’t lost a one of them, ain’t a feeling like nothing in the world.)
(Laughter) (Applause)

MR. CURRAN: Any questions of Mark?

MR. BICKNELL. I guess ISC for this moment. You were our first 32-byte ASN peer as well – or 32-bit. Sorry. That would be a really big ASN.

MR. SEASTROM: We’ll never run out of 32 byte –
(Laughter)

MR. BICKNELL: And I will say that there was a minor amount of trepidation hitting return at the end of that line for the first time on the router and, remarkably, absolutely nothing bad happened. I will slightly chastise you, though, that the e-mail that was sent to us with your ASN, was in AS dot format. So you have not completely converted to AS plain format.

MR. KOSTERS: I saw that e-mail. I think Michael – he corrected himself.

MR. BICKNELL: Two other real quick comments. On the OriginaAS data, I think there’s actually two different communities, and the presentation yesterday didn’t really go into this. There are folks who use that data for researching OriginAS, whether it be security, whether it be pure research. They’re interested in where did this thing come from. The other user of a lot of that data is ISPs that do route filtering and might want to build a filter for a peer or a customer or anything like that.

The reason it’s interesting to make that distinction is all of the /29s that have origin data don’t get routed. So to the routing community, while there are thousands of records and they’re very accurate, they are useless for building filters. So it might be interesting to kind of take those two views as depending on the community you’re trying to serve, they may see that data in much different light. One community is going to love it. Another one’s not going to know what to do with it.

The last thing I wanted to say is on the IRR is we have had this problem for years and there are many of them out in the world. Almost all of the other ones that exist we refer to by really cool names like RADB, or the RIPE database. Or things that are not confusing. And I implore ARIN staff to come up with any other name that they can call this thing than IRR. Anything would be very nice.

MR. KOSTERS: We’ll come up with a name. Don’t you worry. (Laughter)

So as a final sort of note I just want to thank membership services for putting all this together. Because otherwise it would have been really boring and you all would have fell asleep anyhow. So thank you.

MR. CURRAN: Thank you, Mark.
(Applause)

I’ll also in fairness – I’ll give credit to this company called EDS whose Super Bowl commercial we just touched on. Thank you for giving us such a pleasant video.

I’ll now introduce Richard Jimmerson to give our ARIN outreach report. Thank you.

ARIN Outreach Efforts

MR. JIMMERSON: I’m Richard Jimmerson. I’m going to give you some information about our outreach efforts inside the region. What I’m focusing on is the in-person outreach that we’re doing. We do all types of outreach that you get via e-mail, that you see on our website and everything. But what I’ll be talking about is the stuff where we actually go out and meet people face to face, giving presentations, talk to people in booths and things along those lines.

Now, this effort that I’m going to talk about is largely supported across the organization. We get massive amounts of supports from the Member Services department, Dé Harvey in particular inside the Member Services department.

Also we have support from the Registration Services department, Engineering, and other areas inside the organization. And none of what I’m getting ready to talk about here right now would happened inside the organization without the work of our Public Relations Officer, Megan Kruse.

Now, the purpose of our outreach, when we go out to talk to people, is we want to reach out to as many stakeholder types as possible. What we don’t want are people participating in the process that only represent one segment of the industry, one idea, one mindset. So we’re trying to reach out to new groups and bring more people into the policy development process and make them aware of what we’re doing as the Regional Internet Registries and ARIN. We’re raising awareness of ARIN and some key messages. I’m going to talk a bit about what those key messages are in a few moments.

We’re also out there to break through some industry rumor and innuendo and to create a more positive perception of ARIN. There are people out there that do have a negative view of ARIN, the ARIN organization, what we do, and a lot of it is rumor and innuendo.
Just a quick example of something like that is we do booth events and we have people come to booths, they talk to us, and often it’s an executive from a company somewhere that says: You know, I’ve heard of you guys before and you’re very difficult to deal with. The guy inside his organization has told him that we’re hard to deal with. So at one of these events just recently in the last month we asked, well, Is he here? Is that person here? Can you bring him to the booth? Maybe we can have a discussion about this. He said, No, he’s not, but I can call him up on the telephone. He rung him up on the telephone and we had a little conference call right there at the booth with the person from his staff. I think what the gentleman found out was that his staff member was using ARIN as a scapegoat for things he didn’t want to do or problems that he had, and he was just pushing it on the ARIN organization. We got off the phone and the guy apologized and walked away and said: I think I know what the problem is now. But it’s important for us to be out there and talk to people so that they do see that we’re here to help them and that we are available, and we kind of do cut through a lot of that rumor and innuendo. And we also provide education services to all these people out there that we talk to.

Now, the messages that we share with people when we do go talk to them is, one, the ARIN organization and the Regional Internet Registry System. It’s important for people to know that it’s there and that it’s working. We come across people often that have never heard of it before. They’re not aware it’s there. They think it’s something that the government does. They think it’s something that just magically appears and happens when it comes to getting their resources from their service provider.

We talk about industry self-regulation. We make sure that everyone knows that what we do is industry self-regulated, and we talk about the importance of their participation in the process so it can continue to be that way. A lot of people still believe that this is run by government.

And we do talk about the policy development process and we encourage people to participate in that process and to join the public policy mailing lists and have discussions there, to remotely participate in our meetings or come physically to these meetings.

And one of the key messages that we’re talking about today is IPv4 depletion and IPv6 adoption. We are out there spreading that message like wildfire the best we can in person at all of these events. And we’ve noticed a change over the last two years. Next month will be two years ago when the ARIN Board of Trustees issued the statement that IPv4 was depleting and there was a need for organizations to consider the adoption of IPv6 in the next couple of years. We started this outreach effort two years ago when that happened. And when we first started talking to people at a booth, a presentation, on a stage, we would get feedback from them that I don’t believe that IPv4 is running out, I’ve been hearing that since the mid-1990s, it’s not going to happen, IPv6 isn’t going to deploy, and things like that. People just didn’t believe it was something that they had to worry about. Today when we go talk to people, that’s not the case. In fact, we have people coming to us because they want to share with us what they’re doing and they want to know if we can help them spread that to other people. We give them resources where they can share information, and they’re past that stage where they’re in denial and they’re getting very much close to the point where they accept the fact that they’re deploying IPv6.

And we do talk about other messages as needed, Legacy RSA at some of the events we go to. For instance, we do a lot of work at the Joint Techs meetings. We do attend those. And we talk about Legacy Registration Services Agreement there because that’s a large audience of legacy resource holders. And we talk about that at some of our other events as well. And we also add four-byte AS numbers and other topics as needed.

Now, the audiences that we reach out to. We want to reach out to providers of Internet services. We do talk to Internet service providers, content providers, application service providers, all type of organizations that provide Internet services. We also talk to equipment and software vendors, because there’s a need for those organizations to become ready for IPv6. And a lot of them have not put IPv6 in their products yet. And in fact we’ve talked just earlier this year to one of the larger vendors around the world of a home router. And that organization told us that they had no plans at all to put IPv6 into their products. They didn’t think it was something they needed to do. And in fact the gentleman that I was speaking to became so annoyed at the fact that I was trying to convince them that this is something that they needed to consider, that he just asked me for my business card and sent me away and told me that they would call us if they ever needed help. And this is the lead design engineer for that organization. So we’re working on ways to try to reach out and try to get through to them more.

Enterprise companies. It’s very important for them to know that IPv4 is depleting and that they need to adopt IPv6 as well. It’s just not Internet service providers. So we’re reaching out to those organizations as well. They may have a need over the next couple of years to get their website, their mail server, and other devices up and running with IPv6 so that if they do have native v6 users trying to reach them in the next few years that they can communicate with them.

And governments. It’s very important for governments to get this message, and governments are really coming on board with the IPv4 depletion/IPv6 adoption message nowadays. We’re getting invited by governments more and more to go talk to them about this topic and other topics. And in fact we have Leslie Nobile and Cathy Handley traveling out today to speak to another government group tomorrow.

And media and press. We’re reaching out to them in all the ways we can now. There’s one segment of the media that we really haven’t aggressively gone after yet, and those are the large national and international media organizations. They haven’t really been interested in this topic; it’s not exciting enough for them. People aren’t dying from it, there aren’t things happening that they want to report about. And, quite frankly, it’s not something that we’ve been ready for yet.

Leading up to this point we have been reaching out to bloggers, small media type organizations, industry media organizations. We often get in there and we get articles written about this topic there, but the national media is something that we need to be working with here very soon. And I’m going to talk about that in a slide here in just a moment.

Our methods. We do in-person presentations. Anyplace that we can get on an agenda where there will be a large number of people that need to hear our message, we go there and we talk to them. Exhibits. We do exhibits throughout the year. This year we have approximately 20 exhibits planned. We go and we set up a booth and we talk to everyone that comes by about the topics on the previous slide. We do direct exhibits where we stand there and we talk to the people that come by and talk to us. But often when we go to these shows, there could be hundreds of exhibitors and the exhibitors are the ones that need to get the message from ARIN about v4 depletion and v6 adoption. So what we’ll do is we’ll use the booth as a base of operations and then we will take staff and we will send them around to speak to all the exhibitors and pass the message to them, because they’re not going to come by and see us. And that’s hit and miss because sometimes they hire models to stand on their booth, and that’s not the right person to be talking to. But often you’ll have someone from the organization there and there’s some gain in speaking to them.

We also do media interviews. We get contacted by media. We push ourselves on media. Depending on the topic, John Curran will take and do a media interview, Mark Kosters if it’s engineering related. Leslie Nobile has done some, I’ve done some, and we’re constantly pursuing that. In the future when we do aggressively reach out to media, this is going to become a topic they’re going to want to cover at some point. And we’ll have people from the ARIN organization likely on radio and TV at that point. You’ll probably see John Curran or someone else from the organization sitting up there, a member of our Advisory Council, another member of the board, and we’ll work with those people to do media training before that happens. But it’s likely something that you’re going to see.

Event attendance and participation. Where we can’t get on the agenda or can’t do an exhibit, we’ll show up at events and talk to people in the hallways, ask questions at the microphone. Not so much today, but in years past people were spreading misinformation about the v4/v6 topic. They were making things up. They were doing some very wild things, and it was very interesting. We often found ourselves just having to defend the ARIN organization, the process, at the microphone from these individuals. And we had to do that quite a bit. Not so much nowadays, because as we get closer to v4 depletion, there’s not a whole lot of misinformation to spread because it’s something that’s really happening. The misinformation I was talking about is in the early 2000s, we were going to run out of address space in 2002 and 2003 and so on and so forth. Now, the materials that we use, we have a fact and information sheets that we pass out to people. We have all that information on CDs so they can take that away with them. We have audio and video that we show on the booths, and the policy development process, the Number Resource Organization, the video of the ARIN meeting. A lot of other different things. We show this at the event. We often had people stop by and watching that as an introduction before they talk with us.

We have little giveaways, give away pens and stickers and things. One of the most popular things that we give away that we just can’t seem to hold onto are little IPv6 stickers that some of you have. Those go very quickly. And also the comic books. The comic books are one of the most important giveaways and pieces of media that we have at these events that we go to. I know they may not be very popular inside this immediate group here, but when we go out and we speak at events where there are educators present, where there are people from government present, these people love it. We were at the Nonprofit Technology Conference over the weekend. We couldn’t hold onto the comic books because the nonprofit organizations thought it was a brilliant way to spread information about a topic. And everyone wanted a copy because they were going to go home and do that themselves.

Now, you’ve seen the fact sheets. This is an example of something that we pass out when we’re at those events. Now, here’s some sample events. These are some of the places that we’re going to and the folks that we’re talking to. We go to Usenix’s LISA conferences. And, by the way, this is at a very aggressive group. We really have to be careful about who we send to this thing because of all the places that we go to, this is the one event for some reason where people come up on the booth and they’re not liking the IPv6 message. They don’t think IPv6 is going to deploy and they don’t want to hear about it and they chastise us for being there talking to people about it. And that’s very interesting for that show. But we also reach out to people at HostingCON where we have hosting providers. We went to Nonprofit Technology this weekend and a slew of other events and we’re constantly identifying people that need the message. An example of that is Dan Alexander was with ARIN at the Cable Show about a month ago, and during that show he had all the cable operators there and their vendors and they were very on message with v4 depletion/v6 adoption. But there was another subgroup of operators there that weren’t necessarily cable that just happened to be at the show, and they were WiMAX operators. The WiMAX operators aren’t hearing this message yet. And they have very large deployments coming 12 to 18 months down the road. And all they’re thinking of right now is IPv4, for the most part. So I was introduced to some folks by Dan inside the WiMAX Forum, and we’ve added the WiMAX Forum Americas Conference that’s going on in Miami, Florida, later on this year and we’re going to go there and exhibit and talk to those folks. We’re constantly finding new people that need the message.

Now, one of the things that we’re doing to kind of kick this up from what we’ve been doing for the last two years is this year for the first time targeted at spreading these certain messages, we’re going to hire a public relations firm at ARIN. Now, we put a request for proposals for a public relations firm out on April 21st, earlier this month. We’re going to have all our proposals in, they’re all due by May 29th and we’ll make a selection by the close of June this year. Now, we’re going to use this public relations firm primarily, at least on the onset, to assist ARIN in spreading key messages; in particular, the IPv4 depletion/IPv6 adoption message. And we’re going to need their assistance to help us move this to national and international media. And you’re going to see a lot more of the topic, I think, here soon.

And we’re also going to use them for other things as needed. There are things that happen. When it does hit the national media, when it does hit the international media, when you do see it on your favorite news show, it’s not going to be a public service message. They don’t like to do that type of stuff. So they’re not going to do a fancy this is great, look what these folks are doing, they’re informing you and everybody needs to know about this. They’re not interested in that. What’s going to happen is you’re likely going to see this organization or this industry under attack for not doing anything, for not doing enough. And they’re going to call it out as a big crisis and that we need to do something. That’s going to be bad. That may be how it’s introduced to us. The PR firm is going to help us turn that around, and we’re going to work to make this a positive thing for the industry and for the ARIN organization.

Now, here’s an example of what some of the booths look like when we’re out at some of the shows. Here’s Doreen from the registration services department helping us out at one of the booths a couple of months ago. And this just gives you an idea of what some of that looks like. We have the video screen out. People watch videos. We’ve got the materials sitting there and we usually have a few staff members there. It’s either myself, Megan, someone from MSD, RSD, engineering, so on and so forth. And we also have support from the ARIN Advisory Council that will come to these shows and help us out. Dan Alexander has been on some shows with us. Cathy has been with us on some of the shows. There’s been several Advisory Council members that have been out there with us. And we’re going to do continue to do that because there’s very high value to the community to speak to someone that’s like them from the industry and not someone just from this nonprofit organization that’s trying to, quote/unquote, sell them something. And here’s a picture of David. People like David on these booths because he’ll do funny things like that. He’s a big IPv6 guy. And it’s really a lot of fun. It’s not just standing there doing boring and dull and drab things. We have a good time when we’re out there, and we try to make the best of it. And we do get to talk to a lot of people.

That’s it. I’m happy to answer any questions. Cathy.

MS. ARONSON: Cathy Aronson, ARIN Advisory Council. I worked at CompTEL with Richard which was totally a blast. Getting to do this on the Advisory Council is really, really an educational experience, because the rumor and innuendo is humongous. They come by and say: You guys stink. You start teasing it apart and you find out that one of the CEOs or CTOs that came by the booth was a riot. He was like: Yeah, my guy’s telling me you guys are difficult. Let me get him on my cell phone. He gets him on his cell phone and we find out that the guy just hasn’t finished his application. He just decided to say that ARIN isn’t responsive when it had nothing to do with ARIN. He was at least smart enough to ring his guy and get him on the phone. It was really interesting.

And we did come across one guy whose son is actually named Arin, so he needed a stack of everything that said ARIN, including the comic books, the pens, the stickers. And I’m not really sure what people do with the massive stacks of IPv6 stickers, but they take huge stacks of them. When they think you’re not looking, they’ll like grab a big stack of them and walk out of the booth.

I would like to thank the Advisory Council for letting us participate.

MR. JIMMERSON: Thank you, R.S., because you’ve done the shows with us, too.

MR. SEASTROM: I’ve been privileged to stand in the same booth with Richard and Megan and answer the same questions over and over again twice. And it really is shocking how much lack of knowledge and understanding there is out there. And I think this has a really, really good effect on getting the word out.

And thank you for your tireless efforts. I was going to get you a set of rabbit ears as a booth bunny, but I didn’t manage to find your size.

MR. JIMMERSON: Thanks, R.S.

MR. CURRAN: We have a remote comment, Cathy.

MS. MURPHY: Joe Maimon of CHL asks: Does the outreach include encouraging ARIN participation letter? The CEO letter. Was this a somewhat missed opportunity for outreach to explain about ARIN for encouraging participation, or has the letter served those purposes? Are more communications being considered in that vein? Also, any thoughts on this mainstream article? And then there’s a Ben Edelman reference.

MR. JIMMERSON: John’s going to take this one.

MR. CURRAN: So we had an interesting challenge with the CEO letter which was how to write something that’s long enough to contain the essence of the message, which is you need to pay attention to the fact that your IPv4 address space is running out, you’ll need to attest to applications, and you need to look at v6. There are a couple messages we needed to get, and we wanted to hope it was going to be read.

I have some experience dealing with executives at the senior level from several companies. And one page is a limit; pretty much a hard limit. In fact, one page that has actually words and not graphics is probably over the limit for some executives. So we limited the CEO letter to one page to make sure it got read and got – would have a good chance of being done. It’s recognized that we’re going to need to do additional follow up. Already there’s been some discussion of whether or not we need to do – now that this is out there and now that executives are seeing it, there’s probably a better audience for us to do some mainstream press, and we’ll be doing some of that. And I do think that next year we’re going to have to follow up with additional communications, because it will be far more poignant and far more important for these organizations to be planning their transition.

So I think we’ll have lots of opportunities and we’ll take them up. But the efforts that Richard and folks do out there at these conferences is essential because it builds groundwork. You need to have a group of people who know what’s going on because it doesn’t help for just the CEO to know or just the network engineers who come here. In some cases we’ve got to get to the marketing department of people building products to say, yeah, you may not have heard about IPv6, but that Ethernet jack or that wireless interface, you have something you have to do.

So we’re going to continue to do the outreach. I think the members think it’s a worthwhile investment. But there’s an open mic coming, so if you think we’re not doing a good thing or are doing a good thing, I do ask you to come up and give us feedback, because it is an investment of our money, the community’s money. Thank you.

MR. DARTE: Hi. Bill Darte. I’m with the Advisory Council. That’s the hat I’m wearing at this point anyway. I’ve been on one of those outreach things, too, so I ditto everything that Cathy and Rob said. It is a great experience and a great opportunity for us to learn as well and sharpen our messages.

The other thing I’d like to say, though, and acknowledge and make a personal thank you in public here to ARIN and to John Curran for coming and supporting an event I have in St. Louis. As a representative of Washington University’s Center for the Application of Information Technology, we’ve had 35 years of outreach to IT executives and technical people doing training and professional development and things like that. And John came and spoke to an audience of our large IT-related staff in Fortune 50 to 200 companies in St. Louis. And, you know, John does just a superlative job of being able to reach a pretty diverse audience that existed in that meeting. And today still people see me in other events and remind me what a great event that was and how enlightening it was because these large companies at that level, at the CIO and senior IT director level, just had no clue that all of this stuff was going on. And John made it relevant to them that it’s not just ISPs that have to worry about this, it’s their interests are at stake as well.

I wanted to thank the organization and John publicly for that, and it was great.

MR. WILLIAMSON: David Williamson, Tellme Networks. I wanted to thank you for the work you’ve done with Usenix and LISA. I don’t really think I need to say you need to continue doing that.

But what I’d like to do is actually more for everybody else, if you’re involved with Usenix or LISA in any way or know people who are, please keep hitting them up about IPv6 and v4 exhaustion. There’s a massive amount of denial in that community that there’s even a problem. I’ve been working with them for years and it’s slow going. So, please, if you have any opportunity to interact with that crowd and the administration community, please keep working with them about getting the message out.

MR. JIMMERSON: Thank you, David. All right. Thank you very much.

MR. CURRAN: We’re going to take a very short break and come back and hear the ASO AC report, the Advisory Council report and the Board of Trustees report. And the treasurer’s report. Treasurer’s report. So be back here, 15 minutes. Thank you. It is ten of. We’ll see you back here at five past the hour.

ARIN Financial Report

MR. CURRAN: Good morning. We’re going to resume in about 30 seconds. Gotta keep the trains on time, folks, you know.

We’re actually going to reorder the agenda so people can make their speaking engagements today before they fly out. Next on the agenda is going to be the treasurer’s report. I’ll turn it over to Scott Bradner, our treasurer. Thank you, Scott.

MR. BRADNER: Good morning. This is a different treasurer than you last saw. Lee and I threw hats in the air and they came down on different heads. So I’m now your treasurer. And Lee is pleased with that result.
(Laughter)

So, well, so far so good, because I have more than adequate help out of Bob. And whenever I get into trouble on this presentation, Bob is carefully sat in the front row right here so I can call on him for real data.

Which one do I press to cause anything to happen? I tried that. And the other left? The one that’s on the right, in other words?

Okay. So the first part of this report is what has the Finance Committee of the Board been doing. We’ve met. And we met telephonically. The finance committee accepted the audit results, and we’ll talk about them a little bit later on. And the Board has now accepted the audit results as of last night. We reviewed the insurance, the type of insurance where if the Board says something stupid, the lawyers will help us out. And the insurance company will help pay for the lawyers. That sort of thing. Looked at the lease status and tried to figure out whether it makes sense to extend our lease in this down market. It’s a great time, because our current lease is actually more expensive than the going rate. So maybe it’s a time to renegotiate and get a longer lease at a lower rate. We’ll go off and try and see whether that’s possible, and then reviewed the first quarter actual versus budget. We’ll take a look at that. We looked – did a review of the fees, and I’ll show you some slides on how the fees work and who is paying what level, what percentage of the fees and things like that.

There were some expense categorization stuff as to where to put some things such as the outreach effort, now, the CEO letter effort, where to put that sort of stuff. We needed a plan as to who is going to do the audit next year. It’s one of the things we need to look at from time to time is whether we want to keep the same auditor or move to a new one. It’s a general good practice in the industry to move to a new auditor every few years so that Bob doesn’t get too comfortable with the local auditor person or vice versa and slip things through. So so far we’re going to keep with the same auditor this year. We’ll think about it next year. But that’s the way it goes. And we looked at the reserves. You’ll see this was not one of the positive parts of our meeting was looking at the reserves. You’ll see that.

We got the auditor’s report and we got the qualifying letter which is sort of the cover letter on the auditor’s report and basically the auditor said, it’s okay, what they (ARIN Staff) said was real. So what’s written in our financial statements is following general accepted practices. They did not find any internal deficiencies and Bob didn’t stiff-arm them. It was well done and got good cooperation with ARIN staff. So that’s all very good. It’s about as clean a report as you can get. So I’m quite happy that we don’t have any issues where the auditor comes and said, hey, by the way we may want to rethink this.

So here’s the statement of financial position as the auditors have approved. Current assets and liabilities, et cetera et cetera, from 2008 compared to 2007. We’re partway through 2009. We’ll mention that a little bit later on. We’ve got a reasonable amount of assets. It’s down considerable from last year. As I said, the reserves took a hit. And I’ll show you that in a minute. The real world is really the real world. A little up on property and equipment and things like that. Money market fund we had set aside money to pay ICANN and we paid them. And now it’s on a regular basis. So it’s no longer being a set aside so that won’t show up as the same kind of category in the future.

Liabilities: Accounts payable, et cetera et cetera. Current total liabilities 5.8 million versus 6 million, not current but the end of 2008 versus the end of 2007, 6 million, about the same. Unrestricted net assets, down because of the hit in the reserves. The registrations, up a little bit last year. And you can see the split here that maintenance fees versus end-user registrations, et cetera. Contributions. This is the stuff that’s come in the meeting and things like that. Is that right? I look to the guy who actually knows. Membership transfers and dues, et cetera.

Program services: You can see that Mark is a persuasive fellow and has persuaded us to spend a lot more money on actually doing things, and so we’re in the middle of a burst of that. It won’t last forever. But it’s going to last for a little while and Mark talked about some of the things he’s doing and money well spent, it seems from the reports and what he showed.

Registration services: This is about even. Member services is about even. Outreach, you heard a lot of Richard talking about the outreach efforts, and so it’s a significant effort and I think it’s worthwhile. The Board thinks it’s worthwhile. And so we’ll keep doing that sort of thing. Support services about the same.

Change in net assets. That’s how much money we got in excess of expenses. Last year it was 1.2 million in excess of – 2007 it was 1.2 million in excess of expenses and 2008 it was 300,000. We were trying to – we were trying to get it to be about even that the revenue from various, all of our activities was even with our expenses. We got closer last year. We’re getting closer this year for a different reason. But the investments took a hit of $7.2 million hit. And that’s a biggie. We weren’t in CDs. We are in CDs in some of our reserves. But we weren’t in part of it. We had done very well previously, and you’ll see that in a slide or two. And we didn’t do well last year. We are actually doing pretty well this year. We’re estimating around a million dollars in return. We’re a little bit up so far this year. But that’s from a low, from a $7 million hole and we’re digging out of the hole and getting there. So we’re unrestricted assets beginning of the year was 23 million versus 20 million and the end of the year the end of 2008 had unrestricted assets, about 17 million. Which is enough to get us around for a while. It’s not two years’ worth of reserves, but it’s more than a year’s worth of reserves.

I mention that we’re going to talk a little bit about the revenue and who is paying the revenue. This just shows – and John is going to talk during the open mic session, John is going to ask people to think about this, because this is one of the issues we have that’s come up on the mailing list a number of times, is the ratio of between what kinds of fees we charge, ARIN charges, and the scale of the resources that somebody might have. We have a reverse progressive tax system here so that the bigger you are, the less you pay per unit, which is great for some people and other people think that’s unfair. And so that’s one of the things that probably should be discussed a little later this morning. But here we have that the small- and medium-sized organizations pay the vast majority, the vast majority of the revenue and yet the cumulative space, this is not legacy space, this is space after ARIN was created, that the vast majority of the space is in the extra-large category.

So I just queue that up as data background for future discussion.

Here’s what we’ve been doing on the reserves. You can see the reserves were growing quite smartly up until last year. Now, some of that was growing because we’re actually getting pretty good return from the investments. Quite a nice return from the investments, and part of it because we were getting revenue in excess of expenses and putting it into the reserves. The red block is the decline last year. So it was a good chunk of money but it’s – percentage-wise it’s not as bad as my personal retirement funds. Bob did better than that. And, as I said, we are growing the reserves this year by about a million dollars. That’s the estimate, anyway.

The 2009 budget as approved and in force now, total revenue is projected to be about 13 million, of which about 6.8 million on personnel; operation, 2.4 million; breaks down into the various different components. All this, by the way, is on the web page, on the website. Our budgets and the accounting report and all of that kind of stuff we put up there so if you are having trouble sleeping some night or just want to dig up dirt, this may not be a particularly productive place to dig up dirt, but you have the opportunity to try.

General office administration: about 5.9 million. A bunch of outreach stuff there. Bad debt expense. That’s the guesstimate of who is not going to pay. Bob nods. I have to look at him to see if I’m talking the truth. Lee got all that straight. I have to take a while to learn all this stuff.

Travel is a reasonable hit but we do a lot of travel. The Board and the AC and the staff all travel to all those places that Richard was talking about, but also to the other RIR meetings and the like and Cathy goes off to commune with ICANN and the ITU. Better her than me. And so we do spend a reasonable amount of money on travel.

Internet support: we support ICANN. And we do research and support – we do kinds of things that help support CAIDA, and Jean Camp doing the report that she gave the other day. NRO expenses. Total expenses, about 15.9 million. And that’s going to take off about $2 million, 2.6 million out of the reserves.

Any questions? Any actual factual questions, I’ll ask Bob to come up. But if there’s any questions about presentation style, let me know.

MS. SCHILLER: Did I understand –

MR. BRADNER: Starting with name.

MS> SCHILLER: Heather Schiller, Verizon Business. Did I understand that you just said that the Jean Camp presentation you paid money for some of the research and work behind that?

MR. BRADNER: Yes. We do support the CAIDA and others on research and the Board can commission – Board members can commission research if they think it will be helpful for their deliberations.

MR. CURRAN: I wanted to pick up on that point, Scott.

MR. BRADNER: Go to it, Mr. Acting Chair.

MR. CURRAN: Briefly, we have some standing research that we pay for. I guess it’s an Internet support, community support. That includes things like broadcasting the Internet meetings, includes support for CAIDA each year. We also, as Scott indicated, from time to time if a Board member says I’d like research into a particular topic, we have a process by which we go out and we’ll actually commission that sort of study.

That’s actually required because the Board members have a duty to be able to say they’re well informed. So if the question is: Are there alternatives and what are the implications of alternatives to various allocations other than the ones we’ve been using and a Board member says I don’t feel as though the expertise of the organization is enough to do their duty, we have an obligation to actually provide that Board member what they need to be well informed.

So from time to time we will do that.

MR. BRADNER: Lee. Not Lee. Bill. One of the other skinny guys.
(Laughter)

MR. WOODCOCK: With a beard. You can’t really tell us apart.

So regardless of what one feels about the merit of any particular piece of research that may have happened, part and parcel of research is that sometimes it’s useful and sometimes you wind up with a dud and sometimes you wind up with completely unexpected results. And you know that’s kind of the deal, right? So looking at any individual result and saying, well, we shouldn’t have paid for that, it wasn’t worthwhile, it discounts the need for being able to do it and also for results that wind up being very useful to processes.

MS. SCHILLER: The two things I was going to ask is, one, would you be willing to tell the community what the framework of your specific request was for that piece of research, and then also before that research gets presented to the community make it known to the community that this is the result of a request from the Board?

MR. CURRAN: So this was a new set of activities we were undergoing. Sort of going down that direction, and actually the Board has met a couple times this week, probably more than you might expect.

MR. BRADNER: More than the Board expected.

MR. CURRAN: More than we expected. And we had discussion of additional work to be done and we’re going to create a framework for how to handle these in a way that people understand what we’re doing and why we’re doing it.

I will say some of this, if I commission a report that says which organizational policies would endanger ARIN and how – we might not make that report a report that we tell you and release because it would endanger the organization and its defenses.

To the extent possible, we’ll have it all up on the website.

MS. SCHILLER: Which is fine but before her presentation I didn’t understand that this is something that the Board had commissioned. Then I hear Scott say that. Then I thought: What was the Board actually asking for from this presentation? Because I couldn’t tell.

MR. CURRAN: We’ll actually make that much clearer in the future. I do agree.

MR. BRADNER: If you look at the budget on the web page you’ll see that there’s a couple hundred thousand dollars set aside for this sort of thing. Now, it hasn’t all been used and it may not be, but it’s up to that amount.

Front microphone.

MR. WILLIAMSON: David Williamson, Tellme Networks. You show the two graphs that show income from different sized organizations and then the pie chart after it with the – yeah those two – with the IPv6 consumption. Do you also have another chart that shows just number of organizations in each category?

MR. BRADNER: I don’t have percentages here. So if you’re quick at math and know what the total is, you can figure it out.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Hurts my head to do on the fly. It would be an interesting piece of data.

MR. BRADNER: Do you know how many members we have? Bob?

MR. STRATTON: It’s roughly 70 extra-large and around 1,600 small, 500 extra-small. 650 medium, I think. I’m unsure on that number. That’s the breakdown.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Interesting. Thanks.

MR. LEIBRAND: Scott Leibrand, ARIN AC, Internap. Could you speak to any crystal ball, forecasting projections you’ve got for how you see things going out in the medium term, more than this year or next year, but do you see major changes required in the way that the finances are done to meet the needs of the organization and the community?

MR. BRADNER: Staff was asked to do some projections going out. I don’t have that here. And probably we should have put that in there. But we did go over it in the FinCom. And the projections are that the renewals is a big component. And that’s going to continue to be the big component for quite a while so that we’re seeing an increase – as I recall, an increase in the revenue on a steady state, even after v4 exhaustion from the renewal process.

So at that point up to some reasonable time when those renewals drop off because of real switchover to v6, it’s probably not a big change. After that, the world ends and film at 11. John, would you like to say something?

MR. CURRAN: What Scott said exactly. With our present financial structure, the adoption of v6 doesn’t per se significantly change our revenue structure or expense structure. Doesn’t significantly endanger the organization or pose a unique opportunity. It’s the long long-term release of resources that will actually change the structure.

Now, that of course doesn’t preclude the Board from looking and saying we need to look at fee structures or we need to look at maintenance versus new requests. There are things we might do to optimize between them but per se if we did nothing, presently the financial structure’s fine.

MR. BRADNER: We will include the staff projections for future in the next presentation. I think that would be a good thing to include.

MR. HUGHES: Aaron Hughes. So if it comes down to it and the world is going to end, v6 hasn’t been adopted and we need to go after a larger advertising campaign much like the digital cable cutover from analog or your pulse telephones going away –

MR. BRADNER: We just get the FCC to postpone the run out? (Laughter)

MR. HUGHES: No, no, I was going to ask are we thinking about reserving some funds for a larger campaign near that deadline? Obviously the policy doesn’t exist. Hasn’t even been proposed or maybe CJ, Cathy may have proposed something like an end-date policy a long, long time ago. But if that were to come down to it, do we have funds in reserve for that kind of advertising campaign?

MR. BRADNER: We do have some reserve funds. It’s not likely that that campaign would be undertaken in this calendar year. So it would be in this calendar year’s budget, but we do have reserves in this year’s budget. It’s certainly something to be considered for next year’s budget.

Any other questions? Well, thank you. And thank Bob for the real numbers.
(Applause)

MR. CURRAN: Okay. Next on we’re going to catch up with our reports so we’re going to have Louis Lee come and present the ASO AC report. We didn’t get to it yesterday. Come on up, Louis.
(Applause)

NRO NC Report

MR. LEE: Thank you, folks. Louis Lee, Equinix, NRO Number Council. This is a campaign to recycle your badge if you’re not going to be using it after the meeting. There’s a box over at the registration desk and ARIN would love that. Now I’m Paul, too.
(Laughter)

All right. So you saw me. I am this year the chair of the ASO Address Council, also the NRO Number Council. Last year I was the chair. And I was the AC nomination committee observer. I’m also on the communications and procedures committee.

We have Jason. Jason, do you want to stand up? Hi, Jason. He was on the Nom Com and currently on the ICANN Appointment Procedure Review Committee and also the Global Policy Proposal Facilitator team, made up of a group of individuals who watch closely the global policy proposals that come through and work with the rest of the Address Council.

Martin Hannigan, are you still here? Okay. He was an AC Nom Com observer and also on the Communications and Procedures committee. Although he’s listed as an observer here, and officially he is, he’s done an awful lot of work for the committee itself. So I may not classify him as just an observer, but, regardless, that’s how it ended up.

Okay. Our current members are made up of three individuals from each of the five RIRs, so there are 15 members from around the world.

So what do we do? We appoint seats nine and 10 to the ICANN Board of Directors, appoint a representative to the Nominating Committee, and this Nom Com will put people in various seats in the ICANN organization. We objectively process RIR-related global policies, meaning we make sure that the policy proposal within each region follows that region’s policy development process. We also then offer advice to the ICANN board on RIR-related issues, and we develop internal procedures, just to keep going.

I’m not sure I really want to go through this slide since you all heard about how global policy is done. But it’s just letting you know they all have to synch up before we put it up to the ICANN board.

So what’s happened since the last time we met at the ARIN meeting? So the global policy for the allocation of the remaining IPv4 address space, also known as 2007-23 or The N=1 Policy. This was unanimously ratified by the ICANN board of directors, and there is no issue in implementing that, as we’ve heard from Leo. Relating to that policy proposal, that policy, now, at the time there were 32 unallocated /8s, as of yesterday there are now 30 unallocated /8s. Two went to APNIC. And then that 30 is counting the five that is set aside to be given out to the five RIRs. So there are in essence 25 remaining in the free pool.

We attended a couple of the ICANN meetings and participated in the joint SOAC open-discussion sessions where members of our group talked with the other supporting organizations and advisory councils to ICANN about various global issues that affect them. We also appointed Ray Plzak to the ICANN board. This was done last week. There were several issues, several by about more than a dozen, raised adherence to the appointment process. We deemed these issues to not have affected the election itself, but we will produce in the minutes and report to the public on how we arrived at this decision, and we have a review committee that we’ve put together to improve on our process. So that will be open to all, too.

Now, what’s happening this year? We have a draft policy that we’re watching. We had extensive discussion on that yesterday, the 2009-3. The Address Council is going to have a face-to-face meeting coming up in May in Panama City, and we’ll hammer out some of our more important issues there. There’s an ICANN meeting coming up in June, also one in October, where we’ll participate in the joint SOAC discussion. And we will be appointing a new ASO AC member to the ICANN nom com. Hartmut’s position is up. And we’ll initiate a process to appoint the next ICANN board director. So if you have any suggestions, please let us know.

And thank you to the ARIN board for all the time, Ray for his support, John for his advice and support by the ARIN staff, especially for Nate’s time and effort, Einar for – let’s see, for the fantastic job he does managing policy and making everything easy to find.
(Applause)

Therese for dealing with the travel details, late e-mails, incomplete paperwork.
(Applause)

The NRO executive council, which is made up of the RIR CEOs, for the time, great advice, support of the – especially by the ASO secretariat, which this year is the RIPE NCC, specifically Nick and Fergal.
(Applause)

And to you. Big hand, big hand.
(Applause)

John Curran: Any questions for Louis on the ASO AC report? Thank you, Louis. Great job to you and the team.
(Applause).

Next up we have ARIN’s Advisory Council and our chair, John Sweeting.

ARIN Advisory Council Report

MR. SWEETING: Did you take it with you, Louis? Hopefully this will be quick. I’m John Sweeting, Time Warner Cable and ARIN AC. So here is your Advisory Council; picture taken in January in Reston during our face-to-face meeting and initial workshop. There are 15 elected members. Each signed three year terms. And they’re mostly spread around this room. Hopefully you’ve all had a chance to meet them and talk to them during this week, for these three days.

The AC’s main role is, of course, as an advisory council in the policy area. Our role in the policy development process is it follows the little five steps around the circle there: evaluating the policy proposals that are submitted, developing draft policy based on need, presenting the draft policy at the Public Policy Meeting for discussion, to determine that policy meets the needs requirements through consensus, and then recommending those draft policies that meet those requirements to the Board of Trustees for adoption and implementation.

Quick slide on 2008 in review: Meetings attended. There were four ARIN meetings, the regular two and two Caribbean meetings. Two NANOG, seven other RIR events and meetings, and then there was volunteers that attended several of the outreach programs that Richard talked about earlier. And then in the proposal activity, recommended seven policies for adoption. Abandoned two, and from what I understand from the AC members that I’ve talked to, there was a lot of effort put into the transfer policy. If you want to know more about that, I would suggest just corner one of the AC members that was involved in that last year.

So for what’s happened so far in 2009, as far as proposals, we’ve had five that were submitted and turned into draft policies, two that have been abandoned, and one that is pending acceptance or abandonment on our docket. Of the draft policies, there’ve been two adopted policies. There are currently five draft policies, three are new and two are carryovers, and there’s one that’s still being developed. And there’s also one emergency draft policy that we’re working with.

Meetings for 2009: The list is there and who is going to be representing the AC at those meetings: the NANOG meetings, RIPE, APNIC, LACNIC, AFRINIC, and there are 11 or 12 of the outreach programs that we’re going to attend with Richard and his staff, and he had those up earlier.

Besides just our role in the policy development process, some of the other roles that we assume when asked. We work with the fellowship program. Heather, I believe, is our participant on the selection committee. And there are three – Bill Darte, Cathy and Scott – act as mentors for the fellows that have been selected here at the meeting. On the outreach program, we participate in the ARIN booth that you saw pictures of from Richard. We discuss all the areas that Richard had put up here at those and promote ARIN meetings. And some of the other programs, we have Marla who participates at IETF and in the IPv6 area. And one of the new things we did at this meeting was participate in lunch table discussion. Some other things we do is participate in the mailing list, and there’s several things that we do that we get asked to do by the Board or ARIN staff.

I thank everybody that Leo thanked or that Louis thanked, because we get all the great support from the same people for the same thing.

So thank you.
(Applause)

MR. CURRAN: Any questions for Mr. Sweeting? Get up there. Get back.

MR. LEE: And thank you. And thank you. And you. Especially for all the work you guys are doing on the global policy. It makes my life a lot easier.

MR. DARTE: Bill Darte on Advisory Council. One of the activities we don’t get enough of is that personal interaction with a lot of you. I’m sure you have perspectives and things that you’re sharing on the PPML, but there might be other things that you’d like to say or find out or whatever, and so I just reiterate that all the AC members are anxious to talk to any one of you personally and individually as you’d like.

MR. CURRAN: Thank you, John.
(Applause).

MR. CURRAN: And the last presentation is always the ARIN Board of Trustees report. And it will presented by our new chairman, Paul Vixie.

ARIN Board of Trustees Report

MR. VIXIE: This is my first such presentation. I hope you’ll bear with me.

Really, all of this information is already public, if you read the minutes that are published after our meetings. You can find out what we’ve been up to, but in case there’s just too much information there, here is a summary of our recent activities since I guess October when the previous chair gave a similar report.

We have ratified the following proposals. Most of which are not controversial. Obviously 2008-6 turned out to be somewhat controversial. I’m not sure that everyone in the ARIN community knew that there was a transfer proposal being worked by the AC in the last year or two. But there is one, and according to the announcement earlier this week, it will be deployed in June. It will show up in the NRPM and it will be available for use and again the rest of these are not very controversial and we’re running low on time. I’m going to skip through those.

Management actions: It’s important to note that the Board doesn’t manage in any sort of operational sort of way. But we are elected by the membership to oversee the management team, hire the new CEO that sort of thing and to give them strategic direction. Here is some of the direction that has come about as a result of Board deliberations, meetings and so on.

There is now a four quarter forward-looking goals and budget. In other words, we don’t just ask for a budget at the end of the year to say what is going to happen next year and then we approve that or we don’t; there is at any given time a standing four-quarter budget. This is a fad that has come through industry in recent years and we’ve adopted it and it’s a good one. We also have each program in the budget, each activity, each thing we’re spending your money on is actually written down as to how we will measure success and how we’re doing in terms of timeliness and budget on each of those. So if you want to compare this to employee reviews, it means that you’re getting your feedback from your boss all the time rather than at the end of the year you find out you’ve been doing poorly or well.

There is a new RSA. Last couple of years we have decided the RSA several times. I like the current one. It’s clean. It’s sleek. Counsel did a lot of really good work on that. Staff did a lot of really good work on that. So feel free to upgrade to it. It’s not a requirement. But anybody who has signed a previous version is welcome to upgrade.

We have a new PDP. Again, thanks to various people, including AC, staff, Scott, we have a lot of people who are interested in how policy gets made. It is a new PDP, and I have heard that there are still some rough spots. So it might be subject to further revision, but not as extensive as the rewrite that PDP is over IRPEP.

Obviously we confirmed the 2008 election results. That’s why we have the current AC and the current Board. Seated the current Board who then elected officers and set up their committees. That was done in January.

John has already spoken about the CEO letters. And ultimately it’s for staff to do that, but the idea of, gee, can’t we notify the other fiduciaries in the mix – in other words, the executives among our members – can’t we let them know what’s going on in case the technical people in those empires cannot get face time with the boss, maybe we can help out by letting the boss know that there is something happening and it’s v6 and they need to pay attention and maybe find the person inside their organization who has been trying to get face time and give it to them. So that’s already been reported on. That initiated inside the Board and might be able to imagine who on the Board thought that was a great idea. All of us now, but it came ultimately from one guy, and this process review, business process engineering and automation. It tends to be either you love it or you hate it, and sad for anybody who doesn’t love it. But you save so much money year to year by investing in advance in knowing what you’re going to do and how you’re going to do it and how you’re going to measure it, that I really recommend if you’re not currently a process engineering wonk, that you go Google that or study it a little bit and see if you can take some of that home with you.

So the relationship with the other RIRs is good. But it evolves continuously. Some Board members like to travel more than others. But all of us try to get out to RIR meetings, meet the other boards, meet members of the other RIRs, get a sense of what the rest of the world looks like. Our president is a member of the NRO EC, and so we have pretty good continuous relations with that. But, again, NRO is a construct and it is subject to sort of periodic growth, organic revision, evolution.

ICANN, as Cathy mentioned, is doing its periodic upheavals trying to decide whether it’s going to be in the U.S. government portfolio or not. We will no doubt have a public comment on the notice of inquiry that was released a week ago. We also do try to keep abreast of ITU. I think the Internet came out of nowhere from ITU’s point of view and they’re a little bit surprised that there are numbers that are being used for communications that they don’t have any part in allocating. I think that’s okay, because I think we do a pretty good job. So I’m not worried about it. But sometimes I’m worried that they’re worried about it. So rest assured that your Board is keeping abreast of everything ITU is doing that might affect our space.

Should we still have time for open mic today, we’re going to talk a little bit about fee philosophy and whether we want to stay with cost recovery or move to a couple of different echelons that have been talked about.

IPv4 depletion: I know that everybody who takes the time to read PPML, takes the time to attend these meetings, is interested in or worried about IPv4 depletion. I think on the Board we worry about that more than we worry about any other single topic. IPv6 wasn’t really strongly contemplated at the time that ARIN was founded. We were originally the IPv4 company in a sense. And we have to go through this knothole, we as an organization, we as an industry have to go through this knothole and the Board of directors – the Board of Trustees, excuse me, spends a lot of time making sure that that goes as well as it can go, which includes this outreach and advocacy on the IPv6. So let me add to the other voices who have said this week: If you’re not using v6, you should try it. It’s fun. It’s free – not free. But it’s cheap. And speaking personally, we have been running v6 dual-stack for years, and the only person who ever complains about it is Leo. I think he could find something else to complain about if not for that. So try it. Really.
(Laughter)

Any questions about recent activities of the Board?

Open Microphone

MR. CURRAN: Any questions for Paul?

Thank you, Paul.
(Applause)

And as we wind up our meeting we end with an open mic session, I think, if we have enough time – time says, yes, a brief open mic. And, as always, the Chair gets to moderate that.

Look at that look. Wielding his newfound powers. Come on up.

MR. HOWARD: Lee Howard, ARIN Board of Trustees. I’d like to say to our remote participants: Hi to John’s mom.
(Laughter)

MR. VIXIE: Owen.

MR. DELONG: Owen DeLong. While I’m a member of the AC, I’m speaking now strictly as myself. We have a general concept that if you have v4 and v6 resources you pay for the greater of the two or one of the two. But there is a circumstance where you end up having to pay for both. And that is if you are an LRSA IPv4 holder and you get an IPv6 end-user assignment you actually end up having to create or ARIN creates for you a second organization ID with a suffix -Z. You end up with two ORGs paying two ORG maintenance fees. I don’t know if that is the deliberate intent or if that’s an accidental side effect of treating LRSA and RSA separately.

MR. VIXIE: John?

MR. CURRAN: I’ll look around for staff for a moment. Leslie or Bob, is it true that you end up with a separate ORG ID as a result?

MR. STRATTON: Yes.

MR. CURRAN: Is that intentional or a side effect of the implementation of the process? It’s how it is, okay. So and I guess, Owen, the question would be, you’re saying if it’s a side effect, it’s an unnecessary one.

MR. DELONG: My statement is if that’s not how the board intended the fee structure be applied to people, there is a need for change to how ARIN is implementing it.

MR. CURRAN: Acknowledged.

MR. WOODCOCK: Woody. As one of the people who signed the LRSA and unexpectedly found himself with an extra ORG ID, I didn’t really think about the extra $100 a year, which I don’t think is a big deal. I mean for me. But it did seem like an unnecessary bit of hackery. And I can see how people using the WHOIS to figure out what belonged to whom might find it misleading if they looked somebody up and found one set of resources and then subsequently discovered that there were a whole additional set of resources which were invisible to them because they did not think to check another ORG ID.

MR. VIXIE: Luckily we’re in the middle of a significant business process reengineering effort allowing the opportunity to examine such things and correct them. So got it.

MR. SCHILLER: Jason Schiller, Verizon Business. Now that we have the new policy development process and the Advisory Council has much more power to edit, modify, combine and rewrite policy, I think it’s important that we address one of the concerns that we had talked about previously, which is it becomes much more critical what people we put on the Advisory Council. So I’m wondering, given that there’s going to be elections this fall, what are we doing to change the election process? What are we doing to make sure that the community and the membership can ask the appropriate questions of the potential candidates so they can select Advisory Council members that they think – I think that’s the gist of it. Go ahead.

MR. CURRAN: I didn’t plant you in the audience to ask that question. But it’s a very good question. And it’s one that I probably should have planted you in the audience to ask if you didn’t come up.

MR. SCHILLER: So just for full disclosure. I was very concerned at the new policy development process when we were talking about it – I guess it was about a year ago. And my concern was originators, once they gave the text in, had very little control over what happens to it. And I tried to stand up and say it’s very important that people make efforts to work with reasonable authors. Or I guess I should say originators. So, for example, I would like to ask all the potential Advisory Council candidates: Are you willing to make a reasonable effort to work with authors when they’re reasonable? And I’d like to hear the answer to a question like that. And I’m sure there’s other questions that other people would like to ask as well.

MR. CURRAN: So let me ask on both counts. So the first one is that obviously we’ve had some AC board interactions talking about the PDP process and the need to continue to keep authors well informed and work with them. And we’re going to continue to have those.

But on the specific question of how do you ask a question of an incoming set of candidates, we’ve always had the ability to submit questions for the Nom Com and have them used in the Nom Com in how they qualify candidates. We’ll actually be putting out a call in a few weeks, I think in a few weeks, for questions to be used for Board and AC candidates. And those questions will actually – the Nom Com is going to need to weed them, combine them, and select them. But the final list of questions will be used and given to every candidate and their responses will be part of their curriculum vitae, their application to be on it. So there will be an opportunity to put a question in and have it asked of every candidate for the AC.

MR. SCHILLER: Great, thank you.

MR. WOODCOCK: In a sort of related – not exactly answer, but tangent, the board has had a series of subcommittees looking at issues of voting and membership and representation and so forth and examining a fairly wide range of different possibilities.

And so feedback from the community about how you think voting should work, how you think the membership structure should work, all these kinds of things are really valuable to us, because they’re in play. They’re in discussion. And input helps us get it right.

MR. VIXIE: Over here. Do you want to move to the center microphone?

MR. DANIEL: Is this one on? Yes. Excuse me.

MR. CURRAN: Do you want to move to the center question and we’ll come back to that mic? Stacy, go ahead.

MS. HUGHES: Stacy Hughes channeling Jo Rhett, Silicon Valley Colocation. Can we get a good diagram of the approaching wall for IPv4 exhaustion. And he’s got a bunch of comments, but what he is asking for essentially is like a PowerPoint for CEOs.

MR. CURRAN: Okay. So actually that touches a request that I got at the break, which reminds me of a request from last year which we didn’t move on because it wasn’t timely but now it is. ARIN needs to have a standing slide deck that can be used by anyone so that if Richard can’t be there or I can’t be there and you want to give something to your CEO or you want to present something to your community group that intelligently says who ARIN is and what this IPv4 thing is and what the wall is, you can pull the appropriate slides down and give them. And I think that PowerPoint for someone to use for CEOs would be one of those little slide decks we’ll put online.

MR. HUGHES: It might be a great parallel to the wiki link on the web page about v6. Clearly the v6 information is all technically focused and has very little high-level information.

MR. CURRAN: That’s a good point. That should be on the get IPv6 info and similar pages.

MR. DANIEL: Rudy Daniel, ICT for Development, Caribbean, and ARIN fellow. Just moving on from Richard’s outreach slide, which he did show that ARIN participate in with both the CTU in the Caribbean and I think the Internet governance regime, there is also another group which I think that ARIN ought to perhaps post notices when you’re able to, and that is – that group is called CIVIC, which is a virtual multi-stakeholder group, which was formed sometime around 2003. So we’ve now been going for six years, which is pretty good.

And we are on the Net only. And it’s a group that not only has the legal people. It also has government ministers and quite a few consultants from the region is in that group and also technical staff people. So I’d just like to mention that. I will send some information on the group to Bill Darte.

MR. CURRAN: The ICT stakeholder community?

MR. DANIEL: Correct.

MR. CURRAN: Richard, if you want to talk to him afterward, we’ll get information to you on how to participate.

MR. DANIEL: That’s great. Lastly, I would really like to share my appreciation to Bill Darte for being an excellent resource to me while I’ve been here for the last few days.

MR. CURRAN: Go Bill.
(Applause)

While we’re clapping I’d actually like to thank all of the fellows who are here and all of their mentors. Thank you.
(Applause)

David.

MR. FARMER: David Farmer, University of Minnesota, ARIN AC. One thing real quick. I want to apologize for losing it at the mic a little bit yesterday.

SEPAKER: (Inaudible)

MR. FARMER: Exactly. Nobody has ever lost their – or nobody has ever apologized.
(Laughter)

So I’m apologizing and just wanted to say what triggered me was the whole hobby thing, and the Internet was a hobby at one time. So let’s not attack hobbies. But what I really wanted to stand up and say is I would like to challenge everyone in this room to take the slide deck that John talked about and take it to a community group, like your computer society or any of those kind of technical groups, and give that presentation. Because John and ARIN can come in from the top; we’ve got to come up from the bottom. And they can’t do that. We have to do that.

MR. CURRAN: Okay. We’ll have a slide deck up in, say, a week’s time. We don’t have a current reference, but we’ll have a clean set of reference slides for that purpose.

MR. WOODCOCK: Something I’d ask for people’s opinion.

MR. CURRAN: Who are you?

MR. WOODCOCK: Bill Woodcock, Board. Ask for people’s opinion about. There was briefly some talk about having three meetings a year rather than two, which I was not wildly excited about because I’m somebody who already has to go to rather a lot of meetings. On the other hand, the talk was about having those three meetings be one in Canada, one in the U.S., one in the Caribbean. And that, on the other hand, struck me as a relatively good idea to have a kind of structured, sort of expected way of distributing the meetings throughout the region. I wonder if people have thoughts on that. It’s not something that I think is in play in the imminent future, because we’ve got meetings already sort of planned out for at least a year and a half or so.

MR. CURRAN: Let me give one little update. For purposes of 2009 and planning, we looked at the attendance at the Caribbean Sector Meetings we had and in fact some of you actually probably got the message from me saying: Okay, we’re outnumbering the attendees at the meeting. If we send the board and the AC and we all converge and we only have a dozen attendees, it’s hard to justify ARIN’s participation in a full ARIN member meeting in these regions. So while we’re going to do significant outreach at a lot of events in the Caribbean, the economics – and I mean the economics of the climate in that region – hasn’t allowed enough people to participate if we have a local meeting.

This is still under consideration one way or another. We definitely want feedback. But recognize the sensitivity on ARIN’s part isn’t to get down into those regions. It’s to get down to those regions in a way that’s cost-effective and makes sense. So definitely would welcome comments from the floor.

MR. VIXIE: Staff comment.

MS. HAMLIN: Susan Hamlin. One of the things we’re considering and would like some feedback is in 2010/11 going forward we would alternate the spring meeting between Canada one year, Caribbean the next, back to Canada, keep the fall meeting back to back with NANOG in the U.S. So I would be interested in feedback on that idea.

MR. OBERMAN: Or wherever NANOG chooses to meet, which might itself be in Canada or the Caribbean? NANOG does meet in both of those locations on occasion. Well, the Caribbean, once. Canada rather infrequently frequently. Kevin Oberman, ESnet. More or less in alignment with the last comment. NANOG, as you’re probably aware, did hold its last meeting in Santo Domingo. And while Santo Domingo did an awesome job of hosting the conference, I think the meeting was one of the best in terms of quality of presentation; attendance was, shall we say, rather sparse. NANOG, which, of course, has to try to break even on these meetings, certainly didn’t on this one. And so it was – it’s very questionable whether it will make sense to – and there were virtually no local participants at that meeting. Just about everybody who attended the NANOG meeting actually – even though there was a strong outreach effort to locals, just about everybody was from the States, and lots of people who usually attend from the States could not get corporate approval for the international travel. Santo Domingo might be just a short flight, but the paperwork is long.

MR. DANIEL: Rudy Daniel, ICT for Development, Caribbean. With regards to the Caribbean meetings, I think the virtual group I just suggested could well assist in actually getting some membership to meetings. I think we have the CTU and then you have those – there are some ad hoc Internet governance groups, about two or three of them around the region. And I think CIVIC is probably the most truly representative of a multi-stakeholder community in the Caribbean in terms of the Internet.

MR. VIXIE: I want to say that I’m going to close the microphones. We’re past noon. And I know John’s got his hand up about a fee-related discussion. If you’re planning to speak, get up to a microphone.

MR. HUGHES. I’m sure you’re expecting this comment. But I would love to see, aside from the political and financial issues, NANOG and ARIN combine their meetings. I don’t care if it’s two or three. October is still very hard for people who attend NANOG, GPF, ARIN and RIPE, particularly when they stick them a week apart and then you have to fly back to your house, et cetera. Love the idea of moving it around. Don’t particularly care if it’s oscillating between Caribbean or Canada. The one note about Canada is the winter meetings in Canada are horrifying and would prefer not to do that again.

MR. VIXIE: Microphones are closed. Stacy will be the last speaker.

MS. HUGHES: Can I speak for myself and for my question?

MR. VIXIE: Yes, please.

MS. HUGHES: Okay. Stacy Hughes. Bernadette of the CTU down in the Caribbean did note that Caribbean operators often suffer from over-meetings. So that could explain partially why those meetings are not so well attended.

Now channeling Martin Levy: What’s the percentage of records within the ARIN database that’s from Canada, U.S., and the Caribbean? That would influence where the meetings should be.

MR. CURRAN: Percentage of records is an interesting number. It’s not attendees, it’s not address space; it’s individual records. So we’ll need to figure out what that is to answer that, but it’s a good point.

I have a question that actually the Board tasked me with asking, and it has to do with two aspects. First, earlier today we saw the treasurer’s report. We saw a pair of donuts, one of which showed the fees paid in total by each category size of membership to ARIN, and then we saw the space held by each category of size where the extra-large slice of the donut went to the extra-large membership category for space, obviously. The Board worries about things like that. Obviously if you take that graph and you produce it by number of members, the extra-large category is very small. It’s about 60 of them compared to the thousands of members we have. And it’s a balance because while it does take longer to process a large request, they don’t come in that frequently. We are concerned making sure that we’re in synchronization with the community about what it feels about those fees.

The second fee topic that’s come up is that we’ve had recently discussion about fee waivers for various categories of address holders. This includes particular network types, includes not-for-profits in general. It includes charitable and similar organizations. Presently ARIN doesn’t distinguish. We have everyone sign the same paperwork and pay the same fees, figuring that the folks of special financial benefit or incorporation benefit get that from other mechanisms, and I guess we’re looking for feedback as to whether or not our fee philosophy is what this community wants.

Oh, look, people at the microphones. Paul, do you want to run this? Do you want me to run it?

MR. VIXIE: I will recognize Leo who can ask his question, which you can then answer.
(Laughter)

MR. BICKNELL: Thank you. Leo Bicknell, ARIN AC, ISC. Speaking from a personal point of view, I tend to err more on the cost per IP should be more on par. Putting on my AC hat and my ISC hat, simultaneously, I see how that is problematic. I do think, though, that there is a slightly related issue in that we’ve been trying many mechanisms to get a hold of CEOs and other decision-makers with regard to IPv4 resources. In an awful lot of organizations, if the exact same bill comes in every year, it gets paid because it’s in the budget and often a fairly low person in AP can say, yep, same as last year, and move on with life. And so what I would actually like to advocate is that the v4 fees go up. I actually don’t think it matters a whole lot if it’s $1 or a million dollars or anything else, as long as it doesn’t match the value before. I think that pushes it up a couple levels in the organization and somebody has to say, oh, yeah, we do pay for that all the time. What is that again? Why are we paying for it? Who are these ARIN people? And that could be a valuable thing. And I think that perhaps at the same time both in terms of getting parity and in terms of getting the right person’s attention, an extra-small organization may well notice a dollar and a large corporation may well need it to go up a thousand dollars to make it take notice. So there may need to be a little adjustment there.

MR. WOODCOCK: Clarification. Do you think that IPv4 fees should go up for people who are already paying fees for already-allocated resources or do you think they should only go up for new allocations?

MR. BICKNELL: I think the value is for people who already have resources. I think whether or not it affects the first-timers, at least in my opinion, is largely irrelevant. I don’t have an opinion whether that’s good, bad or indifferent. I don’t think it matters a whole lot. But right now they’re the same. Right? You pay the same day one as you pay year one. So that’s simple for people to understand. So that kind of argues that simple is good and they should both go up the same.

MR. WOODCOCK: No, no, I mean, let’s say that there’s somebody with a small college somewhere that got its allocation 15 years ago now they signed an LRSA, whatever, but their business model right now does not include paying us for use of v4 addresses. Are you saying that people like that should have fees applied to them that are not presently applied, or are you saying that only someone who comes to us now for a new allocation should see a different fee structure?

MR. BICKNELL: I am not going to comment on whether people who pay $0 today should pay some fee. I merely comment that people who pay fees today for v4 resources should pay a higher fee so it is noticed.

MR. VIXIE: If you’re going to speak on this topic, which will be the last of the meeting, please get in the queue now. John.

MR. CURRAN: And I want to expand on the topic because Owen reminded the other question that the Board tasked me for asking is historically the ARIN Board has strayed away from fees as a mechanism of policy. The only exception to date has been the IPv6 fee waiver where we have waived the fees for IPv6 to encourage deployment. But, in general, our fees are based on a cost recovery philosophy and we waived it for v6 to encourage deployment.

There’s a question in the Board’s mind about whether or not additional fee structures to motivate appropriate behavior, further motivate appropriate behavior are called for. Obviously you just advocated one, so there is a question about whether or not we should be working, changing the fees in order to encourage certain behavior as well. And that’s something we’d like to hear.

I just wanted to expand the scope of the fee discussion.

MR. VIXIE: Thank you, John. Owen.

MR. DELONG: So a few comments. Owen DeLong, ARIN AC, and speaking primarily for myself. I don’t like the idea of using fees as a policy tool. So I’ll put that out there first.

In terms of the fees across the board for subscriber members, because we have two different categories of fees, in the subscriber member realm, I think that we need something closer to a linear fee per address. I certainly think there should not be a maximum fee paid if you have – I think it’s a /14 or more, and no matter how many /8s you have you still pay that same fee. There should be some linear progression beyond that. I do not think it should be strictly linear, however. I think that an extra-large organization does not cost ARIN nearly as much maintenance effort per IP as an extra-small organization. And so I think that needs to be taken into account. And then we need to try and align the fees along the lines of cost recovery directly related to the cost of maintaining the resources we are maintaining for the organization as much as possible.

Finally, I do support the idea of some level of fee relief for classes of organizations that may be unable to participate in the ARIN process strictly due to the nature of the ARIN fee structure. Community networks would be one such example. Thank you.

MR. VIXIE: Microphones are closed. If you’re not in queue now, better luck next time.

MR. DUL: Andrew Dul, Perkins Coie. I would mostly echo Owen’s comments. I support fee waivers or fee reductions for certain classes of organizations. I don’t think we should ever consider going below the $100 threshold per year. I would see those fees applying to subscriptions for allocations or initial assignment fee reductions. I also think that we could probably do a better job of allocating resources or allocating fees associated with the amount of resources that an organization has. I don’t necessarily think it should be linear, as Owen described it, but more weighted toward those organizations which have a larger resource pool than it is currently, for sure.

MR. VIXIE: Thank you, Andrew. Aaron.

MR. HUGHES: Aaron Hughes. I do think fee increases are certainly a good motivator leaning more towards new allocations than existing allocations. Although it might be a fairly reasonable motivation for those particularly large holders, I do think there should be fee waivers, including down to $0 for organizations that cannot afford it. I don’t necessarily agree with that $250,000 mark, but something pretty small. And also think that the last time we did make a policy that affected fees did not actually result in the outcome we were looking for in that the smallest v4 allocation you have to get in order to obtain the smallest v6 allocation for free costs us more than giving away a free v6 allocation.

MR. VIXIE: Thank you. Good point. John, any more on this topic?

MR. CURRAN: No.

MR. VIXIE: Open mic is closed. John.

MR. CURRAN: Thank you. And that’s the end of our meeting. Thank you, everyone.

Closing Announcements and Meeting Adjournment

MR. CURRAN: We have a couple of brief announcements. Meeting surveys. Yep, it’s a theme. You can tell. There’s a meeting survey available. Please complete it. This is the one that lets you judge the whole meeting. Tell us what to do better. If you enter it, you can win something. This one’s a USB guitar. I don’t know what you would use it for, but I’m guessing people would figure out something.

Consolation prize: Enter the survey. If you don’t win any of the prizes, you can enter this consolation prize. For anyone who entered the daily meeting surveys and didn’t win.

Sponsors, one more time. Time Warner Cable.
(Applause)

And also Rackspace. Both very nice sponsors. Thank you for coming.

Reminders: The wireless network will shut down after the members meeting. So as this ends, so does the connectivity.

And that’s it. Thank you, everyone. Thank you for coming. And we’ll see you at the next meeting. Our joint meeting is going to be in Dearborn. In conjunction with NANOG, of course. So see you in lovely Dearborn.
(Applause)

URL for the survey. For those remote participants who want to find out where that survey URL flashed by, it’s also on the meeting page.

(Meeting adjourned 12:26 p.m.)

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