ARIN XXIV Members Meeting Draft Transcript - 23 October 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

John Curran: Okay. Good morning. If everyone will settle down. If you happen to be not in the room, please come in the room. If you’re upstairs having breakfast, come down. I don’t know if that’s going to work, I don’t think it will, but I’ll try. Couple things coming up. First item we have is we have last night’s – welcome everyone. We have last night’s – we have the daily survey. And this is a very interesting one. A 400-watt Power Dome Mini Generator; this lets you work in all sorts of developing countries and create great stuff. So I need a volunteer, looking along my list of volunteers. I also try to make sure that when I choose someone they’re not on the list. Owen, come on up. Stand here, Owen. It was Karl Zimmerman. Karl. Are you here, Karl? You must be present to win. This is really unfortunate. Karl, are you here? Karl Zimmerman? Going once. Going twice. Owen. Prepare again. Go ahead. Stop. Aha, got it. Joe Guerin.

Dave Barger: He’s in Atlanta.

John Curran: He’s a remote participant. Who do we have monitoring the remote board? You must be present, virtual or online. Mark, can you tell me who’s online? Joe Guerin. Okay. Come on up, Owen. Take the survey and be here the next day.

Dave Barger: I just got a message from John Guerin. He is online, but he’s having Jabber problems or something. I don’t know if that matters. Anyway, I’ll just tell him he lost.

John Curran: I put it to the room. This is your organization. Everyone who thinks Joe should get it, raise your hand. Everyone who doesn’t, raise your hands. All right, Joe, you get it. Thank you very much.

(Applause.)

Okay. Please fill out your meeting survey. At the end of the meeting there will be one drawing, and you don’t have to be here because none of us will be here, and it will be announced on the ARIN website and we’ll send you out your mini USB monitor. If you’re following us, or if you’re posting, our Twitter hashtag is #ARIN24. You can also find us on Facebook and YouTube. Our sponsors one more time: Arbor, Merit UnitedLayer and our media partners.

(Applause.)

Rules and reminders. Rules are in your packet, but I moderate all discussion so draft policies and questions about the presentations can be heard, everyone has a chance to speak. If you show up at the microphones before I’ve gotten a chance to get everyone and it’s your second time at the mic, you’ll be passed over until I give everyone a chance to speak at least once. When you get up to the mic, if you’re speaking about policy proposal, which probably isn’t today, say whether you support it or not, but definitely, no matter what, identify yourself. Thank you.

Today’s agenda. We have the departmental reports and updates. We have the Advisory Council Report, the Financial Report and the Board of Trustees, followed by an open mic.

So at the head table we have the Board of Trustees who are here. Some of our Board of Trustees had to fly off. But we have Lee, and we have Bill and myself, and then we have John Sweeting, the head of the AC, and we have Marc, the member of the AC and the Jabber relay for us.

So we’re going to start right in on the departmental reports. The first report is Government Affairs and Public Policy report by Cathy.

ARIN Reports - Government Affairs and Public Policy Support

Cathy Handley: Good morning. For those that don’t know me, I’m Cathy Handley, and I’m ARIN’s Executive Director of Government Affairs and Public Policy, which means I actually have probably the longest title of anybody at ARIN. First thing I’m going to do is cover the activities since the last meeting. It’s been pretty busy. We’ve had CITEL meetings, which is an organization that’s part of the organization of American States. Shortly after our San Antonio meeting, we were notified that I am now a member of the Multi-Stakeholder Advisory Group, which came out of WSIS, and is what kind of puts together the IGF meetings, which the 2009 IGF meeting will be in November.

I was in the Navajo – visiting with the Navajo Nation folks. They are making great progress on a fiber ring. They’re going to participate in the broadband work that’s going on from the U.S. government, and we have hooked them up with the national –

John Curran: I can’t remember either.

Cathy: Bill? Is it the National Oregon –

Bill Woodcock: NSRC.

Cathy: NSRC. Sorry. And they’re moving along getting a network set up. We had an ICANN meeting and two APNIC meetings. CANTO celebrated their 25th anniversary in Trinidad. Megan Kruse and Richard Jimmerson and I were there, at which they also announced that – the CTU announced that ARIN is a partner in their ICT roadshow that’s coming on to get more Internet involvement there.

We’ve had two Internet Governance Forum preparations again for this meeting that will be in November. Attended the RIPE government roundtable a few weeks ago. We launched the – NRO launched, I should say, the Public Affairs Coordination Group. Those of you that are familiar with the NRO, they’re having five different organizations trying to do five different sets of public policies, can get really confusing and you can run over each other. So we’re trying to coordinate that better. We participated in ITU Telecom World a few weeks ago, which was a pseudo trade show that the ITU puts on to show off their wares and where they plan on going.

So it’s been fairly busy last few months. Again, probably the most significant event that we’ve done internally has to do with the forming of the PCG. And the last statement on there is actually what is in the charter that we will be following. Those of you that are familiar with ICANN, that’s been a bundle of new events. Rod Beckstrom was announced as the new CEO at the ICANN meeting in June. The ICANN U.S. DOC Joint Project Agreement ended on September 30th this year. They signed a new agreement, ICANN and DOC did, called the Affirmation of Commitment Agreement, and that can be found on the website that I’ve got listed there for those of you that are interested. A little bit about that agreement is, unlike the earlier agreements where the JPA and the MOU had a definite end date, the affirmation does not. It is in perpetuity. ICANN has agreed it will stay headquartered in the U.S. There will be reviews done as they have been in the past, however they will not be done solely by the U.S. government. The GAC Chair – GAC is the Government Advisory Committee – and the ICANN CEO will select members from the community to perform those reviews.

Upcoming activities: The Internet Governance Forum, the 15th through the 18th of November. Nate will be there and so will John. And we have Board members that will be there participating doing workshops and such. The main sessions in the workshops are going to focus on critical Internet resources, which is everything from IP addresses to internationalized domain names. It’s a catch-all for everything. Child safety, youth and social networking, all of which are very important topics to the Egyptian ministries who are hosting the meeting. Cyber security. Internet governance from several different aspects will be looked at. And the situation in developing countries as far as Internet deployment and human rights. That pretty much ends it. That’s pretty quick, but that is basically what’s been going on for the last year.

John Curran: Okay. Any questions for Cathy?

(Applause.)

ARIN Reports - Registration Services

John Curran: Next up is Registration Services from Leslie.

Leslie Nobile: Good morning, everyone. So this is the Registration Services update. This is our team on the left. Cathy, David and John, that’s our senior team. And on the right are our resource analysts: Doreen, Sue, Mike, Lisa and Giselle, several are out here at the help desk and have been here all week so hopefully you’ve had a chance to chat with them.

Our current focus: So we’ve been doing a lot of work on ARIN Online with the rest of our team, with engineering, and we’re starting to create user stories. If anybody is familiar with Agile, you’ll know what that is. But it’s a whole new way of working on requirements. And Mark’s going to tell you all about it later, so I won’t go into that. We’re now processing Q&As and points of contact, POC, requests through ARIN Online in addition to doing it through our regular system. So we’ve got lots of work coming in both directions.

We’re doing some new work on the legacy RSA as far as follow-up. We found that we were getting lots of sort of pending legacy RSA requests that never got finished. I think we had close to 400 just sort of waiting, and so we’re going to start doing some 30-, 60-, 90-day follow-up and close them after 90 days if we have no response and call them abandoned. If they want to sign it, they can come back and start the process again. Working on resource revocations, which I have a slide on so I’ll chat about that later, some fraud activity and reports we’re working on. And, of course, business as usual.

The fraud reporting process. I’m not sure if you’re all familiar with this. This is something that we started maybe a year ago. And it’s a way of reporting suspected Internet number resource fraud as it relates to ARIN’s mission and scope. So we have it set up on the Web and it’s a Web form. And it basically – it really is about things like utilization reporting, hijacking, transfers, similar activity that involved fraudulent submissions to ARIN or fraudulent changes to data in ARIN’s WHOIS. It’s a three-part process. There’s a submission, investigation and reporting. The link is there for the submission where the Web form is. The staff investigates everything. All information is kept confidential, and we report quarterly on the results of our research. So the fraud reports. Published quarterly. They’re at that link. And the reporter and the resources in question remain anonymous. We don’t actually out anybody. We just sort of give a general description of the types of reports we’re receiving. Since March of 2009 we’ve had a total of 43 reports submitted. As you can see, 39 of them were not related to anything ARIN does, actually. There were phishing, spam, identity theft. We got some stalking. We got some really interesting things. A lot of network abuse reports. Four actually involved suspected fraudulent activity against ARIN. So we, of course, researched them very thoroughly. None of those have resulted in resource reclamation. But we are starting to use NRPM 12 which I think John mentioned, you heard us talk about a little bit. It’s the Resource Review Policy. It’s something we haven’t taken advantage of but we are starting to. And we’re using it in cases where there’s no fraud but still some evidence of resource misappropriation. So we are going to do some follow-up activity on some of these fraud reports to see how the resources are actually being used or if they’re being used.

Recovered resources: I think I mentioned before that we get a lot of resources returned to ARIN. We get revoked resources. We reclaim resources, and we have different descriptions for each of those. The terminology is different. So returned is obviously voluntarily returned by a registrant. Revoked is revoked for non-payment of registration fees. And reclaimed is generally space that’s reclaimed for fraud, misappropriation or business dissolution. So I just kind of put some numbers – yeah, back to January 2005. So over the past almost four years we’ve had 270 /16 equivalents returned to us and 1213 autonomous system numbers. We’ve revoked 84.21 /16 equivalents and 3,943 ASNs, and we’ve reclaimed 2.04 /16 equivalents and nine ASNs.

So what do we do with all this space we get back? What we actually do is reissue it. So we have a practice – and I think I discussed it a little bit in the policy BoF the other day. But our practice with this recovered space is to hold it for at least one year prior to reissuing. That’s to clear filters, et cetera. And then just prior to reissue, we check routing tables and if it’s routed we’ll contact the ORG that’s routing it and ask them to stop. We check some of the RBL operators to see if the block is listed. And as I mentioned, we have a tool that we’re using and it goes out and checks about 140 RBLs and black listers. And if it is being listed, we’ll try to contact the RBL operator. We don’t have contacts for all of them. Some of the big ones, we do. We’ve built up a working relationship with them. When we contact them, they immediately take it off their list. If it’s listed by multiple operators that we don’t know and we have no contact for, we’ll pull the block and we’ll add it back to the bottom of the hold list for another year. And we also publish a daily RSS feed. John mentioned it yesterday in the consultation process, and it lists all the space that was issued each day and all the space that’s released from the one year hold, the day it’s released and the link to the RSS feed is right there.

People keep asking me – Is there increased demand for IPv4 space in our region? How about for IPv6? So we looked at the IPv4 requests received and it’s actually gone down a little bit as you can see. We had a very slow summer actually. But it’s been up and down. It peaks occasionally when a large ISP comes in or if multiples come in at one time. But as far as what we’re issuing, it’s pretty flat. We’re not seeing any real growth in IPv4. IPv6 – there’s very clearly a growth trend up. We’re getting many more requests. And we’re issuing more IPv6 allocations. We don’t see any run on IPv4.Yes, we’re definitely issuing IPv6, yea. So the conclusion at this point is there’s not been a run on the bank for IPv4 space. It’s pretty steady activity. I think that’s all I have. Any questions?

John Curran: Floor’s open for questions.

Mark Willson: Mark Willson, Uncommon Technology. I was wondering how much IP space is sitting in hold?

Leslie Nobile: At this point? That’s a good question. I don’t actually know.

John Curran: You mean at ARIN?

Mark Willson: At ARIN. These recycled blocks that have come in, how many are sitting around on various time delays, one-year, two-year?

Leslie Nobile: Generally it’s a one-year hold. It changes every single day. It’s all different. One day this much gets released, this much comes in. How do I go backwards? That one. So that’s the total space and that’s – when I did –

John Curran: Over four years.

Leslie Nobile: This was over four years.

John Curran: So if that’s an average, you can presume that there’s 25 percent of that in at any time. Can you look, when we’re done, can you look and see what the current queue is?

Leslie Nobile: I’ll check that, sure, yeah.

John Curran: But that will change tomorrow?

Leslie Nobile: Yes.

John Curran: Microphones remain open. Center microphone.

Leo Bicknell: Leo Bicknell, ARIN AC, ISC. Don’t necessarily expect you to answer this now but a request for future reports. On the IPv6 side, could you report the number of total requests for people requesting IPv6 that do not have any IPv4, they’re not saying here’s my IPv4, give me IPv6, they’re saying I only need IPv6. I think that would be an interesting statistic for the community going forward.

Leslie Nobile: Good input. Okay.

John Curran: Microphones remain open. Any remote questions?

(Applause.)

John Curran: Next up is the HR Resources Administration report from Mary K. Come on up.

ARIN Reports - Human Resources and Administration

Mary K. Lee: Good morning, everyone. A report from the HR and administrative area of ARIN, department update, what’s on our radar, what are we doing, and a little shoutout to Michigan. Who are we? Well, Thérèse Colosi, who is the Executive Assistant, she provides support to pretty much everybody sitting up here on this dais and the rest of the executive team, Advisory Board travel, minutes, all sorts of things to keep us going. Jess Heideman, who is sitting at the front desk, our receptionist. And she does all the little visible and invisible things that make ARIN run and let the rest of the people here do their jobs to keep us all going: Hotel, travels, supplies. Do we have enough cold Coca Colas to fuel everybody? Is there coffee? Is the building clean, et cetera. That sort of covers what we do in that area. I sort of sometimes call my area and the people who work for me the kitchen sink, because it’s a little bit of everything. So we do the travel. I have payroll and comp and benefits, facility management, which I do along with the SA team, and probably some other things that I can’t think of right now.

Right now one of our concentrations is document retention. We’ve been working on it very slowly. But unfortunately not a whole lot of emphasis, which we’ve begun again now. So the reinventory of ARIN records, which includes both paper and electronic, has been completed. What we’re doing now is we’re classifying everything and then working on a disposition schedule and plan to have that piece of it done by the end of the year and then we’ll move on to even more work with it.

Six-month reviews were finished the end of June. We changed them just a little bit. I had a lot of good feedback from the managers this go-around which I don’t always get. I was able to incorporate some things into them and update them a bit and also update the annual review forms coming up for the reviews in December.

And then some numbers and some things about us. What do we have here at ARIN? We now have 50 full-time employees; 24 women, 26 men. Our average tenure is five and a half years. 27 employees have been with us for more than five years. Six employees at ten years, and next year we’ll have five ten-year anniversaries. So we’re definitely getting to be quite a tenured company. I thought it would be interesting to see what do we look like compared to the rest of the workforce in the U.S. And as you can see, pretty similar. Not an exact match. But quite a bit of one. We definitely have the edge on the Gen X, which I think is really the first generation that grew up with computers. So that actually makes sense that that’s the piece of the workforce that we have quite a bit of. So have we lived in Michigan? Have we visited Michigan? Got somebody smiling in the front row here who has lived in Michigan. 16 percent of us have lived here. Not counting this meeting, of course, 46 percent of us have visited Michigan. Fords we have owned: If I had gone to the museum before I took these pictures or got these pictures off the website I would have had even better ones, because it was quite a fabulous sight last night. I do know, for instance, John and I both owned a Ford Falcon. We exchanged some stories the other day at the office. Although, his story is much better than mine. What have we had: Explorers, Escapes, Expeditions, Taurus, Escort, Pintos. Kind of a little bit of the works. Couple funny stories people relayed to me. One person recalled driving their mother’s seven-year-old Ford Fairmont to the senior prom. And another employee remembered running over a mailbox in a Ford Elite. So we’ve done a little bit of everything.

And I thought songs we’ve heard. Of course there’s Motown songs, but what other kind of songs have Michigan in them? I got some very funny answers to this, of course, and people wanted to know do they really have songs that mention Michigan in them. But of course they do. We have the Wreck of the Edmond Fitzgerald. The Red Hot Chili Peppers do a song called Especially in Michigan. Eminem’s Eight-Mile Song happens to mention Michigan. Of course we have the University of Michigan Fight Song. And let’s see, what else in Michigan? My Michigan. And these were our favorite sports teams among Michigan teams: The Lions and the Red Wings. Thank you.

John Curran: Any questions for Mary K.? Thank you very much.

(Applause.)

ARIN Reports - Member Services

John Curran: Next up is someone very important, the one who makes this meeting and everything else happen, I’m going to have Susan come up and give the Member Services Report.

Susan Hamlin: Good morning, everyone. We’ve had a lot of interesting discussion and topics this week, but one that’s sorely been lacking is any mention of Motown. So if you will bear with me while I – thank you. I’m going to use this theme to tell you a little bit about member services and what we’ve been up to in addition to this meeting. So all the Member Services Department is here. We are all happy people in general. We’re especially happy because we put a lot of effort into these meetings and we like to be here and meet you all face to face and get feedback from you. So I asked our folks what some of their favorite Motown songs were, I think you’ll recognize almost all of them on this list.

So who are we? We have approximately 3500 members currently. These stats were from September 30th. Majority in the U.S. You’ll see the figures here. Membership has been growing steadily. Last year this time we were at about 3200 members. So we average 25 new members a month, and these are primarily ISPs who come in for an allocation. And what’s going on? Member Services takes care of a lot of the communications. We support the website. We develop content. We support outreach, in addition to creating materials. We develop the swag and there’s an example of our latest IPv6 sticker.

We also support Richard and Megan’s efforts on the road by helping with shipping, taking care of all those materials, and then in addition we facilitate and administer several of the ARIN processes, policy development of course being the most important, and then elections that are ongoing. The ACSP. And I’m pleased this morning, or yesterday, we had 55 people complete the survey about the consultation process.

So we’re anxious to read and hear what you all have to say about it if you think it’s an effective tool. Lately, we’ve developed a few things. If you visited the information center, which was out there, took a peek at our new Flash piece on managing Internet number resources, the theme is really Internet governance. It’s a piece we have developed to take on the road to be able to explain to people a little more about the RIR system, about the importance of getting involved in the policy process, mailing list, that sort of thing. It will be up on the website within the next couple of weeks. So if you get a chance, if you go to the knowledge section, please take a look. We like feedback. We enjoy developing these kinds of pieces, not only for you all to use, but for you all to refer people to, to take out on the road if, you’re going to talk with groups. We encourage you to use these pieces.

There’s a slide deck now on the ARIN website for you to use, and we’re also happy to supply you with copies of some of the FAQ sheets and some of the swags. If you’re doing any outreach, let us know if there’s anything we can do to support you in that effort. Another area we work with our communication colleagues from all the registries and NRO activities. Most recently we were on a booth with ICANN and ISOC in Geneva, and we work with our other colleagues on developing content for the NRO website.

Elections are ongoing. You’ve probably received, if you’re a DMR, more e-mails than you would have cared to about registering and becoming eligible. We sent out several promotional pieces. This week or early next week if you’re a DMR, you’ll be receiving a certified letter asking you to please vote. Next week ARIN staff will be calling DMRs. We look forward to chatting with you, and we thank you for your participation in advance. This is probably the most important slide for us, reaching out, and it really is a two-way street. We are here to serve you. We are here to provide information. We like to hear from you what types of services, especially in the communications area, you would like to see ARIN working on.

So there are a number of ways you can contact us. These are some of the ones listed. We have recently gone social. And Megan will talk more about that shortly. We encourage you to use those tools. And if you can think of other ways that you would like to hear from us or that we can help you, please let us know.

So getting ready. We have two meetings next year scheduled. Locations posted and dates. We will be in Toronto in April and Atlanta in October. So we look forward to seeing you there. We have network sponsors for both of these meetings, but we’re always looking for people interested in helping sponsor other activities such as the social or other kinds of happy hours, that sort of thing.

And the Fellowship Program, I’d really like to ask for your help and maybe suggestions. You all hopefully have met the three fellows here. We are looking for ways to get that word out further into the community, people we might not normally reach, and encourage them to apply and get involved with ARIN. So if you have any ideas of where we might be promoting this program, I’d like to hear. And that’s it. Any questions? Thank you.

(Applause.)

ARIN Reports - Financial Services

John Curran: Okay. Moving right ahead. Next up is the Financial Services Report by Bob Stratton.

Bob Stratton: Good morning, everybody. As John said, I’m Bob Stratton, the director of the Financial Services Department. I’m going to give you a quick overview of our staff, what we’re up to in operations, our contracting process, some green initiatives that ARIN has gotten into, and some basic financial trends both at ARIN and in the environment at large. Val, Cathy and Tammy’s staff are back at the office. Tammy has been here at the registration desk. Hopefully you’ve had a chance to meet with her. They do a great job.

Operations: We’re currently working with Mark’s staff on integrating the accounting system into ARIN Online. There are some challenges there. The data model is different in the accounting system than in the registration data. So we’ve got some work to do.

We’re also working on our overdue maintenance cleanup. We pretty much caught up. As you guys have heard in the past, we had some overdue allocations that we took care of a few years back. So now we’ve worked on the maintenance. This is more of a manual process than we would like. And when ARIN Online is integrated, hopefully our reminder process can be automated for this as well.

Speaking of the e-mail process, I’ll show you in the next slide how we have a reminder process set up for the allocations. We’ve improved our monthly accounts receivable report which helps us close the books at a faster manner. There was a discussion on ARIN Discuss related to the invoice doesn’t have any wording related to revocation. Well, I wanted to outline what our actual reminder process is for the allocation invoices we send out. We send the invoices out in an e-mail to the billing POC two months before they’re due. A month later we send a reminder to the billing, admin and tech POCs. When it’s due, we send another reminder to the same three. After it’s a month overdue, we send another reminder to the same three and we mention revocation. 60 days, stronger language, revocation again. So, in essence, the billing tech and admin POCs should know what’s going on by this point. After that, we then turn it over to RSD about 90 days, and there’s one more e-mail sent, and then RSD looks for somebody to, any POCs associated with it. So we want to make sure that people are aware before we revoke space for non-payment, and we think we’re being fairly robust in this process. When ARIN Online kicks in, and we’re integrated, hopefully you would be able to go at any given point in time and check your status of your invoice whether paid or unpaid, and if there’s any threat of revocation. So we look forward to that day.

We’ve got a contracting process in place. Basically review all contracts that come in. We look for certain aspects of it. That’s where we have a standard contract template so that we want to check off that terms and conditions that protect ARIN as an organization are in place and any contract that we engage in. We also have an RFP process in place, Request for Proposals. We’re inundated occasionally in that. But we have efforts mostly related to engineering that we need outside vendors for.

Some ARIN green initiatives: You can read the list of everything that’s going on in the office. Also, just to let you know, occasionally Mark Kosters rides his bike into work, which is a frightening sight, but that’s all right.

The main thing I want to point out here is the Board has directed us to buy carbon offsets for travel by staff, Board, and ASO and the AC. And we will engage in that next year. And we’re continually to look for any improvements that we can do in this area.

This is a chart of our revenue, ARIN’s registration revenue versus expense on a four-year time line. The main thing I want to show here is the revenues and expenses are kind of coming together. This has a lot to do with the engineering infrastructure improvements we have in place over the last couple of years, and also the outreach associated with IPv4 exhaustion and IPv6 deployment. This is just, not that anybody isn’t aware of the economic environment, but the GDP growth rates for the developed world are going to be rather de minimis or lower than the average, whereas in the developing world it’s still pretty robust. China, Brazil, India are still growing fairly robustly. And yet inflation hasn’t shown up. Central banks have flooded the zone with liquidity but so far no inflation. Interesting times. With that in mind, thank you. Any questions?

John Curran: Questions for Bob? Microphones are open.

Dave Barger: Dave Barger, AT&T. Bob, just a thought I had, when you were going through the e-mail process on that one slide, and I was just curious how big of a problem is that as you step through those different reminders and ultimately get to the big one that says your space is going to be revoked and –

Bob Stratton: We’ve had very few actual revocations. It shows that IPv4 is actually a valuable issue for companies. And I think our main premise is to make sure that we get people aware. And as far as I can tell, I don’t have any stats, but I think people are actually paying their bills earlier under this process than they were before.

Dave Barger: The only other thing I was going to suggest is if you needed to put some more teeth in that process or something, maybe you could consider using the CEO or corporate officer information you’re gathering now for getting new allocations and possibly use that person as sort of a last person of resort to escalate it to or something like that. So just a thought.

Bob Stratton: Good suggestion. Thanks, Dave.

John Curran: Center front.

David Farmer: Is the process you just described, described on the Web anywhere on ARIN’s website?

John Curran: For how we go about looking to get paid the revocation –

David Farmer: The notices and et cetera?

John Curran: No, do you need it out there somewhere?

David Farmer: It might not be a bad thing. It might be one of those things you could throw at the bottom of your notices saying if you’re interested in more details of the whole thing.

John Curran: There is a small downside to that. I see the value. The downside is some companies will look at that and decide, well, that means in arrears is really 154 days before I have to pay because they’ll go through these steps. I don’t want to get people relying on a process that gives them lots of time because we’re cautious and find out that then becomes we’re their bank.

David Farmer: I get where you’re coming from.

John Curran: I prefer them to think the swift hand comes back and rips the resources out of their hand if a check doesn’t deposit that day. But as you can see, that’s really not what happens.

David Farmer: I’ll note the University of Minnesota is probably net 120 no matter what you tell us or do.

John Curran: Understood. Any other questions? Thank you, Bob.

(Applause.)

ARIN Reports - Engineering

John Curran: Next up, Engineering Report with Mark Kosters.

Mark Kosters: So I come up here, and I’m kind of nervous. The reason I’m kind of nervous is I’m going to do not a rated G presentation. It’s going to be a PG-13. So if you see anything that’s really kind of, I don’t know, strange, talk to me later, and we can get to the rating association together and maybe make it rated R.

All right. So here we have our staffing. We have six people within operations. We had seven this summer. We had an intern that was from Germany. He was fantastic. Helped us with our IRR work. We have ten people in development, four of which are contractors helping us with ARIN Online and a number of other initiatives I’ll get into a little bit. We have three people in quality assurance making sure our software is up to snuff for the most part. One person working with requirements and the pointy haired boss. That’s me. Most of you know what a PHB is, right? Good. Some didn’t. So just making sure that’s clear.

Okay. Operations: We have replication going on with our disaster recovery site now. So if we got down, we could have 100 percent confidence that we could come up online at a remote location. I’m feeling really good about that. I think I talked about this before, but I’ll tell you all again. ARIN is very close to Dulles Airport. And when you leave in the afternoon it’s usually rush hour for international flights and you have all these incredibly large planes taking off much like you do in LA and San Francisco and elsewhere. But if anything does crash, it might crash into ARIN. And I’d like you to make sure you have Internet if something does happen.

We also have a police training academy right next door, and it’s kind of like walking into a war zone. You come to work and you hear machine gunfire; you hear sirens going, and if you’re not used to it, it’s a very interesting opportunity to experience. So if you want to come to ARIN, I welcome you to come to ARIN and we can go outside and enjoy the sights and sounds together.

So we also have diversity in serving up our /8s under in-addr.arpa. About two years ago, when I started, at that point it was really essentially sole sourced, it was all going on with Verisign. And we wanted to make sure if something went south with Verisign that we were able to actually move on to some other provider and do it without any sort of loss in service and we have that diversity going on and continuing to go on.

We have a site operation on the West Coast in – if any of you want to peer with us over 4-byte AS, we welcome that. It’s amazing how many people have come to us and said they cannot peer with us. We’d like to be able to change that. And we like to encourage the use of new technology and eat our own dog food by doing this.

DNSSEC is operational. How many of you have noticed that? Has anyone? Has anyone noticed any loss of service? That’s good enough. So there is no loss of service. This is great for the Internet community in general. Actually, I’m giving a presentation about this next week talking about how we deployed DNSSEC in helping – essentially ARIN’s among the leaders here in this area making this happen. We have IPv6 in our IRR. I really need a better name for that. I said I was going to come up with a better name for it but I haven’t found it yet. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Lee Howard: Roger.

Mark Kosters: Roger. Oh, that’s useful. Maybe we’ll go ahead and do that. Roger. We’ll work on Roger. So we have 389 administrative requests to answer as well. So there’s a big component of us actually dealing with IT support. Here you can see our WHOIS statistics, and it’s really ten year’s worth of data right now. What’s interesting on this is we’ve grown and grown and grown, and essentially we’ve plateaued the last couple of months, which I found kind of interesting. So I’m not sure what that means. Maybe we’ll continue growing. Maybe the economy has actually slowed down WHOIS queries as well. Maybe we should pay per dip. Here you can see the WHOIS statistics on IPv6. I made a separate graph for this because you couldn’t see it if I put this with the IPv4 traffic. It’s a fraction of a percent right now. But we do see some traffic against it. And you can see that kind of oscillates as well.

John Curran: This is WHOIS statistics for queries for IPv6 records in the database?

Mark Kosters: No, no, no. I’m sorry, these are queries for WHOIS information over the IPv6 transport.

John Curran: That’s what I wanted to know. Thank you.

Mark Kosters: So thank you. So development: Aside from sleeping, they’re working on ARIN Online. They’re making improvements to existing systems. One of the things that you heard about at the last meeting is we’ve gone through business process reengineering and we’re working on actually integrating that within our development process now. We have a resource certification project, pilot, that’s going on at rpki-pilot.arin.net. Look forward to seeing you guys actually on there to start playing with this because this is something that’s going to be important within the next couple of years.

Of course, we’ve been working on DNSSEC. And Andy gave a presentation about WHOIS RESTful Web services, WHOIS and Roger. We got IPv6 support in the pilot now that’s going to production here very soon.

Within ARIN Online, we have database updates directly, updates that are made to points of contacts directly into the database now. And these are improvements over e-mail submission in terms of you have real time validation, better instructions, improved processing and all that, all that good stuff that comes along with actually doing this stuff real time as opposed to getting something a couple of hours later saying, oh, I messed this up. So this is useful information for you guys. We’ve gotten some really good feedback on it.

ARIN Online 2.2 is coming out essentially after Thanksgiving. It’s going to have new functionality of which I’m going to show you a little bit of this resource record, displays, reassignments reports and association report. And I’ll go ahead and talk about that a little bit here. Here you can see resources that are tied to our organization. And this is a report I believe you can ask for, but now you can actually get it anytime you wish. The next report you can get is for any particular ARIN Online account. You can actually see all the associations associated with all the POCs, all the organizations associated with that POC, all the resources associated with that organization, so on and so forth. So it gives you a plethora of information that’s at your fingertips. We have had over 10,000 active accounts now. And you can see that there’s basically two times increase over last, the report that we had six months ago. So there’s definitely good uptake with y’all using this tool. So here’s kind of the disturbing picture. If you want to focus on it for a little bit, take your heads out of your laptops, that’s cool.

No one seems to be too disturbed. That’s good. So one of the other things that we’re working on is Agile methodology. We’ve been using the traditional waterfall model where you go from requirements to development, to Q&A, to production. And that’s really well and good, but with us we’ve had some fairly slow release cycles. We’re trying to speed it up so you can see what we’re doing more immediately. And also it helps, works on some of the strengths of the organization. The organization we’re finding out is very visual and they like to see things. So we’re working on showing these things before we roll them out and getting good buy-in and hopefully successful delivery as well. As part of the Agile methodology, you integrate your quality assurance people within the development team. So we’re working on that as well in terms of actually seating these people together. And the end result of this is actually more frequent releases. So we’re excited about this and look forward to actually seeing it go on. And I hope you guys do as well.

One of the things that’s a little bit different with quality assurance is that Tim and his crew are not only focused on actually making, identifying bugs, but he’s also looking at it from the user perspective, making sure that this information is what you expect to see. And of course we’re looking at broad browser support, full regression testing and that sort of thing. Here you have requirements. Erika is working on testable systems and making sure that she tries to stay faster in development. And one of the things she’s doing now is a little bit more lightweight, she’s creating these things called user stories. Who has actually played with Agile before? Anyone played with this before? Wow. Okay. So Agile is this really an up-and-coming sort of methodology in terms of having a very sort of lightweight documentation process that leads into the development phase. The developers have these things called sprints that they work through, and they commit to doing so much during a monthly cycle. And at the end of that cycle they actually put it out into demonstration what they’ve done. So it gives a lot more accountability to the developers and everybody else and it allows everybody to have a lot more feedback as well.

Upcoming challenges, and we have a lot of them, is adding on more ARIN Online features. And you’ve heard a little bit of this from Bob in terms of putting out financial information that sort of thing within our systems. We also have this pilot I talked about a little bit before, resource certification, that we are planning on moving from a pilot mode into production over the next year. And, again, this is going to be an important thing, and I can’t stress it enough, that this is the time for you guys to actually use this.

DNSSEC, we’re working on a phased approach to this. Right now we’re actually signing ourselves and putting them out, but we’re not allowing you the opportunity yet to put your signed zones into our provisioning system. We’re working on changing that. So this coming year we’ll have a zone management system, so you that can actually put in what’s called DS records into our provisioning system so that you can see from our signed zones, your signed zones, so on and so forth, going on down the line. We’re working with document retention and management systems, replacement of legacy gear, and of course looking at new routing methodologies like LISP. So I know that was kind of a little bit dry and made you kind of sleepy. That was kind of the focus of the pictures, if you hadn’t noticed.

John Curran: Microphones open to question Mark.

Cathy Aronson: Cathy Aronson. Two things: One, if you do name it Roger, then you’re immediately going to hire an employee named Roger and that will really stink for the employee. I had a question about the 4-byte ASN thing. Do people say why they couldn’t peer with your 4-byte ASN?

Mark Kosters: Usually their hardware wasn’t able to support, actually their OS – it wasn’t hardware – wasn’t able to support it at that point.

Cathy Aronson: And there were lots of those?

Mark Kosters: There were a number of them that have come to us and said: Oh I just can’t do that now. When I finally get OS I can support 4-byte ASN I’ll come talk to you again.

John Curran: Center front.

Kevin Oberman: Kevin Oberman, ESnet. You mentioned you had implemented DNSSEC, which is wonderful. But when you say implemented, does that mean you’re signing data; you’re validating data? What things in DNSSEC have you implemented?

Mark Kosters: So what we’re doing is we’re actually signing the zones that we’re authoritative for. It’s up to you to validate the zones as a recursive revolver.

Kevin Oberman: No, it’s up to me to validate your data. The question is, are you validating my data?

Mark Kosters: Not yet, because we have not included in our provisioning system the ability for you to put DS records in it. At that point we’d validate it.

John Curran: He wants to know whether we’re using a resolver to do validation, is our DNS resolver actually checking to see if DNS answers that, for example, our office staff get are valid coming from the Internet.

Kevin Oberman: Things like from .sec and .gov and folks who actually are signing it do have signed data and signatures available –

John Curran: Could someone spoof a domain to our users internally within ARIN, or are we validating the signed zones that are out there, resolution.

Mark Kosters: Currently within ARIN ourselves we are not running DNSSEC in terms of putting in the trust anchors, so on and so forth. But it’s a good thing to do.

Matt, do you want to come up here and say something about that? Go ahead, Matt.

Matt Ryanczak: We are internally validating. We’re using ISC’s DLV and all that stuff.

John Curran: Let me ask Matt just to be clear. To the extent that a signed zone is incorrectly signed we’ll throw out the record?

Matt Ryanczak: You’ll get a serve fail, yeah.

John Curran: Does that answer your question, Kevin?

Mark Kosters: I stand corrected.

John Curran: I didn’t know either. Center rear microphone.

Leo Bicknell: Leo Bicknell, ISC, definitely not ARIN AC at this moment. Do you publish the in-addr.arpa keys in any trust registries? And I heard internally, have you published them, for instance, in ISC’s DLV as a way to get users to use them until the root signs?

Mark Kosters: Yes, we do. Actually ISC has come to us and said we’d like to use your trust anchors, we’ll go ahead and put in a DLV. So we haven’t been very aggressive about going to other repositories and actually putting our trust anchors there. I assume that some of them have come to us. But I haven’t really followed up on that, and that’s a good thing to follow up on.

Leo Bicknell: I like our product, but publish them as many places as you can, please.

Mark Kosters: Understood.

John Curran: Far microphone.

Randy Epstein: Randy Epstein, WVFiber. On the 4-byte AS peering, is that only on the West Coast? Are you just peering with a 4-byte ASN there?

Mark Kosters: We’re peering exclusively on the 4-byte ASN on the West Coast.

Matt, are we doing that on the East Coast, too? I’m seeing a nod on the yes. But there’s also a 2-byte AS on the East Coast.

Randy Epstein: And how many peers have actually been able to turn up there on the West Coast?

Mark Kosters: We’re looking at that right now. It’s a handful.

Randy Epstein: Our software will not support it to the level that we can actually trust IOS for like two years. I mean, we’re two years away before we can even do it.

Mark Kosters: Matt’s coming back with a number.

Matt Ryanczak: So we have eight peers total using 4-byte, two on the East Coast and six on the West Coast.

John Curran: Remote participant.

Marc Crandall: We have a question from Joe Maimon from CHL. He wanted to know whether ARIN thinks it’s appropriate to talk about fee scale disparity, public perception related to it, and whether any other potential models are under consideration or analysis. That’s his question.

Mark Kosters: The first piece, that’s really not my bag.

John Curran: Okay. Got it. Want to know whether ARIN thinks it’s appropriate to talk to scale disparity public perception related to any potential models under consideration regarding fee disparities. Certainly in an open microphone session like at this meeting would be an appropriate time if people want to raise those issues. The Board of Trustees has been very receptive to getting input on the fees. We’ve lowered fees four, maybe five times, I can’t remember offhand, over the last five years. And we’re interested in what people think the fee setup should be for ARIN going forward. That’s a particularly relevant topic because as we move into IPv6, that adds an interesting twist to all of our fee schedules. So the open microphone would be a great time to bring that up today.

Leo.

Leo Bicknell: Leo Bicknell, ISC, ARIN AC. Just a quick comment on the 4-byte ASN thing. ARIN is our only 4-byte ASN peer. And I can definitely attest that nothing unusual happened with that. But the thing I wanted to add, because in many, many hallway conversations I’ve noticed a lack of understanding on this. There is a transition technology for peering with 4-byte ASNs. It’s AS 23456. And many of the people who have equipment that does not support 4-byte ASNs can in fact peer with someone using a 4-byte ASN using that technology. And I find a lot of people don’t know that. There are some gotchas depending on your internal network, if you use route reflectors, confederations, other things, you may need to read the documentation quite thoroughly. But for a lot of people, in a standard situation, you don’t have to have code that supports a 4-byte ASN to peer with the 4-byte ASN. So I’m trying to say that in as many forms as possible. Please read the docs.

John Curran: Okay. Any other questions for Mark? Thank you, Mark.

(Applause.)

ARIN Reports - ARIN Outreach Efforts

John Curran: Now we have a report on ARIN’s outreach efforts, and I’m going to invite our Publicity Officer, Megan. Come on up, Megan.

Megan Kruse: I don’t have any ridiculous pictures, so I’m sorry if this gets a little boring. All right. I’m going to do – I also didn’t put my name on the slide. I’m Megan Kruse, I’m public relations and outreach for ARIN. So this is going to be an outreach and public relations update. I am essentially half of the department. It’s Richard Jimmerson, who is at a trade show this week. It’s the two of us. That being said, we get a lot of support, logistical support from Member Services, and pretty much we yank people from all sorts of departments to go to trade shows with us. We also bring in Advisory Council members. Even though it’s the two of us, it’s John and the entire team. Why we do this is basically to get to people that are not in this room that are not interested in coming to this room yet. And it’s just to raise awareness of our key messages and our issues. Those issues are, we talk a lot about ARIN and the RIR system. We talk about Internet governance. We talk about the policy development process and how to get involved.

Of course, we’re talking a lot about IPv4 depletion and IPv6 adoption at this point, and then depending on the audience we’ll bring in other messages. People ask about the Legacy RSA and 4-byte ASNs. Sometimes they ask about engineering, depending on how technical the show is. So we just try to answer questions as we get them and we try to bring in the appropriate people because I’m certainly not going to answer engineering questions. That would get ugly. We talk to Internet service providers, content providers, a lot of vendors. We’ve been reaching out to places like CES trying to get the people that actually make the equipment. A lot of this crosses over into government affairs.

So Cathy covered a lot of that. But we do ITU Telecom World and things like that. It includes presentations. That’s mostly John and Richard. The exhibits, we stand on a booth and talk to people who come to us and that reverse exhibiting is basically we’ll leave one person in the booth and the others of us will go around and talk to the other exhibiters, because often they need to hear the message sometimes more than the attendees of whatever conference it is we’re attending.

We’re doing media interviews. Again, that’s a lot John and Richard. Some advertisements in various things. And it’s just about networking and getting out to conferences and talking to people in hallways. And even if we don’t have a panel at the conference, then we can sit in on panels and talk at the microphone. So it’s just however we can get the message out, we will, essentially.

If you go right outside that door, there’s our information center. Susan already talked a bit about this. But we’ve got a lot of materials. We’re always creating new things. So if you see something, if you say I really wish you had a fact sheet on whatever, come talk to me, maybe we can create it. Again, with MSD’s help. All of our multimedia, we’ve got pens and stickers. We did replenish the stickers. If you want IPv6 stickers, they’re back out there. Didn’t realize they’d disappear quite as fast as they did. But that’s good. Take them. Stick ’em. Slide decks, comic books, those are out there, too. We’ve got all sorts of swag that we just keep ordering. People love it, so we’ll go for it.

I know that font’s really small, but we’ve been busy. That column on the left is everything we’ve done since the last outreach report, at our last meeting in April. And on the rest of 2009, there are eight more events between now and the end of the year. So we’re not home much. But again – he’s laughing. He’s never home. This is a big effort in our community. So, again, we’ll take people and take Advisory Council members and engineers and RSD people and whoever and get out there on the road. Richard Jimmerson, by the way, is at Supercomm, which is the last one on the left. That’s why he’s not here giving this presentation. We had to split duties this week.

Now something near and dear to my heart. We’ve actually hired a PR firm. We’re really excited. That’s been in place since July. We’re doing a lot of strategy and planning and kind of getting this off the ground at this point. They’re helping us out a lot with media interviews. You’ve probably seen John around a bit more than you have in the past. They’re setting us up with speaking engagements doing the proposals and getting us on agendas and things like that. That’s been really helpful. The other big thing is social media strategy and tactics, which Susan talked a little bit about and I’ll get there in a minute. But going back to the media thing for a bit, this is just some of the sample coverage, Network World, ,and we’re in DC, so a lot of the government computer news and federal computer week and things like that. We had some coverage there. We’re working on business press and things like that. So it’s an expanding world for us and it’s an exciting time. So you’ll probably be hearing more and more about us in the press as we go forward.

ARIN Goes Social. You’ve been hearing about this all week. We’ve officially launched, MSD and Outreach together launched a YouTube channel, a Facebook and a Twitter account. And it’s just, again, it’s another way to get our names out there, start conversations with people that are, again, outside this room. We’re talking a lot about, hey, we’re going to be at Hosting Con next week. This is our booth number. Here’s the free pass to the exhibit hall, that sort of thing, just to meet new people. And also ARIN members are actively involved. I’ve met several of my new Twitter friends are here, which is great. So introduce me. I’m pretty much Team ARIN and Megan_at_ARIN on Twitter, and so we’re trying to get the word out. And if there’s anything you think we should be posting, again, grab me. So we’re labeled Team ARIN across the Board, Facebook Twitter and YouTube. So come find us and start a conversation.

A couple things coming up. We are working on an outreach site. Right now on our current website there’s really no place to say this is where we’re going to be and come visit us and this is our booth number. So we’re going to create an outreach site for that. The other big piece of that is going to be a speaker resource center. So if you’re going to your company meeting or some regional thing that we can’t get to, you can take this message and do it yourself. We’ve got the community slide deck. We’ve got all this swag, and we’ll send you some information. We can send you some info packets and you can go spread the word yourself. That will be a big part of that. We’ll incorporate the social media into this outreach site. We’ll have blogs and you can comment on it. It’s a work in progress, but we’re getting there. And then the PR firm is going to help us with a revamped media section, so you can actually read the articles that John and Richard and Mark and a couple other people are doing, so you can kind of keep up with what people are saying about us.

I’m happy to answer any questions. That’s kind of the bulk of it.

John Curran: Microphones are open. Any questions? Any remote participants? Thank you, Megan.

(Applause.)

Legacy Registration Services Agreement

John Curran: We’re actually ahead of schedule, which is the situation I always like to be in. But rather than going out for the break early, I thought I’d give you an oral update. First, we had a question about sparse allocation for IPv6, which I said I would answer on Friday, and today is Friday so I’m answering it. By November 16th – 18th or 16th? Let’s say Thanksgiving, we’ll be doing sparse allocation for IPv6. We need to coordinate a little bit.

(Applause.)

But it will happen, and hopefully that will mean that some day in the far, far future, when someone gets a second allocation, it’ll aggregate.

I want to also give an update on the Legacy Registration Services Agreement. I’ve had a few people ask me about this. I have a couple of quick slides with some statistics. So let me give you where we are with the LRSA. Again, as people remember, this covers resources issued prior to December 1997. They’re considered legacy in ARIN’s database. The agreement that we created allows for formal agreements between the legacy holders and ARIN, because presently there’s really no agreement between ARIN and the legacy holders, except a sort of informal history. It would be nice for legacy holders to come forth and sign an agreement that would let us have some formal relationship.

We do – it’s not required – we do put a $100 annual fee for legacy RSA signers. This way when we’re doing things like WHOIS outreach and contacts and we’re doing in-addr and we’re replicating it to multiple cities and we’re doing everything associated with maintaining the records, the legacy holders are at least paying a maintenance fee. We will continue to provide services to legacy holders without a signed legacy LRSA modular or minus any policy changes passed by the community. This community has never said stop serving legacy holders, so we keep doing it. That’s the expectation, and that’s what we like. Having said that, it’s kind of interesting. If you are a holder of legacy resources and you sign an agreement with ARIN, you have an agreement that as long as you continue to provide – as long as you continue to pay and follow our policies and procedures, you continue to get services.

It’s those who don’t sign the legacy RSA that would be subject to a decision of this community. Those who sign the legacy RSA actually aren’t subject to changes in policies to this community in general. That’s what the legacy RSA agreement says. So if you like the status quo and you have legacy resources, or you know someone who does, the way to preserve the status quo is to bring them in on a legacy RSA agreement.

Let’s talk about where we are in terms of signing these. We have had 764 requests. 343 have been signed. 47 were determined not required. They were already covered by RSA or another legacy RSA. 35 added to existing RSA. 339 pending. That’s a pretty big pending list. And people ought to understand that one of the challenges is all of these are pre-1997. So someone shows up and says, oh, I’m the legacy holder for this address block. And we go, yes, we understand you believe that and we also want to believe that and now it’s sharing the belief system. So we believe it just as much as you do. That can take a little bit of research. We’re not in a situation where we want to have legacy holders go through this process and suddenly instantly become recognized if they don’t have valid documentation. So it does take a little bit. Of the 334 that are signed, we have educational users, 86; government, 31; other, 204; Internet service providers, 13.

If you look, there’s nearly four /8s equivalents under legacy RSA. In terms of space equivalent, quite a bit of a stress space has coming over because of the larger organizations that have signed RSAs. And that’s it, I think. Questions? Owen, center front mic.

Owen DeLong: If you can go back to the last slide. You’ve got 764 total requests. Do we know what percentage of the total body of legacy holders that represents?

John Curran: Yes, actually, we’re estimating that there’s about 17,000. That’s an estimate, because sometimes it’s hard to tell if organizations are unique. About 17,000 legacy space holders. Many of them are holding a /24, as it turns out. But there’s quite a few of them. In terms of percentage space, I said 25. It’s actually about 24 and a half percent space-wise is covered but a much smaller percentage in terms of numeric count of people. Does that help clarify?

Owen DeLong: It does. I was just trying to get a sense of what level of success 764 represents, because if it’s 764 out of 1200, well, that’s pretty good. If it’s 764 out of 17,000, then –

John Curran: It’s the – we need a lot more effort here. We need a lot more effort. This is not a success. This is the start of a success. The only other thing I’ll note is that there’s quite a bit of legacy space that’s no longer legacy space. I don’t know how to say that any other way. But there are some organizations that in the past brought legacy resources under their RSA. So that does skew the statistics a little bit. But we have quite a bit of work to go. Yes, David?

David Farmer: Do we know what that number is, or is that included in the four /8s here?

John Curran: It is not included in the four /8s here. It is – hang on.

David Farmer: Oh, and it’s David Farmer, University of Minnesota, while you’re doing that.

John Curran: The number actually I do have, because we build an awful lot of statistics in advance of when we need them.

David Farmer: Because you know we’re going to ask all these anointed questions.

John Curran: No, we don’t know. But we suspect. We don’t want to bore everyone. We are looking at that in terms of covered by an RSA, well, so covered by legacy RSA is about 5 percent, those four /8s. And so nearly 18 percent of what you would consider legacy space has already been brought under an RSA. That’s why the total is about 24, 25. Any other questions? Sorry, the bright lights are bright.

John Springer: John Springer, Inland Telephone. So you’ve got a total of three, 21, and then 13 Internet service providers, for a total of 334. That 343 should be on the left?

John Curran: Yes. The graph was updated. I don’t think the numbers on the right were updated. I apologize. We wanted to give you the most current chart we could. Nate?

Nate Lyon: Actually that is. The 343s that are signed are the sum of both the end users, the total 321 and the 13.

John Curran: 343 signed is 13 plus 321. Got it.

Nate Lyon: 334. No, not correct. You’re right, John.

John Curran: Nate, I think we have the right pie chart, we don’t have the right right column. We didn’t update that to reflect the nine additional agreements. Okay. Any other questions on this? Okay. That’s it for the legacy RSA update. Thank you.

At this point we are ready to take a quick break. We have to come back at 10:00 and we have the AC, the financial, and the Board of Trustees reports. So you have 30 minutes. I look forward to seeing everybody back here at 10:00 a.m.

Unidentified Speaker: You said 10:00.

John Curran: 11:00 a.m.

(Recess taken at 10:23)

John Curran: Okay. If everyone will be settled, we’ll get started. It’s 11:00. Everyone’s successfully packed and checked out or whatever you did. Very good. This afternoon – this morning all we have is the Advisory Council Report, the Financial Report and the Board of Trustees Report, followed by an open microphone.

I’d like actually to kick off, though, briefly with refreshed slides regarding the legacy stats that we were just asked about. So here is the numbers. 343 signed. 343, and here’s the breakdown for the people who were asking. There was one other question that came up with the legacy RSA. The LRSA is available until December 30th of this year. One of the questions is can I sign an LRSA next year? And the answer is I don’t know. The Board is going to consider this issue over the next 60 days and decide whether to continue to offer the LRSA. Why wouldn’t we offer the LRSA? Well, the LRSA offers a whole set of unique terms that may not match your wishes.

For example, if you change policy, some of the people who have already signed the LRSA may not be bound by that policy. So we’re not sure we can continue this indefinitely. We decided to do it on a year-by-year basis. If you intend to sign an LRSA, or you know someone who does, I would recommend you start the process immediately. Any questions on that? I see David approaching the mic. Go ahead, Dave.

David Farmer: I’d like to encourage ARIN and the Board to at least extend – I’d like to see you extend it for another year, but at the very least I would like to see you allow some time, maybe six months, for the people that are in the pending state to wrap things up.

John Curran: Understood. I think that’s only the wise move. But, again, I serve at your and the Board wishes. But hopefully that would be the case. Yes, Owen.

Owen DeLong: Owen DeLong, Hurricane Electric, ARIN Advisory Council. I strongly encourage the Board to extend the period for which people can sign up LRSA as well as certainly anybody who starts the process before any deadline should be allowed to complete it to whatever conclusion it comes to.

John Curran: Thank you. Cathy, go ahead.

Cathy Aronson: Cathy Aronson, ARIN AC. I just was thinking at the break that it might be also useful to have the metric of what percentage of the address space that’s in this category do these 764 represent, because if there’s 17,000 of them but most of them have a /24.

John Curran: For the ones who are pending –

Cathy Aronson: In total.

John Curran: The ones who have completed in total are the nearly four /8 equivalents. I don’t have a breakdown of the 339 pending. That’s what you’re looking for.

Cathy Aronson: Right. But I’m also talking about, okay, there’s 17,000 of these. What percentage of the total amount of address space that they hold is this?

John Curran: I see what you’re saying. We don’t know whether or not the 339 pending, just offhand I don’t know whether those are all As and Bs or whether those are all Cs. I don’t know that. But we can try to figure that out if you want.

The bigger issue is that with having only done about a thousand of these and having 17,000 to go, if we want to have these organizations under legacy RSA, it would be really prudent to encourage people with legacy addresses to do this. It’s also important because we’d like to look at some services that might become fairly important to people. Like RPKI means issuing certificates for the space that you’re holding. While ARIN will continue to do in-addr service and WHOIS service for the legacy folks, rolling out additional services for people not under agreement is somewhat questionable financially. And I’d like to have everyone who has resource have the ability to get a cert for it. That would mean getting these folks to come in and sign an agreement for some nominal amount. So to the extent you know someone who is a legacy holder, you should remind them that this is available, because it’s a good program.

Okay. I’m going to move ahead now to the Advisory Council Report. John Sweeting.

ARIN Advisory Council Report

John Sweeting: Good morning everybody. We’ll make this short and sweet so we can get on to the open mic and everybody hopefully everybody will be able to get out there and catch the flights that they want to catch.

I want to make a real quick announcement to the AC members. We are planning to start our AC meeting 30 minutes after we adjourn here. So just so you can plan if you’ve got to check out or anything, unless I have any objections. Okay. Here is the Advisory Council. You get to see this picture on the website and of course you’ve seen all the people here in person this week. There’s 15 elected members; three-year terms; five elections each year, five positions up for election each year. I would like to take time to thank Lea and Leo for their long and dedicated efforts with the AC.

(Applause.)

As you can see, Lea has served for ten years and Leo for six years, and Leo was also past chair. They have been involved in quite a bit of the history of ARIN up until now. Thank you, guys, and good luck on what you’re planning to do next.

The 2009 Advisory Council election, as I said, the AC members serve three-year terms, five members up for re-election each year. The terms ending this year are Leo, Stacy Hughes, Lea, Rob Seastrom and Heather. There are 17 nominated individuals for the five positions. I believe that’s probably the high mark ever for an AC election. So it’s going to be very, very important for everybody to get out and vote for who they would like to see on the AC.

The AC role in the policy development process is to, of course, we evaluate the proposals, develop them into the ones that we think require development into draft policy. Present the draft policy on the PPML and also at the meetings here. Determining – we determine that the policies meet the community needs and requirements, and then we recommend those that we feel meet those requirements up to the Board of Trustees for adoption.

In 2009, the Advisory Council reviewed 25 proposals. 15 of them were accepted to work on and ten were abandoned. Of the 15 that we accepted onto our docket, 11 became Draft Policies and four were deferred until after this meeting. The status of the 11 Draft Policies that we worked on, five are currently pending. Two are global. Okay. Four were approved. I did do an update to this, but I’ll just tell you three were actually approved and one is on hold at the Board level right now. They’ve requested some additional information from the AC on it. So the correction to the slide is three approved, one is currently at the Board level on hold waiting for their information from the AC, and two have been abandoned. And there was also one emergency draft policy approved this year, up to date.

As far as where the Advisory Council members have traveled to this year and represented ARIN, we’ve been at both ARIN meetings. Everybody of course was there. One ARIN Caribbean meeting, three NANOGs, two RIPEs, two APNICs, one LACNIC, two AFRINICs, and 11 outreach programs, events supporting Megan.

Moving right along. Some of the other things we participated in was the Fellowship Program at both of the ARIN meetings. And from what I understand and have seen that has been a huge success. The outreach program, as I said, and basically we do – we participate in a lot of things we get asked to by ARIN. One of the main ones, of course, is the lunch table topic discussions.

So that’s it in a nutshell. So thank you, and please remember to vote. Like I said, there’s a lot of people running, and every single vote will count for sure.

John Curran: Okay, any questions for John regarding the Advisory Council Report? Next up, the ARIN Financial Report. This would be normally done by the treasurer. Scott is unable to be here, so we’re going to have our financial controller, Bob Stratton, come up.

ARIN Financial Report

Bob Stratton: Okay. I’m going to channel Scott. I’m going to talk about the Finance Committee, FinCom. It reviewed the fee structure and some suggestions we received. They’ve also monitored our results for this year. We also revised our investment policy and have forwarded to the Board for approval. And we’ve reviewed the IRS filing requirements and form.

Fee structure: The FinCom decided to keep the current fee structure in place after analyzing and reviewing it. They want to maintain the parallel between IPv4 and IPv6 and have the maintenance fees continue. We also received some suggestions through the suggestion process. A hardship forgiveness and a nonprofit fee differential. While they applauded the spirit of the suggestions, they wanted to keep the fee structure simple and these might be problematic to implement.

Projected year-end financials: I’m going to take a minute to chat about this. Total revenue is about what we expected. It’s about a 1 percent increase to what was projected. The salaries and benefits are somewhat under. This mainly has to do with benefits. We had a little less 401(k) match. Our budget estimate for health insurance was a little less than what we thought it might be. And training. Mark and his engineering efforts have kept us so busy that our training plans were kind of interrupted. So that’s the reason for that line being a little less. The travel line is somewhat less. However, we have two more months left in the year. So that may come closer.

Members meetings, Internet support, close. The last two lines, equipment communication, general office. This has to do with several factors. One, in doing the budget – and I claim a mea culpa here, on the Web portal effort I actually expensed it and it should have been a capital expense because GAAP calls for something where you do an effort to derive something that you’re going to use over a useful lifetime should actually be capitalized.

So the expense related to that is actually capitalized as we deploy the different levels of the Web portal or ARIN Online. Also, some equipment was delayed. Capital purchase equipment. So the depreciation expense is hitting later in the year, and finally there was a couple of estimates for colocation and disaster recovery sites where the actual solution derived by Matt and his team was a lot less than what we had estimated. We actually leveraged some of our current colocation sites. So fortunately for us we’re actually way under budget due to those factors.

Changes to investment funds: We have three main investment funds. We’ve changed the naming, and, in some, cases their purposes. Capital improvement we’ve changed operating reserve. It’s a true draw account. If we need the money we would pull the money from the operating reserve. Short-term CDs mainly. Deferred revenue changed to legal reserve. This is to meet future legal challenges. Again, it would be CDs a little longer term, but it should be available for us to draw on. And, finally, we changed the name of the Operating Reserve to the Long-Term Reserve. These are truly long-term accounts. Equity and bond mutual funds. It’s where the lion’s share of the money is. It also would derive where the volatility and investments would reside. There’s been a change in the IRS form. As a 501c(6), we’re a business league. So we have a 990 report. The FinCom is reviewing it. We’re redoing it. We had some questions. And before we file, the full Board is going to review it.

This slide shows the net change in investment revenue or income associated with our reserves. Last year was an unfortunate year, but this year seems to be going back into the green. In general, we’re up over the four-year time span. In terms of our draw on reserves, this is simply a cash needs for the organization. As you can see, since we have more activity in the last couple of years, we’ve actually had to draw on the reserves. This year so far we’ve only drawn half a million dollars. This just goes in line with the increased expenses due to the engineering effort and also the outreach efforts.

Last, Scott in San Antonio had mentioned we had some projections on our revenue streams. Again, these are projections. So no one knows what the future holds. The main point here is that IPv4 renewals probably will continue to be the lion’s share of our revenue stream going forward, at least for the next five-year time span. Now, this is an aggregation of all the director’s estimates, so our guess is as good as yours, as it were. But in reality, as you can see, IPv6 and maintenance will become more important, but still they are small compared to the IPv4 renewals. Even though the IPv4 initials will slowly decline and disappear, it’s the renewals that we assume we rely on for our revenue stream going forward. And this has IPv4 exhaustion predicted at the end of 2011. And with that, if you have any questions . . .

John Curran: Any questions on the Financial Report for ARIN? Okay. Thank you.

(Applause.)

ARIN Board of Trustees Report

John Curran: The last presentation is the ARIN Board of Trustees Report. Normally Paul Vixie would be giving this. Paul’s staying home taking care of family. If people don’t know it, there’s a lot of flus going around, and so family first. I stepped in. I offered to do the Board of Trustees Report because I have some experience doing it. So let’s start right in. Three areas of work: Policy actions, management actions and a look forward.

Policy actions this year: Since this is from San Antonio, I always give the report as we, meeting to meeting. Since San Antonio, we ratified the 2008-7 Identify Invalid WHOIS POCs, and we already had quite a bit of discussion about the implementation of that. We’ll continue to do so. And the Board ratified Draft Policy 2009-1, the transfer policy, which we also discussed quite a bit. Management actions. We hired a new President and CEO. Hi, I’m here.

(Applause.)

Thank you. We established an ARIN research process. Occasionally the community or the Board will have something that they want us to look into. For example, one of the topics that came up is how big can a router table be using equipment in the field today that has some relevance to aggregation and address size. We actually put out a research initiative to do that. Folks last year or earlier this year saw Jean Camp present a discussion about whether, a study she did commissioned by ARIN, about whether it’s worth trying to extend the life of IPv4 by greatly rationing addresses. So we do do these from time to time. We decided we would formalize the process, make sure that when we go out to this and ask for research to be done, that we do it in a way that people are aware of it. We post these now. We have a formal statement of work to make sure it’s all being consistently done. So folks should be aware that if you are an organization that does do network research, network development from time to time, ARIN might ask for a project and we welcome solicitations from everyone.

We set the resource RPKI service direction. Obviously been talking about this for a number of years. The ARIN Board, along with the other RIRs, committed to a direction. There’s actually a statement on the NRO website regarding RPKI that says we’re all working aggressively on pilot services, and we will all work on a long-term production service that can be done with a single TA.

Strengthened IPv6 outreach program. Megan already presented that. Yeah, we’re doing a lot of outreach about IPv6. I am up to 20 to 30 presentations a month between interviews and road. And we intend to continue this. This is something that the community told us, hey, folks, it’s going to be very challenging to get to IPv6. The more we can make people aware, the better. I am still running into people and giving presentations. Sometimes these are executive level presentations to gatherings of CEOs where they say I’ve heard about this but I didn’t think it was actually going to happen; didn’t you guys cancel the IPv6 stuff? So there’s a lot of education to be done. We’re going to continue to work very hard on doing IPv6 outreach. Working with related organizations in some cases. We’re working with the RIRs both individually and through the coordination function of the NRO.

We’re working with ICANN. ICANN’s actually been a good partner, has worked with us on trade show booths, on presentations, on materials to educate about IPv6. We’re very happy. ISOC similarly a good partner here, the Internet Society, and working with us on doing outreach.

And then finally, management actions in the last six months, review and approve the Finance Committee recommendations which you already saw.

Looking forward, we’re in the midst of considering the membership and anti-takeover committee reports. People may not know, I mentioned this about a year and a half ago, we had a membership and anti-takeover committees, a pair of them. They made recommendations to the Board. The Board’s looking at them. Part of it is to look at how do we want to structure membership long term. Obviously you saw the graph showing revenues, and IPv4 continues to be there. But we also have to look for the year where 20 years out maybe the IPv4 installed base isn’t as large or isn’t as interesting. So trying to look at some long-term issues. Anti-takeover, amazingly two people approached me at this meeting and said: Hey, I’m wondering, people can get a paid membership. And I said, yeah, they get a vote. Yeah, that’s true. We notice that the fact of the matter is that we have a situation where we want to make sure that ARIN represents the community, and the community is the people that we see here, the people participating on the list, the folks who are involved. We don’t want to have a circumstance where someone could step up and suddenly have 150 entities registered as members and suddenly have 150 votes. So we’re looking at some of the challenges of that and how to structure the membership. And you’ll probably see something from us accordingly.

Significant time and resource commitments for international education on the RIR system. Okay. Why are we spending a lot of time internationally discussing the Regional Internet Registry system? You would think that we could each, in our own region, educate people. Well, it turns out there’s a lot of countries that are paying attention to the Internet and realizing how important it is to their economy. And they’re looking at some of the developments like us somehow running out of IPv4 addresses.

You would think if we’re running out of IPv4 addresses we probably did something wrong, obviously, and so countries are paying attention to the Internet like they weren’t before. We have regulatory and intergovernmental groups that are now, such as the ITU, looking aggressively at how the Internet and the Internet resource management should be done, such as Internet numbers. This means we spend a lot of time explaining how the policies are formed on a bottom-up representative basis. We spend a lot of time explaining how we work together. We have to explain this all to a lot of people. I’m stepping on a plane to Seoul, Korea this week and Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt in two weeks. And there’s a lot of people who don’t understand how the regional system has been built, how we interact with the IETF and ICANN. And so the outreach is very important.

If we’re to continue to be able to control Internet numbering policy and have a number resource policy manual, we have to have cooperation and continued education to that region, because it’s possible that this could be decided to be done through a more government-organized system. And that’s not necessarily one that would be as adaptive to the needs of the members as what we’ve enjoyed over the last few days.

Bill Woodcock: I’d like to point out that many of your companies have government affairs officers and there are very few people in the world who actually understand this set of issues and actually are informed enough on it to be able to speak to these issues.And if you like being able to help regulate your own flow of Internet resources, you might want to have your government affairs officers get in touch with me or John or Cathy and we can sort of help bring them up to speed on what the issues are, what they might be able to do to help preserve the bottom up process.

John Curran: Absolutely. If you have an organization, if you’re an organization that has a government affairs or public policy group, I would love to speak to them. I’d love to hear their views, describe how we work and also let them know about the challenges we have because it’s possible they could help us out as well. Very good point. Finally, looking forward, the Board’s spending a lot of time looking at, both the staff and the Board, looking at the long-term vision for services via our strategic planning process. We’ve set one in place that’s now beginning to have results. We’re actually trying to structure our services in a way that we understand what you value and what you don’t and how those will evolve over time. An example of this is we realize that not everyone necessarily wants us to run every service for them.

We’ve had the community come back and say, well, maybe I will run my own RPKI server, or I’ll run a WHOIS server, or I’ll handle doing that function. Some of the members out there want us to provide it all as a turn-key package, and some, you have your own software. You have your own policies. You have your own procedures. You want us to keep, just keep a clean registry. So we’re trying to structure that so that long term we don’t get into a dichotomy where everyone has to get everything because that’s what you’ve decided, or ARIN’s a no frills organization and we can’t help a start-up or new ISP with some of the services they need. We’ll be presenting in meetings in the next few years how we want to evolve that so you folks get the core services you want, and if you want more, we understand how to deliver it.

That’s all I have. Questions? Microphones are open.

Lee Howard: Lee Howard. John, I’m delighted and surprised that this is the first Board report you’ve ever given where you had slides.

John Curran: Not quite true, but close, yes. I figured I would give slides since I wanted to send them to our chairman before I actually stood up here. But yes. I could have sent him my mental thoughts, but then I might have said something else instead. So microphones are open. Yes, Far right side.

John Springer: John Springer, Inland Telephone. On the 22nd of September, Member Services announced that the research opportunity had been awarded to Mr. Edleman. In your comments announcing the research opportunity on the 7th of August, there’s a carefully worded statement that I’m wondering if I can get some amplification for.

“ARIN Board of Trustees will use the results of this research to determine changes in strategic directions, operating plan objectives and may share with the Internet community or other interested parties for policy evaluation and consideration.”

– You may share ?

John Curran: You actually need to be careful. We’ve actually done a number of research awards. One of them was done under counsel. And so it is one that’s not disclosed in full detail, relating to how people could break into ARIN’s systems or game our policy system, if people want to know what it’s all about. So in particular, though, Ben Edleman is simply studying some issues regarding transfer policy and implications of transfer policy and what it means to us in terms of economics of the organization.

John Springer: Understood. When is his report going to be available or what circumstances may you consider that it won’t be available?

John Curran: Once the Board’s reviewed it, it will make a determination. It’s quite likely to be available. That was the intention originally. We don’t have it yet. I’m not going to put him on the spot, but it’s something that we’re hoping to have over the next few months. And people should continue to pay attention to the announced mailing list because there are other projects that the Board or the organization has decided it needs to know, so there will be other announcements. Okay. Microphones are open. Remote mics are open. They’ll be open for at least another minute.

Marc Crandall: Question from Joe Maimon. What does takeover mean?

John Curran: What exactly does takeover mean? We have a remote question.

So the assumption here is that organizations participate and those organizations who participate want to elect Advisory Council members and Board members who actually know about this area and are knowledgeable and they trust their decision-making process. The concern of the Takeover Committee was what if one concern, imagine a big evil, nasty company called JC, decided that it would use its millions of dollars in reserve – since we’re being hypothetical, it’s tens of millions, actually, now that I think about it – and it wants to go out and take over ARIN, would there be a way for it to purchase memberships and eventually put Board members on, cycle Board members off so it ended up with control of the organization, and then we’d all be showing up to a meeting where, because they change how everything works, you really don’t have a say. You think this is a remote possibility, but it actually happens to organizations, particularly not for profit organizations or industry trade associations that aren’t careful. So we just want to make sure that you folks are represented and that you continue to be represented and that there’s the necessary barriers. That it’s not a trivial activity to show up with a bucket of money and take over the organization.

Microphones remain open. Closing the microphones. Closing the remote mics.

Okay. That’s the end of the Board of Trustees Report.

Open Microphone

John Curran: We now go to open mic. Microphones are open for any purpose. Owen DeLong.

Owen DeLong: So this sort of relates to the takeover thing, but I felt it was better for open mic than for the Board report. As it currently stands, there is a little bit of a dichotomy in my opinion, and you and I have talked about this privately but I’m going to bring it up in a public forum now, where the Advisory Council represents the community at large and yet is elected by the ARIN membership. I would like to put before the members the idea that the Advisory Council should perhaps be elected by the community.

John Curran: So that you would suggest that ARIN would count votes from a group of people called “the community” in determining who was appropriately elected for the AC?

Owen DeLong: Correct.

John Curran: And then the qualifications of a voter out in that thing called “the community” would be an e-mail address or a –

Owen DeLong: Well, at the very least I would say we could look at those who have participated on PPML or those who are subscribed to PPML or – there should be the metric we used for the NRO. There should be some way in which we can not require $500 a year or more in order to influence the content of the Advisory Council.

John Curran: So one would think – I’m just going to hypothecate. I understand what you’re proposing – one would think that you’re not really electing Advisory Council members to get a particular policy or proposal through, you’re electing them based on their knowledge and their wisdom. So as long as you’ve got a good set of 15 that suffices for the purposes of anybody out in the community working on policy who wants to get it. If they can’t explain it in such a way that it’s valuable to the AC, the goal is I can’t explain it to the current AC so I’ll slowly replace them?

Owen DeLong: I think it’s more a matter of the – everybody’s got opinions. And not everybody agrees on what the right thing for a given circumstance is. And I think if you’ve got a good set of 15, your definition of a good set of 15 can vary depending on your particular portion of the more broad community that you are a portion of. And I think that the need to be a member to vote on the Advisory Council elections may skew things towards one portion of the community more than others. I’m not sure that that’s happening, but I put it before the membership as something to consider.

John Curran: Okay.

Owen DeLong: Maybe we should be elected by the body we represent.

John Curran: If people want to get up and speak, go right ahead. Microphones are open for that or any other topic. Yes, Lee.

Lee Howard: I’d be interested in – I guess I don’t need to ask for your specific response, but in considering that, people should think about whether we have a well-constituted Advisory Council. If there are people, constituency interests who are not represented, then, of course, we should have better nominees. And, please, I encourage people to nominate. John sort of raised the question, the fundamental question becomes: How do you qualify a voter? And I would imagine people having trouble supporting a proposal without knowing how a voter becomes qualified, because there’s a danger of – because the danger of takeover, and it’s not that ARIN has resources. It’s I could imagine a large organization seeding a lot of participants in order to effect policy that benefits them directly and that’s a very scary proposition to me.

John Curran: Okay. Remote participant.

Marc Crandall: We have a question from Joe Maimon from CHL. The various petition processes, has some consideration gone into whether it’s working or not? The policy petition process was not well understood earlier this year, and the noncompetition process evoked some strong reactions.

John Curran: Right. So the answer is the Board’s discussed this quite a bit. The staff’s discussed this quite a bit. And we certainly, with respect to the election processes, after this election we will make much clearer and more concise and simpler the election petition processes.

With respect to the policy, we just implemented the new PPML which has a petition process at every part, and I guess the question is we probably need to communicate that much better to the community. But there’s literally, for every decision that the AC makes, there’s a potential for an organization to petition to move past that point. So if I didn’t say it before, I’m saying it now. If you don’t like a decision of the AC, there is an opportunity to petition, I guarantee it, whatever that decision might be. It is now a general petition process to move past an AC decision and we’ll need to communicate that a lot better, I think, but it’s a very important point.

Rear microphone.

Leo Bicknell: Leo Bicknell, ISC, ARIN AC. I’m very sympathetic to Owen’s concept here, and in particular I wanted to point out that one of the areas the AC has a lot of difficulty with in my experience is when we have policies that are only relevant to a subset of the community. From time to time we get policies that are very, very important but perhaps only to 10 percent of the people in the room and the other 90 percent of the people honestly don’t care. They just don’t have a dog in that hunt. And so we’ll get votes, shows of hands in the room, excuse me, of ten for/none against. And oftentimes we kind of scratch our heads and go, yeah, really the other 120 people in the room don’t care. That’s consensus and that’s a very difficult thing for us. And I think in many of those cases the groups are underrepresented in the current situation. One example I would give is the community networks folks. A lot of the community networks folks that the AC has talked with for various reasons haven’t been able to show up at the meetings, aren’t members paying $500 a year, and so it is more difficult for them to influence the results. I would almost say that Owen’s idea is unworkable due to the problem of who gets to vote and how do you prevent someone from getting all of their DSL subscribers to magically become voters somehow or something like that.

But the one idea that I had is there’s been some outcry from a small segment of the population for tighter integration between ARIN and NANOG. And perhaps NANOG attendees should be able to vote for Advisory Council positions. That seems like a relatively well-defined group. They already have a voting and identification system and they’re absolutely community members I think. So it’s not perhaps as inclusive as Owen was suggesting, but I think it might be workable.

John Curran: Understood. Can I ask a question about the prior example you gave of community networking or some other party? I understand it may be hard for them to, hard for them to participate and elect someone to the Advisory Council, but remote participation is wide open. We have all the slides. We stay to the agenda so the policies come up at the right time. They’re counted in the polls that are taken as remote participants. And so I just want to say if a hundred community networking people were to remotely attend a meeting where that policy was being considered, none of them would have to pay $500 and your vote would be 110 to none.

Leo Bicknell: Understand. I think some of the constituencies involved don’t really understand that. And some education might help. But at the same time some of the communities, that may not be a great example, but in some of the communities they don’t even have the time to sit on line for a day, day and a half watching what’s going on and commenting at the right time and things of that nature. I also think there might be certainly a perception problem – I don’t know if it’s deeper than a perception problem – in that with the PDP change, I think there is a perception at least that AC members’ opinions on things have a new importance. It’s not been in place long enough for me to really know if that perception is reality or not.

But it may also be leading to a situation where more people who haven’t participated in the past see the makeup of the AC as a more interesting and important function than it used to be.

John Curran: Got it. Bill, you wanted to comment?

Bill Woodcock: I was going to say that it seems perhaps logistically difficult or organizationally difficult to just kind of extend voting privileges to an arbitrary group of somebody else’s members. On the other hand, NANOG participation and ARIN individual membership are sort of similar cost and we already integrate with them fairly tightly on meetings. So one thing that might be worth proposing is how it would work to have those be reciprocal, right, so that someone who paid for NANOG attendance could also be made an individual member, or someone who became an ARIN individual member might also gain NANOG attendance that way, what that might look like. There’s back end business stuff that would have to be done and I’m sure this would give ARIN staff heart attacks, but –

John Curran: Just depends on who they’re writing the check to, but otherwise, all good.

Bill Woodcock: Right. If you’re looking for a way to do it, that seems like a way that’s not sort of arbitrarily saying, oh, and those people, they get to vote, too.

Leo Bicknell: Oh, I’m not hanging my hat on any particular structure there. Obviously in the NRO election, NANOG folks got to vote. So it seems like on some level this is workable.

John Curran: We have a comment remote on this.

Marc Crandall: There was a comment to Leo from Joe Maimon from CHL, which was that – the point he wanted to make was that he was pleasantly surprised by the fact that there were so few remote participants, but the ones that there were, by the weight that ARIN assigns to those remote participants who choose to participate.

John Curran: Good. Very good. Center front microphone.

Andrew Dul: With regard to membership and specifically with regard to voting for AC or not regarding to voting for, or with regard to voting for the Board as well, we have a group of organizations that don’t have a vote today, and those are all of our end users. I know that this has come up in the past as a question of how do we allow those people to participate more in the process. And one of the ways we can consider that is to making them more part of our membership in the future than they are today. I don’t know if that would mean changing the fee structure slightly or something else to bring those other people into the realm of being a full member, but it seems to me that we would want to include those organizations that are end users and who want to participate as much as an ISP who chooses to participate.

John Curran: If you have a suggestion, we’d love to have it.

Andrew Dul: I don’t know if I have a specific suggestion to bring them in, other than you could do $200 or something. I don’t know. There just seems to be a group of people that a little bit of encouragement might bring them in more to participate. I realize that 95 percent of end users would not participate. But if we got those 5 percent to participate in either the Board election or the Advisory Council positions, I think that would be valuable. I don’t know exactly how to do it. But I would like to see that happen.

John Curran: You’d like to see more participation in the elections as opposed to the policy process or both?

Andrew Dul: I think the policy process is open for any end user who wishes to participate. Specifically, I think that end users who want to participate in the Board or the Advisory Council election should be permitted to do so given some set of hoops.

John Curran: Okay. Rear microphone.

Jason Schiller: Jason Schiller, Verizon, UUNET and NRO NC. One of the things you talked about is reciprocation between the ARIN community and the NANOG community. I think there’s one very important thing that needs to be reciprocated and that’s information. We can’t stand up here and make number policy in a vacuum and not think it affects operations. And the operators can’t make routing decisions in a vacuum and not think that it affects number policy. These two things are tightly coupled, and I think that the information that these two communities have is overlapping and is necessary to have both good number policy and good routing policy.

John Curran: Okay. We’ve made some efforts to get close to NANOG, I think, for example, this particular meeting, Wednesday’s meeting was about as joint as you could get and still be distinct organizations. I guess I’m wondering, do you have suggestions for how to get closer and improve the information sharing?

Jason Schiller: Well, one of the things you talked about was doing some sort of reciprocation in terms of allowing NANOG members to vote. Another thing you might consider, if you’re going through all the trouble of passing money around behind the scenes, is to make it more easy for those folks to attend our meetings and for us to attend their meetings by having maybe a single registration, or some sort of discount if you register for both, or have a day in between both conferences which is clearly not an ARIN day and clearly not a NANOG day where we address these issues, where maybe Einar can get up and talk about policies that are on the docket and how they might impact routing and allow the operators to weigh in on their concerns about that or have a period of time where operators can stand up and say these are the problems I have with ARIN policy and this is why it’s crap and maybe that can get some exchange back and forth and draw more people into this process.

John Curran: Got it. Thank you.

Center front.

Cathy Aronson: Hi, Cathy Aronson, ARIN AC again. Wow, my list got really long while I was standing up here. Just to respond directly to Jason. I don’t know whether it’s good or bad. But I’m now on the NANOG program committee. So if you have ideas like his, please let me know, because that’s one of the reasons why I decided to do that. And, like I said, I’m not sure if that’s good or bad.

The other thing is regarding the other topic. Anyone can be on the Board, run for the Board or the AC regardless of whether they’re a member. And I don’t know if everybody here realizes that, but there’s a number of us that haven’t been ARIN members for a really long time. All you have to do is actually get an ARIN member to nominate you. So if you think there’s an underserved area and that person should be on the AC, if you’re a member, nominate them. If you’re not, get a member to nominate them, it’s pretty easy.

I also wondered why it is that the NRO election process isn’t appropriate? Because everybody in the community, right, somehow votes for the NRO candidates but not the AC candidates. I wondered if you could address what the issue with that might be.

John Curran: Purely a historical situation. The NRO election is supposed to be open to everyone in the region, and that was what was set up at the time of the MOU which established all of us working together under ICANN, and ARIN forms a traditional business association which has advisory groups which are generally elected by what’s recognized as members. So it is simply the fact that they’ve come from two different origins. That’s not to say we can’t change the AC election process if that’s what’s desired.

Cathy Aronson: Is there a particular reason why that process wouldn’t work for the AC?

John Curran: Go ahead, Lee.

Lee Howard: My response would be that the risk of capture of the NRO NC is significantly lower because we only elect three of 15 members to that body. So even if it were captured within our region, the process could still go on. And furthermore, the scope of responsibilities for the NRO NC is significantly different than that for the ARIN AC. So I’m not sure that – I’m having a little trouble coming up with even in my paranoid little mind why somebody would want to take over the NRO NC. John Sweeting just reminded me that one of the three ASO NRO NC members is appointed, not elected.

John Curran: Right. Bill, you want to respond?

Bill Woodcock: Also, I think there are probably a lot of people in the room who think, hmmm, takeover, that seems like a pretty remote prospect or that’s paranoia or whatever. But as John said, this is something that does happen to nonprofits. Nonprofits get targeted for this as their bank account gets larger and as their revenues get larger and as they gain control over critical resources that are subject to inflexible demand by companies with even larger revenue streams like yourselves. More specifically, in the last year, the national mix of two countries – that is the ccTLD domain registries for two countries got taken over by domainers who simply wanted to take the money and run, and so we do need to be careful with these things.

John Curran: Far right mic.

John Springer: John Springer, Inland Telephone. I’d just like to point out that the two pursuits, protection against hostile takeover and the attempt to open up membership to grassroots types organizations that don’t have the resources to participate more visibly are orthogonal to each other. So if the organization is successful at beefing up whatever controls are necessary to prevent hostile takeover, it is going to vastly complicate this question.

John Curran: Got it. Center front.

Owen DeLong: Owen DeLong, ARIN AC, Hurricane Electric. As the person who sort of first brought this topic up, I want to respond first to Andrew’s comments. I think it’s absolutely inappropriate to open up voting for the Board to nonmembers. I think the Board has the fiduciary responsibility to the organization and that it is accountable to the membership of the organization in its role as the Board and not to the community at large. And so I think that the Board should be elected by that body which it technically serves, which is the membership. I think that the AC’s role is very different, and I’m not sure whether we need to change anything or not. I’m not convinced that the process as it stands is broken. I wanted to put this in front of the community and the membership and have it discussed. I think one way that we might be able to expand this very easily with relatively minimal likelihood of it being a takeover risk would be if you are a POC with resources attached to your POC handle, then you have one vote in the AC election. And if you are not, then you do not, because that pretty well defines the community.

John Curran: That would effectively open it up to from members to members plus end users holding resources, plus ASN holders’ resources, plus legacy holders holding resources. That’s an interesting proposal. I will think about that. Center front.

Andrew Dul: Andrew Dul. To respond to Owen’s. I was not suggesting that we open the Board election to nonmembers. I was suggesting that we make the membership larger by figuring out how to make end users more like members. That was my goal there. I’d like to see more end-user participation. And if people can vote, maybe they feel like they’re more inclined to participate.

John Curran: Got it. Makes perfect sense. Remote participant.

Marc Crandall: Remote participant. We have a comment from Joe Maimon from CHL. He’d like to go on the record stating that he believes ARIN is an incredibly open and welcoming organization. To the extent they should be concerned with takeover, which could cost only as much as about two to five million, then non-participants should only have themselves to blame.

John Curran: Okay. Center rear mic.

Steve Feldman: Steve Feldman, NANOG Steering Committee. Couple of things in terms of the election thing, I probably can’t comment too much on it. But if there are ways that NANOG and ARIN can work together on some things, NANOG certainly would be open to helping with that. We’ve been working really closely with ARIN, been in conversations this week in particular about how to jointly manage these back-to-back meetings, how to arrange joint programming. We’ve had a couple of surveys come back already saying that they thought that they thought the stuff both on Monday and yesterday was incredibly valuable to them, and we want to see more of it. So definitely plan to work with you some more on that. The only other comment really is we do things the way we do because we’ve always done them that way and there’s inertia. Change is good, but somebody needs to put things in motion, propose good ideas, and push to see them carried through. So thanks.

John Curran: Thanks, Steve. Center rear mic.

Leo Bicknell: I have a related but slightly different topic. I see no one else at the mic, so probably a good time. Leo Bicknell, ISC, ARIN AC. One of the things that I’ve noticed is even with the joint sessions which we’ve done several of now in the fall, on Wednesday an awful lot of routing folks leave and an awful lot of addressing folks show up. And the only other example I have that I’ve been to is a RIPE meeting where it’s the same week-long, but all the addressing and routing stuff is fully interleaved so folks can’t do that, which I’m sure they actually don’t like, because it means that everyone’s here for the whole week. But it forces them to mingle. And so I’m wondering what folks think of a joint ARIN/NANOG where before the break is NANOG, after the break is ARIN. After lunch is NANOG, after the break is ARIN, and do that for five days, so that people can’t leave halfway through and we’re forcing them to actually talk to each other.

John Curran: Microphones are open.

Aaron Hughes: Aaron Hughes. I think that’s generally probably a great idea with the exception of individual company justification for that period of time, becomes more difficult, and we may lose some attendance at the same time as educating both sides, but a smaller group of people.

John Curran: Understood. We hear you, and we’ll work with the PC and SC with NANOG to get close.

Lee Howard: Lee Howard, ARIN Board and other places. New topic. I wanted to comment – I wanted to specifically thank, I’m sure you’ll do this any way – I want to specifically thank the remote participants this week. Not only have the comments, I think, been valuable and useful, and I’m glad you were able to do that, but I noticed that during one of these shows of hands yesterday, the balance of hands favor and opposed tilted based on the number of hands in the remote participation room. So great job. Thank you.

(Applause.)

John Curran: Microphones remain open. I’ll be closing microphones in a minute. Approach the mic if you have a topic. Center front.

Scott Leibrand: Scott Leibrand, ARIN AC. One thing that occurred to me while doing my ballot for this election is we have a situation where we have a lot of really good candidates. We have a limited number of slots. We have the possibility that, for example, if I’m voting for five AC members, more than likely not all five of my votes are going to be the five that get elected just by mathematics. So I have no say in those other two. An alternative that occurred to me is called rank choice voting.

John Curran: Can you back up, when you say you have no say in those other two, what do you mean?

Scott Leibrand: I mean, I select five people. If two of the people I selected don’t get elected and I had a preference among the other people as to which ones should be elected if those ones I chose didn’t get elected, that doesn’t get communicated in the process.

John Curran: You’re correct.

Scott Leibrand: There’s a process called rank choice voting where you simply number as many people as you want, one through whatever as these are my preferences in order, that has actually been used in regular elections, in regular places and addresses that problem. So I’d like to suggest that ARIN consider that for the online elections. It seems a rather simple process that has a number of benefits, and it also seems to help with the increasingly good and long slates of good candidates that we have, so that might help address some of the pressure on the NonCom to print people as well.

John Curran: As part of the NonCom post-election review of the NonCom election process, I’ll add that to the list of things we bring to the Board. Center rear mic. I’m closing the microphones in 10, five, four, three, two, one. Microphones are closed. Center rear mic.

Rob Seastrom: Rob Seastrom, ARIN Advisory Council and NANOG Steering Committee and Afilias. While I understand the motivation behind Leo’s recommendation that we have sort of joint meeting where it sort of passes back and forth and around and all that, I think that poses a logistical nightmare and ends up being something that’s more likely to come out looking like an Abbott and Costello sketch than anything else.

So I’m not exactly in favor of that.

John Curran: Okay. Right microphone.

Steve Woodrow: Steve Woodrow, MIT. So I gather the fellowship program is relatively new. I wanted to provide some feedback. First of all, thank you for, I guess, for all of the ARIN members supporting this process. I think it was really valuable. It was really an enlightening four days. I learned a lot. Met some really interesting people. So thanks for selecting me and keep it up. I think it’s really a great program.

John Curran: Thank you.

(Applause.)

Center front.

David Farmer: David Farmer, University of Minnesota, ARIN AC. Sorry about that. In the Wednesday session about IPv6, a couple of comments came up about having your address show up on the ARIN web page when you go there. I would like to point out, I made a suggestion through the suggestion process for that very thing around the beginning of the year. And it’s 2009-2, from the suggestion process. Is there an update that could be given on that?

John Curran: It’s a difficult thing to do because of the content management system that you’re interfacing with for the front end. I’ve told the organization I want to do this. We should have the address on the page and it will happen slowly.

David Farmer: Okay.

John Curran: Not forgotten, though.

David Farmer: Believe me, I understand the difficulties of content management systems. But somehow several of the other RIRs seemed to figure it out.

John Curran: One of the valuable things about our RIR system, the fact that we have five, not one, is that we all do different things and we get to learn from each other. So I note that we’re a little behind in that particular battle and we will catch up. Okay. Scott, you were in line when I closed it. No? I just want to make sure there was no one cut off. All right. That concludes the open microphone. Thank you, everyone.

(Applause.)

Closing Announcements and Meeting Adjournment

John Curran: And this is the end of the meeting. So remember to complete your meeting survey. You can win a portable little mini monitor. Wonderful little thing. Consolation prize. We keep track of the daily meeting survey respondents, except Owen’s, who doesn’t fill his out, but we keep track of all the ones who did get filled out, and we will enter them into a consolation prize entry to win a Linux-based photo frame.

Calling all DMRs. Elections are open. Vote now. All organizations should exercise their right to vote. Go to the ARIN website, click on the “vote now” button and vote. You will be hearing from us. We’ll be reminding all DMRs of organizations over the next week.

Sponsors, one more time, Arbor and Merit, our network connectivity sponsors.

(Applause.)

Reminders: The wireless network will shut down after the members’ meeting. That’s momentarily. Thanks for being part of ARIN XXIV. One more thing: You have badges here. We recycle these holders. They show up meeting to meeting. Take them off and drop them off at the basket on the table out there. If you have to have a memento, take it. If you don’t, please give it back to us so we can conserve.

Thank you very much. See you at the next meeting.

(Adjourned at 12:04 p.m.)