ARIN XXI Members Meeting Draft Transcript - 9 April 2008 [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.

Meeting Called to Order

MR. PLZAK: All right. Good morning. We’re getting a little more sparse here. One thing you may want to do is check your airline connections because there may be some difficulties today. But I can’t say whether or not there will be, but a prudent traveler would do so. So, let’s go ahead and get started with this morning’s activities. First of all, remember to visit the Cyber Café, and we still have some more surveys. The help desks are still open. And remember – just a minute. Yeah, I definitely need a Vanna White. So, anyway, that’s the consolation prize. This is given to us by Egate, and I’ll put a little brief word in here. This is an example of a sponsorship opportunity, just to do this kind of thing. You don’t have to sponsor a lunch or a breakfast or anything else. You could do something as simple as this. And other people have done it in the past. So, this is an opportunity for you. So let’s thank our big sponsor, WildBlue. (Applause)

MR. PLZAK: Remember, the rules apply, and John will be enforcing them. At the head table, we have all the Board members, with the exception of Lee Howard, who could not travel to Denver, and also, the Chair of the Advisory Council, Leo. And so, now we are ready to begin. And I will turn the floor over to John Curran, the Chair.

ARIN Election Process

MR. CURRAN: Thank you, Ray. Good morning. Yeah, I have a tie on. Luckily, IM in Java works, because I’m getting lots of feedback already. I talked yesterday about the fact that occasionally we do outreach to communities beyond the ISP community. I have one of those later on today. And I would let you know that when I go do those things, I actually dress up, not as we dress here, but as we might get expected to dress in the real world. So, I apologize for the tie, for those who are so offended. So, let’s see. Today we have a fairly busy agenda. I believe the two things that we need to address are – that I added to the agenda was the ARIN Election Process and the ARIN Membership List AUP. I want to talk about the election process first. Since our last meeting, we had an occasion where we had folks raise questions about the election process. It was quite an active discussion on arin-discuss. I actually sent a message to the mailing list clarifying ARIN’s position, to make sure everyone knew exactly what it is. We are an interesting organization in that, because of our online nature, by default we have a very high level of participation, a very high level of contact with our community.

Having said such, when you intersect our bylaws with the Virginia laws, there was an ambiguity regarding quorum. And we’ve actually amended the bylaws to specifically make it clear how we treat the quorum question, which is that because of the amount of online work we do and the e-mail we send to every member, the fact that we use those same e-mail addresses to contact you and for billing purposes, we know the mail’s getting through. And we send more than half a dozen reminders of the election. So, for that reason, we actually consider those ballots delivered and we count them in quorum. Now, the bylaws have been updated to make that crystal clear, so I don’t have to address that in the future. But it does bring up an interesting question. Because, this community is actively involved, and I have faith that if we looked at the votes, the people who are here would probably be in the organizations that cast votes.

We do need to have some feedback as to whether or not we have a high enough level of participation from the more than 2,000 organizations that didn’t respond to their ballots. And, we can do a number of things about this. We could – SMTP has something called Return Receipt Accepted. I know, because a lot of us filter it. But a lot of organizations don’t filter it, and it would allow us a relatively high, assured count of knowing that ballots got through. There’s also the possibility of doing more colorful and interesting things to create a trail of evidence that shows that we’ve gotten through to members. This includes the use of an HTTP reference for a very small, one-pixel image, so you would actually know that it got opened on someone’s screen. There are some folks who have strong moral objections to such things. But it’s certainly a possibility. We can, actually, pick up the phone and call members. We can pick up the phone, or have a small group of people pick up the phone, and call the members who have not responded online and gone into the election website and cast their ballot. That’s another possibility. We don’t need to do anything here. But, certainly, if someone’s asked from the outside, it would be good to show that we have a higher level of assurance that the community has seen those ballots, other than the fact that those e-mail addresses have been in use and we call them six times – we send e-mail six times, we don’t get a lot of rejections. Still, from the outside world, it’s probably better to have a higher level of involvement.

Someone mentioned the fact that we could go as far as to say, you must cast a vote. You know? It’s not a privilege; it’s a duty. There’re some interesting questions about that, because we are an organization that has members and, as such, we have to intersect with the legal aspects of that. So, I’m not sure we can go that far, but we can certainly explore it if that’s what the community wants. So along these lines, regarding participation in our elections, from those who might not, right now, be casting the ballots, but simply deleting them as the reminders arrive, what should ARIN be doing about this? I open the floor for community feedback.

MR. DeLONG: Owen DeLong, ARIN AC. Has any investigation been done to identify the reasons such a large percentage of the membership are not responding?

MR. CURRAN: No, I guess if we took to the act of calling them, we could probably ask that as the first question. But the act of calling them may solve the problem. So, no, we – we can ask you, okay. Everyone in the room, why didn’t you vote in the last election? Did anyone not vote and feel that they want to confess it before the mic? Come forth, the microphones are open. Unfortunately, we don’t have a lot of contact with those organizations. We know they pay their bills.

MR. DeLONG: It’s understood. I’m just thinking that in order to solve a problem, it might be good to know why the problem exists.

MR. CURRAN: Right. Good question. So maybe as part of outreach we should not just call them and remind them, but ask them, is there a difficulty here we’re unaware of? Okay. Good feedback. Center microphone.

MR. DARTE: Yeah, Bill Darte, ARIN AC. It seems to me that in security procedure, there’s the mechanism of click through. And that, you know, for whatever it’s worth, is certainly a, you know, establishes some sort of a record. And I, again, to the extent that people pay their bills, if there could be some click through sort of a procedure there, that they are aware that they have a duty, or at least the capability, of voting, that would be an acknowledgment.

MR. CURRAN: Okay. Thank you. Center rear microphone.

MR. SEASTROM: Rob Seastrom, ARIN AC, et cetera. I’d like to point out that it is probably less expensive to do Certified Mail, Return Receipt Requested. And probably something that would weather any kind of legal challenge a lot better than making phone calls.

MR. CURRAN: Okay. Good feedback. Rear microphone. Jason.

MR. SCHILLER: Jason Schiller, Verizon Business, NRO NC. I only know of one organization that did not vote in the last election, and that had to do with a mix up about the fact that they had a role account and did not have an individual designated.

MR. CURRAN: Okay. Yes, Leo.

MR. BICKNELL: As a question, when the bills go out – because I’ve never received one because that’s not my department – oh, sorry. When the bills go out, is there anything on the bill that says your organization is entitled to vote? Is there anything educating that? Because I know, often, the person who receives the bill is not the person who might be coming to this meeting, for instance. It goes to, you know, some other group, some other department. So.

MR. WOODCOCK: And you want your accounts payable department voting?

MR. BICKNELL: Not necessarily, but I’m thinking that might be another avenue.

MR. CURRAN: Okay. So, point of information. Ray, do you want to respond? Or Bob Stratton?

MR. PLZAK: Bob, Bob, Bob. Would you respond to that please?

MR. CURRAN: Bob, is there anything on the bill that says, you have the right to vote?

MR. STRATTON: No, but the bill does refer to our website and all your rights are (off mike) there on the website.

SPEAKER: Right.

MR. STRATTON: We could certainly put it on there if you wanted us to.

MR. CURRAN: Okay. Another interesting thought. It is true that in some organizations, bills go into a system, so the paper may actually not make it to anyone. In fact, in some cases, only the digits make it to people. But that depends on how – right, it depends on how bad the organization is. But thank you for the suggestion. Microphones remain open. Think we’ve gotten some good suggestions so far?

MR. WILLIAMSON: David Williamson, Tellme Networks. I think you’re going to find the problem semi-intractable at points. A lot of the, you know, designated member representatives are administrators, just, you know, whomever gets the bill, or, you know, someone in management just had to go deal with ARIN once to get some space. And those are people that honestly aren’t going to care. And in a lot of other organizations, you’re going to find people who are not active participants in PPML or this body, and they’re going to look at the list of names they can vote for and go, I have no idea who these people are, I have no way to make a valid choice, so I’ll just abstain.

SPEAKER: Right.

MR. WILLIAMSON: So, I think, you know, I don’t want to discourage outreach. I think that’s clearly the right move, but I think you’re going to find that there may be limited possibilities for actually getting more participation in the voting process.

MR. CURRAN: Okay. Good feedback.

MR. WILLIAMSON: I would hope we could, like, double the number of votes. That, alone, would be fabulous.

MR. CURRAN: Okay. Microphones remain open. Do you have the mic? Go ahead. Bob?

MR. STRATTON: Just a point of information. We do send out reminders on the invoices to the tech POCs. So.

MR. CURRAN: Right, right. Okay. Microphone.

MR. SHACKELFORD: Scott Shackelford, Cox Communications. Aside from the billing, maybe something can be attached to, associated with, whatever, SWIPs, response from SWIPS, the automated replies, a link, anything. Because the technical people who are doing all the SWIPs, and more than likely they’re the ones that are going to make a difference, they’re not caught up in the billing system internally. Maybe something that says your SWIP has been approved, hey, go here, check this out, please vote, we love you, et cetera.

MR. CURRAN: Okay. Thank you. Good feedback. Yes, front and center.

MR. WEILER: Sam Weiler. I’m happy with the status quo. If folks don’t care, let’s not push.

MR. CURRAN: Yep. Understood. Okay. Any other feedback on that? Thank you.

E-mail List AUP

MR. CURRAN: Next item is the mailing lists and the Mailing List AUP. Over the course of the last year, and, in fact, even as recently as a few days ago at the open mic, we’ve had folks indicate that the mailing list could be more useful. And we talked about some structures, and discussion of forums and RSS feeds and similar. I’m going to bring up one very small focused aspect. One of the things that was pointed out is that the mailing list has an AUP, ARIN’s mailing lists do have an AUP. And the community was wondering was that AUP enforced, and how rigorously? And the Board actually spent quite a bit of time considering this and decided that it would be useful for us update and revise the AUP, to make sure that the AUP was being enforced as appropriate and, to some extent, that that community was being enforced by the community. To this end, we have a new mailing list AUP policy. It’s actually posted and you can get it on the ARIN website. It actually makes it very clear, the various terms of the AUP that can have posting privileges removed. It also sets up a committee from the community that’s appointed. And we’ve actually appointed that committee. I thought I had it right here. Here we go. And – I wanted to read it all official, like. So. But we have appointed – there’re three members to the committee. One is appointed by the Board, but does not have to be a member of the Board. In this case, it is a Board member, Bill Manning. A member of the Advisory Council, appointed by the president and Chair. In this case, it’s Matt Pounsett. And a member from the community at large, appointed by the president. In this case, it’s Ron da Silva. And the ARIN president and general counsel sit as ex-officio members. So the AUP Committee will handle all reports of AUP violations and take the appropriate action. We do intend to enforce the AUP. I didn’t want this to be a surprise to anyone. But I wanted folks to know we were not ignoring the matter of the ARIN AUP and the ARIN AUP enforcement. Microphones are open for comment on this topic. Yes, far mic.

MR. HANNIGAN: Good morning. Martin Hannigan, Verne Global, NANOG mailing list administrator, unfortunately.

SPEAKER: Yes.

MR. HANNIGAN: The pain. I thought the new AUP and the changes are good. One item that I was concerned with was the prohibition against aliases. I think that it’s – unless there’s a specific problem with aliases, which I haven’t seen on the list, aliases are a mechanism for people that can’t normally say things that they want to say – in both good and bad, I do understand the problem with the aliases, but more so the good. And I think that should be reconsidered. Thank you.

MR. CURRAN: Right. And the discussion at the Board level on the use of aliases, the AUP does say that the poster should be identified and the use aliases is prohibited. The enforcement – the reason we need that enforcement is for someone who generates aliases as a part of avoiding the AUP and the enforcement mechanism. That’s the main mechanism. BillSmith becomes BillSmith7 becomes BillSmith17, and sort of pops around with various aliases. We need some way to identify that it’s actually – that the interpretation’s against the person, not the alias. If that makes any sense.

MR. HANNIGAN: Sorry, yeah. It makes – I completely understand. And I still think that there’re more benefits to allowing aliases than not. I haven’t seen a specific problem, and if it happens, I think that anybody with an alias should be treated like anybody without an alias. If they violate the AUP, they get thrown off the list. If we do have that problem, I guess I could see removing it – the ability to have an alias on the list. But as I said, sometimes it’s beneficial. So, for example, if I can’t speak as Martin Hannigan of Verne Global and I have an important point on a policy or an issue within the community, I can speak as Hartin Mannigan. And –

SPEAKER: Right.

MR. HANNIGAN: You know, it gives me the ability to say what I need to say, without violating any company policies or getting sucked up into politics, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Thanks.

MR. CURRAN: Right. And that’s why we leave it to the committee to judge whether or not someone’s egregiously abusing this. Center rear.

MR. DARTE: Yeah, Bill Darte, Advisory Council. It seems to me that on the website where we post the AUP, and whenever someone is being informed of violations of www.betareporting.com the AUP, they ought to be sent to somewhere where they find an outlet for that, where they can express themselves to somebody about their disenchantment with whatever it is they’re disenchanted with.

MR. CURRAN: There was a lot of discussion about the requirements for public notification of actions, and the need to post actions and someone see exactly what the complaint is. In looking at this issue pretty seriously, while we very well may be notifying the list and/or putting a public web posting of violations, we can’t say that a 100 percent of the time. Because in some cases, the violation itself may be something that has confidential information or may violate someone’s rights. So, we don’t want to draw attention to personal attacks, for example. If someone complains about that, they may want the attack and the post and everything removed, I can’t very well include the post on a public website where everyone can reference a personal disparaging comment.

MR. DARTE: No. Particularly, I was thinking that on the website where the AUPs are posted, a link to the consultation process or some other notification that there’s an outlet other than screaming on PPML, or ARIN, you know, whatever –

MR. CURRAN: Understood.

MR. DARTE: To be heard.

MR. CURRAN: Okay. Thank you. Yes, Owen.

MR. DeLONG: Owen DeLong, ARIN AC. The one thing that concerns me about the process is the appointment of the committee. It sounded to me, and maybe I misunderstood this, but it sounded to me like the committee is basically appointed by the president and Chairman of the Board, pretty much across the Board.

MR. CURRAN: Yep.

MR. DeLONG: And I would like to see some level of greater community input into that decision.

MR. CURRAN: I hear that desire.

MR. DeLONG: Perhaps letting the AC select their member, for example.

MR. CURRAN: The administration of the mailing list is inherently an ARIN organizational or executive function. And the reason is that – is because it, in many cases, is necessary for the operation of the organization. This is the first step of having the AUP enforced outside of the ARIN administrative organization. And if that goes well, we can certainly look at refinements. I have no problem going that direction. But recognize, we see this first step as a step in the direction you want to go. We need to make sure that we don’t go too far, or remove the ability of ARIN to act and respond to defend the lists and keep them useful. And that’s the other side of that equation. Yes. Microphones remain open. Okay. Thank you, everyone. Ray? (Applause)

MR. PLZAK: Thanks, John.

ARIN Department Reports

MR. PLZAK: Okay, we’re going to proceed with the department reports. The first report is from Susan Hamlin, the Member Services director. Susan?

Member Services

MS. HAMLIN: Good morning, everyone. I’m going to give you an update of what’s been going on in Member Services Department since our last meeting. And I want to start with a photo of our staff, all of whom are here today, except Lori. So, starting at top row, left, skipping me: You all know Einar Bohlin, policy analyst; Erika Goedrich, our membership coordinator; Lori Nuth, who is our web designer, and is back home, so, hello, Lori. Bottom row: Jason Byrne, communications manager; Lawson Parker, graphic designer, and this is a new position that we developed last fall, and brought Lawson on Board shortly after the Albuquerque meeting. And you’ve been seeing the results of a lot of her work in the materials in your conference brochure, and some of the graphics that Scott Bradner had in his IRPEP presentation yesterday, the new booth out in the Cyber Café. So we’re glad to have Lawson on Board, and all of her talents. Next to Lawson, Hollis Kara, communications writer. And next to her, Dé Harvey, our new meeting planner, who came on Board about two months ago, picked up to complete the planning for this meeting, and is full speed. And hopefully, you all have had a chance to meet her.

Talk a little bit about our membership growth. And looking at this graph, you’ll see – this is over the past three years, March 31st starting in ‘06 – that we’ve had a steady increase. And this is broken down in our geographic areas of Canada, the Caribbean, North Atlantic islands, and the U.S. Another look at membership is our membership type. There are two ways to become an ARIN member. Organizations who receive a direct allocation of IP address space from ARIN are automatic members, and then we have an open membership category: Any organization or individual may join for a small annual fee. And these membership types have the same rights and privileges.

Okay, looking at our services, and I’ll go through each of these fairly quickly. Obviously, our main communication is our website. We have a new section to the website – actually, it’s not so new – an IPv6 wiki, which you heard a lot about this week, certainly through the IPv6 experiments. We encourage everyone to take a look at that site. We encourage everyone in the community to contribute experiences, information, documentation. There is a link from our home page to the IPv6 wiki. We also have an IPv6 information center. There’s a link to that off the home page. Other types of communication. We developed, last year, a membership handbook, which is being mailed out to every new ARIN member. It contains a lot of information: The basics of how you participate with ARIN, a little bit about billing, a little bit about IP resources. We have received very little feedback about these handbooks, so those of you out in the audience who may be a new organization, if you’ve received it, if you’ve put it to use, we’d love to hear from you. There is a – in the intro page of the handbook, there’s a link to a survey on the website, and we’d appreciate feedback. If there is information you’d like to see in there, please let us know. Another area of communications. ARIN continues to participate with our colleagues, the other RIRs, and NRO efforts. And this is the graphic that Paul Wilson was trying to show in his presentation yesterday. So this is a cover of the new brochure the NRO developed last year for the IGF, it’s called, Continuing Cooperation. And we have several copies of this back in the ARIN offices. So, if anyone is interested, send a note to info@arin.net and we’ll ship one out to you.

Another area we work in is the ARIN Consultation and Suggestion Process. To date, this year, we’ve had 12 suggestions. Some of those are still being worked on. We’ve had two consultations completed, and we have one consultation underway now that actually closes tomorrow. You can find a link to that off the main website, in the upper left. The consultation deals with whether or not ARIN should publish a daily list of IP addresses issued and returned. And we’re looking for feedback on whether the merits of doing such a thing outweighs the possible, potential abuse. So those of you who have not chimed in and offered an opinion, you still have time to do so. Member Services is responsible for the corporate documentation. We look at the bylaws, articles of incorporation, and try to keep those moving forward. We also facilitate the policy development process. And that will be changing in the near future, so we’ll work on updating all of that documentation. We facilitate the election process. Thank you for your input this morning. If you have other thoughts or ideas, you can send them to info@arin.net.

What’s new? If you’ve been out in the Cyber Café, hopefully you’ve seen two new issues of our comic book. One deals with the communication about the depletion of the available pool of IPv4 resources. And the other one deals with Team ARIN thwarting an attempt to slow down community migration to IPv6. So they are timely subjects. I hope you all will take a copy back with you. Also, running in the Cyber Café is a new Flash presentation called, “About ARIN.” It’s an intro to who we are, what we do. This will be available on the ARIN website shortly. Somebody brought up the question yesterday about a slide of information that ARIN could provide to others who want to do outreach in their community. The ARIN – “About ARIN” Flash will be a good presentation that you can certainly download, copy. Also, earlier this year, we were contacted by an organization who was putting on an IPv6 lunch and learn for their customers. And we gladly sent information to the organization, general information about ARIN, about IPv6. They handed out these materials. We are happy to do that for anyone who’s interested. So, again, if you have a need for support materials, contact us at info@arin.net.

Looking ahead, we are working on a new look and feel of the ARIN website. We are streamlining the navigation, updating content. It has, if you’ll notice here, sort of the same look and feel we’re incorporating into Project X. You saw the demo of that at lunch. So, we’re busily working on this. We anticipate release end of second quarter, early third quarter. And we will be updating our Flash presentation to reflect the changes in the policy development process. And we will be – hopefully, you’ll see some web surveys in the near future. We experimented with Survey Monkey with the recent IPv6 survey. We found it to be a useful tool. So we hope to use that and have some targeted surveys to gauge community interest and your needs in the communication areas, or other services that ARIN might be able to provide you all. And looking way ahead, we invite you to the next ARIN meeting. ARIN XXII will be in Los Angeles, the 15th - 17th of October. And this is our back-to-back meeting with NANOG. NANOG will start Sunday the 12th. So we invite all of you to join us. Thank you. Any questions?

MR. DARTE: Bill Darte. The member handbook, I have one. It’s a fine piece of work. I wonder, as things change, like the IRPEP and the AUPs and stuff like that, how will you be updating people’s handbooks? Or do you intend to do so?

MS. HAMLIN: We will be sending updates. And currently, we send out handbooks to new members at the end each month, so they, obviously, will get the new materials. And we will be sending updates. Haven’t quite decided, it depends on how extensive, we may be sending out a letter with links to the new materials, to advise everybody to check there.

SPEAKER: Okay.

MS. HAMLIN: That’s good feedback. And we’d like to hear from those of you who have a handbook, if you would like to receive paper updates, or is a link to the website –

MR. DARTE: The other thing is, is as these – the new Flash programs, you know, I have no idea how expensive or troublesome it would be to, you know, make those available to people for their handbooks, so that they could just run them, if they had the occasion to do that, to explain anything to other people. Just a thought.

MS. HAMLIN: We actually include a CD in the handbook that has all of our Flash presentations, as well as some of our documentation that you see out in the Cyber Café and online.

MR. DARTE: And you’ll be updating those, as well?

MS. HAMLIN: And we will update those, also.

SPEAKER: Thank you.

MS. HAMLIN: Yes?

MR. LEIBRAND: Scott Leibrand, ARIN AC. Your, like, third slide or something was about registration types. And it seemed to me like there were not nearly enough automatic members. Maybe.

MS. HAMLIN: I’m going back here. This is the membership types.

MR. LEIBRAND: So, that reads to me like there’re only 139 people who got allocations and became members automatically. Is that correct? Or are those reversed? Or is that over a certain time period?

MS. HAMLIN: It’s actually 139 member – paid members.

MR. LEIBRAND: Okay, so the labels at the top are –

MS. HAMLIN: You’re right.

MR. LEIBRAND: Okay. That makes a lot more sense, then. Thank you.

MS. HAMLIN: Sorry. And the one thing to notice here, the increase in automatic members was due in large part to the IPv6 waiver, when if you were a member of ARIN, you were entitled to IPv6 free. And for folks who didn’t already have an allocation of IPv4 address space, some of them joined as an automatic ARIN member and then requested IPv6 space. Any other questions? Thank you. (Applause)

MR. PLZAK: Thank you, Susan.

Registration Services

MR. PLZAK: Next up is the Registration Services Department report. Leslie Nobile is the director.

MS. NOBILE: Good morning, everyone. I have the Registration Services Department update. I think most of you know what we do. Our main purpose in life is to issue IPv4 and IPv6 address space, and autonomous system numbers, plus a variety of other things. This is our staff. I haven’t seen the picture. Okay. From the bottom row, we have David Huberman, our technical analyst; Cathy Clements, our principal resource analyst; Dorreen Marrafa, resource analyst; Jon Worley, a senior resource analyst. Me, in the back row, Lisa Liedel, Sue Dobert, Jeff Havens, and Mike Pappano. These are all resource analysts, as well. So, what’s new in the department. We recently received two new /8s from IANA, 173 and 174. We have not started using them yet. We probably will be in the next two to three weeks. So, please tell all your friends to adjust their filters.

We also received a new block of ASNs from IANA. This is the first time in over two years that we got a new block. We had been using ASNs that we reclaimed or revoked or that were returned to us, for one reason or another, and we had quite a few. We usually issue about 1,700 per year, so we had quite a few that came back to us, so we did not go to IANA for two years for these ASNs.

The Legacy RSA. I spoke a little bit about it on Sunday and maybe – most of you were probably there. But we’ve been trying to do a bit of outreach effort to people who hold legacy space. So, we’ve devised this sort of phased system, where we notify Class A holders – we notified them back in December, I think it was, or November – about the existence of the Legacy RSA. Then we recently worked our way through the Class B holders, there are about 4,500 of those. So we sent notifications, just a letter of information. And based on that, this past letter, we’ve gotten quite a bit of feedback, quite a bit of interest, which I have a slide later to show that. And our third phase will be the Class C holders. That one’s going to be really big, so we’re kind of waiting a little bit, and we’ll work our way through those, eventually. No, we’re not recycling spam. This came as a result of a suggestion that came in through the customer suggestion process. The requester asked if, as ARIN issued recycled space back into the community, would we check the RBLs, the Realtime Blackhole Lists, to see if the space was listed. And if it was listed, would we contact the RBLs and let them know that we were about to reissue new space to a fresh new customer. So, we chose about four of the more well-known ones. We plan on increasing that, but right now we’re working with four. And we’ve gotten really good feedback. They’re working with us. They’re, you know, cooperating. So, we think that’s a good thing for the community.

So, the nine of us got together and put our heads together, had a strategic offsite meeting, and tried to devise some ways to, basically, streamline processes and procedures, and to make the lives of our customers easier. So, we came up with lots of ideas and we’ll be implementing those slowly, but surely. Now I have statistics. This is just the typical – this is the amount of work flowing in. This is for 2007: Processing about 52,000 templates each month; answering a little over a 1,000 e-mails, non-templated e-mails – that’s no spam, that’s pure, actual interaction – and getting about 1,100 phone calls each month. This is the Legacy RSA stats. The total number of requests, if you look at the top, were 127: 10 came in that actually were sent in error, 78 have been signed thus far, and there’re 39 pending, we’re working with the organizations. And then, most of the 127 came in through our Web App. We have a simple Web App that you can complete. And 46 of them came in via the transfer request process. We find a lot of people transferring legacy resources when we do transfers, and so we’re notifying them about the existence of the Legacy RSA, and giving them the option of signing either/or.

Four-byte ASNs. I don’t know if most of you know, but the ASN policy is going to change in January. Instead of automatically issuing 2-byte ASNs like we do now, the policy says we’re going to automatically issue 4-byte ASNs in January of 2009. So, looking at this slide, it could be problematic. So far, since it was implemented, the policy of last year, in January, a little over a year ago, we got a 126 requests for 4-byte ASNs. 108 of those people changed their mind when we told them, you know, just a little bit about it. They said, oh, no, we don’t want that. We issued 18 of them. Eleven of them came back and said, oh, no, this is not working for me. My peers don’t accept it, my upstreams don’t accept it, the operating systems haven’t been upgraded to accept 4-byte ASNs. So we’ve currently got seven registered, in a little over a year.

So. Okay. This might be of interest. We actually put this up on our website as a histogram, but we like it better as a doughnut. So. This is a profile of all of the IPv4 addresses issued to organizations in the past two years. Just to explain this a little bit. The total amount of space we issued over the past two years was 5.8 /8s. So, we’re calling extra-large organizations, those that have been issued more than a – in total – more than a /14 in this two-year period. The large organizations have been issued space, in the two- year period, totaling at least a /16, but less than a /14. We call smalls those issued space of at least a /20, but less than a /16. And an extra-small would be less than a /20. And this is all over the two-year period. So, if we start at the top, 83.11-percent of all the space that ARIN issued, in those two years, went to 24 extra-large organizations; 6.75-percent of all the space that we issued in two years went to 58 large organizations; 9-percent went to 1,088 small organizations; and 1.14-percent went to 823 extra-small organizations. So, as you can see, most of the space is going to these extra-large orgs.

So if you want to look at the breakdown of the CIDR prefixes over the past two years, ARIN’s minimum allocation size is twofold. We have the standard minimum allocation size of a /20, and the – that’s for single-homers, and the multi-home (off mike) minimum allocation size is a /22. You can see that those are what we’re issuing most often. Those are the size of the prefixes issued.

Some demographics. So in the past year, from March through February, ARIN issued number resources, that’s everything, v4, v6, ASNs, to 2,682 distinctly different org IDs. And this is how it’s broken down. You can see Canada and the U.S. received the most, and the Caribbean, 34. We broke this down a little bit further for the Caribbean, if you are interested in the islands, the various economies that received space, or resources. Just keeping this up for just a second.

Okay. And I typically go through ARIN’s approval rates: How many requests are we getting in and how many are we issuing? I decided, this time, to go back and look at v4 requests over the past three years. People have been saying, well, are v4 requests increasing because v4 is diminishing, the supply is going away. Are people going to start hoarding. Well, we looked at the requests for the past three years and there’s been – it’s been pretty static. There’s not really been an increase in the number of requests. Although, when you look at the approval ratings, they seem to have gone up each year. So, this past year, 69-percent of all requests for v4 space were approved. We did the same thing for v6, and that’s where you really see a notable difference, that we doubled the number of requests between ‘06 and ‘07. Well, from year to year. So, and we’re approving many, many more than we ever did. Eighty-two percent were approved over this past year, out of the 290 requests that came in. And, that’s all I have. Are there any questions?

MR. LEIBRAND: Scott Leibrand, ARIN AC. What’s the – we passed this 4-byte ASN policy and I kind of vaguely remember what it says, but not –

MS. NOBILE: I can’t hear you, Scott, I’m sorry.

MR. LEIBRAND: We passed the 4-byte ASN policy and I vaguely remember what it says, but I don’t remember what the policy and procedure is for how people go about getting 2-byte ASNs next year after we switch –

MS. NOBILE: They have to specifically request it. If they don’t specifically request, we are to issue, automatically, 4-byte ASNs.

MR. LEIBRAND: And then you have a process if they decide that the 4-byte ASN doesn’t work for them, that they can come back and exchange it?

MS. NOBILE: Well, that’s what – we can continue to do that –

MR. LEIBRAND: So you’re doing – that’s what you’re doing now, right?

MS. NOBILE: Yeah, that’s what we do now. Yeah.

MR. LEIBRAND: Okay.

MS. NOBILE: We work with you, however.

MR. LEIBRAND: So, do you anticipate that that will be an adequate process in a year or do you anticipate that policy work is going to be required to make things work better?

MS. NOBILE: Based on the past year’s experience, you’ll probably see this in a policy experience report, I think people will have issues. Because, we’re hearing frequently the OS of the routers, of the upstreams and peers, are not accepting the 4-bytes. That’s what we keep getting told when people come back.

MR. LEIBRAND: This is going to be fun.

MS. NOBILE: Okay. I think Leo’s next, Ray said. Cathy, sorry.

MR. BICKNELL: Leo Bicknell, ARIN AC. I just had a question on your histogram. You mention the minimum sizes, and I notice there were a couple of /24s and /24s+ on there. Should we assume that those are critical infrastructure, because (off mike) is the only policy I know of that –

MS. NOBILE: Yes. Micro allocations, yes. Cathy?

MS. ARONSON: This is Cathy Aronson. I had a quick question and follow on to the 4-byte ASN thing. Does anybody in any of the other registries, are you having the same problem with people not wanting to get them, or getting them and then giving them back because they don’t work? I just wonder, maybe the date should be changed. Because it’s a globally coordinated policy, maybe we need to start working on moving the date out.

MS. NOBILE: Filiz, do you know if you’re issuing 4-bytes? Paul, do you know if you are in your region? Paul Wilson? Not Paul Rendek. I think Paul may be checking. Do you know about 4-byte ASNs in your region? No, okay. We could probably check the – oh, I don’t even know where we account for that, probably on each of the RIRs’ websites, but, yeah. And did you have a follow on? Did you have something else, Cathy? No, okay. Owen?

MR. DeLONG: Owen DeLong, ARIN AC. Just a quick question on the approval rate increase. Would you attribute that to success of education of the requesting constituency, or would you attribute that to recent policy changes?

MS. NOBILE: I think part of it is recent policy changes, certainly with v6. Yeah.

MR. WILLIAMSON: David Williamson, Tellme Networks.

MS. NOBILE: I can’t hear you, David. I’m sorry.

MR. WILLIAMSON: There we go. David Williamson, Tellme Networks. I noticed you mentioned 173 and 174 were allocated to ARIN. I don’t recall seeing that announced on, like, arin-announce or –

MS. NOBILE: We don’t send it to arin-announce, we send it to the operators groups. And IANA had done that when they issued the space, and they covered every operator group known to man. So, I thought, well, I could wait, because you know when you get these duplicates messages. So, what my plan was, is to send out an announcement from ARIN to all of our operators groups, probably, like, I should have done it a week ago. But I will send it out soon, maybe next week.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Okay. Frankly, I don’t watch the operating groups as closely as I could, because, well, I get way too much mail, like most people.

MS. NOBILE: That’s what I find.

MR. WILLIAMSON: So this is the first I’ve heard 173 and 174 were allocated, and, will I just open a bug to go fix filters?

MS. NOBILE: Right.

MR. WILLIAMSON: I suspect others may be in the same place, so.

MS. NOBILE: Okay. So we’ll send – I’ll send out an announcement very soon. Maybe tomorrow. Today. Okay, are there any others?

MR. MANNING: Leslie? Yeah, there’s one more. Hi. I have a 4-byte ASN, and I have about nine peers. So they work. So, I don’t know why people don’t. And if you want to test, talk to me. Second thing. If you get the prefixes from IANA, a useful operational exercise is to announce a tiniest piece from that prefix before you start actually allocating from it, so people can test for reachability in blackhole space.

MS. NOBILE: We actually have someone doing that for us.

MR. MANNING: Okay.

MS. NOBILE: Okay. So, that’s it. Thank you. (Applause)

MR. PLZAK: Thanks, Leslie.

Financial Services

MR. PLZAK: Next will be the Financial Services’ report from the director of Financial Services, Bob Stratton. Bob?

MR. STRATTON: Okay, if I do this right, I get coffee, so. Good morning, everybody. I have a picture of my staff, too, so let’s see if I can go through the list. Sitting next to me is Val Winkelman, who is our staff accountant. I’ve got to love the mic. All right. Val is sitting next to me on the couch. She’s here. I hope you guys got a chance to meet her. She’s our staff accountant, does great work. Next to her is Tyler Thompson. Behind me, standing, is Dawn Anderson. Next to her is Tanya Gomez. Tammy Rowe is our accounting supervisor. Amaris Wang is next to her. She’s actually here, too. I hope you had a chance to meet her. And Amy Lee is on the right. They do a good job, but we do appreciate any feedback, and complaints, whatever, please let us know.

I’m going to go through some stats based on revenue, expenses, what we’re up to in operations, and then the economic environment that we’re in. I’ve shown this to you guys before. This is the payment types, how you guys pay us. The blue line is the check revenue, and the green line is the credit card revenue. As you can see, you’re using more and more credit cards over time. The average check payment’s about $1,000. The average credit card payment’s about $600. One thing, at the last meeting we notified you that we did a PCI audit, that’s the security of our credit card online transactions. And we passed. So we’re in good shape there. This is a breakdown of our revenue streams. And I only went back to 2007, because our actual – I mean our – our 2007 financial statements haven’t been completely audited yet, so I went back to 2006. As you can see, the lion’s share of our revenue is v4 renewals. No surprise there. The light blue line is v4 initials. That’s the growth rate for the renewals because if you’re an initial this year, you’re now a renewal next year. Thus, that’s the reason for the growth rate. But we are increasing at a decreasing rate, as you can see.

In terms of the other revenue streams, as Leslie alluded to earlier in her talk, the ASs are holding steady. And that means the revenue from the ASs are holding steady. So that black line is in a steady state. The gray line are assignments, IP end-users. They seem to vary a little bit. But as a portion of total revenue, they don’t amount to a whole lot. And the green line is the maintenance payments, and that’s associated with ASs, with end-users, with transfers, and, in the future, with legacy. One thing to keep in mind is that v4 exhaustion, the light blue line and the gray line may be affected pretty dramatically, as v6 registrations are mostly going to be small and extra small, and probably won’t move up the food chain from there. Let’s go through expenses. This is a breakdown from 2004 to 2006, just to give you an idea of the trends by department. One thing that you can see from this is that Registration and Administration are pretty much in a steady state. But with Outreach, Member Services (off mike), and also, with the replacement and the dynamic nature of the industry, Engineering is growing. No surprise there, but it just – this makes it clear.

Now, in terms of our operation. We’re involved in Project X. The main thing here is the billing POCs will be able to administer their information, administer your guys’ accounts, they may not even have to deal with a human being every now and then. We’re very excited about this and we’re very happy to be part of the process. One thing that we alluded to last year, we now recognize revenue when we bill for it. One of the after effects of the overdue accounts receivable is now that we can recognize revenue in a generally accepted accounting principle way, which is, when we bill for it. Also, we’ve made all the due dates the end of the month. And that’s both for maintenance and renewals. Makes it simpler on us, makes it simpler on you. Also, we are setting up a lockbox, which means your checks are going to go directly to the bank, and not to ARIN. Scott will allude to the reason for this later. But, actually, this means that the checks themselves will be processed that much faster, because the – by the lockbox operation being right next to the U.S. Mail facility, the mail gets delivered that much faster.

Now, the economic environment we’re in. As Paul Wilson alluded to, the U.S. dollar has been heading down. I think inflation rate currently is about 4 percent, which seems to me a little on the low side. One thing that this affects ARIN is our overseas travel is being affected, but also some of the budgeted items that we have for 2008 may be a little bit more than what we thought. Also, when we do budgets, this year we put an estimate in for our investment revenue. And I think we all know what’s going on with the stock market. But, as a famous economist said, markets fluctuate. So who knows what’ll happen by the end of the year. And with that, it was good to see everybody. (Applause)

MR. PLZAK: Any questions for Bob?

Engineering

MR. PLZAK: Okay. Next up is the Engineering report by the Chief Technology Officer, the director of Engineering, Mark Kosters.

MR. KOSTERS: So, for you who weren’t here at the very beginning, John – oh, my goodness. Usually, I don’t have a problem with the microphone. So, okay. Let me start again. Can everybody hear me? All right. All right. Thank you. Thank you. All right. So, when John first came up here, he was wearing a suit and he mentioned that he was wearing a tie. Well, I thought, hey, I can upstage him, and I was going to take off my shirt – or my pullover, but then I figured I’d probably cause a HR incident and I just don’t want to go there. So, let’s go ahead and get started. So, are you all awake now? So. Okay, so here’s the engineering team. I’m not going to go through everybody’s names. They’re all really cool. But you’ll probably notice that – why are we standing around this kind of old, beat- up, maroon Honda car? And that Honda is actually older – it has been part of ARIN engineering longer than any of the engineers have. So, the other thing you might say, man, dude, couldn’t you find a better car to, you know, hang around with? And we could’ve used my ‘87 Jeep, but you wouldn’t have been able to find me behind it. So, because I’m so short, of course. So, but what we also like to do is get to this point. And we want to get to the point where we’re actually giving you service that’s really, incredibly speedy. And we want to get rid of that 1990s technology that we’re using right now with web templates, and actually do stuff in the 21st century, going to the web, and that’s why Project X is so important to us. So, here’s our WHOIS query load. It keeps on going up and up and up. And currently we’re seeing 66 queries per second, which is not too bad. And the servers aren’t breaking a sweat, so, this is all well and good. Routing registry. Boy, this is a real snoozer. We had this one guy at the last meeting who was actually doing some research, and that’s why there was all these blips there. And after which, it has really calmed down. In fact, you’ll see on the next slide, that, if you look at this in kind of a – more sort of a fine grain sort of point of view, we’re seeing, like, a query per minute. So, I’m about ready to replace this box with a gerbil that’s going to go in the back and come back with the answer in its mouth. So –

MR. MANNING: Will it be – Mark, will it be the right answer? (Laughter)

MR. KOSTERS: Well, actually, if you look at this slide, it might not be. So, if the routing registry is actually only – the percentage is actually not that great. It’s currently at 65 percent. And this is actually down from the last time I gave this report, where the amount – margin of correctness was at 68 percent. So, this – the IRR is actually atrophying somewhat. On the positive side, autonomous system registrations in WHOIS actually increased by 300 and some percent. And its error rate has stayed about the same. So, I think that’s all, actually, good, in that we do have some way of looking at this. But, this is really not sufficient for routing security. I’ve been at ARIN now for six months. And there’s been a number of things that we’ve actually implemented to try to do a better job of providing better quality code in a more timely manner. And one of the things that was not there that’s now there, that Tim Christianson’s actually running, is we have a QA department that everything is going to be going through. We’ve been doing this by – we were selecting the projects that we were doing to put it through. Project X is actually going to go through this. Things like PGP actually did go through it. And a number of other things, that I’m going to talk about in a little bit, have gone through the QA process, as well. And, actually, this has worked out quite well. So, the code that we’ve rolled out, and we’ve been pretty busy the last six months, has actually improved dramatically in terms of having code coming out that actually worked the first time. We also put in a configuration management process. There were systems that weren’t – we weren’t quite sure what was on those boxes, and we were having some issues with, hey, this code release isn’t the same as that code release and they need to be the same. We have that all worked out now, and it’s all automated, so we know exactly what’s on what systems, and if there’re any issues we can quickly resolve them. Also when I came aBoard –

SPEAKER: Closer to the mic.

MR. KOSTERS: Oh, good grief. Also when I came aBoard – I’ll eat this mic from here on out. Also when I came aBoard, one of the other things is that ARIN was a PERL shop, which is great. It’s a wonderful thing to do, when you have a bunch of systems that are somewhat – when you’re trying to put these things together in a quick fashion, and they are great for systems that are not very well interconnected. But as ARIN has grown, these things have become interconnected and, whenever you change things, it would actually cause a sort of cascading failure someplace else. Java actually takes care of this and, so, we’re in the process of converting to a Java shop. Project X is one of the first tools that’s written entirely in Java. So, and Andy Newton is actually spearheading this. Another thing that we’re using is Atlas’s product suite for all our, sort of, cooperative code sharing, as well as the wiki is also (off mike) Confluence. It’s actually pretty cool, and it’s a great way for us to actually make these things work. And finally, you’ll say, God, why are these dudes looking around these old computers? Well, one of the things that we had within the shop was these – a bunch of fairly old machines, about as old as me, that was called the Big Three. And these boxes really needed to be replaced. And it was getting to the point where you couldn’t even find spare parts for them. It wasn’t quite that bad. But we went through the process of converting everything to a modern OS, with a modern database, over the last couple of months, and no one saw any glitches. So, that worked out really well. But that was a big project for us because almost everything that touched a database had to be changed.

The other thing that we have going on here is we’ve done the v6 work here at ARIN. We had the two IPv6 events, one on Sunday and one on Tuesday, and I think they went really well. And that was a lot of fun for us to actually put all this together. And we had people like Tony Kapela helping us out, making sure that all this went really smoothly. And Jason Russell, also, as kind of an adjunct, sort of (off mike) sort of engineer back there making sure that the webcast works, as well. So, this, I think, went really well. We had a lot of success in making this work. Unfortunately, I wish we could’ve got the Cisco to work, as well, as part of our experiment, but we weren’t able to.

Lame delegation. So this picture kind of shows what lame delegation is like. It’s kind of hurting. We have rolled it out, it went through the first round of QA, and 30-day notices started coming out on Friday, and we’re continuing to look at this and make this better. This is something I know pretty well. DNS is one of things I’ve had a history with. So, this is something that’s going to get a lot more attention in making this happen.

Project X. We currently have 28 users who have used the systems. They’ve linked to 23 points of contacts, which means that there’s actually some real, sort of, look and see going on here. We’re looking to see that we can even get more participation from you guys, because this is going to be the system that you use, and we look forward to getting feedback from you. Now, we’ve received some already, which has been fantastic. And thank you very much for that. Resource certification. So, one of the things that, when I was on the floor with you all, that I always wanted to see was the ability – am I running out of time, Ray? Okay.

Okay. One of the things that I wanted to see, and I’m glad to see to now, is there’s a bunch of very smart people working on solving routing security. And ARIN’s involved in that in making that happen. And ARIN, amongst the other regional registries, as well as a bunch of very, very smart people in the industry, are working on coming up with a scheme to make this happen that could be usable by the community. And I think you will see some really good things coming out of here within the next six months or so as we go forward. I hope to have a pilot available for you to start test-driving here. It’s following some IETF standards that are going through. APNIC is spearheading a lot of that standardization work. And we’re right along there, as well. One of the things that Bob mentioned in his talk was Project X with billing. And billing is something that we’re trying to actually streamline a lot. There was a lot of engineering effort that was going into making billing more sort of intertwined within the system. And I think we have it under control in terms of making this a seamless exercise going between registration services and billing. IP directory services.

So this is like one of my favorite ones. So we have WHOIS in here and we have RWHOIS in here. And there’s been a lot of requests on trying to make WHOIS a better sort of service. And we have this idea that we want to pass by you that’s called IRIS, that’s coming out of CRISP working group, that’s part of the IETF, that we’re going to be talking about in the future, as well. And this is going to give the community a much better sort of flexibility in the types of things that you can do with a directory service than you can do with WHOIS today. So, this is something that, along with resource certification, is going to be vital to ARIN’s growth in the coming years ahead. The other thing that we’re looking ahead to do is, right now, we’re outsourcing all our DNS to VeriSign. And we’re actually looking to change that around a little bit, and actually run some of this stuff ourselves. So, we’re actually reconfiguring our systems in Chantilly, specifically in Ashburn at our CoLo, to actually take care of our authoritive DNS. And we’re actually looking at the West Coast, and there will soon be an RFP out for another CoLo facility to give some more geographic distribution. So more will be coming on this. So that’s the end of my presentation. Any questions?

MR. LEWIS: Ed Lewis, NeuStar. As far as IRIS, are you seeing a lot of interest from the other RIRs in participating in doing an IRIS across all the RIRs?

MR. KOSTERS: We are seeing some that, for example, Frederico, who’s affiliated with LACNIC, is very much interested in this. And there has been interest from the other RIRs as this was being developed within the CRISP working group. And we hope to help show how this can actually be used by the other RIRs, as well.

MR. LEWIS: Have you thought about doing what they do in LACNIC with the, kind of a joint WHOIS, where I can go to their website, put any IP address in, and it tells me which region it belongs to. How you thought about providing that here?

MR. KOSTERS: Well, this will probably go along in that line. IRIS has that ability to do all that stuff, as well. So, we can make that – basically, make that happen. Great. Well, thank you very much. (Applause)

MR. PLZAK: Thanks, Mark.

Human Resources and Administration

MR. PLZAK: I’ll steal Mary K’s thunder; she was going to tell Mark to keep his shirt on. And also, for those of you that don’t know, Mark was an original author of RWhois, and that’s why we really hired him. So I will now turn it over to Mary Kay Lee for the Human Resources and Admin report.

MS. LEE: Good morning, everyone. And once again, just like in Albuquerque, I’ve had to follow Mark Kosters, ARIN’s new comedian, so sorry that my report will not be as much fun as his was. This is the HR and Admin staff, and you’ve met – everyone’s met Thérèse Colosi, but she is back in the office for this meeting. And Teresa Woodfork, she stays at ARIN all the time during the meetings to hold the fort down and get some extra work done while we’re here.

I’m just going to go through some current projects and let you know some of what we’re doing right now. We have redone all of our job descriptions. We do them annually when we do our annual reviews, but this time we took a really strong look at them because we’re also working on doing our third salary survey. I should go back one; going a little too fast here. The salary survey, third time now, we’re taking all of our job descriptions and the current salaries for those positions, and we put them out and compare them to current market surveys in the area. So we’re looking at high-tech companies, nonprofits, associations, and we do a combination of all of them, because obviously, we’re kind of a combination of all of them as well. And then, as I said, we redid the job descriptions companywide. And the other thing that’s been keeping me busy internally is having new hires and figuring out where we’re going to put them.

So here’s a layout of ARIN’s office, which, of course, is pretty tough to see all the detail, but we have split and moved some offices around, taken some storage space away, put people in together and kind of moved us around, and made a home for everyone, including Cathy Handley, I think, got the last official office that was made for everyone. General staff update. We now have 47 full-time positions and 1 part-time position – that’s in Bob Stratton’s department – with 23 women and 25 men. Not too much change there. The big thing for me has been over the last six months we’ve had nine hires. We’ve had a little more turnover than we’ve had over the last four years. ARIN’s turnover has been quite low, under 10 percent and actually usually under about 5 percent, so we’ve had a little bit of turnover and created some new positions. So we’ve had a big push to get people through our new hire orientation and find space for them to sit and get them integrated into their various departments.

Training and education. We try to keep this going at all times for ARIN staff. We have a recent bachelor’s degree in Bob’s department. Somebody working full-time finally got their bachelor’s degree done. We have two people in engineering who are very close to finishing their bachelor’s degrees. And as always, we do some training courses. All of engineering has been doing Java training over the last month. And my favorite class of anything that anyone’s taken is, Megan Kruse took PR Boot Camp, so that just sounded like fun somehow.

Some anniversaries. As you all know, ARIN celebrated its 10-year anniversary in December, and so that means now we have employees who have been with us for 10 years. So I’d like to congratulate Cathy Clements and Bob Stratton, who are here, and Michael O’Neill, who is not here, because all of them have now been with ARIN for 10 years. Employee longevity. You can see there with the one year or less, obviously that’s all the new hires coming in the door here recently, so we have a little swing on that side. But then on the other side now we have more than 20 employees who have been with us for 5 years or more, and our average tenure is about 4-1/2 years. We have, as I said, 21 employees who’ve been here for 5 years or more.

Then I thought I’ll do a little internal survey this time and ask, we’ve had so many meetings and in so many beautiful locations, which were the favorites? And among the staff, these were the three that came out as the favorites: The most recent in the fall in Albuquerque, the Vancouver meeting ARIN XIII, and way back to ARIN VII in San Francisco; it seemed to be a great favorite among a lot of people. I asked staff how many meetings have the attended. We, of course, had a few none, because we have some new. And we had people all the way up to 16 and 17 meetings. I think Richard Jimmerson and myself are the two who have actually attended the most ARIN meetings as an ARIN employee. And that’s all I have today. Thank you. (Applause)

MR. PLZAK: Any questions of Mary K? Thanks. Okay, we are now at the point that we skipped, which was the coffee break, and the coffee is ready. And so, since we are so far ahead of schedule, we’ll make the break a little longer, and so we’ll be making it a 30-minute break. But a reminder: The help desks are open. And please be back here at 10:45. (Recess)

MR. PLZAK: Okay, welcome back, especially all those of your that are still hiding outside. A couple of quick announcements for you. First of all, on the news tickers, if you are on American Airlines and you thought you were flying out on an MD-80, you’re not. They grounded the whole fleet, so you may want to check if that involves you. Secondly, regarding Project X, we’re looking for some test drivers for Project X. You saw Mark’s little racecar; well, he wants to put some people in it. So there’ll be an announcement going out on the ARIN mailing list shortly announcing that. So if you want to be one of those test drivers, please sign up. And the head table has not changed; the same people are here.

MR.PLZAK: And is Cathy Aronson here? Before, when Leslie was giving her report about 4-byte ASs, you had a question? There’s your answer. And I will note that the ARIN, APNIC, and RIPE NCC numbers are discontiguous, so one could infer that numbers had been returned back or exchanged.

SPEAKER: (off mike)

MR. PLZAK: What does it mean? It means that LACNIC’s given out 1, RIPE’s given out 15, APNIC’s 11, ARIN is 6, AFRINIC is 4. Leslie said seven, but we went and looked at the latest stats, and it’s now six.

SPEAKER: (off mike)

MR. PLZAK: No, I’m saying ARIN, APNIC, and RIPE NCC are discontiguous numbers, which would indicate – they’re handed out consecutively, so if there are now holes it’s because people have given some back, okay? So just trying to be a little speedy and give you results. Okay. So these are – like I said – these are the numbers off the FTP stats that we went to the various RIR sites and got this morning.

MR. PAN: For the –

MR. PLZAK: Now who are you?

MR. PAN: – AS number –

MR. PLZAK: Who are you?

MR. PAN: Oh, sorry. I’m Guangliang from APNIC. For the 4-byte AS number, APNIC assigned it more than 11 so far, because we’ve got 2 NIR, which can – they got 20, and also we assigned to another company, about 34 now, so far.

MR. PLZAK: Mm-hmm, okay. Well, these are taken from the FTP stats of the APNIC site, so you may want to check your stats there, too, if that’s incorrect. And like I said, these are the numbers that are showing there, so if there are holes and so forth, gaps, that possibly reflects returns.

ARIN Advisory Council Report

MR. PLZAK: So, having gone through that, we are now onto the next item in the agenda, which is the Advisory Council report presented by the Chair, Leo.

MR. BICKNELL: Hello. My name is Leo Bicknell. I am the Advisory Council Chairman for this year, and want to give you a little update on our activities. So the first thing I want to talk about is some changes since Albuquerque. We did have an election cycle, so we had some new members added, and – hey, wait a minute. I swear I did not do that; there must be something in Keynote. I don’t know how that happened. So we have, in fact, added Owen and Scott, and Alex and Ron departed us last year. I was elected Chair. Marla is the vice Chair for this year; she was the Chairman for last year. So I definitely want to thank those who were on the AC last year and no longer with us, and Marla for being Chair last year, and wish well all of the newcomers. So we actually finally have a picture of the whole Advisory Council taken at a retreat. It looks a little bit better on the website. But that’s all of us with our names. If you’re looking for somebody, we all have the badges and all that, so we’re pretty easy to find.

The AC does some travel. This year we’re sending one AC member to each of the other meetings. Already happened is NANOG 42 and APNIC 25, and you can see the list of upcoming meetings and who’s going to them on the right side. We find this is valuable for two reasons. One is the AC member at these meetings can often help answer questions about what has happened in the ARIN region, and also they can bring back information about what is going on in the other regions. It’s great to be able to read transcripts and see stuff on the Web, but sometimes you just need to stop somebody in the hall and ask them what they’re really thinking and that kind of stuff. And, of course, the entire AC also comes to the ARIN meetings. There’ll be two this year, and hopefully all of you will, too. We did have a relatively unique situation this year.

We had an AC retreat in January. This was largely prompted by the Board’s questions that you’ve heard about several times, and it was also kind of the genesis of the transfer policy. I do want to point out that due to scheduling and trying to get everybody there, the retreat was held on a Saturday and a Sunday, and it was held in Reston. So some of the poor AC members had to fly in from the West Coast Friday night and back out Sunday, and I really want to thank everybody for showing up on that Saturday and Sunday and giving away one of their weekends. I think it was one of the more productive AC meetings that I have ever attended. So I really think that was excellent.

So all of my presentations have to have at least one quote, and this is a rather famous quote. But if you look behind it, it comes from – a questioning of all doctrines that drain life’s energy was the genesis of this quote. And I think that’s very apropos for what’s happened from a scheduling point of view.

So this is the AC schedule as it looked before. The blue is all the things that you’re probably well aware of. We play foosball and do some public policy stuff, and all the wonderful meeting activities. The AC had a business meeting stuck in Tuesday night, and so we would run right out of the meeting and go make a bunch of decisions on policy. And it turned out that wasn’t working so well. We felt we did not have enough time to prepare for that meeting, mull over what happened in the public policy meeting, and really make good decisions. So what we decided to do is, we’ve actually kind of split that up. We took some time for an AC workshop on Sunday, and we’re actually going to have the AC business meeting after the members’ meeting this afternoon. That give us more time, and, most importantly, it gives us the space previously on Tuesday night to discuss and consider.

The AC makes a point of finding authors, finding people who spoke at the mics with key points, or possibly confusing points, and trying to get some information out of them before we go off and make our decisions. And this really opens up our schedule to be able to do that. There is one down side, though, and that is I can’t give you the results of the policy process, which has typically been part of this reporting the past. As I said, the AC will meet this afternoon, and those results will get posted to PPML sometime shortly after that. I’m not sure I’d necessarily expect on Thursday, because the AC and staff will obviously be traveling and whatnot. But very soon, those results will come out, and you’ll have to get them on the mailing list. One last item that the AC has been involved with is the IRPEP revisions. We provided a bunch of input during the Reston retreat, and obviously, Scott and the Board have done a wonderful job on that. The AC is in general very supportive. You heard a lot of the comments yesterday along with Scott’s presentation about this. But we do think it’s going to solve some of the problems we’ve had in the past of trying to figure out how to move forward some overlapping and competitive proposals, cases where authors aren’t responsive. And one of the most common ways that happens is, the author proposes a policy that gets changed due to community feedback, and they’re no longer interested. So this really provides a good solution to that problem. This was presented, and I do want to emphasize – doubly so – the AC wants you to provide your feedback. If you didn’t stand up at the mic yesterday, provide feedback on PPML, provide it in private to AC or Board members.

We really want to be sure that the community is comfortable with the changes and supportive of what we’re doing. And the revisions at the end of the day – basically we really think it’s going to save us a whole bunch of time waiting on authors and/or convincing them of community changes. It’s going to spend more time – the AC editing proposals – we’re probably going to present more of them at meetings. There’s a lot of discussion as to whether this overall increases or decreases the AC workload, and quite frankly, we just don’t know yet. So we’re hoping it’s going to be good, though. And with that, any questions?

MR. BRADNER: Just to on your last point about getting comments on the list about the proposed revisions to the process, we’ll be sending out within the next few weeks a prose version of the proposed new process to try and focus – something people can comment on. And that will be updated based on the comments that we received the other day and anything we receive in between. So thank you for pushing that.

MR. BICKNELL: Anyone else? Excellent. (Applause)

MR. PLZAK: Thanks, Leo.

ARIN Financial Report

MR. PLZAK: Next is the financial report. Lee Howard, as I mentioned earlier, is not here, so Scott Brander will be providing the input, and if necessary, Bob will be up here sitting down, waiting to help him.

MR. BRADNER: You may wonder why me. That’s because I’m a member of the Financial Committee, the FinCom, and so I’ll do the beginning part of this. And then the person who actually knows the numbers will follow; Bob will follow.

What I’m going to talk about is the fact that we had a controls audit. We’ve had a couple of them. The Board thought is was a good idea to have an external set of eyes look at ARIN’s processes. We had an initial one in 2005, and it produced some results that caused changes in the process, some good changes. And we thought after a couple of years it was time to get another one, to verify that the changes had taken, plus get another set of eyes to see whether indeed there were other issues. And there were; there were a number of issues that the auditor came up with. The staff went off and pondered the issues that the auditors came up with. And the auditors had made suggestions in some cases, and the staff looked at the suggestions and made recommendations to the FinCom. FinCom discussed them, and FinCom has approved the following process changes to deal with the particular notes that the auditors had. The one that was the most difficult to deal with was, the auditors felt that ARIN should have somebody with financial acumen on the Board. In a large organization, this is frequently done by recruiting somebody who’s a CPA or something like that. With a small organization, it’s a little hard to do. Finding somebody with the right level of expertise that’s willing to be a regular Board member is difficult. It’s also difficult to pay somebody, because if indeed you’re paying them, then they’re not independent. And so we felt that we couldn’t pay somebody to be on the Board. We’re prohibited to by the bylaws anyway. But even if we decided to change the bylaws, we’d have a situation where an employee was asked to verify the process in a way which would not necessarily be all that good. So the staff suggested instead, why don’t we hire an outside accounting firm to assist the treasurer and to have the authority to report to the Board, the FinCom and the Board, if necessary. And the FinCom discussed that and thought that was a reasonable path, so that’s what’s going to happen. The auditors suggested that the Board needs to know a little bit more about finances on a regular basis, rather than waiting till the end of the year, so they suggested that the Board should hear about the finances on a quarterly basis, and that’s what will happen. Bob already mentioned the lockbox.

The idea here is that checks come in not to ARIN, where a nefarious employee – we don’t have any of those, but in theory we could have one of those – a nefarious employee could run off with the checks or they could get lost or whatever. So instead, they go directly to the bank and get dealt with there. And yeah, it’s a day earlier or something like that, a day faster, so, yes, it’s in theory faster, but it doesn’t make much difference in the real world. But that’s in process; that will be done soon, as Bob mentioned. Separate bank account for payroll. That’s just some auditing thingy that you don’t co-mingle the payroll money with the other money. Me, I actually don’t understand the importance of that, but the auditor said to do it, and so it’s being done. One of the things that Sarbanes-Oxley required in the U.S. was a way for employees to report evildoing of the organization in an anonymous way. And even though we’re a nonprofit, we still should have that functionality by general good accounting practices.

So if somebody sees that Bob is running off with the crown jewels, they can get a report in that the Board can see, and they can investigate it. But if it happened to be somebody who worked for Bob, then that could be a little touchy on the employment side. So there has to be an anonymous was to do that. So ARIN is exploring different ways to do it. At Harvard, what we did was hire an outside company that provides a phone service where people can call up anonymously; the Caller ID is blocked at three different levels. And the people taking the message can’t see the message after they’ve taken it, and all kinds of stuff they’ve done. So ARIN’s exploring different opportunities in this space to see what the best way to do it is, but we think that it is important to have this functionality, though we trust it will never need to be exercised. And now I’m going to turn it over to Bob for the actual numbers. Any questions about the audit comments and our responses to them? No comments? All right.

MR. STRATTON: Just a quick comment on Scott’s point on the payroll. That has to do with if you have a separate account for payroll, and one of us wanted to drain it, they could only drain that account to the extent that that would be funded, and they couldn’t drain the operating account. There you go. Okay, this is our 2008 budget. The first line item is salaries and employee benefits. This is always the lion’s share of ARIN’s costs. It’s a little less than half. As Mary K mentioned, we’ve got 47 FTEs. What we try and do is, since we are a nonprofit, we try and make our employee benefits as generous as we can. We’ve got a 401(k), health insurance, comp leave. We’re very aggressive on the employee benefit side. Next line item is operations. It’s almost $2 million. Communications. That’s mostly links to our office, our co-location site. Connectivity is expensive, as you guys know. We also have a disaster recovery site in the plans. Software support, equipment, and licenses. That’s pretty self-evident. Depreciation of $800,000.

We’ve got a capital budget this year of $1.4 million. As Mark mentioned, we’re replacing obsolete equipment. Thus the reason for that number to increase. General office and administration. About $4.4 million. Professional fees/outreach. As you got from this meeting, we are trying to aggressively outreach to people, and we also have some outside contract. General office hasn’t increased much. The bad debt expense, that’s related to the fact that we now recognize revenue when we bill for it, so anybody that doesn’t pay us, the bill that we generated, we have to recognize that now as an expense. So this is what our estimate of uncollectible accounts is. Legal fees, legal defense fund, members’ meeting, the cost of this meeting, and the cost of this meeting in October. Merit and NANOG webcast support, rent and occupancy, travel. Travel includes everybody.

As Owen mentioned – I mean Leo mentioned, the AC travels, staff travels, and with the dollar falling, those costs rise. Last but not least, Internet support. The funds committed to ICANN in escrow – this is where the five RIR’s get together. Paul Wilson mentioned the $823,000 that we support ICANN with. We have a formula that allocates that amongst the five of us. Then we have some Internet research and support, NRO expenses. So the grand total is $12,350,000. Our estimate on revenue is $12,260,000. So we’re actually planning on running a small deficit this year. We’ll see, as one of the numbers in the revenue is investment estimate. So we’ll see what that brings. But anyway, that is our 2008 budget.

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

MR. LEIBRAND: One question. Scott Leibrand, ARIN AC. Do you foresee a problem in the future as v4-to-v6 transition occurs with adequate revenue coming in to cover expenses? Is that something that’s a concern of yours?

MR. CURRAN: So actually, all the RIRs are looking at this interesting global transition – IPv4 to IPv6 – and as a result of looking at it, clearly you want to make sure that you can do whatever the functions that need to be done for registration maintenance can be covered by the revenue to do it in an efficient way. So talk about studies and lack of comparable cases, when we go through the transition from v4 to v6, we actually don’t know what the v6, IPv6, policy regime will look like. How many policy proposals will there be, and how often will we really need to meet? So we expect it’s going to be very exciting, and there’ll be a lot of need to meet and have policy discussions, and to engage in a lot of outreach right now, over the next few years. But then when we break on through to the other side, there may not be as much policy debate. Do we need the same number of meetings every year? We don’t know how much registration services activity there’ll be because, well, when you come back for your additional block, you should probably get a medal for successfully having hit some utilization rate on your first one. So, it has been a discussion of the Board.

Actually, I have an action item to try to prognosticate the ARIN 10 years out, 15 years out. And the Board will be spending some time on this. I guess at a high level, the thing to remember is that ARIN has historically, even though we’ve lowered fees six times so far, we’ve historically run in the green – in the black, I guess. I like green. And we have a substantial operating reserve. That operating reserve means that we’re not as worried about the actual transition. What we’re worried about is using that transition in order to set up something that makes sense long-term for 20, 30, 50 years going out. We expect we’d probably need to have some different structure for how we handle services fees and registration fees. But the good news is that it’s at least a few years out before we have to worry about that, and we have an operating reserve that probably gives us another few years past that. But yes, it’s foremost in the Board’s mind. Does that answer the question in any level of detail? Any other questions on Bob’s financial report? Okay, thank you.

ARIN Board of Trustees Report

MR. PLZAK: Okay, so next is the Board of Trustees report by John.

MR. CURRAN: I’m back. Okay. So I want to tell you about what the Board has done since you last saw us in October. First, we did have an upcoming year – this is a new year, so it has a new budget. And obviously the Board met, discussed, reviewed, and did an iteration to approve the budget so that we’d have a budget for this operating year. As you see, we have a slight underforecast, and we didn’t see that as a significant concern. It will be something new and innovative, but as I said, we’ve always been financially strong off, so we’re not very concerned about that.

We did have elections, and this year we reelected Mr. Manning and Mr. Vixie to the Board. And then we elected positions, and I was elected Chair, and Scott was elected secretary, and Lee was elected treasurer. So we had actually a non-event with respect to the ARIN Board, because we had the same people come in in the same positions, basically, elected. In the process of that, though, we did sort of wake up, because it called attention to the election processes. So I will say in terms of actions that the Board took since our last meetings, we have spent quite a bit of time looking at the election processes and clarifying them. And you’ll see amendments to the bylaws have been made to make them crystal-clear. We have spent a lot of effort on the mailing list AUP process, because that was also brought up in the middle of all this. And so we’ve clarified that. We spent a lot of time on the IRPEP, the Internet Resource Policy Approval Process, and that’s been discussed over the last two days as a result. So in terms of Board activities, it has been relatively routine.

The thing that you might not see is, the Board has been heavily involved with the other Boards of the other RIRs, having a discussion about basically some of the areas where the RIRs need to work together. And this is just discussing some of the issues and some of the policy proposals that might require inter-RIR coordination under the NRO. We did, as it was alluded earlier, have an inter-RIR meeting of Board members earlier this week. We’ll probably be doing more of those, because we cannot work completely disassociated. That’s why there’s so much emphasis on coordinating with other RIRs. I guess the one other thing the Board is there to do is adopt policy proposals. Since I’ve last seen you, we’ve adopted Policy Proposal 2007-19, which is the global policy for the IANA assignment of ASNs to the RIRs. We also adopted Policy Proposal 2007-25, which was the IPv6 cleanup policy proposal. And we adopted Policy Proposal 2007-22, which is the one that extends the amount of time that you can get for an additional request from 6 months to 12 months. So the Board has been busy doing its review of policy proposals and the process they follow, and, happy to say, making good progress on approving policies as we go. That’s actually been the full Board activity since you’ve last seen us, and the floors are open for questions. Yes?

MR. LEWIS: Ed Lewis, NeuStar. A couple of years ago, one of the issues we had was directory services, and what was going to be put in WHOIS and so on. Has anything come up about that recently? Is it still a burning issue? Have you seen new people wanting information from ARIN? Has anything changed in a while?

MR. CURRAN: So, I’m sorry, the question is in regard to directory services –

MR. LEWIS: Yeah.

MR. CURRAN: – and whether or not –

MR. LEWIS: And WHOIS, and –

MR. CURRAN: – there’s been people asking for information, asking ARIN to supply information out of the WHOIS directory?

MR. LEWIS: Yeah, anything new that’s come up in recent – is it still a burning issue or has that kind of just faded away?

MR. CURRAN: I know we created the bulk AUP to handle WHOIS data. I don’t know how often it’s used, right?

MR. PLZAK: Yeah, Ed, could you be a little bit more specific? Are you talking about specific requests for information or are you talking about general requests for information?

MR. LEWIS: More general. I’m just curious if that issue is still something that we want to look back on, whether we’d want to go back and look at the WHOIS directory. This ties into IRIS, too.

MR. PLZAK: Okay. Well, looking at – okay, let’s look at it from a couple different ways. If you want to look at it from the bulk WHOIS perspective, yes, we still get those requests. Yes, we will probably want to go back and take a real hard look at that AUP associated with it, so there’s some work that we probably will do there. Mark talked about what we are looking at doing in IRIS. We actually – you can see we’ve got some work to do to integrate the Internet routing registry into this. And then, of course, this is all going to get tied up when we start doing resource certification, too. So there’s a lot of work to be done in this area, a lot of different directions. So we’re going to be parsing it out to figure out the best ways to do it, and which things maybe have to come first and so forth.

MR. LEWIS: Okay.

MR. PLZAK: Any more questions for John?

Open Microphone

MR. PLZAK: Okay. If not, then we will now go to the last item on the agenda, which is the open mic. A reminder: The meeting rules are still in effect. A second thing: This open mike is not for the discussion of any policy-related matter. Such questions will not be entertained here. You will be directed to post them to the PPML. John?

MR. CURRAN: Okay. Microphones are open. Any questions regarding ARIN the organization, how we operate, anything we can do better? I don’t know to take that as apathy or outstanding faith in our abilities. Okay, I am going to be closing the mics shortly. I’m closing remote participation. Last call. Thank you, Sam. I felt neglected.

MR. WEILER: You’re so welcome.

MR. CURRAN: Sam.

MR. WEILER: Sam Weiler. ARIN elections: In the case of the AC and the Board, when we are selecting for more than one seat, it seems that the simple plurality –

MR. CURRAN: Hang on. I’m not hearing you.

MR. WEILER: You’re not hearing me. I’ll make sure you can hear me.

MR. CURRAN: Okay.

MR. WEILER: When you are electing for more than one seat, as we do in the AC and Board elections –

MR. CURRAN: Yep.

MR. WEILER: – no voting system is ideal, but the simple plurality system that we are using now has some particular weaknesses.

MR. CURRAN: Mm-hmm.

MR. WEILER: I know that the Board looked at least in passing at alternatives to that during the review of election process, even though you didn’t talk about that at this meeting.

MR. CURRAN: Yes.

MR. WEILER: I hope that you will continue to keep that on your agenda.

MR. CURRAN: Yeah. So let me elaborate. We did actually receive a proposal for some alternative systems for counting – for doing balloting for elections. And there are a number of very interesting systems out there. At this time, the Board has gone with the simplicity of the plurality system, the understandability of it by the members. But if you and others want to get together and propose an alternative, that would be more than welcome. Right now we don’t see a lot of support or a lot of clear statement from the members of the problem that the plurality system faces. Do you seek others to find you so you can build that support?

MR. WEILER: Absolutely.

MR. CURRAN: Okay. To the extent that you’re not a fan of the plurality system, and you want to look at some other systems, Sam is right there. And there are other ways of doing elections that are used in organizations. And we are more than willing – if the membership want to come forth with an alternative to a simple plurality voting – we are quite capable of following anything the membership wants. So thank you. Bernadette?

MS. LEWIS: Bernadette Lewis from the Caribbean Telecommunications Union. I just wanted to place on record my appreciation for the process ARIN uses. The transparency, the ability to participate freely, I think is priceless, and I think it is one of the real pluses of this organization. And I’d like to say that we are looking forward from the Caribbean Telecommunications Union to working more closely with ARIN, to getting involved in the processes, and I think there are tremendous examples for us to take back and use in the Caribbean. And I welcome the opportunity to work with the members of the Advisory Committee and the people who have come forward to make suggestions to us in terms of policy, getting involved in the policy process. We really appreciate that, and we look forward to taking a more active role in the ARIN process. Thank you.

MR. CURRAN: Thank you for your kind words. I can say on behalf of the Board and the membership, we look forward to working even more closely with the folks at the CTU. Microphones remain open. Last call. Microphones are closed. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Closing Announcements and Adjournment

MR. PLZAK: Okay. Thank you, John. So, first of all, let’s thank our sponsor, WildBlue. Come on, put ’em together. Okay. Remember, if you were a loser this week, you can still be a winner. So there is one more chance to be a winner besides being the consolation prize winner, and that’s filling out the meeting survey, so please do so. We value that information that we receive throughout the course of the meeting, and we continue to try and make improvements on everything based upon your suggestions. And remember, giving prizes is a good opportunity to be a sponsor in a small but meaningful way.

Okay, the wireless network will shut down after this meeting, as a reminder. And before I say goodbye, I would like to thank a few folks. First of all, I would like to thank all of you, because you’re the ones that make these meetings a success. So give yourselves a round of applause. Secondly, I would like to thank those members of the ARIN staff whom you only saw at this meeting via their pictures from the directors this morning. ARIN carried on its full responsibility and load of work with the people back at the home office doing some double duty to make sure things stay running smooth. So let’s give them a round of applause. Lastly, I’d like to ask ARIN’s staff that’s present. And please give them a round of applause. And lastly, I hope you can get out of the Denver airport okay, because we really want to look forward to seeing all of you in Los Angeles this coming fall. Thank you. Bye.

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