ARIN XXV Members Meeting Draft Transcript - 21 April 2010 [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

John Curran: Welcome. I’d like to welcome everyone to the member meeting portion of ARIN XXV in lovely Toronto. I’d like to – I see everyone’s here after last night’s exciting social. It’s good to see.

I have a number of announcements, and then we’re going to get started on today’s program.

First, daily survey: people who filled out the survey yesterday were entered into the drawing to receive a Wireless N Travel Router. I have the respondents with me. I would take a volunteer from the audience. I’m looking for a volunteer.

Actually, I’ll take Aaron. Aaron Hughes. I’m looking to see if Aaron is down here. You know you can’t win. Stand here. Close your eyes. Peter Bui from Nortel. Do we have the prize here to give it to him? We’ll give it to you. Very nice. Okay.

The daily survey, that’s our winner, he gets that. What’s that slide say?

Unidentified Speaker: This is the prize for today’s winner.

John Curran: Today’s winner, when you fill out today’s survey – I thought I knew English. Today’s survey will be entered in. We’ll do this later. Not here. Will receive a Carbon Offset gift certificate to make sure you have green travel back to your pleasant home.

Okay. Sponsors. I’d like to give a round of applause to TELUS and EGATE, our sponsors. I’d also like to thank last night’s evening social, thanks to our sponsors, TorIX, FONEX, Hurricane Electric, TelNet and BTI. Everyone had a good time. I’ve seen the photos. Looks like it was quite the adventure.

We have today’s member meeting portion. We’re going to give reports from the ARIN staff of the various departments and we’ll also give the AC Fin Com and Board of Trustee report.

Again, I ask everyone when they approach the mic to state your name and affiliation. I ask everyone to be polite, allow others to speak, don’t speak a second time on a topic until you’ve seen the microphones have cleared out.

ARIN updates, Advisory Council, Fin Com and Board of Trustees. At the head table I see our chair, Paul Vixie; Bill Woodcock; John Sweeting; Lee Howard. I always – I have a problem with the end of that table. Paul Andersen and Scott Bradner. I don’t know why. I think after five names I lose them.

Without further ado, we’ll have Cathy Handley come up and give our policy and government outreach report.

ARIN Reports - Government Affairs and Public Policy Support

Cathy Handley: Good morning. And this will be a very quick update for the Government Affairs and Public Policy, because my – a couple of folks already took care of most of it between John and Raul yesterday. I have a very short report.

So since the last meeting – okay. It doesn’t – just by me looking at it, it doesn’t do it. There we go.

[Laughter]

We had the IGF last year in November, which was in the garden spot of Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. And it was very interesting.

We have another one coming up. The next Internet Governance Forum will be in September in Vilnius, Lithuania. Following the IGF we had an ITU Study Group 2 meeting, and I think you’re all aware of a lot of the activities going on at the ITU right now.

Went to – had a great experience going to AFRINIC to the opening of their Government Working Group. It was fascinating, and I think they’re coming along and have got people really interested.

We had the CITEL Assembly, which is the OAS, Organization of American States, meeting in Mexico City earlier this year, and followed by a fun, rip-roaring ITU Ipv6 meeting in March, which John addressed earlier.

Going forward, it’s going to be a busy year. We have a CITEL meeting in May where we will talk about garnering more support. Raul covered that yesterday. That was a big win to get really strong support and documents out of CITEL for the RIR system.

Have the World Telecommunication Development Conference in May. That is a two-week ITU conference, where they’re going to probably be talking more about the Internet Ipv6 allocations, and I will be spending a lot of time there, two weeks, running around with folks. We’ve got an ICANN meeting in June in Brussels. September will be the second of the ITU Ipv6 meetings.

As John explained, there will be two correspondence groups that are in place. Up until that time, there should be reports that come out at the September meeting. At this point I can’t really tell you what those reports will say or what will happen then, because it is a very – I’ve been doing ITU stuff, as most of you know, for about 15 years, and I’ve never seen a meeting quite organized like this. It seems to change a lot as the days go on exactly what’s going on.

As I said, we have IGF in September. The ITU Plenipotentiary conference is in October. I will not see anyone at the ARIN meeting because I will be there for three weeks. That’s a heavy, heavy duty conference that there will be more discussion about the Ipv6 and the ITU’s role in that.

And this is the administrative conference that determines what the ITU will do for the next four years. That will be a very important meeting. And we’ll end the year with the ICANN meeting in December. It was moved out to December because of the Plenipot in October.

So this looks like it will be a – it will keep me busy and occupied. Like I said, I won’t get to see any of you in Atlanta. But I’ll be thinking about you because I know for a fact you’ll be having more fun than I will.

In keeping with Mr. Sweeting’s view of how to end, there’s no questions. It’s a thank you.

John Curran: But you can stay up anyway in case someone wants to comment on your thank you. Floor’s open for questions.

Yes, Dan.

Dan Alexander: I’ll throw a question out there. Dan Alexander, ARIN AC. John mentioned in one of the previous presentations that ARIN’s tossing around the idea of becoming an ITU member. I actually would voice my support in that. I wrestled with it for a while because do you really want to get involved in that.

But the reality is if you want to have a say, you need to show up. I would actually, the question was really more for the room, does anyone – I’d be curious to see or hear about any objections that anyone would have or they think that ARIN shouldn’t be a member or become a member.

John Curran: Anyone like to comment on that at the microphones?

Bill Darte: Bill Darte, ARIN AC. I think it’s a good idea. If it’s behind the doors, it should be behind the doors.

Cathy Handley: That’s the problem. It’s a very closed organization. And unless you buy a ticket, you can’t get in.

Wesley George: Wes George, Sprint. Just a question sort of along those lines. What timelines would you be looking at in terms of being able to become a member and when you would be able to start participating on behalf of ARIN in some of the events you’ve referenced here?

Cathy Handley: The decision has to be made to join. You fill out the application. Send it in. And then you’re there.

I’m going to the World Telecom Development Conference as a member of the ISOC delegation, because they belong. And forward after that is – we’ll see what gets done.

John Curran: Thank you, Cathy. Just for information sake. We estimate the costs – and I’ve provided a recommendation to the board based on Cathy’s recommendation, that we join with estimated costs.

The problem is I can’t say 100 percent that ARIN will do it, because it was an estimate. You actually don’t know the costs until they look at your application and they judge accordingly and tell you for your circumstances what that will be.

So we need to go through that little process, see the number, confirm that indeed it’s what we expected. But that could happen in a short number of months, one or two months.

Wesley George: To clarify why I was asking the question. I want to make sure some of the things you brought up when you reported the ITU meeting and Ipv6, I think those are very, very important for ARIN to be involved in, the subsequent discussion. So there’s sort of a function of this that is sort of time is of the essence, even though it’s all moving at the speed of government.

John Curran: Moving as quickly as we can. The board has been very supportive.

Cathy Handley: Thank you.

[Applause]

ARIN Reports - Registration Services

Leslie Nobile: Registration Services Update. I hope to make this quick, but I do have a few slides, so I’ll go fast.

So there’s eight members of the RSD team. Their names and titles are up there. And Cathy, David, Doreen and Mike have all been here this week, so hopefully you’ve had a chance to meet with them.

Our current focus. We’re working on lots of things, but our primary focus at the moment is ARIN Online. We do a lot of the user stories and requirements and features for future releases because most of the stuff being done right now is registration-related.

Right now we’re working on processing questions and answers, points of contact and ORGs through AOL. So they’re automatically processed. And we’re working with our regular template system as well. We’re developing new processes and procedures for AOL because things are very different for us, so we’re kind of feeling our way through.

We’re doing lots of different process enhancements. I have a slide on that, so I won’t get into it. But with v4 runout we’ve decided to modify a few of the procedures and processes that we do in the department.

We’re still working resource revocation and reclamation. That’s an ongoing thing. We work with FSD on the revocation of resources for unpaid registration fees, and I’ll talk about that. I actually have a slide.

Working on the legacy RSA: it is expected to be discontinued at the end of June, I believe, of this year. And we still have lots of applications coming in.

And of course business as usual. Our core function, which is issuing IP addresses, Autonomous System numbers, running the helpdesk, et cetera.

So process enhancements: probably many of you know who deal with us, we have some pretty stringent data verification procedures. We found that people were sending us falsified information for quite some time, and we tried to put an end to that. So we do quite a bit of organization vetting right up front when people come to us. We vet the org very thoroughly. We make sure it’s a legal entity within our region; that it’s been in existence for some time, it actually is a valid org and the information is correct and valid.

And any ORGS that come in to make modifications to their records are vetted on a 12-month basis. Every 12 months we just make sure they’re still in existence, then we re-vet.

As most of you know also, we do the officer attestation. When anyone is requesting IPv4 resources, we make sure that an officer of the company certifies that the information being submitted to us is accurate and valid.

And that actually has had very few bumps. There’s been no issues, no complaints, really, to speak of.

We are doing peer review of IPv4 resource requests. Just with v4 runout we want to make sure we’re all on the same page. So the staff does peer review with v4 requests, and the larger the requests, the higher level of seniority is required to sort of sign off on it.

We are now checking utilization on all past allocations. That’s going to be upcoming. Some of you will run into this. You may be a little annoyed, but we feel like it’s the right thing to do as far as being stewards of Internet number resources.

So we typically check the last allocation to make sure it’s 80 percent utilized. We do a pretty thorough check on that. And we’ll continue to do that. But we’ll be asking about all past allocations: How are they utilized? What’s the percentage of utilization? Just to make sure that everybody is fully utilizing that. And that is in compliance with current policy.

We are asking about future IPv4 and IPv6 plans on IPv4 requests. We’re now – we feel like we’re obligated to tell people, you know, if their 18-month need says that they need – they’re going to need /16s’ worth of space, we feel obligated to tell them that ARIN may not have those resources available at that time.

So we will be responding with that kind of information, and we’ll – and asking, you know, the alternative is get your IPv6 address space, what are you doing right now? What are your plans? So that will be coming up. We’re implementing it at this moment, actually.

And we continue to do fraud detection and follow-up, which we do see. People do send us falsified information. So we’re really on the lookout for that. We do quite a bit of follow-up when we do find that. We use NRPM 12, resource review. We’ve been using that quite a bit. It’s quite effective.

Recovered resources: So we get people who return resources voluntarily to ARIN. It’s still happening to this day. Go figure. We revoke resources based on nonpayment of fees. And we also reclaim resources based on sort of fraudulent information, misappropriation, business dissolution. That’s done less often, but we do do it.

Since January of 2005 through March of 2010, that’s the amount of resources we have recovered. 429 /16s have been returned. 1,300, roughly, ASNs. We’ve revoked 87 /16 equivalents. 4,400 Autonomous System Numbers, and we reclaimed a little over two /16s’ worth of v4 addresses – /16, sorry. And nine Autonomous System Numbers.

Legacy RSA status: So at this point we’ve had 903 requests. 444 have been signed. 149 have been approved, but they’re still pending, they’re still sort of working with their legal departments and getting back to us. 135 are pending. They just haven’t responded to us, so they’re in that sort of category.

We do 30- and 60-, and 90-day follow-up. At the end of the 90-day follow-up, if somebody hasn’t responded, we assume they’re disinterested and we call that abandoned. So there’s 41 that have moved to that category.

Then we have 134 that we say not required. It’s kind of the miscellaneous catch-all. Sometimes we have people who have reassignments that try to find a legacy RSA. Quite a few people have decided not to sign the legacy RSA and just move their resources under standard RSA. Some people have – there’s just a whole bunch of things that fall into that one category.

Looking at the total number of resources and organizations that are covered under those signed legacy RSAs, that 444, there’s 176 ASNs. 6.49 /8 equivalents or 1,215 different IPv4 blocks and 444 organizations.

So we’ll move into stats about v4 depletion and v4 uptake. The first thing is we got two new /8s from IANA in February. We got 50 /8 and 107 /8. And Merit has been conducting some testing on those, much like they did with APNIC. Geoff mentioned that.

And they’re looking for leakage. I wrote the exact verbiage; I won’t read it. But they are publishing the results at that – oh. Hmm. This is the wrong presentation. Sorry. I updated the presentation with the correct URL, which we’ll get up on the website.

In case you’re interested in looking at the results, they’re going to be putting – they’re analyzing the results of their work right now and they’ll put it up on the website. But they did tell me that the preliminary look at this shows that both of those blocks are relatively clean and there are no issues that they’re seeing.

So current inventory. People ask us all the time: How much space do you actually have? How much have you used? What are you issuing from?

So we went back and looked and all the space that we maintain. We looked at the IANA registry, says: Maintained by ARIN, administered by ARIN. And we divided it into legacy space and non-legacy, the space that IANA issues directly to us.

So we’re currently maintaining 73 legacy /8 blocks. And out of those we have 4.72 percent of that space free, that we can issue from. We have .05 percent that’s held to be issued. And that’s our one-year return bucket. We hold on to space for a year to clear filters when we reclaim it or revoke it or it’s returned. And 95.28 percent has been issued and is unavailable.

As far as the 33 blocks that we have issued directly to us, we have 9.91 percent free. As I said, we have two full /8s we haven’t started yet. .76 percent is reserved. You know that we do reserve space for the larger ISPs who typically come back every three or four or six months, trying to maintain the goal of aggregation. So we do a bit of reservations for the larger recurring ISPs.

.27 percent is held in that one-year bucket. And 90.09 percent has been issued and is unavailable.

So looking at v4 requests. People wonder “are people starting to hoard?”, are they asking for more space? And we’re just not seeing it. It’s pretty flat. The request rate has not changed at all. There’s a couple of months there you’ll see that we get a whole bunch, but it’s just pretty flat.

As far as space we’re issuing. We are not issuing any more space than we have. In the past several years we’ve been issuing roughly 3.3 /8s per year, and looks like we’re on track the same way so far. We had a pretty low first quarter. Actually very low.

IPv6 requests. That one’s very clear. We’re going straight up. We’re getting a lot of requests. I guess we got a little over 400 last year.

IPv6 allocations issued. So the line is the allocations, the number of allocations we’re making, which is straight up. It’s increased every year. And then I decided to put the total number of /32s. I don’t know if you can actually see that, because I can barely see it from standing here. But the total number of /32s each year.

And there’s sort of an anomaly in I guess 2008 when we made several very large allocations. So that’s why there’s 14,000-plus 32s issued in that single year. But we do occasionally make a larger than 32, /32 allocation, which is the minimum allocation size.

Assignments: IPv6 assignments. Again, this is the number of 48s we issue, and the line is the total number of assignments made. Not much to show there.

And this question. I get asked this one all the time: How many IPv4 ISP subscribers actually have IPv6 address space? So we went back and looked, and currently we have 3,366 IPv4 ISP subscribers. I’m looking at the circle. 2,695 are IPv4 only, and 671 have both IPv4 and IPv6. So 2,295 of them do not – of the v4 subscribers, do not have v6 allocations. That’s about 80 percent.

So, just hypothetically, we went and looked at our current allocation rate. So at the current allocation rate, which is about 30 new IPv6 allocations per month, it would take over seven years for every IPv4 subscriber member to get Ipv6. And it’s not really encouraging, but it’s purely hypothetical.

What else? I think that’s all I have. And that could be thank you or questions, whatever.

John Curran: It’s questions. You always get questions.

Cathy Aronson: Cathy Aronson, ARIN AC. That slide you had with the reclaimed 486. I just wondered if you could speak to what size those blocks are.

Leslie Nobile: Sure. It’s actually everything from a 10, 12, to a 24. We’re getting all types of – oh, I’m sorry, you said just reclaimed. I apologize. I thought you meant all of it.

Cathy Aronson: In essence, it’s all been given back in some form, right?

Leslie Nobile: Yes.

Cathy Aronson: So to speak to the policy, the global policy that didn’t pass, I just wondered like what those were and what was being done with them. Is there a plan to reissue them or whatever?

Leslie Nobile: Actually, they all get put back into the one-year hold bucket, and we’re reissuing constantly. You’ll see that we’re issuing space from way back when. If you look, people are getting space from all the ranges. And it’s because whatever we get back we put it back out to the community after we hold it for a year.

Cathy Aronson: Unless it’s a /8.

Leslie Nobile: Unless it’s a /8. Which we haven’t personally gotten any back. But we’ve directed people.

John Curran: Right. When those /8s come in, they’re directed to the IANA to return it directly. Center rear mic.

Bill Darte: Bill Darte, ARIN AC and Washington University. Similar question to what Cathy said and so I understand you to say you can’t characterize the size of those returns in revokes and things like that; that they’re pretty much over the board. But what’s the trend? That’s a five-year period. Is there a great diminishment of that kind of return in the most recent year, or do you see that?

Leslie Nobile: We’ve actually seen legacy space, we’ve seen everything come back to us. Of course the revoked space is space that ARIN reissues. So that would be a lot of the /19s and 20s, because that’s what we’ve typically been issuing over the past five years. So when we revoke for nonpayment, and it’s usually between a 16 and a 20, but typically 19s and 20s. The rest is all over.

Bill Darte: Particularly interested in returns.

Leslie Nobile: Returns, all over the board. We get legacy space back all the time.

John Curran: We’ve had organizations which have returned address space because we sent the letters out. And someone said I got this letter saying that we’re running out of v4 space. I’m not using mine; here, take it back.

Bill Darte: But the trend is linear horizontal, or not –

Leslie Nobile: It’s not going up. It’s not increasing. It’s pretty much the same. I could probably show the graph.

Bill Darte: That’s good enough.

Leslie Nobile: Let me add: During the course of a transfer, we always ask for resources back when we see that they’re not utilized. And we typically get space back that way in the course of a transfer.

John Curran: Center front.

David Farmer: On the legacy. David Farmer, University of Minnesota, ARIN AC. On the legacy graph, at the bottom you say 444 ORGs, but we had 903 total –

Unidentified Speaker: Project your voice.

David Farmer: Sorry. Is that better? Sorry. I had saw the 444, saw the 903 and went – didn’t add up. But I forgot to look at the signed one.

John Curran: Right. Center rear.

Dan Alexander: Dan Alexander, ARIN AC. Leslie, thank you and your group for putting these stats together. I actually use these internally when I have to go to executives saying why are we doing this, why are we doing this. These are very good pictures that they can quantify and wrap their head around a lot easier than me explaining it to them.

One suggestion to offer for possibly the fall presentation. I’d be curious on this one. Of these 444, what will be 600 by then, how many of those are /8 holders, /16 holders, that have signed the LRSA?

John Curran: We can provide some data in the future. If you want to know, the legacy RSA coverage of legacy address space is about 6 percent right now. We actually have some 15 percent of what you consider legacy address space covered by existing RSAs. Because in the past organizations would bring that under an RSA.

The combined coverage of legacy address space both from RSA and LRSA is 21, 22, and it’s been creeping up 2 or 3 percent every year. It’s not creeping up fast, but it is going up.

Dan Alexander: Thanks.

John Curran: Okay. Thank you, Leslie.

[Applause]

ARIN Reports - Human Resources and Administration

Mary K. Lee: Good morning, everyone. A report about the HR and Administration department, and also facilities is a lot of what we do, too.

Tell you a bit about the department staff, all three of us, our current and recent projects, and then just a little bit about ARIN in general.

The HR and Admin department is ARIN’s smallest department. But what we do is kind of the behind-the-scenes work that enables the other departments to do all the rest of the work for you.

Department staff: Thérèse Colosi is our longtime executive assistant. She does travel, meeting agendas, support for many of the people at the table up here, or most of them at some point, the ASO AC as well, and then some other general office work. Keeping John’s calendar as organized as we possibly can, because he’s pretty busy these days.

Jessica Heidman is our office administrator. She’s been with us since last fall and is just a wonderful new member of the team. She does general office support: Makes sure there’s enough coffee to keep everyone going all the time, mailing, shipments. She does support for external relations for the work that Richard and Megan do, and just a little bit of everything these days.

And I’d like to do a little shout out to them because today is Administrative Professional’s Day, and I want to thank them very much for everything they do for us.

[Applause]

And I do a bunch of things you’ve heard before, so I’m not even going to mention today.

Some of the things we’ve done over the last six months or so, annual reports and audits. Those include a 401(k) tally and reporting for the year. We do a total compensation statement, which is a two-page document – actually four-page document that’s sent to all ARIN employees that lists not only their salaries but all the various benefits they have – the total of their 401(k) account, how much ARIN itself has contributed to it, our training and education efforts – to give us all an idea that life is pretty good sometimes.

Performance appraisals: those – the annual ones were completed in December. We do a full, formal, what I call a formal evaluation. And then in June we do kind of a check-in halfway through the year which is looking at goals and objectives, making sure we’re on track. It’s a one-page form so that everyone has a chance to work with their direct supervisor to see how the year is going and if they’re on track for that, and those will be in June.

Facility improvements: we’ve done not major construction but actually a lot of changes to the facility itself. We have some additional engineering staff, and they are also working in a different methodology as you all well know, which is the Agile methodology.

So we did some kind of changing and moving around and buying some furniture and putting up a few things, and moving a few things and have them all together in good working groups. And as you know from Mark’s presentation yesterday, they’re making very good progress with that.

Let’s see. Facility: that’s about it with that. We do a market pricing salary survey, which means we take all of ARIN’s positions, job descriptions – full job descriptions, not just titles – and put them out on the market and compare them with major salary surveys in our area, across the country, for profit and non-profit. So it’s fairly robust. And we found this is the fourth one. And we are even more on track than we’ve been in the previous ones. So we’re very pleased with these results.

And document retention is one of the big projects that part of that is in my area, and we kick that off in the first quarter. We did select a vendor. We’ve done some requirements and equipment purchasing, and we hope in the second quarter of the year to get very active with all of that.

And employee longevity. We – once again our little company, which is now not quite so little and not quite so young, has gotten bigger, and we definitely have some very good tenure, as you can see.

We had a little turnover at the end of the year and a couple of new positions, so we’ve been very busy with hiring. We’ve had seven new hires in the last four months. So that’s quite a bit for a small company. We now have 52 full-time employees. And as of this coming Monday we will be fully staffed for the first time in six months. I’m very glad about that.

We have 29 men and 23 women on staff at this point. 27 of us have been at ARIN for five years or longer, as you can see, and a good I think 18 to seven years or more. So we’re a very good strong and tenured staff. And I normally don’t do a whole lot of anniversaries, particularly ones that haven’t taken place yet, but I definitely want to recognize some people.

First, Susan Hamlin, who was not able to be us, had her 10-year anniversary in January. So congrats to her.

[Applause]

And I hope they’re all in the room, but we have four more tenure anniversaries this year, which is a big deal: Tim Christensen, Darren Kara and Leslie Nobile and Tammy Rowe. And thank you very much.

[Applause]

Questions?

John Curran: Microphones open. Any questions?

Yes, Lee.

Lee Howard: Lee Howard, ARIN Board of Trustees. You didn’t tell us anything about what kind of cars the staff have driven or where they’ve traveled to.

Mary K. Lee: We retired that survey.

John Curran: If it needs to come back, it will come back.

Thank you, Mary K.

[Applause]

ARIN Reports - Member Services

Hollis Kara: Got up here without falling. Good start. I’m filling in for Susan. She’s home playing mother of the bride, so that’s kind of cool. And because in Member Services we’re the folks who get your direct feedback, I know how much you love these reports, so we’re going to try to breeze right through this and keep things moving.

We’re going to go over this stuff. First, staff. We lost a few folks at the end of the year, have added a few new hires, scrambled things around, realigned people a bit. So new here for the first time at this meeting we’ve got Erin Sellers and Sean “Chuckles” Hopkins. Jason and I both got scrambled around a bit and have taken on new positions in the group, and Einar, Susan, De, and Jud are still rounding things out. And we’re getting lots done.

Membership statistics. As of the end of March, we were up to 3,584 members. 347 of those from our lovely host country of Canada today. And 3,192 Continental U.S. 34 in the Caribbean, and nine that are outside the ARIN region.
So what does that mean? Looking at the membership growth statistics, it means we’re still growing at a nice steady pace. That light blue bar are subscriber members. Folks with direct allocations. The blue bar at the top are paid members.

Which brings us to the definition of ARIN membership. Which I probably don’t need to go into in a whole lot of detail since we covered it pretty well Monday.
But basically the Board adopted a change to the membership definition, and what that’s done is changed it so that membership now requires a contractual agreement with ARIN for voting rights and stuff like that. So that’s where we are. And additionally the pretty red bit is that anybody with a signed registration services agreement or legacy RSA with ARIN and that holds a number resource from ARIN can be a paid member. And that’s all of our end users, ASN holders and legacy RSA signatories. So that’s what that is.

At the same time we also had a minor change to our election rules. We established a voter registration eligibility deadline. And basically what that means is that you must – general member organizations must be on record by January 1 of that year to vote in that year’s election. So everybody who was a member as of January 1, 2010, can vote this year. Anybody who joined after will be able to vote in the next calendar year, the 2011 elections. This change can be viewed in the corporate documents under the bylaws on the website. And this doesn’t change the other rules. You still have to be in good standing and you still have to have an eligible DMR. The deadline for that this year is going to be 22 September.

We’ve also added a new category. That would be our ARIN Advocates. This basically creates an opportunity for folks who no longer qualify for membership to have an affiliation option to show their support for the organization. And information on that is also available on the website.

Current resources. We’re still supporting all the stuff we’ve been supporting. We’ve got our 4-byte wiki and our IPv6 wiki out there waiting for you to use them. So please do. We’ve also revamped our IPv6 info center. That’s available at the top of the hot links on the home page, and that has now been re-titled as the IPv4/IPv6: The Bottom Line, to address both issues. That’s where you’re going to find that handy-dandy downloadable slide deck that gets updated regularly as the stats on v4 depletion change. So that’s a good tool, and it’s right there. So please use it if you need it.

Some new things we’ve done. We rolled out our 2009 annual report at the end of March. So that’s out there. And we’ve also helped outreach stand up a new TeamARIN Microsite, and I’m going to let Richard fill you in on that. But it’s a cool project and we’ll continue to support them with content and whatnot as they go forward.

The other thing that we’ve done is we’ve revamped our new member welcoming efforts. The nice thing with this is we’ve added three personal touches to how we’re incorporating new members. We’re sending out a personalized letter and some goodies every month to our new members, following up with an e-mail, and then we will be following up with a phone call. This is a real new program, so we haven’t hit that point yet. And hopefully we’ll have some good results of getting folks active and participating by doing it this way.

Moving ahead. Coming up, we’re getting ready to kick off plans to move our website over to a content management system. That’s going to make the summer busy. And then in July we’ll be opening nominations for the 2010 elections for the Board of Trustees, Advisory Council and NRO Number Council from the ARIN region. So be on the lookout for that.

Meetings. We’ll be running our fall meeting back to back with NANOG again. That will be in Atlanta, Georgia. The ARIN portion will run from the 6th to the 8th of October. Telx will be the sponsor for the event, and we need sponsors for all the other goodies, so if you want to, please contact info@arin or talk to De. And hot off the presses, we do have dates for the spring meeting for next year. ARIN XXVII will be held in lovely San Juan, Puerto Rico, from the 10th to 13th of April. Hope you can join us. It should be a good time. Same things apply: AT&T will be the sponsor. We’re excited to work with them on them that. And we need sponsors for all the other fun stuff that we do, info@arin, talk to De.

Fellowships. Are our fellows still here? Yea. We love our fellows.

[Applause]

This is the third meeting where we’ve had our fellowship program in effect. We’re very fortunate to have them here. It’s a great program. We’re going to be accepting applications for the fall from July 5th to August 6th. There are lots of folks that would benefit from this program. We’d like your help in getting the word out to them. So if you have any ideas of how we can better promote this program or places we can advertise it, [email protected]. Please. And that’s everything.

John Curran: Thank you very much. Any questions?

Thank you, Hollis.

[Applause]

Okay. Moving right along. We have the Financial Services Report with Bob Stratton.

ARIN Reports - Financial Services

Bob Stratton: I didn’t fall over either. That’s good. Good morning, everybody. I’m going to go over my staff, what we’re up to in operations, the registration revenue breakdown for 2009, what we’re doing to mitigate risk, our support of the Finance Committee, and a quick snapshot of the economy.

Staff. Val, Cathy and Tammy are my direct reports. Amaris, Tanya, Amy and Maria report to Tammy. Tammy and Tanya have been here. Hopefully you’ve had a chance to talk with them.

We had 17,500 invoices generated last year. 64 percent of them were paid by check, 35 percent by credit card, 1 percent by ACH and wire. And we had 1.5 percent accounts receivable as uncollectible bad debt. Excuse me. My voice is falling off on me. This is a rather low percentage. It does show that the IPv4 and v6 registrations are valuable.

The Navision accounting software we’ve scheduled for an upgrade in the second quarter. Our collections are ongoing. We have financial controls in place. In the Sarbanes-Oxley world, we don’t purchase or pay for anything without the correct approvals from those that are authorized.

We’re using the ARIN Online to answer questions. It’s a small number compared to Leslie’s group, but as you guys get the functionality to look at your accounts and the status, I suspect we’ll get more questions in the future.

We’re also involved in document retention. Cathy Murphy is working with Mary K. and Nate. This is a very important project. As we get document retention in place, we’re better able to identify what records we have and how we can retrieve them.

This is a breakdown of our 2009 registration revenue. As you can see, as in the past, v4 renewal registration is the lion’s share. It’s 73 percent. If you add in the initial v4 registrations, it’s pushing 80.

For those of you that are new, the v6 registrations are very de minimis. Those are under a waiver, a multi-year waiver. And as Leslie pointed out, a lot of the v4 registrations – the v6 registrations that have v4 pay the larger of the two fees, and inevitably that’s a v4.

So our v6 registration is a very small percentage of all this. One of the categories that are growing is the maintenance. And keeping up with them, as I referred to over in the collections, is a challenge. Those are a manual collection process. But maintenance of the $100 maintenance fees for transfers, AS and end users.

What we’re doing to mitigate risk. We review our contracts on an annual basis, any new contracts; we make sure that ARIN’s position is protected. Cathy Murphy does a very good job of this. We monitor our accounts. We monitor our bank accounts, our reserve accounts. We monitor our own corporate credit cards. We’ve had some issues there with people getting the numbers in some way, shape or form and we’ve had to swap out some credit cards. Also very important point, we don’t capture our organizations that come in to pay for their Internet resources with us. We don’t capture the credit card numbers. We send them directly over to our vendor.

We review our insurance coverage on an annual basis. For example, last year we initiated an event coverage insurance, event cancellation event coverage. If, for example, the volcanic ash mitigated this meeting for any way, shape or form we’d still be on the hook to pay for the beverages and the rooms. This insurance would help cover whatever we would have to pay. And, finally, our mutual funds in the reserve account are plain vanilla. We don’t have any esoteric investments. They’re pretty much equity and bond funds.

We support the Finance Committee of the Board. We generated the budget for 2010 for their review. We’re working with the auditors on the draft financial statements. Scott, our treasurer, “Gray Beard” as he’s now known, will be giving you a report on that.

This is just a quick economic snapshot. I thought this was interesting. It looks like the developed world is growing rather slowly. What a surprise. But the emerging markets seem to be back on track for pretty robust growth. It doesn’t seem to be much inflation under consumer practices except for India and Russia, which is kind of interesting. It does seem that employment is an issue across the board. But these all look better than they did last year at this time. So that’s a good thing.

And with that, that actually says questions. But whatever.

John Curran: The floor’s open for questions.

Thank you, Bob.

[Applause]

Next up is the engineering activities report by Mark Kosters.

ARIN Reports - Engineering aCTIVITIES

Mark Kosters: So you know I heard some groans while I was coming up here. I’m not exactly sure what that means. Usually I have tasteless pictures. My tasteless pictures this time were exceptionally bad. So they have been replaced. So now it’s going to be about ducks. Oh, geese. Oh, thank you. Canada geese at that. So there’s a story behind the geese. And so one of the things that Bob neglected to mention is our Go Green Program that we have at ARIN. So I would like to join that program. Excuse me.

[Laughter]

Okay. I can’t do the stand-up comedian thing. But I do like riding my bike to work. And on my first time riding my bike to work last year, I actually got attacked by a goose on the way to the office.

[Laughter]

Lee Howard: That falls under risk management.

Mark Kosters: So, needless to say, I’ve been razzed about this constantly in the office. I have a picture on my door that is this goose in particular. And I think her name was Emma. And she made me really bloody. I was riding along and she actually landed on my back and totally freaked me off, and the next thing I knew I fell on the ground, got all bloody, came into the office, and people were saying: What did you do this time? Now you know. Now let me get to the more serious things. There are lots of duck pictures, so you can enjoy this as I go through this.

Lee Howard: Geese.

Mark Kosters: They’re the same thing to me. They both quack.

Lee Howard: That’s why you got attacked.

[Laughter]

Mark Kosters: So we’re working on a surge right now. We have a lot to do within ARIN engineering. You’ll see that in the next slide that we’re supplementing the staff with a bunch of contractors. And here you can see that’s me with longer hair, with one of my more colorful shirts.

There are eight people in operations now. And we’ll have a new DBA starting up after the meeting. This is up by two from the last meeting.

In development, we’ve upped the number of contractors we have from four to eight. We have 14 people doing development. It’s getting to be a sizable group. These people are all stellar, by the way. I’m amazed how quickly they have come in, integrated themselves and have done an exceptional job in helping us really increase – the Agile term is velocity, the amount of actual code that you can actually put out.

And Quality Assurance. We have seven people, four of which are contractors. And one of the things that we’ve done is – and Mary K. talked about this a little bit. We’ve sort of rearranged the room. So they’re all in group rooms, and the QA people are sitting amongst the developers and actually QAing these tasks as they go through to help accelerate development.

Requirements. If you call that – I wanted to call Erika a story person. But requirements seems to be the appropriate term here. And of course me. The one they make fun of.

So disaster recovery – from an operations perspective, Matt Ryanczak’s group, who is sitting back there, has been working really hard on disaster recovery. I’m glad to say that we’ve actually tested this, and we’ve been able to make sure that all our major systems work at our disaster recovery site. So we feel more and more confident that we will be able to continue operations in the event of some sort of disaster. We have diversity within the /8s under IN-ADDR.ARPA in terms of adding more servers at different locations. You’ll be seeing that as – hopefully we’re looking at a site in the Caribbean right now, and we have a site located also in Canada.

DNSSEC, we talked about that a couple of days ago about it being operational.
And we’re attempting to keep up with the WHOIS traffic. So you guys kind of keep that in mind because I have some questions about that I’d like to ask you. So here you have WHOIS statistics.

Now, you’ll see that the legend here is more on the cumulative per month for v6. And I needed to do this to make the numbers really more impressive. So you look at these numbers and you can see that the numbers are quite high, if you look at it from the cumulative per month. But if I was to do the average per second it wouldn’t be nearly that high. So there’s still not a lot of work, much as the rest of you guys know, that has to go on v6. So this is a fraction of a percent for us.

Now, now this is kind of an interesting slide. So if you guys look at this, you’ll see the sort of, you know, up, up and away sort of thing that’s going on here. And we’re having some interesting behavior that’s going on within WHOIS right now. And we’re peaking a little over 400 queries per second. We did over-provision our systems last year to handle the load. But it’s starting to worry us because we’re starting to run out of rack space. And as we started looking at this, we saw that 50 percent of our traffic is self-referential. Basically it’s asking for its own IP address saying, hey, I’m at this particular IP address and I’m asking for my own IP address. And it is a singleton query. So you can’t really say I’m going to rate limit this guy, because he only comes in once and then he’s gone. And we’re starting to see more and more of this.

And we’ve actually talked to various people in that sort of the secure intel community, and it doesn’t appear to be a botnet. And many of them that we’ve looked at seem to be Windows boxes. So if any of you have – know of an application that’s using this or of some other thing that’s occurring, please let myself or Matt Ryanczak know, because we’d really certainly like to see what’s going on here, because we can either engineer this as, hey, here’s an important application – I’m not sure why one would ever want to do something like this – or are able to actually snuff this out.

So when we’re doing this – excuse me, again – what are we going to do with WHOIS? So as we’re going through this, we realized that WHOIS is – it’s a fairly small program that we have. But through this sort of load that we’re seeing, we’re finding it’s a little bit creaky. And as we go through more and more and analyze the sort of queries that people come in with, that we really need to redo this.

And right now we’re adding CPUs and additional boxes that handle the load, but we certainly can’t keep that up forever. So one of the things that Andy Newton has done is actually created WHOIS-RWS, and actually one instance actually that he’s put together actually equals the load that we have on our entire constellation right now. So we’re looking forward to actually putting this out.

Now, one of the things that – so Andy’s talked about this quite a bit over the last couple of days. And you’ve heard me say – you’ve heard John say it – this is going to be an important change. Because you’re going to have the ability to do things a little bit differently than you have now. You’re able to have a much more sort of richer query set than you will now, but there will be some changes behaviorally as this thing comes out. So be aware of that when it does come out. We hope to do this here within the next three months.

Development. Over the – since the last meeting we put out four ARIN Online releases. We’ve done multiple improvements to existing systems, adding boxes and so on to keep adding to the load. We’re adding on the point of contact validation that you’re seeing right now, WHOIS RWS that I’ve just talked about. We’re talking about the RESTful API for provisioning, and Andy sort of referenced this. And, again, it’s really important for you guys to look at this right now and give us feedback on whether or not this is a good idea or not, or what sort of improvements that can be made.

There’s a skeleton document that’s available off the website. Where is that off of, Hollis? Where the API is? It’s off of Tools. There’s an API, which it’s not fixed now. I wouldn’t code against it, but it at least gives you an idea of what a particular API for provisioning could be. I must stress that this is not fixed yet. But it at least gives you an idea so as you start going and saying, well, I need to start budgeting for this for next year, you can give them this document and say it’s something like this, so what would it take to actually put something like this together. It may change some. It may change a lot or not very much at all. But it’s something that our staff has been working on quite – in a dedicated fashion here. And of course what this means is that we’ll have more secure templates.

Coming from VeriSign, this really scares me how ARIN actually does business right now, mostly through e-mail templates. There’s lots of ways that we’re going about it by via third parties that are human interventions, making sure that things are not subverted by miscreants and so on, but this is actually going to help us a lot in terms of making sure that things are more secure coming from you guys to us.

Here’s a feature set of ARIN Online. You’ve seen that before. Here’s what’s coming, upcoming on ARIN Online releases in the future. POC validation, zone management, RESTful API, and RPKI integration, all of which you’ve heard about here earlier this week. Has anyone not heard about this? Who is not listening? Okay. Oh, okay. Thanks. Thanks, Pete, one of the ops guys.

So here’s what a screen shot of zone management looks like. So this is actually going to make things much easier on you in terms of doing your zone management. You can do this – right now you can do things on a per-network basis. We’re going to give you a much more sort of granular sort of management interface so that you can actually do things on a per-zone basis, which makes a lot of sense. We’ve had a lot of customers actually ask us for this, and hence we’ll go forward. And associated with this is that you will actually be able to put in your DS records as well so that you in turn can secure your zones through us via DNSSEC.

Here are numbers on ARIN Online. Geoff, you had like 4,000 active accounts, something like that?

Geoff Huston: Something like that.

Mark Kosters: We’re up to something like 14,000. So we’re doing real well. Thank you. I just thought I would say that. So you can see that people are actually using them, too. So and this is a one and a half times the increase over the last meeting. And from the meeting previous, it was a two times increase. So we’re seeing a little bit of a decrease in terms of the amount of growth. But it’s still pretty impressive. And thank you for joining it and helping us along.

As, again, what Mary K. talked about a little bit earlier in terms of Agile methodology, this is really for us to ensure that schedule accidents don’t happen. And this has actually been – we kind of went around various sorts of methodologies to actually put together development over the past two years. We found that this is definitely the way to go for us. And it’s working on the strengths of the organization. We’re getting very good participation from the various service departments, and I can’t say enough of how the integration of Q&A and development has actually put out good, high-quality releases and doing it in a quick way. And of course they’re more frequent.

So we’re basically doing – trying to do a release a month, and no less than a release every two months. So you will see outage announcements from us on hopefully Saturdays when this thing is going to be – when we’re upgrading our ARIN Online system.

Quality assurance. It’s not only making sure that things work, but also looking at it from the customer experience perspective, and making sure that we just don’t do these sorts of things in an engineering way where you go, what the heck is that. So makes sense for engineers but nobody else. So Tim makes sure he looks at it from a customer perspective and it seems to make sense in a much better way.

Project management. Right now Erika is actually managing three large development projects. You see the ARIN Online ones and there’s two separate ones that are underneath that that are sort of – more sort of structural, infrastructural setups that we’re using, one that leads up to the DNSSEC provisioning and another one deals with WHOIS-RWS, and of course building testable systems.

So upcoming challenges. You can see that we have additional online – ARIN Online features. We hope to start putting in resource management for you guys so you can start managing your IP address resources and autonomous system numbers as well. RESCERT moving from pilot to production by the end of this year. RESTful provisioning. Document retention, systems and management, for that matter. Replacement of legacy gear. And something that I put on the last deck and I put it on this one but at some point we like to look at the sort of overlay work that the people within IETF are doing with LISP, and we do have a box on site. We just need to start focusing on it.

So I’m done. And I apologize for sort of losing it for a second.

Scott Bradner: You might check on Macintoshes for your queries because part of the boot process or readdressing process it sets the host name to the peers to be the result of a WHOIS.

John Curran: Interesting. You have lots of microphones. So front and center.

David Farmer: David Farmer, University of Minnesota, ARIN AC. The zone management and RPKI and all these nice cool things that are part of ARIN Online. One of the things I’m trying to figure out is how to convince people from the higher-education world that they really need to take this legacy RSA stuff seriously, that the world’s changing. All of that stuff is for someone who is a legacy participant; do they need an LRSA or an RSA to participate in ARIN Online and all of that?

John Curran: Yes.

David Farmer: Good. Right answer. So now I have another thing to go whomp them with.

John Curran: Right.

David Farmer: Thank you.

John Curran: Okay. Center rear mic.

Heather Schiller: Heather Schiller, Verizon Business. The strange queries you’re seeing, I know you mentioned you’ve talked to some folks and they don’t think it is part of a botnet, would you be willing to share some of the address ranges that are doing those queries with someone in the security community so we can compare against lists we have?

Mark Kosters: Sure. So we were doing it with Cymru, and they have this – they have a number of dumps from us. There are some other places that we need to send it, we’d be happy to do so.

John Curran: Far left microphone.

Chris Morrow: Chris Morrow, Google and ARIN AC. Does no one use the WHOIS protocol? Is that why it got deprecated? I’m just curious.

Mark Kosters: Why nobody uses it?

Chris Morrow: I mean, the IETF deprecated for a reason, right? So it must be because no one uses it?

Mark Kosters: That’s certainly not true, right?

Chris Morrow: Did you go beat somebody over the head with that? Because they’ve done that a couple times now, and it’s really time to go put a boot in somebody really far up there. Really far.

John Curran: So I guess I want to understand the request. You think we should liaison with the IETF to explain to them that deprecating the protocol is inappropriate while it’s in use?

Chris Morrow: Yes. Maybe Mark in some new boots – I like Doc Martens – and a goose can visit the IETF.

John Curran: And a goose. Several. Several geese.

Mark Kosters: I’ll say it with a straight face next time.

John Curran: Far right microphone.

Tom Zeller: Tom Zeller, Indiana University and ARIN AC. I wanted to ask if the 400 queries per second is NDA or I can share that with the research higher education network, information sharing and analysis center, which is the guy in the cube next to me.

Mark Kosters: Sure. So there are really no privacy implications with this as well. You’ll know the source IP address by the query that is trying to ask for. So it’s really no big deal.

Tom Zeller: Also I wanted to ask – could you go back to the slide on new on ARIN Online. I was taking notes and I didn’t see what the last thing was.

Mark Kosters: This one?

Tom Zeller: Back further.

Mark Kosters: This one?

Tom Zeller: Yes. And then on a later slide, what is our RESCERT again?

Mark Kosters: Resource certification is – I talked about this on Monday afternoon.

Tom Zeller: I’m sure I was paying attention, just refresh my memory.

Mark Kosters: You should have raised your hand. What this is doing is it uses certificates to actually associate your resources, first of all.

Tom Zeller: I remember that conversation. I just didn’t know the term.

John Curran: Thank you. Center rear mic.

Lee Howard: Lee Howard, birder. I’m not sure what you did, but I’m sure you were asking for it.

[Laughter and applause]

Mark Kosters: I only told half the story, by the way.

[Laughter]

Dave Barger: Dave Barger, AT&T. I was taking a look yesterday at the WHOIS RESTful Web service. Very nice. Also looking forward to messing with the provisioning API. My question is: Have you been talking to – have you been talking to any of the vendors that provide like IP management tools in terms of getting them up to speed on what the provisioning interface is all about?

Because there’s a lot of vendors out there that automate the SWIP process, but it’s obviously based on the old templatized-type architecture, and there’s going to be a lot of development related to moving over to this.

John Curran: So if the vendors are here, then we’re sort of talking to them by definition. But if they’re not, I don’t think we’ve done specific outreach. I’m happy to do that. But can you give me a list of vendor contacts so I can do so?

Dave Barger: I can give you a few. E-mail them to you. You bet.

Mark Kosters: There’s a thing I’d like to add to that. As a customer, it would be useful for you to say, hey, look, wake up and we really want this, so that they can say, hey, we have demands, so therefore we can build it.

Dave Barger: Yeah. And we can push it from our side, too. And we will. I just know that, for example, Alcatel-Lucent is the vendor that provides our IP management tool, and I know that they have worked with ARIN in the past, you know, when there have been template upgrades and all of that sort of thing. So I know they’ve talked directly to ARIN. I just didn’t know if you all were on the offense to go out and reach out to vendors or anything. Just curious, but we’ll push it from our side.

Mark Kosters: Great. Thank you.

John Curran: There’s someone in that queue.

Aaron Hughes: Just as an IPAM vendor, no changes will be made to any IPAM software until there’s a stable release that’s never going to change for RESTful.

John Curran: Understood. That makes good sense. Now the other person in that queue.

Heather Schiller: I asked for it before, I’ll ask again, because I haven’t heard anything. So we used the suggestion process to ask for a test bed for all of this stuff. And how is that coming? I mean, it would be nice to have even a test bed for the template stuff so that developers could test template changes, because we have this problem that every time we – we have to wait until it’s in production until we can actually test it, and then we find out there’s some bug in whatever we did, and then we have to have like an emergency maintenance so we stop sending bad templates.

Mark Kosters: We talked about this within engineering quite a bit. So I’m going to describe our sort of legacy environment right now, and then I’m going to describe our new environment. Our legacy environment has lots of boxes doing lots of individual things and they all kind of work together, which makes adding a new environment incredibly hard for us to do. There are lots of boxes, lots of operations work that has to be done to make this happen. Basically building an OT&E environment for you to do your testing in.

With this new environment, it’s essentially very easy for us to throw up a new set of boxes for operational test and evaluation. So you guys can go ahead and throw whatever you want to at it. You can look at the results and see whether or not this is correct. And we do plan on building that as we start building these provisioning tools. And we’re starting that process now.

John Curran: So –

Heather Schiller: The problem from the part of the developers, we’re not going to be able to give you feedback until we have that place to test it. And our developers are not going to want to put something in production that they can’t test against, especially when the entire method of doing this is going to change.

Mark Kosters: So what I’m hearing from you is that as we build out those RESTful APIs, it would be very useful for us to build an OT&E environment for you guys to actually do your test –

Heather Schiller: Don’t wait until you get to the end, otherwise you’re going to get to the end of your development, you’re going to think it’s all good, but then we’ll be able to test and people are going to go, no, no, and you might as well do that in parallel so you don’t waste effort.

Mark Kosters: Understood. I’m with you.

John Curran: Okay. So – and just for ordering, between Aaron and Heather, because I couldn’t figure out, is it fix the API and then provide a test environment? Or is it provide a test environment and then fix the API?

Heather Schiller: Together. At the same time.

Aaron Hughes: There are a couple of methodologies for doing this, one of which is to stick a version identifier inside of the XML code, which is perfectly fine. So as soon as there’s a 1.0 version to release to the public then we can figure it out.

John Curran: Do a 1.0 and a test environment and make it available so you guys can bang it?

Aaron Hughes: Right. As long as the 1.0 never goes away. So you can start building tools off of that. And if you need changes, then you can update your code as appropriate.

John Curran: We’re there. Any questions from Mark?

Mark Kosters: Thank you.

John Curran: Next up is Richard Jimmerson to give the Outreach Report.

ARIN Reports - ARIN Outreach Efforts

Richard Jimmerson: I’m Richard Jimmerson. I do a lot of outreach for ARIN throughout the year. I do that together with Megan and several other people that I’ll talk about here in a few minutes. But I want to give you a brief description of the outreach work we’re doing and why we’re doing this.

So why we’re doing this. So we’re reaching out to contact varied stakeholders beyond the traditional ARIN community. So you guys know all about IPv4 depletion. You know that you need to adopt Ipv6. You know what the governance process is like, but there are many people out there that don’t know about these things, so we’re working hard to raise their awareness of ARIN’s key issues and messages and provide education. When we do go out there and talk to people about some of the topics, they’re surprised to hear that there’s an organization like ARIN, that there is a self-governance process for the Internet. They think that a government runs this. They think that a large corporation runs this and dictates all of it. And they are quite surprised that there is something that they can participate in. So this is very valuable work. And a lot of them do eventually make it into the process. There are also people out there today that still have never heard of IPv4 depletion. The fact that we’re running out of IPv4 addresses, and there’s a need to do anything with IP version 6.

And I think some of the Advisory Council members in the room that have done this outreach with us can attest to that. They can tell you that we encounter those people every time we go out, and they’re not just lay-people, users using the Internet; these are people who are technicians inside their networks running the networks. The key messages that we’re getting out there. ARIN and the other RIRs, we want people to know that there’s a governance system for Internet address space and the things that we do, and ask them to participate in that. And we do talk to them about IPv4 depletion and IPv6 adoption. That’s one of the biggest messages that we’ve been following these last couple of years. And also we have other targeted messages that we’ll use at certain shows, like legacy RSA where there’s a lot of legacy resource holders that are shown, and 4-byte AS numbers among other topics.

Now, the audiences that we reach out to, we’re trying to reach every industry segment that we can. So we’ve hit all the big ones out there, but there’s still a few of them we haven’t reached yet. And that’s evident when we come across them at some shows or during some presentations and they pretend that they’ve never heard that we’re running out of IPv4 address space. Well, actually, they heard about it in the 1990s and the early 2000s, and they think we’re crying wolf. And we need to break through those barriers and talk to them so that they know this isn’t crying wolf; that we’re really talking about something that could happen as soon as next year.

So the methods that we use. Presentations. We go out, we give presentations at all sorts of shows where we can get on the agenda to talk about ARIN, the governance process and IPv4 depletion. We do exhibits. We’ll actually go to a show and we’ll set up a booth and people will come by and they’ll talk to us and we’ll give them our message. It’s a challenge to get them to come by the booth and actually stop and talk to us. So one of the other things that we do is we do reverse exhibiting. We’ll go out and we’ll talk to everyone else that’s there. A lot of times these shows that we go to, the organizations that we need to be reaching out to are the other ones that are exhibiting. They’re vendors with an IP stack on their product and they need to hear this message, and we’ll reach out to them very aggressively. We also do media interviews. And this has picked up quite a bit over the last year or two, and I’ll talk more about that in a moment. And some of the shows we go to, there will be opportunities for advertisements and we’ll put those in their trade show publications and do those things.

Some of the materials that we use are fact and information sheets, and we take and we put that all on CD. Of course, people are much more interested in taking away a CD with all the information on it than a stack of papers, because they don’t have room to carry that stuff. But a lot of people do still like the paper. We have multimedia pieces we run continuously on the booth, and we’ll find that people stop and actually watch the videos on the ARIN meeting, our process and other things that we have going. We have small giveaways, nothing big. Just pens and stickers and those things. And I think the most important or the most popular thing has been the stickers for folks. And slide decks and comic books and other forms of materials. Here’s an example of some of the exhibits and the speaking events that we’ve done just recently since the last meeting.

One of the big ones here is the Consumer Electronics Show. We went there in January, had a booth. We had a lot of people come by our booth and stop and talk to us about IPv4 depletion, IPv6 adoption. That was our big message there. But we also had a team of ARIN staff and Advisory Council members that were there with us, and we did an aggressive reverse exhibit campaign there. We actually mapped out the trade show floor. CES is a very big show. Mapped out the trade show floor, and the volunteers and the ARIN staff that came to that event that week over those four days walked long distances, and we spoke to every vendor that was at CES with the exception of perhaps a few cell phone case vendors, and that made up about a quarter of the organizations there.

[Applause]

Now, other places that we’ve gone to. You can see here we’re trying to do a mix. We’re reaching out to IT people inside small organizations. Large wireless organizations. Voice providers. Internet service providers. Next-generation wireless providers. We’re reaching out to everyone that we can. And there’s some industry segments that we still haven’t hit and we hear about these throughout time. For instance, on the upcoming events we’re trying to get into the E3 Gaming Expo. The reason we’re trying to get into that show and exhibit there and talk to all the vendors there is because it’s come to – we’ve become aware of the fact that a lot of game console providers and organizations that support that service are not thinking about IPv6 yet. It’s strictly IPv4. We need them to be thinking about IPv6.

One of the challenges for getting into shows like that, though, they have a review process. It’s not about paying your money and showing up and talking to people from a booth. You actually have to go through a review panel to see if the – to see if you’re appropriate for the show. So that’s one of the things we’re actually doing this week is trying to get through to get into that show. And there are other things that we’ll do between now and next year, and we’re trying to diversify the audiences that we reach. There are some of them we’ve hit two or three times now, and we’re going to drop those as time goes. But we want to hit as many people as possible so that next year or shortly thereafter that when we do run out of IPv4 address space that there aren’t people there that are saying they’ve heard that for the very first time when it hits the press or media that we have run out.

Now, we did hire a public relations firm last year. We’re working very closely with them. LEWIS PR has done a very good job. Megan speaks with them almost daily. They advise us on a lot of things we do inside the organization PR related, including our social and media outreach.

Now, one of the requirements that we had when we went searching for a PR firm is that, in addition to traditional media, it was an organization that was up on the times for social media. And LEWIS PR had a very good team of young people that came to the meeting where they had pitched their proposal to us, that knew an awful lot about social media. We did select them and it’s paid off for us. They’ve done a wonderful job advising us in that area.

Here’s a sample of some of the media coverage we’ve had just recently. We’re reaching out, doing as many interviews as we can on the topic of IPv4 depletion, IPv6 adoption and participation in the Internet governance process at ARIN. And actually the traffic is picking up. It’s picking up for two reasons. It’s picking up because our PR firm is doing a great job working with Megan. But it’s also picking up because this topic is getting on the front screen for a lot of organizations out there.

As we get closer to IPv4 depletion, the media gets more interested in that. John’s very busy doing media interviews on a regular basis. He’s doing so many of them that I even get to do some, because he can’t do them all. And a thing that we don’t have listed here, but we did have one television cable news network cover the topic. They actually came out to the ARIN organization. They did a video interview with John, and they got an awful lot of education in the time that they sat there and talked to John and also talked to Megan. They looked like real pros when they talked about that. I think John got a couple of seconds of time on the screen. We’re hoping we get more, but we think there are going to be more of those media interviews from television media coming up inside the next year. It’s going to be a topic that everyone’s interested in and it’s going to happen. So I’m glad we have John here to help us out with that.

ARIN goes social. So this is a joint effort between the ARIN Member Services department and the Outreach team. The Outreach team is Megan and I, and you know all the folks in the Member Services department that put on this great meeting. We got together and we worked together on doing social media-related activities. One of the things that we did is come up with the TeamARIN Microsite. The purpose of this microsite is when we go out and we do these outreach events for people, they ask us: Where can I go to get more information? We’ve got few different places they can go. We’ve got a knowledge section on the ARIN website, we’ve got the IPv6 wiki, and we’ve got a few other resources. But what we’ve done is taken all of our social media presences and taken all of our education materials and we’ve put them together in one place on this microsite so we have a place to point people to. And we’re also using this site to document the work that we’ve done in the IPv6 area over the last couple of years.

So you can probably – you’ve probably seen us on Facebook if you’re in this room. We’re also on Twitter. And we’re posting videos up to YouTube. We’ve got about 500 Twitter followers right now. We’re looking to expand that even more. Before I stop here and go into questions, I just wanted to say that none of this work that we do in Outreach would happen without all of you out here in the audience. I want to call out just a few folks because I didn’t have a staff slide, John. I’m going to do this real quick. None of this work would get done without Megan’s work. Megan is our public relations officer. She does an outstanding job with this.
[Applause]

Also we get support from the Member Services department, people like De, Hollis and Jason, and several other people in the Member Services department. They do an awful lot of work with this. Mary K. mentioned Jess. Jess does a lot of work to make this happen. It’s a whole organization effort. And all of the ARIN departments participate in putting together materials and actually going out on the road and talking to people at these shows. Every department inside the organization has been wonderful. John Curran, it’s great having John as staff at ARIN, because John is out continuously speaking to people and he’s very effective. Thank you very much, John. And the ARIN AC. John, yes.

[Applause]

And the ARIN AC.

John Curran: ARIN AC.

[Applause]

Richard Jimmerson: It’s very effective when we go out and we’ve got this one-two punch when we talk to people out there. People are wary. They think we’re trying to sell them something. We explain to them we’re a nonprofit public trust organization, and that relaxes them a little bit. But when they find out we have a member of our elected Advisory Council who is a volunteer that found the message important enough to come on their own volunteer time and stand on the booth with us and talk to them, it’s very significant. It makes a very big difference, and we could not do this without the Advisory Council. Thank you.

[Applause]

John Curran: Any questions for Richard?

Lee Howard: Lee Howard, Board of Trustees. How can we help?

John Curran: How can the Board help or how can everyone help?

Lee Howard: Sorry. Everyone. Maybe I should have said Lee Howard, Time Warner Cable. How can we help?

Richard Jimmerson: Well, one of the things that we’ve done with this microsite is we’ve put a “get the message out” section there where you can go. And we’ve got the public view slide deck there. And we update that now at the frequency of every time a new /8 is issued by the IANA. I think that’s going to be every couple of months. So it’s pretty up to date, and you can use that.

We also have resources there. We have a form people can fill out on that microsite and request materials that can be sent to them if they’re going to be doing a presentation at a show somewhere to spread the word, spread the message. We’ll send a box of stickers and pens and things like that, and perhaps even some hats. And I think that that’s pretty helpful. I think there are even people in the room that have used that before.

John Curran: Center front.

Cathy Aronson: Cathy Aronson. Richard just set my question up perfectly. By some freak of nature there was a tech conference in the lovely town of Jackson, Wyoming, slash, Boondoggle. And they sent me a fabulous box of stickers, and there are canned slides on the website that I used. And I gave a presentation to all of the folks at this tech conference in Jackson, Wyoming, about ARIN and Ipv6. And it was really great. So if you happen to have some conference like that, it’s really easy. They send you a box. It’s got all kinds of goodies in it. And there’s already presentation materials. So it’s pretty nice.

John Curran: Thank you, Cathy. The community should know, while Richard and I go out and do quite a bit of speaking, the number of meetings occurring in any given week exceeds, even with speed of light travel, our ability to be everywhere. So this only scales to the extent that you see a meeting or you see an opportunity locally or an association you’re with or a trade group and you want to go speak, we’re 100 percent behind you. We’ll work with you on the slides. We’ll get your materials. We’ll get you things to pass out.

So I guess to answer Lee a little more fully, we’re probably not going to call out people individually and say “can you speak here.” I think we’re at the point in time of reach-out where you should just go look for those yourself, find them, and go speak, because we have the materials for you. We all need to be IPv6 ambassadors here, or it’s not going to scale fast enough.

Aaron Hughes: Aaron Hughes. The reach-out program is absolutely fantastic. Thank you guys so much for all of your hard work. It’s effective. I use it a lot when I talk to people about v6. The microsite’s great. I would request of the education site one more addition, which is a step before the v4 runout, something like what is an IP address and why do people want them so bad, as well as something that describes the difference between v4 and v6. Because people are still quite confused when they come back about compatibility and what dual stacking is. So that first two steps would be really fantastic so people don’t come back and go, I’ve got it, there’s a scare, there’s a resource that’s running out but I don’t quite understand what it really is.

John Curran: For those materials, do you want the one- or two-page briefing paper or the five-page slide deck sort of format? Sometimes we’re stymied by format because someone says they want something and we sometimes give it to them in the wrong form. What are you looking for?

Aaron Hughes: FAQ-style would be very useful. Just what is this resource. There are so many different types of people that are interested in this resource depletion that varies at different levels inside of a company, and the ones that need to impact their company are not necessarily technically savvy.

Richard Jimmerson: We do have those materials currently. What we’ll do is we’ll take and make sure that they’re displayed more prominently in those locations and we’ll work on a format so that it suits the people that are coming, according to the description you gave.

Aaron Hughes: Fantastic. Thank you.

Bill Darte: Bill Darte, ARIN AC. I noticed in your upcoming events list, et cetera, I didn’t notice anything that looked like government entities. When I hosted a table the day before yesterday talking about government involvement in ARIN and all of that, one of the things we chatted about is outreach from ARIN to these communities and whether speakers could come talk to individual agencies or whether there were interagency opportunities to come hit a lot of folks and all that sort of thing. So I wonder how you do that. I know you do some of that, but how does that get arranged and supported?

John Curran: That’s actually myself and Cathy Handley handle those, and we do quite a bit. So if you have a government opportunity, reach out to myself or Cathy. I’ve done probably a dozen government panels, outreach, including in U.S., Canada. I’ll be at the Caribbean Telecom Ministers later on in a month or so. So we do quite a bit of it. We don’t usually consider it outreach because to some extent they get different materials. They get materials like Aaron was discussing earlier, the sort of 101 version of the course, which is sort of interesting when you think about it. But that’s the way government is. And we do quite a bit, though. So we don’t know where all of those are. And that’s the type of thing that just drop me a message if you find one you want us to be at and we’ll fit it in, generally myself or Cathy.

There are also a select number of people we work with in the industry, who, if we can’t handle it, I can have someone – like we work with the Federal IPv6 Task Force. Pete Tseronis is happy to cover something like that. We’ll work with Industry Canada on the same thing. So we have some relations that we can leverage if we can’t be there, to get someone there who is knowledgeable.

Marla Azinger: Marla Azinger, Frontier Communications and ARIN Advisory Council. You mentioned you’re working with a PR firm. Did they suggest using a gas mask?

[Laughter]

John Curran: The PR firm works on lots of our messaging materials. And we found them to be remarkably effective.

Marla Azinger: Did they suggest the gas mask?

John Curran: I believe they were involved in the development of that idea.

Marla Azinger: If they’re suggesting negative images like that, I would advise maybe you look around for a different PR firm. I understand you all were going for something to draw attention. But I believe one of the standard marketing tactics is not to use negative images with something that you want a good response to. And I know I have an extra personal hate for gas masks, given my history, but it’s a negative image, and you want a good image with v6. So I just – if you have a PR firm suggesting negative images for a marketing campaign, it’s not a great idea.

John Curran: We’ve got a scorecard for how we evaluate the PR firm that I actually run because they’re a significant vendor, and the effectiveness of the PR campaign is a metric. So we’re going to go several months, we’ll see how effective it is. And then we’ll add that. With respect to whether it’s a negative or positive image, I don’t know whether or not it’s particularly one way or the other. But at the end of the day, the score is effectiveness for the ARIN dollar.

Marla Azinger: I don’t believe I’m the only one that thinks it’s a negative image to put with v6, but I’m probably the only one that will publicly say it.

John Curran: Microphones are open.

Unidentified Speaker: Merit. It is kind of like Toxic Avenger or something like that. But two ideas that I just had were like for a high volume messaging, one would be put some spots on NPR, just audio spots. The other is seriously you could consider getting like three minutes on a Jay Leno show type of thing and do a quick public service announcement, Jay Leno, that sort of thing.

John Curran: That’s good ideas. We have actually had a spot. We did a radio spot, have had two interviews. We haven’t yet hit the visibility to get on NPR. But I think we’ll be there sometime this year.

I will tell you that the mainstream media – we do have a lead from Forbes we’re pursuing. That’s getting into the business media. But the mainstream media is hesitant to reach out and touch a topic like this until it’s absolutely overwhelmingly decided. So we might be premature, but I do agree it would be nice to get into magazines and televisions that everyone is watching every day.

Wesley George: Wes George. Just have a quick response directly to that. No one said this has to be something that NPR does as a spot: This segment is sponsored by ARIN who reminds you that IPv4 is close to exhaustion. Visit TeamARIN.com, .net, whatever it is, to learn more. That’s all you need.

John Curran: Got it.

Rob Seastrom: So, John, we’re looking forward to a halftone picture of you above the fold on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. I do not share Marla’s concern about 2010 gas face dude /64. The caption is “it’s not the end of the world.” He is Cold War clipart, which, depending on your age and your level of awareness of the things in the world at a particular age – I’m the trailing end of the generation that ducked under our desks. And, guess what, it all turned out to be just okay. So we went ahead, we followed directions, we sorted things out, and there was nothing to worry about. So that’s the message that I get from that picture.

John Curran: Understood.

Joe Maimon: Joe Maimon, CHL. I just wanted to mention that I’m behind this campaign. I believe, like I expect most in this room, that it’s important to get people to see things the way we do before, perhaps, they form another opinion.
There is something I was curious about. You speak with a lot of people. Some of them probably have no preconceived ideas about what we do. And others probably also do; some of them are probably negative. I was just wondering what kind of negative preconceived things you’ve heard about what we do. Maybe there’s something we need to nip in the bud ahead of time.

Richard Jimmerson: Yes, there is some negativity out there. There are organizations that still think that ARIN is this horrible organization that’s preventing them from doing their jobs, perhaps. But we’ve had those things happen to us, and a lot of it is just hearsay.

So an example I used last time I talked about this. Cathy and I were standing on a booth one time last year and a gentleman showed up. And he immediately – in a suit., he was an executive –Immediately began criticizing the ARIN organization saying that he didn’t like us and that we were basically a horrible organization and that we were causing damage to his business. And so we explored a little bit with that individual and asked him what was going on. And apparently his systems administrator had told him that he had requested – he had requested resources from ARIN and he was having trouble and ARIN was very difficult to deal with and was not giving them what they wanted or what they needed. And basically that’s where that came from. So we asked him if that person was at the meeting with him. And he said, no, they’re not at the meeting. And he said: I’ll tell you what, though, I can call them on the phone. He took out the phone and he called that person up and had them on the speakerphone and said, Hey, Johnny, whatever his name was, I’m standing here on the ARIN booth at – I think it was COMPTEL, and can you tell me a little bit about the problem you’re having with ARIN, because I was trying to describe it to them. The young man on the phone about choked on his tongue, was having a really hard time and couldn’t describe a problem that he was having with the ARIN organization. And as soon as he got off the phone, the gentleman in the suit that was standing in the booth with us apologized to us and told us he now understood what the problem probably was and left. But we do get a lot of that and there are other examples of that, and we do our best to work through that and help people understand that we are there, we are available, we are open, and we invite them in.

John Curran: In terms of general messaging, last – if we go back two years ago, we had people saying we’re never really going to have a problem with v4 addresses. There are lots of them to go around. The legacy space and unused space will come back and we’ll have decades more space. And that was – I mean, there’s some truth that there’s definitely some wiggle room there, but you don’t have to look at the numbers long to realize there’s not decades of wiggle room. So we had to address that message. And I think we have in the community.

We no longer find other technical organizations saying IPv4 runout isn’t a problem. And that’s what we used to see. So now we’re all saying it’s a problem. I think last year’s confusion was, it’s a problem, how is the industry going to deal with it, was where the confusion is. Whose job is it to get us over the hump to v6. Is that a carrier problem or a content provider problem? So we still have some places where we can’t dictate the answer. We have to say it’s a problem. There aren’t going to be available addresses from us. There may be some others available short term and long term it’s carrier grade NAT or going to IPv6.

We’re not at the point now where the industry has said we all have to get to v6 by this day. Some of them have said we’re going to use carrier grade NAT and we think that works forever. So ARIN has to calibrate its message with what we’re hearing from you, and until the community – two years ago you told us promote v6. So now we told people, yes, v6 is what we’re promoting and IPv4 runout is going to occur. Until the community has consensus, we don’t – we try to keep our messaging behind what the technical community is saying, because we don’t want to be the ones advocating a position that this group hasn’t given us.

Owen DeLong: Owen DeLong, Hurricane Electric. It was a real pleasure working with the ARIN folks getting that TeamARIN server up, and I’m glad it’s working as well for you as it is. This is unusual for me, but I’m actually going to disagree with Rob and agree with Marla. I think that the gas mask sends the absolute wrong message about IPv6. I think people see the gas mask. They don’t even necessarily read the caption before their brain reacts with a very negative opinion of whatever the message is going to be behind that. I think that the message with v6 needs to be up and to the right. Positive imagery. And the gas mask isn’t that.

John Curran: Okay. So my question is: Our plans are to run that and see how effective it is at driving participation to the booth, because in some shows, given the number of events we do, there are shows where it’s difficult to get people into the booth.

Owen DeLong: I agree you need more eye-catching imagery to get people into the booth than what we’ve been using. The thing that concerns me about the gas mask is while it may drive a certain number of additional people into the booth, it may drive a lot more people away from our message that don’t ever come to the booth.

Bill Smith: Bill Smith from PayPal. I’d like to speak in favor of Marla’s position, not necessarily for the content, though I personally may find the content objectionable, and I’m new here, but I’m wondering how a member or an ARIN member or a member of the community is able to provide input into such a campaign before the campaign launches. Because as a member that is of interest to me, especially when it is around messaging, marketing messaging, and depending who the messages are delivered to, what form, and, et cetera, what the emotional impact is of that message. So I don’t know what the forum is to provide input, but I suggest there needs to be one.

John Curran: I think that’s a great comment. We, as part of this, have been discussing exactly that. Obviously what has been our outreach campaign and our messaging, we weren’t planning on using the booth images anywhere other than the booth. They’re not a central theme, if you look at what we have. So when we do our marketing campaign, in fact, the materials that we have are based on what you can find online on our website. We actually – on TeamARIN we have that.

Unidentified Speaker: He’s on the website.

John Curran: We put him intentionally on, because the community wanted to see what we were using. But we’re not using him anywhere other than the booth. I think as part of this dialogue we need to figure out how to do that in advance of production of materials and let that feedback happen before we do a selection. That may raise the cost, though, because you can’t do design by committee. You may have to have a couple of campaigns and pay the cost of designing several if you want the membership to help put input into which one to use.

Unidentified Speaker: If I could respond. You may need that. The other point I’d like to raise is that while you may believe that that message is only going out on a show floor, if someone takes a photograph of it or a video of it and places it on YouTube, it can suddenly find itself in the mainstream media.

John Curran: Exactly, yes.

Unidentified Speaker: But it can carry an extremely negative message. That’s my point. And as a member, I don’t want my name associated with negative messaging. So that’s a concern for membership and how I might choose to interact with such an organization.

John Curran: Acknowledged. Center rear.

Heather Schiller: I agree as well that the image is really negative. I think – I didn’t even notice that there was a caption because I didn’t get that far because I looked at it and I went, What the heck? But I wanted to say that it then to me becomes something that you have to – is an obstacle to overcome, because you’re trying to tell people that, yes, transition to v6 is going to be some amount of work, but you don’t want to give the perception that this is this horrible, insurmountable kind of problem that I think that that type of image portrays.

John Curran: Okay. And I guess the question is: Since that’s the booth production that we’re using this year, and it’s being used at shows, do you say it shouldn’t be used? Or we should use it and see how we overcome exactly that? Because –

Heather Schiller: So I’m going with you guys to Interop next week.

John Curran: Is that the smaller booth?

Richard Jimmerson: It won’t be that exact image when you’re with us next week. But you could end up at an event with that there, is the point.

Heather Schiller: So my question was going to be have you used it at an event already?

Richard Jimmerson: No, we have not.

Heather Schiller: You haven’t even tested it to see. Well? And so you’re testing it at the ARIN meeting and you’re getting a bunch of responses that are not exactly positive?

John Curran: Right. The question is whether or not it will drive more people into the booth.

Heather Schiller: I can imagine that the gaming one, maybe, but I don’t know. And I guess if you’re going to use the image next week or a smaller version of it, you can test it out. But are you planning to ask the people: What drove you into the booth? Or are you just going by – do you record numbers? I haven’t gone yet, so I don’t know how you do this. Do you record numbers?

Richard Jimmerson: One of the very difficult things at these trade shows is that you’re a single booth, 10-by-10, amidst hundreds of others, and people are walking down aisles and it’s difficult to grab their attention and bring them in. We do our best to jump out, jump out in the hallway, bring them back in and attack them with our message in a very kind way, of course. But getting them to stop, getting them to stop and take a look and go “what is that” may be an opportunity for us to come in –

Heather Schiller: My question is a lot simpler: How will you measure?

John Curran: I’m going to close the mics. We’re running out of time.

Heather Schiller: How will you measure?

Richard Jimmerson: We will measure that based on the number of people that come in, the comments that people give us. One of the reasons this actual image came up is taking feedback from people at these shows. And actually that type of image was recommended by several people that had come to our shows. And that’s one of the reasons it was in the running when we got to the end of the selection process not too long ago.

Tom Zeller: Tom Zeller, Indiana University, ARIN AC. Yeah, I’ll just put my two cents in. I find the image repellent. I would never walk to a booth that had that image. And even if you get an uptick in people visiting, you won’t be able to measure how many people walk away with a negative image, because they won’t talk to you. I know it’s painful that people second-guess something you put a lot of work on. But that’s just my reaction to it.

I also wanted to say I just downloaded the widget off TeamARIN for my Mac, and I have the really fun Hurricane iPhone, and both of them give days to exhaustion. And my math, 365 minus 513, that puts it – boy, it would be nice if it projected exhaustion date. October 10th, 2011, would be much more dramatic outcome than 513 days, which seems like kind of far in the future.

John Curran: Okay. In the past the days have been more impactful than the date. But I imagine now that we’re getting close it’s the other way around.

Center rear.

Marc Crandall: Perhaps we should replace the – I don’t mind bending down – we could replace the gas mask with an attacking goose. A duck, I mean.

[Laughter and applause]

I was going to say: I guess metrics on how this affects people is very difficult to measure. And coming up with alternative designs is expensive, especially after printing booth material. But maybe one option is simply to have four or five mocks available on the ARIN site, place notice on the appropriate mailing list, and then whoever has an interest in it can go ahead and vote, and then the design and PR department can go forward from there if the membership feels strongly about it. And that should at least help relieve the situation for the time being. My name is Marc Crandall. I’m on the ARIN AC. I’m with Google. Speaking for myself.

Steve Bertrand: Steve Bertrand, eagle.ca. I’ve heard a few people say that this image is only prevalent in trade shows. However, if you go to arin.net homepage, it’s one of three or four rotating ads right in the front page of the ARIN site.

Bill Woodcock: There is something to be said for home-grown imagery and jokes and so forth, and the attacking goose of v4 depletion at least has that going for it.

[Laughter]

Scott Leibrand: Scott Leibrand, ARIN AC. I was at a conference just a couple of weeks ago. There were a lot of people that walked by, saw a bunch of letters, said: I don’t recognize that company; I don’t know what they do. They didn’t say it that loud, but they just kept on walking. I believe it is absolutely essential that we have something to bring people into the booth. I believe that IPv6 needs to be the primary message of the booth materials, not ARIN.

I think the gas face dude is going to be effective in getting people’s attention. I’m personally of the opinion that this is publicity and it’s in a trade show environment; there’s not a lot of bad ways to get attention, I don’t believe. So I don’t have any objection to gas face dude, but whatever we do, it needs to be something along the lines of IPv6, get attention. I think this is a good step in that direction. Obviously we can keep working to improve it. But I thank you for making that happen.

John Curran: Center rear mic.

Bill Darte: Bill Darte, ARIN AC. I thought the suggestion over there of ways to get feedback from the community in advance of some of these PR messaging, you know, my marketing and promotion 101 suggests that focus groups are a pretty powerful and important part of a lot of market messaging, and so if you could get – obviously a biased group, you know, in the membership, but if you could get members who would be willing to participate in some kind of focus group, that would probably be a good thing.

Richard Jimmerson: Thanks, Bill. Far right.

Bill Sandiford: Bill Sandiford, Telnet Communications, ARIN AC. I’ve been to – I think it’s three outreach events so far this year. And echoing what Scott said about his recent experience, we spend a lot of time, especially on the first day of the show, where booth traffic is good and people are coming in, and if necessary we have to step out of the aisle and do a blocking routine to try to direct them in, which always isn’t as fun, but I tend to have the size to pull it off.

But some of the other days it’s exactly what Scott said: It is people walking by, taking a glance up, and very hard to get attention to the booth. I’m not 100 percent certain whether or not I think this particular image is the right image. But sometimes I think in these trade show environments the controversial image is just what you need to get somebody’s attention and perk their interest long enough to come up and say, hey, what is that?

And I’m quite confident in my abilities, and I’m sure other members of the AC are just as good, that when those people come in and see this image, and if they come in with an immediate negative connotation, that we could very easily turn around and say: You know what? Yeah, this looks real negative, but here’s actually why this is a positive image. And although it may give you some negative things in your mind, this is really what we’re trying to show and here’s why we’re here and here’s why this is a good thing.

In terms of selecting the image itself, I know that ARIN values the feedback from the membership community. But I know, myself, that I’m certainly not a marketing expert and I would imagine that a lot of the people that participate in our processes aren’t marketing degree people as much as they are – have their strengths in other areas. And I tend to want to take my trust and put it in the people that the organization has hired to do the marketing for us.

Heather was asking about how we’re going to measure this. I know at the events that I’ve been to, or will go to in the future, I certainly don’t have a problem with someone who looks weird. Sometimes at the end of the conversation or sometimes when a conversation has gone on a bit too long, kind of like this comment, that it’s very easy to cut them off by saying: Well, thank you for coming. Just as an interest, how did you come to visit our booth today? And it’s a great way that we can get feedback, and also push them out of the booth and move on to the next person.

John Curran: Thank you.

Scott Leibrand: I have a remote.

John Curran: Microphones are closed including remote. That will be the last comment. R.S. and then remote.

Rob Seastrom: Rob Seastrom again, ARIN AC and Afilias. I’ve gotten a little bit of a chuckle about negative responses to a negative image or a perceived negative image. And I would encourage people who do not like gas face dude to come up with concepts that can be, of course, extremely rough, because that’s what we pay our marketing people to do, is refine those concepts and turn them into something that you can put in the booth. Please submit your ideas for something that you find less offensive, that you think would be – or, you know, positive or whatever and would be attention-getting to draw people into our booth. I’m sure that your ears are open and your door is open and more than happy to hear about ideas from the community, the AC members, whatever.

John Curran: Thank you. Final comment, remote.

Scott Leibrand: Remote comment from Peter Gutierrez from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. I think the gas mask guy reminds me of Dr. Who, not as negative as other people’s reaction.

John Curran: Okay. Thank you. On that we’ll close out. Do you have anything else, Richard?

Richard Jimmerson: No, I don’t.

John Curran: Thank you very much.

[Applause]

Okay. The refreshment break was at 10:30 and we get back here at 11:00, so we’re here. Congratulations. No, I will not do that for you. We will have a brief refreshment break. I need a 15-minute break. I’d like to be back here at 11:20, please. Everyone come back 11:20.

[Break]

ARIN Advisory Council Report

John Curran: Welcome back. If everyone would be seated. Now that everyone’s gotten their juices flowing, we’ll pick up with the ARIN Advisory Council Report by the ARIN AC Chair, John Sweeting.

John Sweeting: I’m John Sweeting, Chair of the Advisory Council, and I’m going to go through a few slides here. Here’s the picture of the current Advisory Council.

[Applause]

This was taken in January at the Reston Hyatt when we had our face-to-face day-long workshop. The main role of the AC is really policy development. There are really five steps that we use to go through the policy development process.

The first thing we do is we evaluate the policy proposals as they’re sent in to ARIN. As we do that, we assign shepherds to the proposals to dig in a little deeper and provide information to the AC on the conference calls as to whether we accept it on the docket or not.

Next, we develop clear, technically sound and useful policy, which I’m sure you’ve all heard Einar say a million times. We then present draft policy at public policy meetings. We determine draft policies that meet community needs and requirements and then recommend those draft policies that meet the requirements to the Board of Trustees for adoption.

2009 in review. Last year, meetings, we attended three ARIN meetings. One was a Caribbean sector meeting. Three NANOG meetings. Seven other RIR meetings. Volunteered at 11 outreach events and had representation at IGF and IETF. On the proposal and draft policy activities, we had – we recommended adoption of ten draft policies and we abandoned 13 proposals and two draft policies.

This year so far we’ve had ten proposals. Nine have been accepted on the docket, one has been abandoned, and one is currently pending. The status of those is eight have been turned into draft policies, which were presented here this week, and Policy Proposal 109 is still being developed.

Meetings this year. There are two ARIN meetings that we will all attend. Three NANOG meetings. Marla is going to one, Chris is going to one or has gone to one, and all will attend the one in Atlanta that’s the joint with ARIN. Two RIPE meetings. Rob and Stacy. Two APNIC meetings. I’ve already attended the first one this year, and David will be going to Bangkok, I believe. The LACNIC meeting is Bill Darte. Two AFRINICs, Cathy and Marc. And last year there were 11 outreach events we supported. This year my count is we’re volunteered in supporting 23 outreach events. So if you figure that, that’s about two a month. And sometimes there’s actually two or three going on at the same time. So we’re stretched pretty thin this year. I think that’s why Richard gave us some kudos while he was up here.

We also participate in the fellowship program. We participate in the selection committee. This year Owen and Cathy are on the selection committees. I don’t know which one did this one. Owen did this one. Cathy is up for the Atlanta. Mentors: We have mentors for the selected fellows during the meetings. Stacy, Chris and Marla are the mentors for both Toronto and Atlanta.

Outreach program: We participate in the booth, focus on IPv4 depletion and IPv6 education and promote ARIN meetings.

We also have two – I believe volunteers serve on the nomination committee. We have two people, two AC members on a policy development process committee. And then anything else that ARIN really asks for our support, we step up and support.

And that’s it.

John Curran: Okay. Microphones are open. Let’s make sure John gets his share of questions.

Thank you.

[Applause]

Next up we move on to the ARIN Financial Report given by the treasurer, Scott Bradner.

ARIN Financial Report

Scott Bradner: Good morning. Good late morning. So I’m acting as treasurer this year. And I’m going to just do a quick run-through of what ARIN has been doing, the ARIN Fin om, the Financial Committee has been doing in the last year and what we expect to do in the rest of the year.

So far this year we’ve – the staff presented the Fincom with a revised 2010 budget. Minor revisions, but important to get the budget that’s actually being used to be accurate. Such a concept.

The staff presented a draft budget, draft revised budget to the Fincom. We discussed it and we forwarded it to the board with a recommendation to approve the revised budget, and the Board did so.

The revised budget has a total revenue of $13,500,000 and expenses of about $15 million, cutting into the reserves by a little bit. This is something that we decided a number of years to – to do is to deal with the fact we’ve got quite a large reserve, though not as large as we would have had without the economic downturn. And you’ll see that in a minute.

But we decided to – rather than raise fees or cut back on expenses, to cut into the reserves to some degree. So we’re doing that.

And the sort of things we’re spending it on is ARIN Online, the RPKI, document retention system, all of these things that you’ve heard about. And we could have done it by raising fees or deciding not to do some of this. But the Board decided to proceed with this and spend down the reserves.

But we’ve got quite a bit of reserves left. Projected at the end of the year to be about 21 million in reserves. So we’ve got a little ways to go. John can be a little more profligate and still not hurt us too bad. But we don’t want to double the rate or something like that, so we’re going to be a little bit conservative.

This is a picture of the reserves over the last few years. 2008 wasn’t the best of years. The red stuff at the top is the decline in value; i.e., the hit on it.

2009 was not too great. But we’re back to above where we were. And so the people that we hired to manage our reserves are actually quite good. They’ve done quite a good job of coming back. It’s actually my retirement fund is at 90 percent of what it was, and ARIN’s is at 100 percent. So that’s pretty good.

This is the revised budget. I won’t go through this in detail. It’s available. But this is the – thought it was important to put it up here in case anybody has any specific questions on it.

Personnel operations, et cetera: comparing 2009/2010. We’re spending a little bit more. We’re getting a little more in total revenue. Spending quite a bit more in personnel. Spending quite a bit more – or a reasonable amount more in operations. Less in general office and administration, particularly in professional fees and outreach.

Legal defense fund is changed to how we were handling the legal defense fund. It was a line item in the budget. Now it’s part of the reserves.

Our Internet support: ICANN support is down a little bit. Research is up a little bit, and additional expenses for the NRO, if you have questions on that, John can speak to that.

And we are helping with NANOG – what specifically are we doing helping NANOG, John?

John Curran: Specifically our money goes to do the multicast of the – the broadcast of the sessions.

The funding we give to NANOG is for multicast support for their meetings and our meetings.

Scott Bradner: It’s not infrastructure support for NANOG, it’s for letting other people know what’s going on.

So what we’ll be doing the rest of the year, the auditors are busy working, and the way it works is the auditors talk to me as the treasurer. They are busily auditing. They’ll come up with a draft audit and then Fincom will review that, have any comments on it. I’ve already reviewed a first version of it and had some comments and the auditors are working on that.

And we’ll get – the Fincom will get a version of the audit to review to invest to recommend to the board one way or another whether they should accept it. So far the draft audit says no material issues have been found.

So, in other words, Bob and the rest of the gang are telling the truth to the rest of the auditors, or at least they can’t figure out they’re not.

Do an annual review on the investments. As I already mentioned, the investment advisors are pretty good, so it’s likely we’ll continue with them, but that’s not an official decision.

We also on an annual basis look at the fee structure to see whether we should work on it. And, for example, one of the issues we have is the current schedule of the relaxing of the discount on v6 fees. So we’re talking about that.

Review community input on various topics. Look at the insurance. We regularly do that. We did as – as was pointed out yesterday, or maybe today – how time flies when we’re having fun – that we now have insurance on our meetings for things like – that was today – things like volcano insurance on our meetings. We didn’t know in advance that we needed volcano insurance, but that’s what we have.

Looking at just the general monitoring, the general financial status to be sure that we’re not – John isn’t driving us into a hole. And looking and working with the staff on developing a 2011 budget.

Any questions?

Martin Hannigan: Marty Hannigan. That’s a pretty huge reserve we have there. It’s 175 percent of a year’s worth of operating expenses. Could you talk a little bit about the strategy for that and why we would as a community think that that’s a pretty reasonable number for us to have sitting around?

Scott Bradner: Well, the Board a number of years ago asked the staff to put together a reserve of around a year’s worth of support. We’ve come to the membership a number of times since then saying, okay, we’re meeting up the reserves pretty good. We’re building up the reserves, what do you want us to do? Do you want us to reduce fees? Do you want us to do increased services?

And, in general, the discussions in these meetings have been increase services rather than reduce fees. But we also did very well in the investments. And so it was surprisingly good – well, there’s that little aberration a couple years ago. But, other than that, we were doing very well on the investments.

So it’s a little bit of an embarrassment of riches, which is why the Board decided to, rather than reduce – rather than increase fees to cover the budget or to reduce expenditures to make it more in line with the revenues, to spend down the reserves to some degree. Do you want to add anything to that, John?

John Curran: I’d love to. Two things to think about. First is that while it is true that the reserves are significant compared to the more than one year’s operating budget, we have in a short number of years a potentially discontiguous event that occurs when we run out of IPv4 resources for issuance, and ARIN will need to determine the right way to structure its fees and its operation.

Being able to go through that period without having to worry about keeping everything going while we restructure is very important. So I would rather at this point – with just a year or two away, I would rather not go in with lean one-year reserves but have a little more slack there.

Steve Ryan: This is Steve Ryan. I act as counsel to ARIN. I’m at the McDermott firm in Washington D.C., and we have a very large nonprofit group of attorneys who advise nonprofit organizations, which is not my area of expertise. But I’ve relied upon them.

And my personal view is we are under-reserved. As a lawyer I believe we’re under-reserved; that for a nonprofit organization like this, with a limited budget, that a two- to four-year reserve would certainly be within the realm of what other organizations do as well. And, in fact, you could even go beyond that.

In other words, I’ve inquired if there’s an IRS standard at which that appears excessive, and of course there’s certain universities associated with certain people in the room that we would not address as –

[Laughter]

– in any way where reserves were found to be very, very large.

But, in my view, we are not actually in any way over-reserved. And as a prudent set of fiduciary managers, the leadership of the organization may hear different notes from different places, but my note is that we probably could prudently be at two years to four as a way of addressing events in the future that allow, for example, even an orderly liquidation of the corporation over a period of a half dozen years.

And those things are very, very important, I think, to maintain continuity of what are essential Internet governance services.

So I think if there’s any organization that is operationally involved in the Internet the way we are, that would be a very prudent way to do it.

Scott Bradner: Thank you, Steve. No jokes about lawyers looking at the size of the wallet of their clients.

[Laughter]

Martin Hannigan: So I don’t think it’s a good idea for us to second-guess your judgment. It is a good idea to ask questions. And I think that everything that I’m hearing is fairly reasonable. Although, I question the comment regarding two to four years of reserves.

And, again, I’m not saying that it’s not correct or that our advisors are incorrect, but ICANN was just involved in a huge roil over their reserves, and there was quite an extensive discussion as to how much and what those reserves should be doing. And perhaps it’s a different organization than ARIN.

If you had asked us during this meeting – which you kind of are by presenting this – what we would like to see you do, I think you should keep doing what you’re doing. I think that the capital expenditures and the infrastructure are good. And they should be planned accordingly and liberally since you do have some cash.

And I personally think 175 percent, without a reduction in fees, is an eyebrow raiser, but if you can justify it, so be it.

Thank you.

Scott Bradner: We have a remote comment.

Scott Leibrand: The remote comment is from Peter Gutierrez, University of Massachusetts Amherst. He asks: Could we get some more explanation about the legal defense contingency fee being put in reserves and not a line item in the budget.

Scott Bradner: Did you want to address that, Steve? John can do that.

John Curran: Yes. That’s actually an excellent question.

So for many years we’ve carried an annual budget operating expense item which is a legal defense fund, basically a plan that we will have a category of expenditure each year of hundreds of thousands of dollars on the presumption that at some point a suit or some other mechanism would require us to do that.

The challenge with that is that you’re budgeting for an expense that often never occurs. And so we finally realized that it doesn’t adequately say what we really want to say.

What we really want to say is we’d like to set aside some money specifically earmarked for such defense. And rather than carrying it in the operating budget as we’ve been doing and never spending it, we’ll just set aside a portion of the reserves for that purpose and no longer budget an annual legal defense item that never actually gets spent. So it’s to make the budget reflect reality.

Scott Leibrand: Another comment from Tim McGinnis: ARIN should follow the other RIRs in terms of reserve. They all need to have several years of reserve in place with IPv6 revenues projected lower than IPv4.

Scott Bradner: Any other questions or comments?

Joe Maimon: Joe Maimon, CHL. I think what I’m hearing you say is the reserves are in essence a war chest. In that case, they should be bulked up considerably.

Scott Bradner: The legal defense fund portion of the reserve certainly are a war chest. The rest is for orderly operation of the organization in case something goes wrong, if something serious happens in Chantilly where it’s going to cost us a lot of money to recover.

So we need the – the Board, as I said a number of years ago, asked for enough reserves to deal with significant issues like the building burning down and things like that.

And as has been pointed out by the comment just made, looking forward, we are going to be in a stressful time economically as we move to a v6 environment where we’re not going to see a lot of renewals. We’re not going to see a lot of people coming back asking for more address space when they get – when they get more address space in the first shot than the biggest ISP could have imagined in their wildest dreams under v4.

So it’s going to be a challenging time and we’re going to take some time to adjust to that. We don’t want to have to do that in any kind of precipitous way.

But, that said, bulking up that reserve for dealing with that contingency or the general – you know, we are infrastructure for the Internet, so we should be around as long as we’re actually needed.

Any other comments? Okay. Thank you.

ARIN Board of Trustees Report

John Curran: Final report for the morning, followed by our open microphone session, will be given by our chairman, Paul Vixie.

Paul Vixie: Thank you, John. In case folks thought that the Board of Trustees had no function except sitting here at the head table, I’m here to tell you what else we have been up to. Next slide.

So at the conclusion of the policy development process for any given policy proposal, the Board has it on our remit to verify that the policy development process has been followed. No irregularities.

So this looks a little bit like a rubber-stamp function. Although, there have been a few times where we have sent policies back, but not lately. So these are the most recent things to come out the far end of the policy process and are now in the NRPM and are actively being followed by the staff.

We have also revised the ARIN bylaws. As mentioned in yesterday’s meeting, I think the day before, there was an anti-takeover committee which made some recommendations, and this is really getting back to the reserve question again: How do we keep that from looking like an attractive target to somebody who might want to take over the Board for the purpose of writing a check to their buddies. That required some bylaws revisions.

We have also allowed for the idea of appointing a trustee. That would be a little bit unusual. John, as staff, is a, I guess, hired trustee. But the rest of us are elected. We have a desire to have a trustee that has some financial background. And we basically can’t trust the election process to produce that.

So although we have not appointed a trustee who has financial background, we have given ourselves the power to do that. I’m not sure exactly whether and when and why we will exercise that power, but the power is now there in the bylaws.

And, finally, we separated the secretary and the vice chair offices, which is a minor knit. I’m not going to go into that unless there are questions.

The charter of the Mailing List AUP is a Board prerogative, and we did clean that up a little bit because there were some questions on exactly what the rules were and exactly how they would be enforced. But those are minor wording changes.

And then finally we have a new committee. It’s not so much that we are committee happy, although I did notice that Lee Howard was otherwise going to get to sleep in on the third day of this meeting. So now we have a committee to make sure he gets up at the right time.

[Laughter]

Anyway, the policy development process is subject to periodic revision, and that means every couple of years we note that there are some things that are harder than they should be, or that take longer than they should or whatever.

And please do send mail. I know that Lee spoke about this at the open part of the meeting. Please do send some mail to Scott or Lee or any other member of the committee to say, hey, this is what I think is wrong and this is how I think you should fix it. Because I won’t say the sky is exactly the limit, but I would say right now the box is open. And if you want to tinker, this is your opportunity.

Moving right along. As Scott mentioned, we have reviewed and approved the 2010 budget. This is again a Board function because in this case it involved dipping into the reserves a little bit and it’s believed that the elected Board of the membership organization ought to have to comment on that rather than just letting the staff run wild.

So with stern warnings to John as to exactly how profligate to be and not to be, we did approve the budget that Scott outlined for you.

And there is an ARIN Strategic Plan, which is sort of a living document. It gets tinkered with at least once a year on the first Board meeting of the year, often gets tinkered with at a Board retreat that happens in the summer.

And this is more or less the marching orders. In order that the Board not be involved in operational decisions, the staff – basically John needs strategic guidance to know which way to jump if certain things happen and what he ought to be working on.

And so this is probably the single most interesting part of the job of being on the Board is to decide what the company’s strategic objectives ought to be and what the strategic policies ought to be.

And so most of what you see on the screen here is motherhood and apple pie. I will say that with the current – I don’t want to say food fight, but with the current brouhaha going on inside the NANOG community, it has been useful to John to know what ARIN’s position is on what the strategic plan says about operator forums is that we like them and that ARIN depends on a viable, vibrant operator forum in our region.

And so every time somebody from Merit or the NANOG steering committee asks us what we think, that’s what John says. And it’s been very useful.

So I guess this is questions. The microphone.

Cathy Aronson: Cathy Aronson, ARIN AC. I just want to say that I think that’s such a great idea that you guys can appoint somebody to the Board that has fiduciary responsibility, because as a – as a multi-time participator of the nom com, it’s really hard to recruit people and it’s hard to get them elected because we tend to elect people that participate in this process.

So even though we tried really hard, at least the last time I was on the program – I mean the nominations committee, it’s almost an impossible situation. So I think that’s really great.

Paul Vixie: Thank you. Seeing no other questions I will be closing the microphones in a moment and then reopening them for open mic.

But while I’m sort of speaking for the Board itself, I want to say gas mask dude – we do have somebody – it’s not gone unnoticed that there’s some controversy around that, but it’s also not raging emergency from my point of view.

John has said that, gee, we want to try this for a couple of meetings or a couple of trade shows and see how it works. And if it doesn’t work, then we’ll stop doing it on that basis. If it does work but the controversy continues, John may decide to stop doing it on that basis.

But the Board of Trustees as your elected representatives trained to supervise staff usually doesn’t dip down to the level of operational details like what the trade show booth ought to look like. So I could certainly imagine the member suggestion process being used for that. If John –

John Curran: We’ll work on something.

Paul Vixie: We’re listening is I think the point I’d like to make.

Right-hand microphone.

Bill Sandiford: Bill Sandiford, Telnet Communications, ARIN AC. I just wanted to take the time to thank the Board, especially the elected volunteers that donate so much of their extremely valuable time to our organization. It’s truly appreciated and our organization wouldn’t be the same if it wasn’t for the leaders at the head of it. Thank you.

[Applause]

Open Microphone

Paul Vixie: Now we’re back to what we’ve done in the last two days. Open mic. Any questions, comments, topics folks would like to raise having to do with ARIN or ARIN’s operations or mission or whatever.

Center microphone.

Steve Bertrand: Steve Bertrand, eagle.ca. I’m the Canadian fellowship program person. I want to thank John and all of his staff. Many I have talked to and that operate in the background and aren’t very visible, but I do know for a fact that all of the ones that I have spoken to personally share the same views and have the same dedication to ARIN and its operations as I do.

I want to thank Paul and the entire Board of Trustees, the entire AC, those who voted for me to get me in here and otherwise. And most importantly I want to thank my peers as they are the ones that actually make this whole thing work.

And the most important thing for me is the open and transparent process that we reside in. And this has been an absolutely fantastic opportunity for me and I have nothing but good to say about this. And I hope to be here for a long time. Thanks.

[Applause]

Paul Vixie: Thank you, Steve. And the other fellowship recipients, we are very glad to have you. We hope you’ll keep coming back. And thank you to those who have participated in helping to select and recruit fellowship people. We’re going to keep doing that. It’s been a success, as you see.

Right-hand microphone.

Joe Maimon: Joe Maimon, CHL. Just two points: one, about booths, there is a normative standard method of getting people into your booth. So perhaps that can be looked at. I don’t know what the community would feel about that.

[Laughter]

And I do have an abiding concern that people have heard me mention before. I believe that ARIN as an organization has a history behind it which can be shown to contain inequities, disparities. And these things, while if you’re part of the community they do seem perfectly reasonable, can be seized upon. I think those should be given some attention.

I’ve heard from Bob that other communities have given some attention to these things, and perhaps the reserves would be positively affected as well. Perhaps IPv4 returns would be positively affected by that kind of attention also, in which case that’s kind of like three birds, one stone, and I would be encouraged if anybody were to take this up.

Paul Vixie: So, Joe, there’s some head scratching here as to which disparities you’re talking about. But I’m not sure that speaking about them here is your most effective way forward.

We do have a suggestion process, which I’d recommend that you put these into, because that will make sure that they get attention of some kind. There’s an audit trail on such things. You can also use the PPML. You can also use this microphone if that’s your desire.

But if there are problems, we should be working on them. I think I agree with you on that point.

Joe Maimon: Well, I’m going to follow Randy Bush’s advice for a change and not air my dirty laundry.

Paul Vixie: Okay. I hope that if you don’t air it here you will still follow up. Once again, the member suggestion and consultation process is at your disposal, and it is for this type of thing, I think, that it exists.

Center rear.

Bill Darte: Bill Darte. I’m on the Advisory Council but I’m also part of a group at Washington University called the Center for the Application of Information Technology. And we were an early member because I thought it was only right that once I became an Advisory Council member that our organization should be represented as a member of ARIN.

And I was grateful and glad to see that Washington University and St. Louis came under the legacy RSA program recently. And I advocated for that strongly. After that, I was told that CAIT couldn’t be a member of ARIN anymore.

And it really was only just this morning that I found out why that was. And I guess that’s a consequence of the anti-takeover thing. I’m sorry that my organization wasn’t allowed to be grandfathered in to the program and membership, but I certainly understand what it is you’re trying to achieve through that.

Paul Vixie: John would like to reply.

John Curran: Yeah, to the extent that you want to have the same exact status minus a vote, you can have CAIT join as an advocate. You’ll still have attendees, you can still have an affiliation with ARIN, but we didn’t want to have a situation where multiple pieces of an organization – if Boston University is the one with a registration services agreement, that’s the one that can be a member. Unless CAIT has a separate registrations services agreement, you’ll have to go the advocate route instead.

Bill Darte: Yeah. And second piece of information that I learned this morning was of that new category, and I certainly will be following up and pursuing that.

The third piece of information that I got was about the extended welcoming kinds of initiatives that you have. And I’m suggesting they’re probably not working at Washington University, because when I contacted the representatives, the stewards of the resources that allow Washington University to be a member, and said, you know, so who are you going to send as a representative and who is going to be – and they said, well, you’ve been doing a fine job, why don’t you just keep doing it.

And I don’t really think that’s appropriate. So I’ll keep working on them from my end, but I think you ought to work on them from your end, too, to get them involved.

Paul Vixie: Thank you, Bill. Right-hand microphone.

Tom Zeller: Tom Zeller, Indiana University, ARIN AC. Indiana also signed a legacy RSA recently. I’m pretty new to this group, and just wanted to say for those who have been doing this for a while, you may kind of lose sight at how excellent and outstanding an organization this is. It’s one of the most effective organizations I’ve ever been involved with.

And it’s so impressive on so many levels, and if you try to think of another example of an international open, transparent, and democratic institution, the only thing I can think of is the U.N., and I think we come out pretty well in comparison.

So I don’t want to be too self-congratulatory, and I’m sure there’s imperfections that should be worked on, but it’s just pretty wow really. I just need to say that. Thank you.

Paul Vixie: Thank you, Tom. Rear microphone.

Rob Seastrom: Rob Seastrom, ARIN AC and Afilias. Bill’s question left me just slightly confused. I think I got it right, but I just want to make sure.

If you are a member and you have a Registration Services Agreement for resources regardless of whether it’s legacy or critical infrastructure or direct allocation, or blah, blah, blah, then you’re a voting member; is that correct? Is that correct characterization?

Paul Vixie: John would like to reply.

John Curran: Let me make it clearer. Start from the RSA. If you have an RSA, you have a current subscription for registration services. You’re a member.

Rob Seastrom: Even if it’s an LRSA.

John Curran: If you have a Registration Services Agreement that’s a legacy RSA – a Registration Services Agreement for an end user, or a registration services agreement for purpose of an AS number, you can become a member. And because you become a member you will – you pay to become a member, you pay an additional fee, and you’re a member and you get to vote. If you have no –

Rob Seastrom: Stop just a second there. You left out one thing from one of the organizations I’m affiliated with, which is a Registration Services Agreement for Critical Infrastructure.

John Curran: You pay and become a member. If you have no services agreement with ARIN, alas, you cannot become a voting member; you can become an advocate.

Rob Seastrom: Thank you.

Paul Vixie: Right-hand microphone.

Joe Maimon: Joe Maimon, CHL. Just a quick follow-up. Are you focusing on the contracts? Is there any way to have an agreement without resources? Just wanted to clarify that.

Paul Vixie: John would like to reply.

John Curran: You don’t end up with an agreement without resources; you instead become an ARIN advocate.

Joe Maimon: If you had an agreement and resources are returned, is the agreement over?

John Curran: The agreement is there to serve having resources under it. If there are no resources, there is no agreement.

Lee Howard: Lee Howard, ARIN Board of Trustees. I agree with all the comments about how wonderful we are.

[Laughter]

But it seems a little bit self-serving for me to sit here and agree. So we do have a suggestion process, and I do hope Joe and others will use that. You can find it on the ARIN website.

But I’m also interested in other feedback that is not quite so positive. Because we can keep doing what we’re doing, but if there are things that we should do differently or not do, or stop doing or start doing, we’d like to hear what those are.

Bill Smith: Smith, PayPal. First I’d like to echo the compliments. I think this is my first meeting. I’ve been very positively influenced by it.

On the negative side, as a neophyte, it’s – even though I know what most of the acronyms mean, it’s extremely difficult to figure out who is doing what to whom and when.

So in terms of Internet governance, as an example, I can’t find an org chart, and the whole bottoms-up model and the discussions about that, it’s very valuable in terms of operating, but it is extremely difficult as someone coming in from the outside to see how this actually works.

As an example, I’m trying to understand if PayPal could become a member. And I can’t figure it out based on the discussions that was just had.

Paul Vixie: John would like to reply.

John Curran: Couple of quick questions. We’re very interested in providing orientation material to bring people up to speed. It is a very difficult task. When you ask someone in this room to write orientation material, they write it perfectly suited for someone who has already been here two years to get to the point of being an expert, not someone who has never been here.

We did do some attempt at this at the first timer’s lunch. Did you get a chance to go to that?

Bill Smith: I was unable to. I had a personal commitment on Sunday.

John Curran: We need to figure out how to get those materials, because that includes a slide deck overview of the organization, the org chart, and the policy process. And I think that might help a little bit.

Bill Smith: I’m actually talking bigger than that, though. It’s what are the RIRs? What is ICANN? How is the Internet itself governed?

John Curran: Got it. Some of that is in there. But let me – let’s get you those materials, but then also I want more feedback because I’m sure it’s not all there.

Bill Smith: My specific question actually is can PayPal – we have IP numbers.

John Curran: Yes.

Bill Smith: Can we become an ARIN member?

John Curran: You almost certainly have IP addresses under an end user agreement today, and you can go from an end user to an ARIN member.

Bill Smith: Yes. By paying the $500 fee and signing the agreement?

John Curran: Correct.

Bill Smith: Okay. Thanks.

Paul Vixie: Center front microphone.

David Farmer: David Farmer, University of Minnesota, ARIN AC. I wanted to query the Board: What do you think the probabilities of extending the legacy services agreement availability beyond the current deadline is going to be?

Paul Vixie: So given that we have extended it once or twice now, that’s a reasonable and expected question. We took no action on that this week, as far as deciding what to do. We’re going to see how it goes. I think the current time period expires in June. And so we’ll probably decide what to do about that sometime in June. Or May.

And with the understanding it expires for a reason, and yet having it expire without having all of the legacy people yet come in does not quite serve that reason. So we’re playing it by ear.

David Farmer: And I agree with that. And, yeah, this is a dance, and I’m just figuring out when – trying to figure out when the music is going to end, that’s all.

Paul Vixie: It may be June. To the extent there’s been somebody who has been waiting for the last one, this could be it.

David Farmer: I’ll just note that the University of Minnesota has signed its and done its little part of it, but trying to twist a few more arms.

John Curran: Push fast.

David Farmer: I understand.

Paul Vixie: Center rear microphone.

Bill Darte: Bill Darte from the ARIN AC, for the last time.

Just in response to our PayPal friend over there, but perhaps – I think we do a reasonable job of saying that the Board and the ARIN Advisory Council members are always open to have people talk with us and have anything about the organization or our understanding even beyond the organization explain to them, but perhaps as part of the introductory slides or whatever we could announce more formally for people who miss the first timer’s lunch that we’re in fact interested and actively willing to engage in any kind of conversation about this organization, what we do or why.

Paul Vixie: Thank you. John thanks you and I thank you.

Left-hand microphone.

Chris Grundemann: Chris Grundemann. To comment further on new attendee orientation, I think ARIN does a fairly good job explaining what ARIN does and how ARIN operates, at least in my experience. And the part that may be missing is how that correlates and interworks with ICANN, specifically, and maybe some other organizations, but namely ICANN, I think.

Because in the – like in the NRO NC and EC reports, we get a little idea of how they tie together, but there’s never – it’s never been made explicitly clear to me how ICANN, IANA and the RIRs work together in whole, I guess.

Paul Vixie: John is taking that under advisement.

John Curran: I do think we need – even in the materials we have, we have a good orientation to the normal IANA/ICANN/RIR system-ARIN relationship. We cover that. But that’s the 101 course.

I think we might need the 210 course which says: And ICANN has this organization called the ASO and this is how it relates to the RIRs and this is how it relates to the global policy process.

Because that’s not, to my knowledge, in our introductory materials, but it’s almost an assumption to work on certain draft policies that hit the floor here.

Paul Vixie: John, I want to recommend that the background image for that handout be a can of Alphabet Soup.

[Laughter and applause]

I see no other questions. No hands. Oh, John.

John Sweeting: John Sweeting, ARIN AC. I have a quick announcement for the AC members. We’ll try to get the meeting started – the AC meeting started at 12:30 in – I believe it’s called Kingsway, which is upstairs.

Paul Vixie: We have a remote question.

Scott Leibrand: Yes, remote comment from Peter Gutierrez, UMass Amherst.

He says that legal defense incorporation in the reserves is going to make the reserve look like spare change when ARIN tries to take any legacy space from a legacy holder. He says: Full disclosure, we’re in the process of signing an LRSA and have an RSA for other space.

Steve Ryan: I disagree.

Paul Vixie: We have disagreement from corporate counsel as to that assertion.

I’m questioning the – there was an interesting word that was used in that remote comment. The word was “when.” I don’t consider it a given that ARIN will eventually find itself up against someone because we’re trying to take something. So it’s not a when. You know, it’s a consideration. The community has raised it.

If you go back to the earliest years of the minutes of various ARIN meetings ten years ago, you’ll see that working with the legacy holders has been, has come up. But I would question the word “when” there.

John, did you want to add anything?

John Curran: Yeah, just recognize ARIN does provide services to legacy holders, and legacy holders who have records in our registry have a wonderful, peaceful co-existence with ARIN.

And with regards to the “when,” to the extent that legacy holders engage with ARIN in fraudulent behavior and submissions, currently that does trigger resource review, and that will result in reclamation of resources. And so far that has not caused us to tap into the ample legal reserves.

So “when” might be somewhat – there’s a “when” coming, but we’re not sure which one it is.

Paul Vixie: Well, I also want to point out that the LRSA is a very lightweight agreement. It was designed to encourage people to sign up because it actually increases the rights that are on paper and does not really decrease the privileges that are not on paper.

So it’s hoped that there won’t be showdowns with anybody. There will be, of course, in the case of fraud. John’s right about that. But it seems like it would be better if we just had more people signing the LRSA.

So everyone within the sound of my voice, please check it out and print out a copy and hand it to your lawyer if you’re holding legacy space and it’s not currently under any agreement.

Seeing no other hands up, no remote questions, and no one at the microphone, we’re closing Q&A.

Thank you, John.

Closing Announcements and Meeting Adjournment

John Curran: Thank you, Paul.

[Applause]

Okay. It’s time to adjourn the meeting. I have a couple of quick announcements I’d like people to know. The first one is that when the meeting closes, we all leave the room, things happen. The wireless gets shut down. You have about 30, 40 minutes once the meeting ends before the wireless disappears. So just be prepared.

For those people in other rooms for other meetings following on, we will have wireless but we need to orderly pack things up to get everything back to Chantilly in a timely manner. So be prepared.

Okay. Announcements. Meeting survey. Yes, indeed, there was a survey for today. Please fill it out. Give us comments, how we can run a better meeting. We’re more than welcome – that’s how we’ve been able to do what we do today and do a reasonable job. Winner will be announced on the website.

Consolation prize. All of the entrants will be entered into a consolation prize. See, if you fill out this meeting survey it just rains down on you, prizes everywhere. Fill out your meeting survey. Even if you don’t win today you could be entered in for the Nintendo Wii consolation prize.

Sponsors. Another round of applause for network connectivity by TELUS and equipment by EGATE.

Reminders, the wireless will be shut down.

That’s it. Thank you for being a part of ARIN. We look forward to seeing you in Atlanta for ARIN XXVI.

Network Sponsor

Info Center Sponsor