Call For APRICOT2002 Conference Presentations and Tutorials

APRICOT 2002
Asia Pacific Regional Internet Conference on Operational Technologies Bangkok, Thailand

Note: If you are not the right person from your organization to answer this call, or if you are not available, we would appreciate your kind assistance in forwarding this invitation to an appropriate person.

APRICOT 2001, in Kuala Lumpur, was the largest Apricot so far. APRICOT 2002 will be held in Bangkok, Thailand and is going to be an even bigger and more worthwhile event!!

The APRICOT 2002 Program Committee is now preparing a schedule and materials for the conference, and is now seeking contributors to the programme. We are seeking participants who can:

a) Offer a technical tutorial on an appropriate topic; and/or
b) Participate in the technical conference sessions; and/or
c) Chair a technical conference session; and/or
d) Convene and chair a Birds of a Feather (BOF) session.

The theme of APRICOT 2002 is "Creating the Next Internet Wave". The programme committee is therefore seeking material consistent with the theme of the growth and scaling of Internet infrastructure and services in profitable ways.

Tutorial and Technical Conference Session topics that have been successful in the past, or which have been requested for this year, include:

* IPv6 Introduction and Deployment
* IPv4 Address Planning, Conservation, Responsibility and Migration to IPv6
* Network Planning Tools, Techniques and Experiences
* Service and Server Scaling
* Broadband First/Last Mile Access Technologies (Cable, Wireless, Fiber, Copper)
* Mobile and Wireless Technologies
* Internet Exchanges, Peering and Collocation
* Open Source Software and ISP infrastructure
* Redundancy and Reliability Issues and Techniques
* New Pan Asian Backbones
* Experiences and Issues in deploying Internet in Emerging Countries
* Content Delivery Networks, Streaming and Multimedia Infrastructure
* Introduction and Advanced Network Management and ISP System Administration
* Hot Topics in Future Networks, Multi Protocol Label Switching(MPLS), Quality of Service, and Voice over IP
* Traffic Engineering with Multi Protocol Label Switching (MPLS)
* High Speed Networking Technology: ATM, Gigabit Ethernet, Switch Routers and Optical Dense Wave Division Multiplexing(DWDM)
* High Performance IP Backbone Routing and management, Routing Policy and RPSL
* Voice over IP Standards, Efforts and Impacts on ISPs
* Computer Telephony Integration and Voice over IP for ISPs
* Network Security, Encryption, Firewalls and VPNs for ISPs
* BIND, DNSSEC, IPv6 DNS, Reverse and Multilingual DNS
* Unified Messaging, Scaling E-mail infrastructure and SPAM control
* Operations, NOC, Helpdesk and other support aspects of ISPs in multi-lingual environments
* Supporting E-Commerce and ASPs
* Training the Trainers Workshops / Educators Track

The programme committee will consider proposals in any of these areas, and also in new areas. If you have an idea for a tutorial or session subject that is not listed, please feel free to submit it to us.

When considering a subject, remember that the APRICOT audience is mainly comprised of technical network operators and engineers with a wide range of experience levels from beginners to multi-year experience. There is a strong orientation to offer core skills and basic knowledge in the tutorials and to address issues relevant to the day-to-day operations of ISPs over the next 12 - 18 months in the conference sessions.

Important Note:

APRICOT is a TECHNICAL conference and marketing and commercial content is not expected within the programme. The programme committee is charged with maintaining the technical standard of APRICOT, and will therefore not accept inappropriate materials. All sessions provide time for questions, so presenters should expect technical questions, and be prepared to deliver insightful and technically deep responses.

The APRICOT Technical Conference Schedule is made up of 1.5 hour conference sessions, each including up to 3 speakers (therefore allowing 20-30 minutes per speaker). Sessions are chaired by persons of appropriate expertise in the subject matter of the session, and will include ample time for questions from the audience.

Tutorials are full-day workshops which focus on in-depth learning on particular subjects presented by a single Instructor, or a team of instructors working together.

Tutorial Instructors are encouraged to also sign up to be a Conference Session Chair and/or Speaker as well.

APRICOT 2002 will be offering a pre-conference 4 day set of hands on workshops for folks in developing nations or startup environments who need to get up to speed on Internet infrastructure best practices. The workshops will start on Wednesday 27th February at 9am and finish on Saturday 2nd March at 6pm.

The workshops will last for 4 days, and all attendees are required to pre-register and attend from the beginning of the workshops. Topics already proposed include DNS, IP Routing, BGP Multihoming, and ISP Security. We would welcome any other contributions, for example ISP Network Management, Deploying IPv6, Internet Policies, MPLS, etc...

The idea of the workshops is to continue the excellent work done by the ISOC in their past Network Training Workshop series. The workshops aim to teach attendees from developing countries some of the skills which are in common use throughout the developed Internet.

Anyone who is interested in proposing a workshop session, offering material which can be used for the workshops, or assisting with presenting any workshops should contact Philip Smith pfs@cisco.com or Bill Manning bmanning@vacation.karoshi.com or following the instructions at the end of this message for signing up as a speaker or instructor.

Since APRICOT is a non-profit event that tries to keep low cost for attendants , we do not have too much money to pay the costs of speakers. So if you belong to a company or organization that can cover you travel expenses, that would be a big help. For those of you who do not belong to such an organization, Apricot will cover 4 days of hotel accommodation for Tutorial Instructors from Overseas. Apricot can also consider covering airfare up to US$1500 on a case by case basis.

Local Tutorial Instructors can receive a US$500 honorarium but no Hotel accommodations. It is acceptable to split the work of a full day tutorial between several instructors, but APRICOT may only be able to cover the hotel accommodations and case by case airfare for one person per Tutorial. Of course, Tutorial, Conference Chairs and Speakers will not have to pay any registration fee to attend the rest of the conference.

If you would like to be considered as a tutorial instructor, pre-conference workshop instructor, session speaker, session Chair or a convener of a BOF, please go to http://programs.regweb.com/apricot/2002/.

If you have received a USERNAME/PASSWORD, use that to log in. Otherwise select the SPEAKER Audience selection below the username/password entry box and click on "CONTINUE".

NOTE: If you are signing up speakers other than yourself, please create an entry/registration for each speaker. If you do not yet know who the speaker is, create a temporary username. Fill in the First Name with a Speaker Number (i.e. Speaker1, Speaker2, etc) and the Last Name with your company name for each session. Fill in your own contact info for the other fields (Company, email, phone number, Fax).