My name is Pablo Hinojosa and I joined APNIC’s Secretariat in July 2010. I have been with APNIC little more than six months and moved from Washington DC, where I was working for ICANN, as part of the global partnerships team, that tried to contribute to make ICANN more international. I would like to start by speaking about the Secretariat of APNIC. The staff has been very welcoming to me and I am extremely grateful for that. I have found that there is a lot of talent within the organization, and many of my colleagues have actually worked for APNIC for many years, and they still seem to be happy about that. It is not easy to find, among the Internet organizations, such a slow rate of staff turnaround, and it has been fantastic to see so many of my colleagues being experts in the non-trivial art of managing a Regional Internet Registry. So this means I will be a newbie in APNIC for a long time and definitely have a lot to learn from my colleagues. I joined APNIC as senior public affairs advisor. If I understand well what I was hired for, it seems that my job is trying to support APNIC with all those things that we can call “political”. And try to manage relations with strategic partners such as governments, and other entities in the region or internationally. In the last six months I have had the opportunity to help plan for APNIC’s representation in different fora. For this I have had the privilege to work in these projects with Sam Dickinson and Miwa Fuji, both of them members of the team of Communications, lead by German Valdez. I am grateful to German for many reasons, but one of them, to allow me to work with his team to participate in these fora. One of these representations was in September last year, at the last of five IGFs in Lithuania, where APNIC, under the umbrella of the NRO, supported all themes related with the topic of “Critical Internet Resources”. So now a possible new season of the IGF is in the oven and being produced. Sadly, there have been recent efforts that have put some limitations to the participation of the Internet stakeholders. We really hope that the governments responsible of these backward efforts find soon the value of the contributions from the Internet community. APNIC put forward the nomination of Sam for a group that represents the Internet technical community to make improvements, and, hopefully, can prevent IGF to loose its multi-stakeholder fashion. Sam got the support of the wider community and her nomination was approved. That is why she is not here with us today because she is in Switzerland for a meeting dealing with the future of the IGF. With Sam I also worked in ITU related matters. You may have followed her impressive and outstanding work in reporting via twitter and in CircleID, the proceedings of a very important meeting that happened last year, the ITU Plenipotentiary Conference in Mexico. I think her tweets were reflective of how the Internet world reads the old telco world of the ITU and also, hopefully –fingers-crossed—provide grounds to bring these two worlds towards a better understanding of each other. I have also had the privilege to work –I was going to say WITH, but to be truthful, actually I have work FOR Miwa—to help her push forward the gospel of IPv6, in particular, to push it in a very important forum which is very dear to me since a long time: the APEC telecommunications and information Working Group. Miwa worked very hard to help APECTEL organize workshops about IPv6 and I am happy to see that it came to a great result. The Ministers of the 21 economies members of APEC agreed on their declaration to include a high-level and strong commitment to IPv6 deployment. They also approved a series of IPv6 guidelines. Under Miwa’s firm and rigorous leadership I was also fortunate to support the push of the IPv6 messages to the AsiaPacific Telecommunity, a regional inter-governmental body that is strongly linked to the ITU. And in this occasion I also had the opportunity to work with an APNIC old-timer, George Kuo, to help explain to some governments APNIC’s registry functions, to address some of their concerns with regards to security and also how the whois database actually works. This work with George and Miwa, also gave way to a small project on how to better cope with some security concerns from law enforcement agencies. Last year, APNIC participated in two events with law enforcement agencies and worked with them on topics about network abuse and APNIC’s stake on those matters. The final project I would like to share some thoughts with you on, professionally speaking, has been the most enriching one for me. But before going there, let me share a bit of a short story with you. The first day that I went to the office in APNIC, last July, jetlagged and still with no coffee I saw a ghost. It seemed to have been a recent arrival to the office, and there it was, a ghost flying around. If you allow me, let me use this image of a ghost to describe this moment, when the work of the Secretariat was severely questioned by some parts of its community. Let’s call it the ghost of the doubt, this time, doubts expressed about the Secretariat. The language of this ghost was unprecedented in the APNIC community and posed several challenges. I don’t think the Secretariat’s role of APNIC had been exposed before, publicly, with such a light, where there were signs showing lack of confidence on its work. I didn’t found this ghost particularly different from the ones ICANN is exposed everyday. But this ghost was taken very seriously by the Secretariat and raised an important question: “What is it that made attractive to this ghost to come and pay a visit to APNIC?” And that question opened a reasoning process of a lot of issues, all very intricate, that arrived to an escalated level of complexity and that somehow broke the levels of trust and understanding from some important portions of the APNIC community. And this is how Paul gave me the opportunity to work a bit and learn a lot about the different issues that are current between APNIC and different stakeholders in India: the application process for an NIR, discussions about representation mechanisms of this community in APNIC, and a few more. He kind of put a priority in my work portfolio, that I read as: “try to help re-build levels of trust and explore ways to recover communications with an important part of the community”. In this project I have learned a lot from Sunny Chendi and also had the opportunity to work with the Chairman of the EC, Akinori, and the Treasurer James. But most importantly, learned a lot from a very active and energetic part of the APNIC community, which has a governmental component, but mostly a group of different ISPs in India, current members of APNIC, that have a lot to say and hopefully can contribute to the general goal of the healthy improvement of the Internet in the region. While I cannot report too much progress on this project yet, as it is still ongoing, I am hopeful that the myth of an ill-intentioned Secretariat that has prevailed in the last year, can be broken now and for good; that we can restore trust to communicate better; that we can work together for a capable NIR in India. Also that the different initiatives coming from this important group find proper ways to persuade with merits the regional community of APNIC and not divide it. So that got APNIC Secretariat into the business of becoming ghostbusters. We are hopeful that the ghost eventually becomes a friendly one like Casper, and that we can soon return to work full- time in the region for the public good of a secure, stable and reliable Internet.