Transcript - AMM
Transcript - AMM
Disclaimer
While every effort is made to capture a live speaker's words, it is possible at times that the transcript contains some errors or mistranslations. APNIC apologies for any inconvenience but accepts no liability for any event or action resulting from the transcripts
Session 1 Begins
Sunny Chendi: Good morning and welcome to APNIC 33 APNIC Member Meeting. I hope you enjoyed last night's dinner. It was a very entertaining dinner.
This APNIC Member Meeting is chaired by Maemura Akinori, APNIC Executive Council Chairman.
Just a couple of reminders, that we have a members area in front of us, you can see it is cordoned off. I would like to request all APNIC members to sit inside this area, please. This is reserved for the APNIC members.
I see a couple of them sitting outside the area, so I would request them to come and join the other members.
May I request the APNIC staff, if anyone is coming late, just identify if they are members and ask them to sit in the members area, please.
With that, I would like to pass the floor to the Chairman of the APNIC Member Meeting, Akinori Maemura.
Maemura Akinori: Thank you, Sunny.
My name is Maemura Akinori, Chair of the APNIC Executive Council. Welcome to the APNIC Member Meeting, which traditionally we set on the Friday of all APNIC meetings agenda, and this is the members' job to participate in the APNIC Member Meeting, to receive the report from the Secretariat and the Executive Council and some other activities.
I hope you have already enjoyed New Delhi and the APRICOT programs. Let's start the APNIC Member Meeting.
The first agenda item is the EC election. It is not appropriate for me to preside over this meeting, being a candidate, so I will pass to Paul Wilson to preside over this meeting.
Paul Wilson: Thank you, Akinori, and good morning everyone.
For a start, I will ask the EC members who are candidates to join the floor of the meeting, rather than to sit on stage here.
Thank you very much.
Every year at this time we have the Executive Council election. It is an important part of the program at this annual meeting, so I will be going through the details of how the election will proceed today.
There are a few things to go through here, so I would appreciate your patience and attention while I go through all the details.
Today we have three vacant seats on the APNIC EC. There are seven elected members of the EC and they serve for two-year terms, so the election this year is for three and next year it will be for four, and so on.
The call for nominations for the election was open and ended on 10 February this year. Online and on-site voting is available, and the details are on the website at the URL of apnic.net/elections.
The EC, under the APNIC by-laws, is responsible for counting the votes and conducting the election in the manner that it considers appropriate under the circumstances and it may appoint two or more persons to serve as tellers, for the election.
The Election Chair, under the election procedures, is the person who will preside over the actual election process. I would like to introduce Hasanul Haq Inu, who is an elected Member of Parliament and a member of the Parliamentary Standing Committee for Post and Telecommunications from Bangladesh, appointed by the APNIC EC, with responsibilities to oversee the election process, appoint the election scrutineers, declare the results and resolve disputes.
Election officers have been appointed: Connie Chan and George Kuo. They are appointed by the APNIC EC selected under the election procedures by APNIC Secretariat staff. They have responsibilities, including administering the call for nominations, managing the voting processes, supervising the ballot paper collection, performing the vote count with the teller, retrieving the online voting reports.
The election tellers are selected from APNIC staff, Anna, Champika and Vivek, again appointed by the APNIC EC under the procedures and they are responsible for supervising the ballot box, issuing ballot papers, validating and counting the votes and reporting the results to the Election Chair.
The scrutineers are selected from other RIRs, ICANN and ISOC staff who are on site, and the Election Chair has appointed Adiel, Arturo and Anne respectively from AfriNIC, LACNIC and ISOC as the election scrutineers.
They do not vote and they must be independent from any APNIC member or candidate in the election.
The responsibilities of the scrutineers are to observe the tellers, to not handle or touch the ballot papers, to notify the Chair in case of any anomaly or issue that is identified during the process.
The voting entitlement, only the current member's corporate contact and authorised contacts with voting rights as assigned by the member can vote in the election.
The number of votes is determined by the membership tiers. I think we are all familiar with the tiers that provide from 1 to 64 votes for members between the associate up to the extra large category.
Proxies are able to vote on behalf of a member. The appointment period started on the 15th and ended on 29 February, at the precise times mentioned here. Again, proxy holders have to be appointed by corporate contacts to vote on behalf of the member.
Proxy holders need not be from the organization but they do have to be registered for the AMM, to vote here today.
Online voting is something we have been doing for a number of years. It has been open in the normal way for this voting, for this election period, the voting started on the 15th and closed on the 29th at the precise times mentioned here, all in accordance with the election procedures.
The online voting is accessible to members via MyAPNIC.
The system actually preserves the anonymity of voting, so it stores a record of who has voted and a separate record of the votes cast, and of course the reports from that system are available to the scrutineers and tellers during the counting process.
On-site voting, the traditional method of voting, is also in operation today. It starts as announced by the Election Chair in a few short moments and it ends at 2.00 pm today, local time.
Corporate contacts, those with voting rights or appointed proxies can collect ballot papers from the voting desk outside the room until the close of voting today at 2.00 pm UTC+5.5 hours.
The logistics of the on-site voting, the desk is set up outside the room, just outside the doors. The ballot box is placed at the voting desk after the opening of on-site voting is announced. The ballot box is supervised by the election tellers at all times and any inquiries should be directed to the election officers who are at the voting desk.
The ballot papers, which you should have or which are available to you if you are entitled to vote, provide instructions and all of them are marked manually with a unique stamp. So a ballot paper is invalid if when it is counted the tellers find there are no boxes marked, if there are more than three boxes marked, if it has anything ambiguous about the markings or if it does not have the validation stamp.
To make the process easier, we have ballot papers representing multiple votes of 1, 2, 4, 8 or 16 votes. Someone with more than 16 votes will receive multiple ballot papers. If you have a desire to split up your vote into smaller units than that, then you can disaggregate your voting papers by swapping them with smaller value voting papers at the voting desk.
There is an image of the ballot paper that you should have. In this case, the fact that this ballot paper represents 8 votes is shown by the big number "8" in the shadow there. That should be clear on your ballot papers as well.
The counting process is observed by the scrutineers. The votes are counted by the election tellers. All ballot papers are checked. There are tally forms which are used to count, record and verify the total votes, the check marks given to each candidate on each form. They are validated and checked by the tellers.
The online voting reports are printed during the vote count procedure and the total votes for each candidate are calculated by combining the totals from online and on-site votes.
The result of the election will be announced by the Election Chair at the scheduled time. This announcement will include the name and vote count received by each of the candidates; the total number of valid and invalid votes; also notice of any disputes and the resolution of those disputes that may have happened during the process; and disclosure of any communication from the scrutineers regarding any anomaly or issue that they might have observed.
In case of any dispute, any complaint at all is required to be lodged in writing with the Election Chair of this meeting. They must be lodged no later than one hour before the scheduled declaration of the election, and they may only be lodged by members through their authorised voting representatives.
The Election Chair will resolve any dispute and every dispute at his discretion. They will provide notice, as I mentioned, of all lodged disputes and the resolution when the election result is declared. And that's it.
If there are any questions, please would you ask now.
Does anyone have any questions about the election procedure?
I will just resume my seat.
The next step is that we are going to be opening for the speeches from candidates, but I would like to now introduce the Election Chair, Mr Hasanul Haq Inu. Thank you very much, if you could join us. Take the podium, in fact.
Hasanul Haq Inu: Good morning to everybody. I welcome you to the election process of the APNIC Executive Council. As you know, three posts have been vacant and there will be an election today, and the voting will start right now for the three vacant seats.
As told by Paul Wilson, I am Hasanul Haq Inu from Bangladesh, Member of Parliament and at the moment I am the chairperson of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Post and Telecommunications.
I have been requested and invited by the APNIC Executive Council to chair the election process. Personally, I do not have any involvement with the APNIC organization, so to the best of my ability and knowledge, I will try to conduct the elections neutrally, honestly and transparently.
Once again, I thank you all and I hope everybody will cooperate in the election process.
As you know, as Paul Wilson has mentioned, I have nominated three scrutineers: one is Adiel Akplogan from AfriNIC, another is Arturo Servin from Latin America, LACNIC, and another is Anne Lord from ISOC.
To the best of my knowledge, I think they are three persons who will, from my side, oversee the voting process and ballot counting. To my knowledge, they are neutral persons and they will be honest and transparent in counting the votes, overseeing the voting process from my side. Already, APNIC Executive Council has appointed election tellers. They are Annaliza Mulingbayan, Champika and Vivek, and two election officers, George Kuo and Connie Chan. So they are all going to help me conduct the election process.
At the beginning, I will invite the nominees up, one by one, to share their vision with you and to introduce themselves to you.
I will invite Mr JS Sodhi to the dais, a candidate for the post of Executive Council member, to speak to the audience. Mr JS Sodhi.
JS Sodhi: Good morning to you and good morning all APNIC members. As I belong to the host country, first of all I welcome you all here in Delhi in APNIC 33. I hope you have had a wonderful time here.
I am very proud and honoured for being nominated as one of the candidates for APNIC EC body. APNIC is presently doing an excellent job and the credit goes to the present EC members and the APNIC Secretariat.
I think APNIC has done a lot on extending services on general awareness of Internet and Internet Governance. APNIC has always worked very transparently with openness.
I may be a little new to some of you but I am not new to APNIC. I am very close and keen observer of complete functioning, activities, service, and community meetings of APNIC.
During my mail campaign, Greg from Australia asked me, do I feel that India has unfair chances in APNIC? No, it has never. APNIC has given India our own NIR. I think APNIC, many quality members belong to India. I am a keen admirer of APNIC and its progress. APNIC is delivering so much value to community and working with global community with openness and cooperation. I am finding a true community feeling here.
I do not have any hesitation in saying that the main credit goes to the Chair, Maemura. Sir, you said in your last speech during election at APNIC 31 that you won last election because you appeared bigger than other nominees on the video screen.
You are the main leading Chair of APNIC for the last 8 to 10 years, whether you appear in person or on video screen, you are always bigger than us.
I do not have any doubt in saying that today developing countries like India, other South Asian countries, need full support on technologies and products from big brothers, China, Japan, Korea, Australia, New Zealand.
The fair distribution and representation of all users in APNIC EC will help achieving APNIC objectives under mutual cooperation brotherhood. I, with 20 plus years of professional experience volunteer myself to fulfill the aims and objectives of APNIC in driving IT strategies, IT policies and monitoring process. I wish to contribute towards preparation of IT roadmap and blueprint for development and deployment of key IT strategies.
I intend to contribute to the community in the following ways: IPv6 deployment management, which requires the active promotion, education, outreach and support.
This has been talked of a lot in Asian economies, but the implementation per cent is quite low. This was also highlighted in Member Services 2011.
Second is training, which requires the active strategy for multilanguage localized training with extended Help Desk. Again, this came in Member Survey report 2011, that 64 per cent want multilanguage and 75 per cent of members asked for a 24/7 Help Desk.
Both these points require to be addressed differently at Asia and Pacific Islands and other smaller economies, after considering the local geographical, technical and regional issues. I belong to technical and education domain and intend to volunteer my experience and service in developing the strategies and monitoring effective and speedy implementation of APNIC policies.
India is emerging as a growing market and the same is the case with other countries of South Asia and South East Asia. There are several significant issues of this area which need attention and importance at the board level of APNIC.
I strongly hope and wish that I will be able to facilitate the bridge from this unrepresented region of APNIC EC. APNIC is doing a very good job in Internet Governance and I think, with my experience, I can work with APNIC to fulfill it's objectives with the community.
I have discussed these views with various APNIC members and got very encouraging support. I thank all who agree with my opinion and who have given support. I volunteer myself with honestly, sincerity, humility and dedication and hope that with all your support, I can bring the views of our region for prospective growth of Internet for all regions.
If you think I can contribute to APNIC community, then kindly support me. Thank you.
APPLAUSE
Hasanul Haq Inu: Thank you, Mr JS Sodhi. He has introduced himself.
Now I ask Ma Yan, the next candidate, to come to the dais and introduce himself and tell his vision to the audience.
Ma Yan: Good morning, everyone. It is my pleasure to have the opportunity to present myself and also ask for all your great support. During the last few years, I have been actively participating in the APNIC activities around this region, serving as the APNIC EC during the last two years, and actively involved in all the processes of creating very friendly, very constructive construction in our APNIC Region.
The Internet has become more and more important, not only in developed countries but also in developing economies in our region. For example, in my term, I travelled to many countries, many areas, including our region and beyond the Asia Pacific region. APNIC is actively involved in the construction in our region, helping training the local technicians, engineers, promoting the connectivities, and a lot of resource management, Internet resource management, including IP addresses and AS numbers and also making policies to allocate those resources among our region.
In this regard, really this is a very helpful platform for people all working together. APNIC is making very open policy process, letting people really share their experience and helping each other make our Internet resources management more efficient, more constructive, more helpful to the local economy, to our Internet environment.
For this region, for example in my university, we are working very hard to promote the Internet resources, education and also promoting IPv6 deployment.
Currently, my university is already having over 10 gig of pure IPv6 traffic surrounding into our region, in the Asia area, the Pacific area, the North American area and the Europe area, and we are collaborating with all the members, including the service providers in our region.
I suppose, with your support, I would like to be working more actively, more constructively, building our foundation to really move into the future.
I suppose all of you understand what I have been doing during the last two years, and I would really would like to get your support to work for another term. Thank you for your support.
APPLAUSE
Hasanul Haq Inu: Thank you very much, Mr Ma Yan.
We have another nominee who is contesting the election, and I am inviting now Mr Maemura Akinori to the dais to speak a few words to the audience.
Maemura Akinori: Thank you very much, Mr Inu.
Good morning, again. My name is Maemura Akinori. Currently I am the Chair of the APNIC Executive Council, and I am employed by JPNIC as the general manager for the Internet development division department.
I am very happy to run again for the APNIC Executive Council. My term is very long, I hope it is not too long. I was elected in October 2000 in Brisbane, the first APNIC standalone meeting. Since then I have been really happy to be involved in APNIC's activities.
Moreover, I have been Chair of that since 2003, and I experienced a lot of things and several changes and working with a lot of people within the Executive Council and also the Secretariat people. They are really fantastic people.
This time, I am really happy to have the nomination, not only from my organization, JPNIC, but also two other organizations, which are SoftBank BB and also the National Internet Centre of Laos. Really, that is my honour, great honour, to have such nomination, and I feel I am really supported.
The reason my job is not only the IP address management, but in JPNIC I need to cover the ICANN and domain name issues. So in the recent two years, coverage for the ICANN issues, I had a lot of knowledge and perspective on ICANN for running the policy making process for the domain names issue, and I have much of the findings in comparison with APNIC's business and ICANN's, and such kind of experience will be really helpful for me if I again am elected for the Executive Council.
As I already stated in the nominee statement, it is a really difficult time and a dynamic time, due to the IPv4 address exhaustion, and the dynamic emergence of the IPv6 era. In this situation, APNIC needs to focus on how to bring the members and the broader community to a new value, which will be indispensable for the members in the broader community to operate a sustainable Internet.
I hope my experience and knowledge and capability will help APNIC by being elected for the Executive Council again, and really hope to have your support. Thank you very much.
APPLAUSE
Hasanul Haq Inu: Thank you, Mr Akinori.
I am now going to invite the last candidate to the dais, to tell his views to the audience. I invite Mr Che-Hoo Cheng to the dais to speak a few words.
Che-Hoo Cheng: Good morning, everybody. Thank you, Chair.
My name is Che-Hoo Cheng. I am from Hong Kong. The coming years will be crucial for not just APNIC but also Internet Community as a whole.
IPv4 addresses have essentially depleted in our region, while IPv6 deployment rate is still not as high as we wish. ISPs still need IPv4 addresses to operate and grow and they have to find alternate ways to fulfill their requirements. There is no quick fix to the problem.
APNIC as a membership organization needs to adapt itself to the ever changing environment, so that APNIC can sustain in long term and at the same time serve the needs of the members and the community well.
I have been serving the Asia Pacific Internet Community for more than 10 years, through my capacity on APNIC EC, my working experience in Asia, and Flag Telecom, and my involvement in the DotAsia bid. I worked for the commercial sector before and I am working for the education sector and also working for the IT sector, and with my variety of knowledge and experience, I believe I fulfill the needs for APNIC leadership, and I hope APNIC members will support me and vote for me, so that I can continue to serve the APNIC community and to help build a stronger and healthier APNIC. Thank you.
Hasanul Haq Inu: Thank you, Mr Che-Hoo Cheng.
The candidates have spoken to you. I will move to the next stage, and that stage is opening the ballot box and to show to you the position of the ballot box, so that you are confident that it is open, clear and transparent.
I will ask Mr George to please bring the ballot box to the dais and let me show it to the audience.
I am like a magician. Clear, nothing inside. I will now seal it.
It is sealed. There is an opening here. I will open it like that. And the voters will vote in the slit. So this is sealed. It cannot be opened.
I will take this ballot box -- Mr George will take this ballot box and place it outside, and the tellers will have the ballot papers and the voting will start at exactly -- what is the time -- I declare the voting process open and the voting will start within minutes. The voting will end right at 2.00 pm, that is 1400 hours.
Election means somebody wins, somebody loses, but the ultimate winner is democracy. The ultimate winner is the organization. As you know, Mr Hobbes was a philosopher from England. He observed that human beings are the most cunning, strongest and dangerous animal. But I add to Hobbes that human beings are the most intelligent animal on earth, and that is why human beings have organized an organization and a state where dos and don'ts are there, and the human being is the only animal on the earth that can laugh -- no other animal can smile and laugh. So it is the human being who laughs and smiles.
I ask everybody, all the voters and the candidates, to start the voting with a smile and a laugh, and close the voting with a smile and laugh, and no malice to anybody. Thank you very much.
APPLAUSE
Please take the ballot box. I will go with you. Let me see where it is placed.
APPLAUSE
Paul Wilson: On behalf of the APNIC EC, I would like to say thanks very much to Mr Inu for his willingness to conduct this important role for us.
As that is now the end of the introduction to the voting process, I will hand back to Akinori and ask the EC members to rejoin here on stage.
Maemura Akinori: Back again. So the election process has already started and the voting has started, so please feel free to use your right as a member.
The next part of the Member Meeting is the APNIC Secretariat reports. This part is starting with our Director General, Paul Wilson, and followed, area by area, by each director.
Paul Wilson: Thanks, Akinori. Hello again. I have my normal hat on again now, in order to give you an introduction to the Secretariat reporting for this meeting.
As usual, we have quite a few reports here and I am very grateful to you for your interest and your attention. If there are any questions at all after the reports, there will be time for that, and also anyone who is presenting here or represented by these reports and who is here with us in Delhi, that is anyone from the Secretariat, will also be very happy to help.
You can identify us today by the uniform, we have all got the blue shirt on. So please, again, make the best of the APNIC staff who are here for the rest of today.
I will give an overview now of the reporting that is coming up. I will be talking primarily about what has happened in the past year, in 2011, and a few notes about what is coming up in 2012.
Then we will get into the details, and some of my colleagues will be presenting different parts of the Secretariat reporting to follow me.
2011 in review -- that is what this is all about, the annual report for the last year.
The Internet in 2011, the year that has passed, really saw some major changes and we were involved with quite a number of them. The IPv4 address exhaustion is something we have spoken about a lot in these meetings, over quite a number of years, as most of you would remember. It did happen last year, or at least we hit a couple of very important milestones -- major milestones, in February with the final allocations from IANA, and in April with the final allocations from APNIC under our normal policies, before we moved into the last /8 policy. In some sense it was the biggest year ever for APNIC to be coming through that series of steps and doing so quite successfully. You will hear more about that this morning.
Of course, that leads to IPv6 and IPv6 implementation is a "here and now" thing. From now on, for the next -- we hope not too many years, but it will be APNIC's priority for the time being at least. The APNIC EC, in their planning -- and you will hear more about this as well this morning, but the APNIC EC recently also reiterated the view that IPv6 is the only way that we are going to be able to keep the Internet growing sustainably and according to the ideal Internet model of a global neutral end-to-end network.
If we do not do that, if we do not move on with IPv6, then the Internet in a few years will be a very different network indeed. It will be in many respects not nearly the same network that we know and love and take for granted today. Again, I am paraphrasing an APNIC EC position, but IPv6 is indeed one of our lead priorities for the time being.
In the last year as well, there has been ongoing movement in the wider stage of politics and governance, Internet Governance is something that has taken an increasing amount of APNIC resources.
If you look at APNIC from the point of view of purely as a registry, then the politics and governance stuff, in some senses, is an overhead. It is an overhead that is increasing, but what we need to do is scale that overhead and make sure we are again spending member resources wisely and efficiently in ways that we really need to do.
We are trying to keep the membership up to date as much as possible with what we are doing in this area, so that we get feedback from you, so that you are comfortable with what APNIC, the Secretariat and the EC feel that we need to be doing in this space. That is a number of quite significant changes.
At the same time, however, this is the aeroplane that is flying while we are changing the engines in mid-flight, and the Internet continues to operate, it continues to grow as this global infrastructure that is now absolutely critical.
I have used the phrase, we are here in incredible India to talk about the incredible Internet, and that is what we are all working on. We have the challenges of keeping the thing running and seeing the kind of major growth that's continuing through this region, while at the same time trying to change a few of the engines and other components.
We have seen unanticipated or unexpected ongoing growth in allocation activity and in membership over the last year. You will hear about that as well.
More changes are coming and have come in the forms of new technology and technical challenges, so DNSSEC and RPKI, in the form of policies, particularly the implementation and changes that were made to the transfer policy and our support for it, the support for NIRs as well, and also the challenges, as I have said, of growth, security and reliability of the Internet and governance of the Internet -- all of these things coming together in 2011 and making life really quite interesting.
As an organization in 2011, we saw, as I mentioned, strong growth continuing and not exactly expected. This is on the revenue side, membership growth was bigger last year than any previous year, and allocations in terms of the rate of allocation activity is also increasing.
We had steady growth of the organization in terms of what we are doing. On the expense side, we really made and stuck to quite conservative projections and expectations on that side last year. We had a little bit of staff growth, but really minimal in comparison, I would say, with the ongoing increase in workload.
We did manage many new developments in services that you can see and internals that you might not be able to see so much, and in particular in structural development and planning.
On that side, in those terms, we had a fair amount of internal work in the last year, various workshops, work with the EC, within the Secretariat we defined some new functional areas. The learning and development area, the external relations program, human resources and APNIC Labs were also developed.
I would like to introduce and formally announce to you now a new position that was created fairly recently of a senior director in APNIC who is operating effectively as a chief operating officer of the organization, coordinating and streamlining operational activities, working with the other directors who are involved with operational activities, the many operational activities we have under way. The senior director, also director of services of APNIC, is Sanjaya, and I think you all know Sanjaya.
APPLAUSE
Honestly, he is off to a flying start in this position. He pre-dates me at APNIC. He goes back a very long way in the organization. I have a great deal of personal gratitude to Sanjaya for the work he has done and is doing now. So thank you very much.
The senior team these days looks like this. In the bottom of the screen, here are the operational directors of the organization, with Sanjaya in that coordinating role. We have Richard Brown as the business director; Philip Smith, as I hope you all know by now, recently joined APNIC as director of learning and development; Byron Ellacott, technical director; German Valdez, the external relations program director; and Louise Tromp, the human relations director.
On the top are other senior members of the team, including Pablo Hinojosa, who is the public affairs director. We all know the Chief Scientist, Geoff Huston, now in charge of something we are calling APNIC Labs, and also Craig Ng, who is also a relative newcomer to APNIC as our first permanent General Counsel.
If you have not met any of these, mostly guys and gals, then please do so before the end of the day. They are all with us here in Delhi.
I would like to move on now to the planning processes which, as I have said, are under fairly continual improvement and evolution at APNIC. You have seen this diagram before. It illustrates how our planning starts with the membership and through the member survey we receive the primary guidance that is formally directed into the organization from the membership. That comes to the APNIC EC in the formation of a strategic plan and the approval of a budget. It also goes straight into the Secretariat's activities at the operational planning level, which also feed off the strategic plan and feed back into the budget.
So there is a multistage process here. The important thing is that the membership is on the left-hand side, in the first step of the whole process.
During 2011, we announced the results of the latest APNIC survey of members and stakeholders, the members and stakeholders survey of 2011. That was the latest of our two-yearly survey process. It was described in detail at the time, and I will not go into that now, but what we took out of the survey were key areas of focus for the organization.
These areas were endorsed by the EC in their response to the survey that they traditionally provide after receiving the report. They gave us the areas of IPv6 deployment, of focus and improvement on APNIC's registry function, the strengthening of our training activities, improving remote participation in our meetings, continuing to strengthen the R&D activities and increasing engagement with government. They were really key areas that we were focusing on over the last year.
Within the operational plan, we are organizing ourselves -- and you will see this shortly -- in four separate pillars which group our activities and which guide our activities towards a strategic direction. This is something you have seen before as well, but we class these activities under delivering value, support for Internet development, collaborating and communicating, and internal corporate support that keeps the organization running.
Under each of those four pillars, we have plenty to report. Just in terms of key achievements, under the first, the IPv4 exhaustion, the challenge of IPv6 transfers were key achievements in the last year. The delivery of full support for DNSSEC management, through MyAPNIC, as well.
Under supporting Internet development, it is pretty incredible, I feel, that we had 2,599 participants in our training activities during 2011, which covers all activities, including face-to-face training, training workshops, the training that happens at the meetings here and around the region, also remote training that is delivered online. But 2,600 is a pretty impressive number, I think.
Under this area as well, the work we did on IPv6 capability tracking was work of Geoff Huston and George Michaelson, and various collaborators. I think that work was really of global impact, and it showed IPv6 deployment in a new and very important light, which is really the actual end point capabilities and the end point issues and problems that happen in access to IPv6.
ISIF is the Information Society Innovation Fund and under a new banner we have secured funding for the next two and a half years. The International Development Research Centre has put $1.3 million into that for two and a half years. Some of that comes to APNIC in a form to support the Secretariat function we operate.Under collaborating and communicating, the success we had in managing IPv4 exhaustion was very much a communications activity, and a lot of credit goes to the communications team at APNIC that was working on that project; firstly, raising awareness and keeping our members in particular up to date was important, as well as outreach much more generally to the wider community.
IPv6 also is a big outreach challenge and a priority for us to be collaborating and reaching out. We are spending a fair amount of effort here with governments and intergovernmental organizations, ITU for one, but many others as well, particularly with the focus on not only information sharing but on capacity building and particularly in the developing parts of this region.
Internal to APNIC, the corporate support pillar was also one with a lot of activities. We developed a business continuity plan over the last couple of years -- actually, with thanks to RIPE NCC for a lot of help we got from them in having paved the way in that particular direction, but we had the opportunity to exercise that plan in real life, with a major flood that hit our city in January 2011.
Fortunately, in our own case, we did not have to declare a disaster under the plan in that particular case, and I hope we never do have to, but the plan was well exercised in terms of what we were committed to doing to make sure we had continuity of service and so forth, and we came through that pretty well.
We have spent a lot of time on internal systems. A new enterprise resource management system has been selected after a long selection process and implemented surprisingly quickly, actually, which gives testament to the selection process and the people involved. That will bring some real changes and serious efficiencies to many aspects of the internals of the organization.
As I mentioned, prudent cost management and also better than expected figures gave us a pretty healthy financial surplus in the last year.
The new look for APNIC, I would like to dedicate a slide to this one. I think you have all seen it by now, but we did a whole corporate rebranding exercise in the last year, and you can see the results of that all around you.
One thing that is really important, particularly here today, in this meeting in Delhi, is the work we have done which is coming to a very important phase very soon, and that is on the NIR in India. This does deserve special mention. It covers the four pillars we have operating in the organization, it covers all parts of APNIC, all staff, and of course is of great interest to the EC.
Just in practical terms, we provided quite a lot of support and worked hard with the people from NIXI, with our friends and colleagues there. We had the pleasure of hosting NIXI staff for three visits, a three-week initial training program, which was an incredible intensive information dump of everything that relates to APNIC as an RIR and to NIR operations. That was mid-year.
Shortly after, we had a high level delegation, including Dr Govind and our friend Ravi Shankar, and that was also a turning point in our relations and really a milestone.
We spent three weeks after that as well, giving an intensive Hostmaster training program in November, covering everything about how to be a Hostmaster, and we have also had regular videoconferences with NIXI.
So what this led to during this week was a visit by an evaluation team, who went to NIXI to take a look at what NIXI had achieved. I can say, it was a very impressive achievement that had been made by NIXI in a really short space of time.
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More on 2011 is contained in the report, the link on the page here. We are not printing this report any more, in the interests of our ecoAPNIC principles and initiative, but it is online now, I believe -- yes. You can consider the 2011 annual report hereby launched.
I will move on quickly into what is coming up in 2012, before we go back to 2011 with quite some more details.
2012 in some respects is more of the same. We have accelerating support that we have decided to provide for IPv6 deployment. We have no more IPv4 address space to give away in any large quantities at least, but we are anticipating the prospect of global IPv4 address transfers, which could bring an amount, unknown yet, but it could bring an amount of IPv4 address space back into the Asia Pacific region from other parts of the world where it is less used. That will be a really important development, if we can achieve it.
I have said many times that the ability for IPv4 addresses to be more equalized around the world is not just a question of access to addresses, but it is a question of motivation for IPv6, and while there is a disproportionate distribution of v4 around the place, we have a disproportionate motivation towards IPv6. We know by our experience over the last 10 years that the only time anyone thinks about IPv6 is when they run out of IPv4. At the same time, a successful transition is going to rely on everyone moving together. So I do see transfers as a really critical step in achieving both of those ends.
As I said, the Internet just keeps growing, we can't seem to stop it, so we are managing that at the same time, and we are increasing our attention to the global Internet ecosystem. You will hear more about some intergovernmental conferences that are coming up in the next couple of years, that we are needing to pay quite a bit of attention to.
The bottom line is that APNIC is a member organization, a service organization, where the resources that drive APNIC are provided by you, particularly in the middle of the room here, the members of APNIC, so we are really dedicated as an organization to providing the best service we can in the most effective and efficient way that we can.
We do not always know exactly how to do that, and that is why we do like to talk to you as often as possible, to talk with you, to hear from you, so the thing we need is to encourage your participation in these meetings, particularly also in the APNIC surveys, and we have more to announce on that shortly.
Activity planning in 2012 is an ongoing refinement to an existing approach we have. We have redefined the key activities that capture what APNIC does. These things include business as usual and new project kind of components. Internally, we are managing those quite carefully and clearly with assigned leaders who are coordinating and driving those activities.
There are 11 we have defined. The way we map these out in a graphical form has tended to change a little bit, but this illustrates that there are three activities on the left-hand side which support the entire organization: corporate governance, which is primarily the concern of the EC, but implemented by the Secretariat. We also have business and technical infrastructure as two distinct supporting core activities of APNIC.
Then we have a set of eight more that have different stakeholder profiles. The one that I will mention first is the one I alluded to earlier, which is the support of our membership as a key core activity, which we can define and account for in a cost accounting sense, and target that activity exclusively towards the members.
Going down from there, we have training and conferences, IPv6 and community support, which have a broader audience. We have the APNIC Registry, the R&D we do with the external relations, which have a global impact.
So this is the way we are looking at APNIC's core activities in 2012. We hope to be doing some internal and hopefully visible cost accounting on these activities, and I think it will be quite interesting to see, having refined this down to this level, where APNIC resources are being spent, and we are very happy to share that with you.
I mentioned the survey. I mentioned the need for APNIC to hear from its members and stakeholders. We have another survey to announce this year. The survey is normally a two-yearly affair. As you recall, we have traditionally delivered the survey results in March each year. That does not work so well with the calendar year planning process, so we have decided to realign it by six months and bring the next survey forward by six months, to announce it today, to deliver the results in August and for those results to be available for the planning processes through into 2013.
If you remember the survey process, we have focus groups, that forms the initial process of surveying the community on what issues in general are most important. That is a process that helps us to finalise or instrument a survey form, and we are ramping up the focus groups this year, now starting in April and being conducted throughout April this year, we have 17 face-to-face focus group meetings scheduled now. They are crossing 13 economies and there will be plenty of content there.
One other significant change in this coming survey is that the content of those focus group meetings won't just feed into the survey form itself, but the content will be exposed through to the survey report itself, and that is a result of quite a lot of people who commented that those focus group meetings really are very rich environments for discussing and providing useful outputs to be used.
The online survey is to be launched in May of this year. It will have a set of questions specific to three different stakeholder groupings, the ones I showed you before of APNIC members, plus the wider community and the global community, and the results of the survey will be delivered in August 2012 at the meeting in Phnom Penh.
There are two people critical in the survey process, one who has been a longstanding contributor and architect of the surveys APNIC has been conducting, which is Dr John Earls, who is sitting in the back of the room there. I think you all know John.
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John is continuing to advise and to guide, but meeting the challenge of this growing survey activity, we have also enrolled the help, since the last survey, of the Nanyang Technical University and the Singapore Internet Research Centre, which is led by Professor Ang Peng Hwa, whom also many of you know.
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Peng Hwa is leading the survey analysis and providing the report in the name of his research centre, and to have that level of expertise and authority coming into that reporting process is important, critical in fact, because this survey is intended always to be run as an independent anonymous survey, so anyone is able to contribute to it without the source of their contributions or remarks coming back into in any way, into the APNIC Secretariat or the EC, and the independence of Peng Hwa and his institution are really important in that. I'd like to thank both Professor Ang and Dr Earls for the help they will be giving us in this coming survey.
That is it from me. Next up we will have some more details, updates on APNIC operations in 2011 primarily under these four pillars I have described already. I will hand over to the first of those right now. Thanks very much.
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Maemura Akinori: Thank you very much, Paul.
The next report is from Sanjaya. As Paul reported, Sanjaya was recently appointed as a senior director and his presentation will include a wide range of APNIC's operations.
Sanjaya: Thank you, Chair.
I know we are a bit late for morning break, so I am going to go through my presentation rather quickly, but any details are available on our website anyway, and our annual report.
I am going to cover what we call the delivering value part of APNIC operations, and that is to give back -- we are funded by the membership fund and this is what we are giving back to our members.
Our core services resolve around resource registration and distribution and also member services.
As you know, with IPv4 exhaustion, we have reached our final /8 IPv4 block in mid-April, so we are now delegating from the final /8, which is the 103/8. Realising that some of our members need more IPv4 than what we have available in APNIC, we are working very hard at facilitating IPv4 address transfers. So we are providing easy to use portal for members to get approved for transfer requests.
These are our final /8 delegation statistics, beginning in April when we first hit our last /8. As you can see, it has a tailing-off effect. The first few months after April we were clearing up the backlog of the normal requests that did not make it for the normal allocation, and then had to be evaluated under the last /8 policy. There is a tailing-off in April, five months after we hit the last /8 and now we can see it now stabilizing.
There are 33 economies that have taken their final /8 delegations from APNIC and the mix is the same as the normal statistics that we have, so nothing different there.
This is our IPv4 delegations in the last five years. As you can see, had IPv4 still been available in 2011, we could probably consume another three or four /8s, but since it isn't, you can see a tapering off and you expect to see almost nothing in 2012.
Total IPv4 distribution by economy is pretty much unchanged from previous years, so it is still mainly East Asia, South East Asia and South Asia.
Now on IPv6 delegations, we had a very good IPv6 delegation growth in the last two year. I still cannot explain why 2011 is slightly less than 2010, but maybe it is caused by people still focusing on rushing for the last remaining of IPv4, but I expect it will pick up again in the next year.
This is the IPv6 distribution over all the economies in our region. The left part is anyone with more than 10 delegations and the right one is 10 and below. As you can see, we have a total of 42 economies already getting IPv6, so that is a penetration of 75 per cent of all our economies: so 75 per cent of APNIC economies, the members have got IPv6.
AS number delegations are growing steadily, reflecting the network maturity in the Asia Pacific region. As you can see here, if you look at the economy, the growth of AS numbers is quite spread over the different subregions. If you look at the first third part of the chart, where the distribution of AS numbers is the most, you can see a mix of people from East Asia, South East Asia, South Asia and Oceania.
As part of APNIC's role in resource registry, we continuously work on assuring that the resource we are managing is of high quality. By that, we mean that we are managing as much as possible usable addresses. Addresses become unusable because of network filters or abuse filters, so there is a lot of outreach we do to remind people to maintain their filters responsibly and also perform tests on ourselves to make sure that numbers that are not supposed to be filtered are not filtered.
We also have just finished the Whois clean-up project, which cleans up quite a lot of information, so we have very compact but high quality Whois information.
On membership growth, we finally hit 3,000 members, so it is a significant milestone for us. Growth has been steady and, as you can see, the growth has been in the very small, medium and large segments of our membership. So very healthy growth.
On the member services, now that we have 3,000 members, we have been operating our Help Desk for 12 hours every day, to cover most of our region. These are the statistics. We have a year-to-year growth of 4.3 per cent of Help Desk float. So it is still manageable. We automate as much as we can, self-help is provided as much as we can, but we will also provide hands-on individual assistance to members. So they will have that service.
Talking about self-help, we do a lot of our self-help features through MyAPNIC, so I do suggest that every member makes full use of the MyAPNIC features. These are the five key MyAPNIC features in 2011, the new development we made.
DNSSEC support, as Paul has reported, so you can now sign your reverse DNS record through MyAPNIC. A reminder, if you do not have a proper abuse contact, we add a feature in MyAPNIC to give you a reminder of that. Whois update improvements, to make it much easier for you to manage your different Whois object types.
We have also introduced something unique in IPv6 sparse assignment. As you probably heard from the policy discussion yesterday, APNIC has been asked to allocate resources based on a sparse algorithm, so we actually provide the same tool for the members, so they can make a subsequent assignment based on sparse assignment as well. So have a look at that in MyAPNIC.
Lastly, as I have mentioned, the addition of IPv4 transfer facilitation, which is basically the implementation of prop-050 and prop-096.
Thank you. That is all my report on delivering value.
Maemura Akinori: Questions or comments?
Thank you very much, Sanjaya.
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The next part is from German Valdez, reporting about his area.
German Valdez: Thank you, Maemura-san. Good morning. My name is German Valdez and since January this year, I am APNIC's external relations program director.
My presentation will cover the activities from the IPv6 program and external relations activities in 2011.
It is not a mystery that our commitment to IPv6 in 2011, the APNIC EC reconfirmed that commitment to IPv6 as a critical priority. More than ever since April last year, IPv4 is an optional resource, so we have put a lot of effort into promoting the IPv4 exhaustion; before that, bringing secure information to the community and promoting IPv6 as the only way to keep the Internet growing in a sustainable way into the future.
Also, the IPv6 program has been acting as the Secretariat for the Asia Pacific IPv6 Task Force, which has allowed us to have direct contact with different national task forces. Two days ago, we had a very successful gathering of these task forces, and an important exchange of information and it is very relevant for the activities that APNIC deploys in the region.
Also, we have increased collaboration, the outreach and education activities across the region with all stakeholders, where we constantly bring information about the IPv6 deployment status, providing customized information on issue related to IPv6, deployment within local networks and addressing concerns about IPv6 related topics.
The program also is working on organizing and coordinating important IPv6 events. We organized two about IPv6 transition as part of the program of two conferences we organized last year in Hong Kong and Busan. Also, we organized a seminar in conjunction with ICANN, to give a context of business in the IPv6 transition, and we were also participants in the World IPv6 Day last year, where we had quite interesting results on the research that we conducted on this day, about IPv6 readiness, where our technical labs find out that 25 per cent of the world's host computers are ready to run IPv6 native mode right now, based on the World IPv6 Day of last June.
This is the program that has touched many corners of the organization, not only about dissemination of information but also actually doing tangible scientific research.
In terms of the regional activities, expanding a little more on the extensive work that we have been doing through the IPv6 programs, we are trying to provide deployment experiences and updates of progress on IPv6 at many conferences. This is a list of different activities where we have a strong and committed and sometimes constant presence.
Also we have put in a lot of special attention to the public sector. We have had joint sessions with regulators, policy makers and governments to raise awareness and support the industry with deployment of IPv6. Last year we participated in many intergovernmental forums. Also we had bilateral reunions and meetings with a few governments in the region.
We are a constant participant in the APEC TEL organization. As a matter of fact, we are a guest member of this group. We provide content and we are helping to organize workshops related to IPv6 for the benefit of the attendees from the governmental offices attending these meetings.
As Paul mentioned, we started this year with a new program, which I have the honour to lead. The external relations program is designed to streamline APNIC's representation abroad and we will implement a framework to enhance participation and use resources for representation more effectively.
We review our ecosystem, that APNIC has been participating or has needed to follow discussions in more than 80 different events and conferences across the region and the world, so it is a lot of work for Internet coordination that needs to be made internally. In other words, this program will try to bring a new level of our representation activities.
We continued in 2001 to engage with the community. "Engagement" is a key word for us. We are constantly participating in network operator groups, IPv6 summits, NIR meetings, Internet Governance forums, and the list is growing every year.
To give you a few numbers, last year, only in the region, we travelled and participated in activities in 39 cities, which represents 26 economies. We organized, participated or delivered messages in 32 IPv6 conferences or workshops across the region. This is a little less than three events per month, so it is an extremely active agenda in APNIC. Nine Network Operation Groups, NIR and OPM meetings and 10 governmental and intergovernmental support meetings, and several other meetings, which includes ICANN meetings conducted in the region or ITF, last year in Taipei, or ICT events, like communications in Singapore.
Our efforts expand more than the regional scope, so also we have been working on global activities through other organizations.
APNIC is more active through the NRO, the Number Resource Organization, which is a coalition of the five RIRs, and some of the joint efforts we have been doing with the NRO is like all the global communications campaign we did when it was the last allocation from IANA to ICANN at the beginning of last year, also the NRO coordinates some comments about the renewal of the IANA contract to the US Government, and recently they formed a new coordination group made up of public affairs officers, to coordinate global coordination in intergovernmental activities.
In addition, APNIC has been participating in the OECD through one of their advisory committees, which is the Internet Technical Committee. This committee provides recommendations or input to the OECD about Internet related issues and specifically APNIC has provided information about the success of the multi-stakeholder model, the IPv6 deployment, security and the future of the network infrastructure.
Also we have maintained a strong commitment to the Internet Governance Forum. Last year we supported in many ways, financially, providing content, hosting the website, providing the registration system to the first Pacific Island IGF. During this event also we had the opportunity to sign a cooperation agreement with the Secretariat of the Pacific Community in regard to enhancing IPv6 cooperation and dissemination of information through their members.
Also, as we have done in the last couple of years, we participated with content in the regional IGF, trying to discuss the relevant topics and the regional relevant topics and bringing them to the global IGF that we had in Kenya last year, where also we organized a remote hub in the University of South Pacific in Fiji, bringing 19 remote participants to the Global IGF in Kenya.
Finally, also we have been working and cooperating with the ITU. One of the bodies where we have been actively participating is the Asia Pacific telecom community, which is a ICT governmental organization representing 38 economies in the region.
It is one of the most important feeders in ICT-related topics to the ITU. We have been constantly invited to participate in the workshops and, more importantly, also we have the opportunity to have direct contact with Ministers and policy officers during the policy forums for the region and also the one focused in the Pacific Islands.
I think that will be my presentation. Thank you very much. Any questions?
Maemura Akinori: Thank you very much, German.
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Any questions or comments?
If not, I am sorry the first session in the morning went a bit longer, but we are now having our morning coffee break. Please be back here at 11.00, 15 minutes to have the break and please come back here at 11.00 am. Thank you very much.