Qualifications sought include:

• Demonstrated business acumen with significant entrepreneurial, non-commercial and/or marketing skills;
• understanding and engagement in the retail domain name space;
• known contributor to the ICANN processes;
• financial literacy;
• expertise in the application of Internet technologies to support non-commercial organizations; and
• experience with the operation and policies of TLD registries.

Global diversity in candidates is desired.
Please forward a statement of interest and qualifications, three references, and a curriculum vitae highlighting relevant experience, expertise, and contact information to:

Lynn St. Amour, President and CEO, Internet Society
Email: pir-nomcomm@isoc.org.
Please submit materials in attached documents (pdf, .doc, .txt)

For full consideration, please apply by June 11th, 2007. Applications will be evaluated as they are received.

Desired Characteristics of Board Members

Time Commitment

PIR Board Members are required to dedicate a significant amount of time and this should be carefully vetted with new board members. A firm commitment must be in place to attend meetings in person as it is imperative that a small board have full participation.

Board Meetings: four per year, 1.5 days in length plus travel time. One in Reston, VA in January and the other three collocated with ICANN meetings around the world.

Strategic Planning Retreat: one per year, generally 3 days plus travel time, can be anywhere in the world.
Advisory Council Meeting: one per year, generally 3 days in the fall plus travel time, can be anywhere in the world.
Conference calls: as needed, currently weekly.
Email correspondence: daily.

Because the board is intentionally small, it is also important for the board members to seriously consider their role as an officer. Currently, we have five elected officer positions: Chair, Vice-Chair, Treasurer, Secretary, and Assistant Secretary, two of which will be filled with non-board members.

Skills

The priority skills are as follows:

General business acumen with either significant entrepreneurial, non-profit and/or marketing (not sales) skills
Known as a contributor in ICANN – Understanding and engagement in the retail domain name space (e.g. a Pindar equivalent)
Additional useful skills are:

Long term strategic thinker
Financial acumen; PIR is a $40M/yr. enterprise
Familiarity with the non-commercial enterprise world
Geographical diversity
Please also note that without current exposure/involvement with the highly volatile name space business arena, it will take board member 6-12 months to get up-to-speed. With two new members next year, it will be crucial to make sure at least one new member is actively engaged in the name space arena.

Personal Qualities of a Board Member

The personal qualitites of a board member are important to a high-functioning small board:

High ethical standards/integrity
Motivator
Strong communication skills
Passionate and energetic
Collaborative and consensus builder

PIR – Do Well, Do Right, Do Good

PIR

The Public Interest Registry is the Internet domain registry for all .ORG Top Level Domains. PIR has a particular focus on acting in the public interest. Working together with Afilias, its business partner and back-end provider, PIR seeks to:

Do Well – PIR performs its role as a registry well, serving its registrars and the users of .org names with predictable, reliable, and efficient registration services and name resolution. It seeks to meet and exceed the requirements set by ICANN for registry operation and meet or exceed the expectations of its registrars and the public who use .org names. In this respect, PIR seeks to be an exemplary registry in its operations. PIR is a serious business entity seeking to earn the maximum surplus possible consistent with its other missions below and by doing so, provide the funding that makes the other missions possible.

Do Right – PIR has a particular focus in the Internet name space to envision, develop consensus around, and lead in the implementation of registry and namespace policies that serve the wider interests of registrants and the Internet and therefore its stability as a whole. In this respect, PIR acts in the public interest and seeks to be an exemplary registry in its policies and values.

Do Good – The .org namespace is the natural home of non-commercial organizations on the Internet. PIR has a special role in fostering effective and efficient use of the Internet by non-commercial organizations, and seeks to leverage the benefits non-commercial organizations can provide to society by helping them make innovative and constructive uses of the Internet. In this respect, PIR acts in the public interest and wishes to magnify the good that these non-commercial organizations can provide to society. PIR also seeks to serve the broader goals of Internet education, standards development, and Internet policy stewardship represented by the Internet Society, and uses the vast majority of its surplus to serve the public interest in the Internet in this way.

One position is to be filled for a three year term. In addition, one additional position opened up this year due to an early vacancy. After a complete count, the results are:

• Patrick Vande Walle
• Dr. Alejandro Pisanty

As such, Patrick Vande Walle is elected to a new three year term and Dr.Alejandro Pisanty is elected to fill the vacancy for the coming year.

For the election of Trustees by Organization Members, there were had four candidatesand total of 52 of 78 (67%) possible ballots. The percentage of organizational members participating was much greater than last year. After a complete count, factoring in membership-level weighting, the results are:

• Desiree Miloshevic
• Dr. Hiroshi Esaki

As such, Desiree Miloshevic and Dr. Hiroshi Esaki are elected for three year terms.

In a separate process, the IETF has selected Ted Hardie to serve for a three year term.

Many competing ISPs (Visual Online, Luxembourg Online, Alternet, Tele2)  use the P&T infrastructure. Hence , their offers have been adapted, too. I guess it will only take weeks before the competing infrastructure provider, Cegecom, will offer the same speeds, too.

A few months ago, the Luxembourg chapter of ISOC launched a survey among the Internet users. The main finding was that the users were unhappy with the slowish speed of their “broadband” connection. While I would not dare to say that this report changed the landscape, I think it nevertheless contributed to speed up the deployment of the new DSLAMs.

Strange, because offering good Usenet service is neither difficult  nor expensive. In less than 2 weeks, we have been able to offer to our members a good service, with multiple peers, all of which do it for free. How come a volunteer not-for-profit can do what a commercial ISP cannot ?
This is quite typical of the mostly general attitude of ISPs over here, which is along the lines of “Pay your subscription and don’t complain”.

Finally, as the MOU has become a symbol internationally of US control over the DNS, it can be argued that the MOU, which was originally designed to support and shore up ICANN in its early days, is now actually hampering ICANN’s continued development and their legitimacy in the eyes of many.

ISOC believes a clear unambiguous signal needs to be made internationally that we are entering a new phase and taking steps to move to the private sector model per the original vision of the US Government.

I heard a zillion times that ISOC was the USG’s best friend. I hope this will definitively show it is untrue.

• Maarten Botterman: Europe (RAND Corporation)
• Hans Peter Dittler: Europe (Internet Society)
• Michael Mann: North America (Grassroots.ORG)
• Sebastian Ricciardi: South America (Jauregui & Assoc.)
• Sadiq Hussain: Asia (Majan University College)
• Angela Stuber: North America (Ohio Community Computing Network)
• Jaechul Sir: Asia Pacific (Korea NIC)
• Frannie Wellings (NCUC Representative)

ISOC and The IPv6 Portal organize a half day IPv6 workshop in Istanbul, next Friday 28th, after the RIPE meeting.

The target audience is engineers, ICT managers, software developers and public sector. It is expected that the participants have some IPv4 knowledge in order to take bigger advantage of the workshop.

The goal of the workshop will be to introduce IPv6 from a theoretical point of view, and make some hands-on practices with Windows XP. Information about other operating systems will be also provided. The workshop will also give some basic ideas about how to enable IPv6 in ISP and enterprise networks. As a practical exercise, the participants will be able to present their own network cases and work on possible transition paths for those cases. It is expected that the participants bring their own laptops with XP SP2 to take further advantage of the hands-on part.

What is great about this initiative it that it addresses what matters most, ie how do you actually set up IPv6 in a real production environment. This is most welcome. The deployment of IPv6 has been slowed down by the fact that it still appears to be working in the lab only and not quite ready for mass deployment. From an IETF outsider’s point of view, it looks like they are still working on the specs. ‘IPv6 Test beds’ are being advertised. But again, most IT managers will consider that what is still at the test stage is not production ready.
On the software side, the lack of simple how-to documents and up to date configurations are also confusing users. As an example, there is no GUI in Windows XP to configure IPv6. You need to revert to obscure ‘netsh’ commands to make it work.
On a Linux Redhat 4 box, although you are offered to configure IPv6 at installation time, it does not define the default route. You end up with an unusable IPv6 config, unless you make the adjustments yourself.

(tip: ip -6 route add 2000::/3 via replace_this_with_your_ipv6_default_gateway).

In case you have not noticed, this blog is reachable through IPv6. Try ‘dig patrick.vande-walle.eu AAAA‘ (if you have a real operating system, of course )

This is no diplomatic talk. Maher talks frankly about Postel (“God”), Cerf, Magaziner and how the Clinton administration managed to ignore the IAHC in favour of of its creation, ICANN.