Author(s): Geoff Huston
Date: 2001.6.25
Committee: Executive Committee of BoT
Document: excom-01-004
Revision:
Supersedes:
Status:
Maintainer:
Access: Unconfirmed
ISOC Executive Committee
Phone conference, 6/25/2001
Minutes taken by Christian Huitema.
I. Participants:
- Bob Vaughan
- Brian Carpenter
- Rosa Delgado
- Lynn StAmour
- Mike Conn
- Kees Neggers.
- Christian Huitema
- Latif Latid
II. President’s report
A. Budget discussion
The May financials are being finalized. The situation is pretty grim. The best case is that we will have 2 weeks of cash at the end of the month. Our payments are hard to delay: salaries, rent and RFC editor fee. Our only flexibility is to delay scheduled payment increases to the RFC editor.
B. Org members
We are getting bad news from several Gold Members: some are in difficult financial conditions, other have merged or have been acquired. We have signed 14 new members in the last 5 months, and hope to sign at least one new Gold member. Many organizations tend to pay long after their due date.
C. Organization
Lance has moved on to PR and Public Policy. He will only be working 40% of is time for ISOC, working on the state of the Internet report, and also on a set of reports aimed at members, e.g. a small report on the internationalization of domain names with John Klensin. Rosa proposes documents from Latin America.
ISOC moved to a new office. The move has been completed with few problems.
III. Outstanding board items
A. INET 2002
We have not yet received an actionable memo regarding the organization of INET 2002 and therefore there is no authorization to spend any money yet. The Board is concerned as it’s getting very late and requires a plan for approval by mid- July.
B. ISTF
The Chair of the ISTF has asked for time until the December Board of Trustees meeting for the WG’s to deliver several projects and has asked for more time to make a recommendation on changing the ISTF’s structure. While the Chair has promised a monthly report the Executive Committee is concerned that the current approach does not follow the recommendation of the board nor does it reflect the urgency expressed in the Board meeting. Therefore the ISTF Chair is requested to submit a report to the Executive Committee by mid-July which better addresses the Board action item and answers the concerns expressed at the Board of Trustees meeting and in subsequent exchanges.
C. IPv6 Education proposal
We are preparing the draft proposal. We are a bit behind. We have been busy with the IPv6 Task Force as well as working on the EU-funded IPv6 Trials mainly Euro6IX including ISPs. The other large scale IPv6 trial test bed is 6NET run by Cisco including IBM for national research networks. Latif would like George or Lynn to suggest potential reviewers for the curriculum. Lynn observes that we are resource constrained, so asks Latif to explain plainly what’s required of ISOC and the Technical ‘team’ as well what the benefit to ISOC will be. We will investigate if some of the budget could be spent on adding a track to the INET conference.
D. Individual members
We have 7200 members, with about 5000 paying full fare. If we exclude G&A, we almost break even; if we include G&A, the loss is between $150,000 and $200,000. This is a large number. The big cost items are publications, elections, and the administration costs.
E. Election review
During the Stockholm meeting, the Board chartered a sub-committee to review the proposals of the former election committee chair in the form of proposed amendments to the election procedure. The Board named Trustee Burack to chair the Election Review sub-committee, with Rosa Delgado, Wawa Ngenge, Christian Huitema and Stuart Levi as committee members. The Sub-Committee was requested to submit their report to the Board by the end of July.
The election review sub-committee needs to start activities in view of preparing the report. Some committee members seem to believe that this is mostly a logistics issue; other would like to address wider issues, such as the structure of the board. The truth is probably in between: there are serious logistical issues that have to be solved, such as the reliance on postal mail, and there are also ethical issues, such as the occurrence of block voting; but the structure of the board should be debated by the board at large, not by the elections’ committee.
F. Fund raising
Lynn would like to appoint a fund-raising committee, including highly visible personalities such as Vint Cerf. We need people who can call the CEO’s of large companies and convince them to join. Lynn will submit a proposal to the Executive Committee within 1 week.
IV. Strategy
The Executive Committee has reviewed a list of activities underway which we believe address the strategic issues raised during the Board meeting. Work continues on these activities and an updated report will be sent out by mid-July.
ISOC considers stopping OTI if we don’t have enough cash in the bank. We are preparing a new set of fund raising material – but we certainly can use the “standards” issue of OTI for fund raising.
V. Other points
A. Public policy committee
Lynn would like to work with David Maher to set up a Public Policy committee and this was agreed by the Executive Committee.
B. ACM
Lynn had a good discussion with Laurie Cranor of ACM, who is planning to set up an on-line newsletter on standards. There is a risk of competition if we don’t cooperate.
C. .ORG registry
No plan yet.
D. Other business
Keep working, we must steer this organization and be realistic. We should challenge the board to execute fund-raising.
We should immediately start to establish friendly relationships with the IPv6 Forum.
The board has to appoint the members of the nomination committee; we are expecting the nomination committee chair to make soon a proposal to the board on the profile of Board members we’re looking to nominate.
All Board Executive Committee Meeting Minutes