Meetings
Chapters and members meeting
Date: Wednesday 13 Feb, 7-9pm
Venue ICANN meeting hotel:
Taj Palace Hotel, Sardar Patel Marg, Diplomatic Enclave, New Delhi 110 021, India
Chairs: Brajesh Jain.
Draft Agenda
1. Introduction
2. Local host overview of chapter activities - ISOC Delhi (in formation)
3. Membership system update - Anne
4. Sharing of activities in the chapters - All
5. One web day 2008 - Susan Crawford
6. Preparation for IGF, Delhi - Stefano Trumpy, Internet Bill of Rights
7. Meeting close
Attendees
Brajesh Jain (ISOC Delhi - chapter in formation)
Veni markovski - ISOC Bulgaria
Calvin Browne - ISOC South Africa
Veena Merz - ISOC AU member
Susan Crawford - invited speaker for OneWebDay
Rajesh Charia - ISOC Delhi (in formation)
Maninder Singh Walia - ISOC Delhi (in formation)
Ramam Mitterl - ISOC Delhi (in formation)
Puneet Tiwari - ISOC Delhi (in formation)
Deepak Mahajan - ISOC Delhi (in formation)
Vakul Sharma - ISOC Delhi (in formation)
Anil Prakash - ISOC Delhi (in formation)
Gurpreet Singh - ISOC Delhi (in formation)
Rajesh Aggarwal - ISOC Delhi (in formation)
Shailendra Gupta - ISOC Delhi (in formation)
Col R S Perhar - ISOC Delhi (in formation)
Satyan Gupta - ISOC Delhi (in formation)
Kulin Sanghvi - ISOC Delhi (in formation)
Manish Gupta - ISOC Delhi (in formation)
Meenakshi Arora - ISOC Delhi (in formation)
Sebastien Bachollet - ISOC France
Didier Kasole - ISOC Democratic Republic of Congo
Stefano Trumpy - ISOC Italy
Cheryl Langdon Orr - ISOC Australia
Apologies: Sivasubramanian Muthusamy - ISOC Chennai
1. Introductions
Brajesh Jain opened the meeting and welcomed all participants. There was a round table of introductions. Apologies were sent by Sivasubramanian Muthusamy from ISOC Chennai.
2. Local host overview of chapter activities - ISOC Delhi (in formation)
Brajesh gave an overview of the Delhi chapter history and formation. ISOC Delhi was dormant and during the APNIC/SANOG meeting there was a meeting to rejuvenate the chapter. They convened a multi-stakeholder group to assist with reforming the chapter. They have in their membership people from the press, ISP association, NIXI and Govt and civil society.
Rajesh Aggarwal gave a short update on the current status of the chapter. Their belief is that they come in personal capacities. They feel they are in a position to influence policy. They have had discussions on IPv6 and policies. We also have active members from academia. They have sponsored training. They are talking to a blind school and have been helping them.
Colonel Perhar explained that ISOC Delhi membership idea was to gather members from all walks of life. Aim is to spread awareness and availability of the Internet through the the mechanisms of the chapter.
Sharma presented on behalf of the programme committee. He explained they have been involved in a school for blind children assisting with hardware and training. They are also looking at content in indian languages promotion, IPv6 and policy input to ISOC and ICANN.
3. Membership system update - Anne
Anne gave an update on the membership system explaining some of the background to those who were not familiar with the history. The objective is to have a membership system that meets the needs of all stakeholders and that includes the chapters, organisational and individual members as well as the staff. The business rules (BRIMS) document is a baseline document that establishes high level policies. This document has been approved by the ISOC Board of Trustees (BoT). There were however some outstanding items (data privacy is one) and these have been carried forward into the next stage of the work.
The next phases are as follows:
Phase 1 - to establish a baseline (where are we now) and to develop and RFP.
Phase 2 - issue the RFP, seek bids and select the vendor
Phase 3 - System development and testing
Phase 4 - System roll out, training and implementation
A group of volunteers have come together to assist with the next phases of the project. There are 10 volunteers from 8 different chapters. More are welcome. Just send email to <chapters@isoc.org>. ISOC is interviewing organisations to assist with phases 1 and 2 and aims to have a decision by the beginning of March.
4. Sharing of activities in the chapters.
Cheryl gave an update for ISOC AU. ISOC AU is in their 11th year. They reviewed their current activities at their 11 year anniversary. They have an IPv6 summit every year. They feel now that their need is to bring in a new type of member. They have to engage people who feel that the Internet is a utility and they are looking at how to bring them on board. They are looking at reviewing their website to meet these needs.
In their structure, they have SIGs (Special Interest Groups) to take on important topics. This has enlivened discussions and is allowing them to share in a non-competitive, non commercial space free and open discussions. This is important to how they have become a peak body in Australia.
Brajesh Jain asked how they manage with such a large country. Cheryl answered that they are a large country but have a small population. Challenges are in connectivity.
Veena stated that in the case of India there is a great deal of cultural diversity and language is complicated. So if you are trying to form one or multiple chapters you need to think about how you are going to serve the community.
There is no local language content. Veena commented that they have a curricula for blind people as part of Cisco academy. Veena described IPv6 training activities in ISOC AU.
Didier Kasole commented for ISOC Congo challenge is connectivity. Their mission is to push for connectivity and to help schools get connected and to find ways to bridge university and schools to business. There is no fibre and everything is wireless which is $$ for end users. Satellite is widely used and service beetween cities is not good. So many services are hosted outside of the Congo. They are not active in the policy space really.
Veni Markovski noted that two of his staff members have been in India for work. Veni said ISOC Bulgaria would be happy to help with training is ISOC Delhi if they need help. Content in local languages is very important. For ISOC Bulgaria initially they were explaining what the Internet is. The content drove the need for higher speeds. Speeds now are around 100mb or 1Gigabit and the prices are low - around 600 rupees a month.
Sebastien Bachollet commented for ISOC France. They are in a "developed" country and they are an undeveloped chapter. They try to do things on a low budget. They try to have a dinner once a month with a special invite to talk to them. They have an annual conference each year and they organise an event in June - a one day - this year it will be 20th June. They have subjects like the future of the Internet, individual users - what do they want. This year they will be assisting the ICANN meeting planning in Paris.
Stefano Trumpy commented for ISOC Italy. ISOC IT is addressing the Italian speaking community in the world as well as in Italy. Main goal is to spread and help disseminating Internet culture - ie understand Internet system and to ensure appropriate information about the Internet. In Italy around 35-40% of the population is using the Internet. ISOC IT also want to collect information about items of interest from the community and they transfer this to the appropriate sectors beit govt or business.
Calvin spoke for ISOC South Africa. They believe that the Government should pass any ICT regulation through them. They have made representations to Parliament in particular regarding a communications and transactions bill and others. Their regulator has made regulations regarding the broadband market and ISOC ZA has tried to convince them that lowering the price would help promote local content. The outcome was not as good as they hoped, so there is more work to do.
They had an interesting problem when it came to policies and procedures for membership. They found they had problems with quorums for meetings due to their large virtual membership base, so they have had to changed their procedures in this regard and now allow on-line participation for AGMs.
They have a SPAM bounty programme. They now have sponsors to pay a bounty with the first conviction. SPAM is becoming increasingly a problem. The chapter has around 200 members. There are few requirements for joining. They did talk about having several chapters but for now have kept it as one chapter. In ZA there are 11 official languages.
There was a question as to the definition of SPAM. It basically is unsolicitied.
5. One web day 2008 - Susan Crawford
Susan described purpose of OneWebDay. The function of it is to build a global celebration of the collaborative participatory nature of the web, scheduled for Sept 22 each year. This year it will focus on access and threats to the ubiquity of the Internet. OneWebDay is a completely local event. It is a kind of "earth day" - it is a day of teaching, or be public, talking about the Internet. Censorship is also an issue. The purpose of the day is to explain the important of the Internet. To have fun, and to celebrate the Internet. Very public, visible and personal. They chose the name because it sounded human, reasonable, and accessible. The basic notion is that they are worried about the threats of the Internet, and to celebrating the advances it has brought. There is a wiki - they try to list all the places that are celebrating it.
6. Preparation for IGF, Delhi, Stefano Trumpy, Internet Bill of Rights.
Stefano gave some background to Internet Governance and the forum.
IGF will be finished in 2010, completing a run for 5 years. The idea was to create a forum to talk, which does not have any power or results. The most important aspect was to have free and open dialogue with all stakeholders.
Important not to confuse - governance with government. The address system and root server system is the core of the fifth main theme "critical resources" that was formally added in the second IGF in Rio. The broad definition of Internet Governance includes access, diversity, security and openness. The "enhanced co-operation" process was not started by the UN Secretary General in the top down way as foreseen in the Tunis Agenda document. For Delhi, an idea is to have a special focus devoted to developing countries.
The Internet Bill of Rights is a "dynamic coalition" constituted in the first IGF in Athens trying to build something similar to the human bill of rights dedicated to cyberspace. ISOC IT would like to encourage chapters to participate in this effort. Possibilities are to be on the mailing list to follow activities or other chapters may join the Dynamic Coalition to participate in the next IGF.
Chapters have the possibility to explain to the community what Internet Governance is. A book has been created in Italian to "sensitise" the local community to the legal issues around Internet Governance.
Frederic asked if the bill is about creating new rights? Susan says when you create a bill of rights you usually protect yourself against some bigger threat and whether the bill of rights creates obligations. It was answered that this was an expectation.
7. Meeting close
The chair thanked the participants for a lively and interesting meeting and looked forward to future collaboration with other chapters as part of ISOC.
