Executive Committee
Meeting Minutes 03-004
Executive committee conference call, 5/19/03
Minutes taken by Christian Huitema
Present to the call:
Fred Baker
Rosa Delgado
Lynn Duval
Christian Huitema
Latif Ladid
Toshio Miki
Kees Neggers
Glenn Ricart
Lynn St. Amour
Veni Markovski joined the call during the discussion of the INET 2004 conference, and Jim Galvin during the discussion of chapters and membership issues.
Date: 2003.05.19 Committee: Executive Committee of BoT Document: excom-03-004 Revision: Supersedes: Status: Maintainer: Minutes taken by Christian Huitema.
Access: Unconfirmed
Financial status
The April report will be ready at the end of the week.
PIR report
PIR has asked for a statement of direction from ISOC. Lynn prepared a memo that describes the role of the three entities, ISOC, PIR & Affilias, restating the plan of record, and ISOC expectation that PIR will be an exemplary registry. The document also restates the commonality of purposes between PIR & ISOC, which induces cooperation on programs.
ISOC is working to establish processes for cooperation with PIR. The PIR board is debating whether PIR should directly manage a fraction of the program funds, or leave their management entirely to ISOC. For PIR, an advantage of leaving management to ISOC is that the PIR board will not be distracted by program issues and could concentrate on managing an exemplary registry. This will also avoid wasting resource by building two parallel program management systems.
Regarding the process, Lynn proposes to work on an annual program defining the strategic directions and the corresponding budget. The program would be reviewed and approved, by the ISOC and PIR boards.
The executive committee agrees with Lynn's proposal.
Election report
The ballots will be counted tomorrow. Alan is disappointed by the low turnout to date, specially in the chapters elections.
European projects
According to Latif, there is 50% chance to get the "Security expert initiative" project accepted. This will be a test of the ability of ISOC to receive funds from the EU.
Fund raising report
Latif has an excel file showing the progress of the trustees. He compliments Fred, who has been the most productive.
Conference report
Lynn attended the 2003 conference in Barcelona, and was impressed by the professionalism of the conference. She obtained guarantees from Vicenç Gasulla that they would cover the costs of the conference, and isolate ISOC from all the financial risks. They are interested in the added visibility that ISOC would give for their conference. There is a remaining issue on the funding of international speakers and a final sponsorship model is still to be agreed.
We are probably looking at a 4 track conference. For the conference, there will be INET
speakers in the morning and local speakers in the afternoon. The organizers will provide simultaneous translation in English, Spanish and Catalan.
This year's conference attracted 1600 attendees.
Rosa mentions that this event is very well perceived by all Spanish chapters, not just Catalonia, and that the conference looks very promising.
Kees agrees with Lynn's assessment of the organizers' professionalism. This ought to relieve ISOC's staff from conference organization tasks, to concentrate on building ISOC! Lynn agrees.
Lynn will now work on a high level MOU with the organizer, which we should have by the end of next week. A contract will be drafted shortly after that.
The executive committee compliments Veni for his work on the INET organization committee.
July board meeting
There was a decision last June to seat the new board early in the meeting. Lynn asks whether we should go back to the previous tradition. Glenn suggest that the old board should ratify the electronic decisions, the minutes and the treasurer’s report. There is wide agreement to keep things that way, i.e. let the old board wrap up the last year, and then quickly pass the responsibilities to the new board.
Lynn asks whether we want to act on comments that the board keeps discussing the same old issues. Rather than a wide strategic discussion, we should discuss a few very specific issues, e.g. how can ISOC help developing countries.
There is a consensus to not spend a lot of time discussing governance issues. Regarding the IM issue, it does not appear that we can have a conclusive discussion without a concrete proposal on the table well in advance of the board meeting. The same request to have documents available in advance applies in fact to all domains where a board decision is needed.
Individual Members
Jim Galvin reports no progress on the preparation of an IM proposal. Jim asks whether the IM committee should concentrate just on IM structure, and leave board structure issues to the board; the executive committee agrees.
Jim mentions that the report will not be available before mid June.
ISOC has quotes on a new IM system from last fall and these are still accurate enough for use today. It will be quite expensive and a funding stream will need to be found before moving ahead. Also, given the cost Lynn recommends we evaluate going to open source systems and possibly developing it ourselves. We could then make it available to other organizations.
The committee recognizes that voting is just one aspect of the discussion. The focus should be on the benefits given to individual members, and specially to those in any new paying categories.
Chapter Coordination Councils
Jim and Lynn have prepared a new MOU. They are now getting ready to call the various chapters.
There appears to be a lack of active involvement from many of the original proponents of the proposed ECC. It seems that only a very small number of people are involved.
Societal issues
There has been a discussion on the ISDF list of restarting the ISTF. The dominant view on the ISDF lists is that any such structure should first produce results and this is in line with the Board's discussion from the June 2001 Board meeting. There is a rising issue posed by the WSIS, which is spawning a large number of discussion groups. Latif argues that ISOC should be more active in the WSIS effort.
This is similar to the debate we had several years ago, and we concluded at the time that ISOC cannot be a "discussion group", since our legitimacy is mostly technical. On the other hand, a few chapters are participating in the WSIS in a fragmented way. Rosa and Mike are working aggressively on the issue. Mike's assessment is that WSIS is poorly organized, and that most countries only have very low level representation.
Education
We are structuring an AFNOG workshop, using a grant from Sida.
Randy and Zita are setting up a teaching material portal, augmenting the material from the NTW’s. Latif reports that this material is being used already by North-African countries.
