Annual Report of the Executive Director to the 2002 AGM of InternetNZ

June 28, 2002

I am pleased to present my fourth Annual Report to the Society. 2002 has been another busy year for the Office of the Society, details of which have been reported at monthly Council Meetings. This report will highlight the activities which arose from decisions made by the membership at the previous two AGMs and new issues which arose during the year. The President has described some of these in his Annual Report on behalf of Council, so I will not repeat them here.

REBRANDING

At the 2001 AGM the membership determined that the Society should rebrand from ISOCNZ to InternetNZ, and a budget of $50,000 was allocated. The members also decided that the process of creating a new logo would be in keeping with our usual way of doing business - fully participative. In line with that directive I worked with Rob Grindlay of Fruitful Communications to create a full re-branding brief, and then the public design competition was announced, with a $2000 cash prize donated by 2Day.com.

The competition itself accomplished part of our rebranding promotion, drawing 95 high quality entries from all around the country. Spoiled for choice, Members then winnowed the designs down to the top twelve through an online straw poll. A panel of distinguished judges then made the final decision. Tracey Woolett's design was chosen and she received her prize at a ceremony at InternetNZ's offices. The logo was reworked for a range of media into the professional result we use today. Members who have joined since the competition may like to look at the entries at http://www.internetnz.net.nz/communications/logos/ .

The final expenditure for the rebranding exercise was $29193.41, $20806.59 under budget. This is largely because we cut sharply back on promotion by not doing a formal launch of the new brand, and also reflects the amount of extra work done by Rob Grindlay after his imagination was caught by our "radical" approach. I'd like to thank everyone who gave of their time and energy to this project, not the least of whom were the judges who had to make the final decision: Ian Newlands, Chris Lipscombe, and Rob Grindlay from the PR industry, Keith Davidson and Simon Riley from Council, and Jonathan Ah Kit and Brendan Sue from the Membership. I will make a very short presentation on the rebranding at the AGM.

NEXT GENERATION INTERNET STUDY

InternetNZ set up the Internet2 (NZ) Steering Group in response to public demand in August 2001. The Society agreed to facilitate the work of the group which intends to create a leading edge network capability for the national research community; enable revolutionary Internet applications, and ensure the rapid transfer of new network services and applications to the broader Internet community in New Zealand.

After hosting a public consultation on Next Generation Internet (NGI), the Steering Group approached government for funding for an NGI Capability Study. Last month the government announced $50,000 matching funding and the Society was asked to act as sponsor for the contracts. CISCO, Otago University, and InternetNZ have joined together to provide the other $50,000 worth of funding support. I have just completed negotiations with Industry NZ on the funding contract and this will be signed next week. In the meantime the Steering Group has engaged a Lead Consultant, Laurence Zwimpfer, and the final Report will be delivered at a government event in September. The expectation is that a Research and Education Consortium will be set up and an international peering point to the USA's GigaPoP established.

ICANN

ICANN representation continues and has risen in importance with the release of the CEO of ICANN's "Reform" paper. Peter Dengate Thrush and I represented the Society at the Montevideo meeting in September 2001, arriving home the day before the Sept 11 tragedy. President Keith Davidson and I attended the APRICOT meeting in Bangkok in March, where I represented the Society at the APTLD meeting, we then attended the APNIC meeting, and I also did a presentation on the current state of Internet development in NZ to the APIA meeting. I didn't go to the current ICANN meeting in Bucharest as the AGM had to take precedence, but we are ably represented by Peter and by Councillor Jennifer Northover. I expect to attend Shanghai in October where we will hopefully see the birth of the new global ccTLD organisation.

In other ICANN matters, we still have not been able to get ICANN to change our address in the IANA database - they are treating such administrative requests as "redelegation" requests and refusing to make the changes until we sign their contract. ICANN has only just admitted that this is Policy - see http://www.iana.org/cctld/redelegation-overview-19jun02.htm .

The CEO of ICANN has responded to our letter declining to make any further contributions to ICANN coffers until we have our relationships sorted out satisfactorily, and that letter will be presented at the first meeting of the new Council. (It would be fair to say that ICANN is less than impressed - possibly because our letter received wide publicity globally). Our letter can be found at 

The intended donation has been deposited with KPMG Legal in the interim.

We had significant input into the creation of the "Best Practice Guidelines for ccTLD Managers", which was adopted by the ccTLDs in June 2001. In line with the AGM 2001 directive (AGM10) to adopt a Best Practice document, .nz has signed this - see

INTERNET INDUSTRY FORUM

The Internet Industry Forum attracted 44 participants, with two attending from overseas (Niue and Tokelau) and we received very positive feedback about the content (Legislation and Self-Regulation). The original expenditure budget was $18000 for a one-day event - in the end a two day event ran for a total cost $21810. The Forum has given the Society the mandate for future work on the Internet Code of Practice and this forms the basis of one of the Business Cases arising from the Council Planning work.

STRATEGIC PLANNING

The Council held a planning day in April 2002. Council discussed 11 candidate projects, some of which were submitted by Members. Everyone agreed that the Society had reached the stage where a more formal Strategic Planning approach was needed, and the President has set up a Strategic Planning Taskforce to work on recommendations for a planning cycle.

I was tasked with working up the candidate projects after the planning day, and as it was clear that many were insufficiently detailed for Council to be able to make sound decisions upon, I prepared Project Control Templates as a criteria for assessment. These have been adopted for future project work and have been used as the basis for preparing Business Cases for the work of the Society. This document is currently with Council for comment and will then be circulated to members for input.

NEW CONSTITUTION

A new Constitution was adopted by the Society at an SGM in September 2001, but the principles it was based upon came into effect after the AGM in 2001. This led to the Office running:

• Online straw poll for Officers
• Online By-election
• Two SGMs (one co-located)
• Online voting for Elections and Constitutional Amendments for this AGM

The online voting system has had to be modified several times with the introduction of preferential voting. A wide range of implementation issues have arisen as a result of the new Constitution and we have had to deal with these "on the fly". A debriefing paper will be prepared by the Office after the AGM.

TECHNICAL WORK

We also ran the Straw Poll for the '.maori.nz' proposal which saw a high turnout of over 1600 voters. The system worked well, and I'd like to record my thanks for all the extra work our part-time Technical Manager, John Vorstermans has put in on the evolving voting systems (and without ever losing his cool!)

We now have online calendars, which not only gives staff the ability to access appointments externally, but allows anyone to make bookings for the Boardroom or find out scheduled Council and Committee meetings from the comfort of their own computer. It's a tidy open source piece of software at a reasonable price. Mailserver-based antivirus products have been trialled and installed and Mailman upgraded. We continue to move the Office towards an open source environment (I finally got Outlook off everyone's machines!), but we may strike a limit with the need to use temp workers to meet our resourcing needs. This will continue to be a subject for debate and experiment.

John is currently working to install a new server and upgrade the others, as well as reworking the internal network. This requires patience on everyone's part, though upgrades in the week before the AGM saw cries of "technical abuse" 8-) being lofted towards him on Wednesday. We've changed to a new access provider, and if I'd had any doubts, the 8.2 MB download which arrived in approximately 30 seconds erased them completely!

I'd once again like to acknowledge the advice and other contributions that Councillor David Zanetti has freely given to this side of the Office's work.

SRS IMPLEMENTATION

Finally, but by no means least, has been the support work provided by the Office over the past year for the SRS Implementation Team, the new Registry, and the new Office of the Domain Name Commissioner. A large part of the physical work - from making travel arrangements and getting printing done to creative thinking in relation to accommodating our new colleagues - has fallen on Administration Manager Beverley Irvine's shoulders. Beverley remains cheerful whilst being deluged, and retains efficiency when pulled by competing demands. Over the next few months we will have worked through many of the resourcing issues, but in the meantime, we are performing an extended juggling act!

DOMAIN NAME COMMISSIONER

The Office of the Society was very pleased to welcome the Office of the Domain Name Commissioner in May. Debbie Monahan's professionalism was demonstrated from the moment she walked in the door, and she has made what could have been a very traumatic change into a positive and exciting experience for all involved.

CONCLUSION

The Business Cases include notional assessments of the voluntary hours contributed by the Councillors and Officers of the Society, and by members of Committees and Working Groups. The figures are huge, something which we need to pay tribute to often and thoroughly. The volume of email alone consumes weeks of time every year. I'd like to acknowledge all of you who contribute to the work of the Society - if you didn't do it, we would have nothing to implement, and New Zealand would be the poorer for it. Special thanks to Keith Davidson for his willingness to put aside his own heavy workload at a moment's notice when the Office calls, as his position involves a support role over and above the other work as the President of the Society.

Sue Leader
Executive Director
InternetNZ

© 2002 InternetNZ
Last updated 28 June 2002