Minutes of Technical Policy Committee - 12 June 2008

Present: Jamie Baddeley (Chair), Sam Sargeant, Michael Wallmannsberger (by phone).

In attendance: Keith Davidson, Campbell Gardiner, Simon Riley.

Apologies: Peter Macaulay, Don Stokes.

Opened: 3.06pm

Minutes of Last Meeting – 5 May 2008:
Minutes of last meeting adopted as a true and accurate record.

Action Points / Matters Arising from the Previous Minutes:

AP - Circulate NZRS Best Practice document – to do.

AP - Come up with a small list of non-controversial Best Practice topics – to do.

AP - Speak with MW about Liverton’s strawman and with KD about a joint workshop with the SSC – to do.

AP - Discuss with DNC access to the .nz zone file – Done, but Don yet to apply.

AP - Advise Council/Tech-Pol of amount used from TCDF for Webstock attendees – (See Appendix 1).

AP - Email Tech-Pol members reminding them about the Honeypot Project update at Council’s 13 June meeting – to do.

Best Practice Programme:

There is a Best Practice action point still to be done viz circulate the NZRS best practice document to both Tech-Pol and NZNOG mailing lists. Keith will do this.

Considerable interest and support for the Best Practice Programme has been expressed from some NZNOGers (Brian Carpenter, Richard Wade and Dave Hall). These people and those from Tech-Pol will be invited to form a tiger team.

The process from here is:

Circulate an exemplar document to NZNOG (NZRS best practice document),

Tech-Pol to seed a list of possible other best practice documents to the NOG and ask for any other document suggestions,

Document topics that are deemed candidates for incentives will be published to the NOG list and announced as ‘open’ and teams of writers called for,

Note: the judging process is yet to be finalised.

Sam Sargeant joined the meeting – 3.16pm.

AP – Staff to document the process as described above (with timelines) and forward to the tiger team to sign off.

IPv6:

Keith gave a progress report on preparations for the IPv6 Hui. It is thoroughly under control and Tech-Pol will be asked to help work the programme at a later date.

Note: Keith will be shoulder-tapping various people at ICANN Paris, letting them know about the event. The preferred audience for the Hui will be CIO, CTOs.

In addition, dates for the two IPv6 technical workshops have been confirmed and IPv6 will also be covered in some detail at the upcoming APNIC meeting.

The SSC has indicated a level of IPv6 support re: all-of-Government, and Telecom has agreed they’ll be supportive in terms of their NGN.

Sam met with the SSC earlier this week and they are writing a policy paper on IPv6. They didn’t know about the Hui and are keen to be involved.

It was suggested we start some PR around the event and get TUANZ and TCF involved and informed. Further, it was noted that carriers need to be involved and we should be infecting them with information on IPv6.

Certificate Authority:

Liverton’s strawman is sitting waiting to be actioned. The SSC are said to be reasonably animated on CA but it isn’t a high priority.

There was general agreement that InternetNZ should continue to keep the work moving and keep the SSC informed. Don’s action point re: SSL-enabled web servers in .nz will give us some idea of scale, which can be fed back to the SSC.

Discussion on the slow pace of the project; we are still having the same conversation we were having two years ago. However the process by its nature is stop – start.

To be discussed further once Don comes back with his results.

NZCERT:

Two ‘very productive’ meetings have been held with the GCSB. They are keen for InternetNZ to be the lead agency on NZCERT.

If Council signs off on the draft NZCERT RFP at its 13 June meeting it will be taken to the MED, SSC and CCIP for further feedback. The RFP will then be issued as a closed tender. A small team will be assembled to examine responses to the RFP.

Discussion on getting Wigley to review the draft RFP and whether InternetNZ should be early engaging with the National Party in the event of a change of Government.

Keith noted there is an SSC document that reviews the need for a CERT. Apparently there is increasingly strong support within Government for a CERT.

Michael Wallmannsberger left the meeting – 3.55pm

Discussion on whether to supply an NZCERT speaker for the APAN meeting. It was agreed that, no, we don’t have anything to add and suggest the conference organisers contact the SSC or CCIP.

Broadband Measurement:

We have received a Broadband Measurement document from MediaLab and the University of Waikato. This will go to the Council meeting on 13 June as a document ‘for information’.

The importance of the role of Consumer was emphasised and we need to re-engage with them; a task made slightly more difficult by the fact that our main technical contact there is leaving shortly.

The reason for the broadband measurement project is to give consumers information that will allow them to make an informed choice re: ISPs. Currently consumers’ decisions revolve almost exclusively around price. We want consumers to be more discerning about who they choose as a provider.

Simon iterated that we must clearly distinguish between the outputs from this and the outputs from Epitiro. He suggests compiling a simple matrix of what this proposal offers that Epitiro doesn’t and that we document the outputs.

Discussion following on the importance of buy-in from Consumer and communications strategies relating to 3.1, 3.2 and 3.3; also marketing to potential audiences and intellectual property aspects.

AP – Supply the report as a paper for information for 13 June Council meeting.

AP – Meet with Consumer to see that they are aligned and will promote this to their members.

Honeypot:

Victoria University will update Council at its June 13 meeting. A Honeypot PowerPoint presentation has been prepared for Keith to run through at ICANN Paris.

The presentation explains the project and where to find the source code. This, hopefully, will encourage more ccTLDs to run client honeypots; this in light of recent questionable international security reports viz McAfee.

Technical Capability Development Fund:

Use of the fund recently has been negligible, with a small amount granted to Andy Linton.

Simon talked about possible uses of the fund re: the academic community and a “Web 2.0 mash-up competition” aimed at getting people more interested in using the web.

Discussion followed on ‘the application space,’ rich media content across networks & peer-to-peer distribution, and whether or not it is worth spending some time and money on quantifying these issues a bit more. Also briefly discussed were online conferencing and collaboration tools and that InternetNZ should be ‘walking the talk’ in these areas.

There was a suggestion that InternetNZ more widely advertise and ‘tidy up’ its travel fund.

The idea of a holding a small workshop with the Society’s technical folk was mooted. The workshop would be held before the next Tech-Pol meeting and focus on the Technical Capability Development Fund – i.e. what should we be doing with the fund, are we properly discharging our responsibilities re: technical development and innovation.

MED Discussion Paper – MSP 2.5GHz Band:

We are honour-bound to respond to the discussion paper given our previous work in this area. Jamie and Jon Brewer and Campbell will draft a submission.

The discussion paper has been sent to the Tech-Pol mailing list and is to be sent to the Members-Discuss list for feedback.

General Business:

The Executive Director’s office is in the process of employing Richard St Clair as InternetNZ’s technical support, with FX’s Blair Harrison in a minor backup role. Tech-Pol will be able to draw on their technical expertise.

Date of Next Meeting: TBC

Closed: 4.50pm

Appendix 1:

Use of TCDF for Webstock Event

In February 2008, the Webstock event was held in Wellington.

InternetNZ entered into an agreement with Webstock for their web authoring workshops to allow two participants from Pacific Islands to attend.

Their attendance was funded from the Technical Capability Development Fund, with $5,625 spent.

Cost Breakdown

Registration $2500

Registration $2500

GST $625

___________________

Total $5625

Action Points Register as at: 12 June 2008