Meeting (15 July 2002)

Date: 2002.07.15
Committee: Executive Committee of BoT
Document: excom-02-006
Revision:
Supersedes:
Status:
Maintainer: Minutes taken by Christian Huitema.
Access: Unconfirmed

Attendees:
Lynn St.Amour
Fred Baker
Latif Ladid
Christian Huitema
Glenn Ricart
Terry Weigler
Toshio Mikki
Rosa Delgado

Excused:
Kees Neggers

I. .ORG bid update
The news of our bid for managing the .ORG domain has raised questions among some of our members. One concern is that ISOC, which used to be “above the fray”, will suddenly become one of the players; another concern is that, if ISOC develop its own autonomous source of revenue, the control of the society by its members will be looser. These concerns have been expressed by some of our platinum members. Similar issues have been raised by the IAB.

Lynn pointed out that these concerns can largely be alleviated through the structure (a separate not-for-profit company) and the governance model we intend to put in place. No revenues would accrue directly to ISOC although donations could be made to the parent company (ISOC). In addition the contributions of Platinum members are used solely to support their chosen pillars/activities (and today it’s the RFC Editor in all cases ), without any overhead retained by ISOC; providing the same funding to these destinations independently of ISOC would in fact be less efficient. Lynn also confirms that the society will remain financially solvent in the year to come but we need to work to ensure we are more financially stable in the long-term.

ICANN has received 11 bids in total. Lynn received an e-mail mentioning that the decision would be pushed out a couple of weeks; there is a risk that it could be pushed even more. Regardless, we must prepare the launching of the PIR organization. The sense of the executive committee is that we must demonstrate early that our stewardship of .ORG will be exemplary. We should set up an independent nomination committee to select the directors of PIR; Lynn will kick-off a nomination process. After, we have to organize some form of public workshop to get community input on the best way to manage .ORG for the benefit of non-profit organizations, in addition to the Advisory Council that PIR will establish if we are successful in our bid.

II. 2002 financial update
The staff expects to be able to publish the financial statement in the 3rd week of every month; this will not be the case for the June statements because of vacations, but they expect to be strictly on schedule after that.

The cash on hand was 165K end of May, it’s just over 4 weeks of operative expenses; account payable 219K, including $110K not yet invoiced for the RFC editor contract. We also expect to pay $71K to ExpoNova, as a final settlement; we need to sign a final release with ExpoNova and Key3Media, which bought ExpoNova. At the end of May, the surplus was 46K, as we received some past due member payments. The total surplus is behind budget by 75K.

We used to receive a 10% management fee for the ThinkQuest program, which was cancelled in February; we will thus receive 2-3K this year on this program, instead of the expected 10K.

Education pillar showed a sizeable loss — we don’t expect any revenues from INET.

According to Lynn’s reasonably conservative forecast, we are looking at a year end P&L surplus of $50K.

III. Fundraising committee update
Philippe, Latif and Vint are trying to create a new fundraising model, moving from generic fundraising to project selling or support. The societal side appears to be ripe for new initiatives. We want ideas of new projects — there are certainly many that interest our members.

IV. Conference
We have mixed feelings regarding the outcome of INET 2002; one positive aspect however is that this conference helped us get new organization members. Lynn had a discussion with Richard Perlman, regarding the potential organization of INET 2003, and there is general agreement to not run another conference on the same model as the previous INET, and certainly not in June 2003, as the delay would be too short for proper organization. Brian suggested holding a INET 2003 conference jointly with the World Summit on the Information Society, WSIS, which would be held under the high patronage of the UN Secretary-General, with ITU taking the role of the Executive Secretariat, and with the participation of UN agencies, governments, private sector, NGOs and civil society at-large. One possibility was holding a few tracks at that conference 8-9, before the 10-12 December 2003, either at Palexpo or at the conference center in Geneva; the cost would be very low, we might be able to offer it for free. But we need to first understand whether this is the appropriate venue and event; ISOC is already involved with WSIS as are numerous individual members. Rosa mentions that the Swiss chapter is already involved, but that we have to be very concerned with the accommodations; we would have to choose clearly our focus.

V. Chapters update
The Internet Society of China, which was created without approval from ISOC, is seeking to establish some ties with us. There are multiple matters under discussion, one of which is a request that the Taiwanese chapter change its designation to some name that is politically acceptable by the PRC. Any discussion should be deferred to Fred or Lynn.

VI. Christine’s resignation
We just learned that Christine Maxwell resigned from her position on the Board of Trustees. Lynn will draft an appropriate announcement. The Executive Committee thanks Christine for her efforts and wishes her all the best in her new endeavors.

All Board Executive Committee Meeting Minutes