Meeting - Feb 19 2009

ISOC-NY held a public meeting on Feb 19 2009 at NYU.

Attendees

• David Solomonoff
• Aaron Williamson
• Evan Korth
• Hannah Kopelman
• Lou Klepner
• Ron Catera

Ron Catera

• New member
• Manages 30 websites for Komodo
• SSL encryption specialists
• company has a dead anonymity project
• * virtual VPN

Minutes

• January minutes approved.

ISOC Community Grant Program

• Deadline is March 30.

• 25% co-funding requirement - used to be 50% -
• 'In kind' donations cannot come from ISOC-NY members?
• Funds can't be used to pay ISOC-NY members for work?
• Wording implies this only applies to applying member?

Current Event Grant

• Lessig appears to have been paid from another source.
• Interim report needs to be submitted by Evan.

TOR

• Tor developers grant proposal received
• improvement required - optimal routing without sacrificing anonymity.
• Tor definitely needs improving.
• They do have other sources of funding.
• Vital component of ISX project.
• Total funding required $50K - ISOC grant could be targeted at certain phases of development.

TWISTED

• Aaron talking to developers
• Framework rather than application
• Free and open tool for developing network protocols
• More difficult to reconciloe with ISOC's criteria

OneWebDay

• Need to immediately upgrade front end of website.
• Second web development meeting held.
• Planning to submit for ISOC Grant to pay The Mechanism to do work.
• Nathan James thinks he can find co-funder in DC.
• Big grant from Ford Foundation further down line under negotiation.

ISX

• INCOGNITO is a distribution that has many of the qualities we are looking for.
• Uses different central components - GENTOO Linux, and KDE GUI.
• Developer has health issues.
• Says it could easily be rebranded

Future Events

• AT&T 25th anniversary breakup event
• Organizers: Bruce Kushnick & Joe Plotkin
• Mar 6 at Courant Institute
• ISOC-NY is co-sponsor with OIA

• Cloud computing panel
  • aka Web Services Freedom panel?
  • user autonomy in web services - freedomk in the cloud
  • David is in touch with folks at autonomo.us

• Censorship event
  • Nobody's talked to ILI
  • Contact Elizabeth Stark?

Elections

• According to by-laws Elections are very two years.
• Elections have, however, been held yearly.
• No position is ever contested.
• Are they necessary right now?
• David speaks for:
  • good for giving members sense of involvement
• Joly against
  • we should do what by-laws say or change them
  • exposes member / non-member dichotomy which
  • will improve when ISOC introduces new CMS.

• Consensus is that Elections are OK

Meetings & Board makeup

• Current board acts as Executive Committee
• Board should be influential people that is just oversight?
• Meetings can get bogged down with process

ISOC Board election

• We petitioned for outgoing chapter rep Franck Martin to be included in this year's election.
• 2 Chapter Reps on BOT serve for 2 years - one position is up.
• Khaled Koubaa of Tunisia, Narelle Clark of Australia, standing.
• Zittrain is an organizational candidate.

ISOC Chapters

• ISOC have announced $2000/yr Community Grant program
• Joly working on Chapter Handbook project

ICANN

• Meeting held with Rudi Vansnick
• Sense that At-Large is ineffective
• We need to renew our membership of NCUC

Patents & IETF Standards

• IETF does not have a policy that standards should be based on open or royalty-free implementations
• W3C does have such a policy.
• Aaron is participating in discussions.
• We could make concerns known to ISOC Policy Director.

NYC Community Fiber Project

• alternate approach to last mile
• pilot project
  • Home Run Fiber to each member
  • local peering place
  • interconnect to other local networks
  • connect at wirespeed to backbone 'meetup rooms'
    • = "Carrier-Neutral Meet Me Points"
    • 25 Broadway | 111 8th Ave | 60 Hudson St
  • choice of vendors for "transit" = internet connectivity
• possibilty stimulus funds
• initial 50/100 members pay $100 to set up
• ongoing rates decrease as more people join
• getting advice from optical network consultant
• 2 levels of City approval for rights of way
  • DOITT local high speed telecom franchise ($$$)
  • Right of Way Consents. Petitions/Drawings (6 mths)
• most conduit is controlled by Empire City Subway (Verizon) $3K/mile
• existing dark fiber goes to some larger buildings
  • NYSERNET - NY State Educational Research Network - is a similar project
  • Abovenet
• Second approach
  • Modified Routers with multiple WAN connections - daisy chained
• Similar Projects
  • Ottawa - Bill St Arnaud - CANARIE
    • Bundled with Energy provider
• What's needed now?
  • Critical mass of interested people
  • Seed Funding