Organization: Packet Clearing House

Title :

This workshop is being proposed by a global coalition of organizations that provide technical expertise and services in the communications sector, and share a common desire that participants in the IGF process have ready availability to, and a shared understanding of, the technical underpinnings of the Internet and the terminology used to describe them.  These organizations include:

• Packet Clearing House, a not-for-profit NGO supporting affordable and reliable critical communications infrastructure globally, with offices in London, San Francisco, and Kathmandu; 
• The Office of Utilities Regulation of the Government of Jamaica; 
• AfriNIC, the not-for-profit African Regional Internet Registry, providing bottom-up Internet governance in the network number space from offices throughout the African continent; 
• ARIN, the not-for-profit Regional Internet Registry governed by stakeholders in Canada, the United States, and parts of the Caribbean; and
• AIMS, a commercial enterprise headquartered in Kuala Lumpur, providing critical Internet infrastructure and facilities in Arabic countries.

The principal speakers in this workshop are anticipated to be:

• Bill Woodcock, Research Director of Packet Clearing House,
• Mark Tinka, Network Architect of AIMS, and
• Barbara Fraser, Chairman of the Board of the Internet Society.

Packet Clearing House has been conducting workshops of this nature since 1993, at a frequency of more than one per week.

Bill Woodcock is the principal author of PCH’s courseware material, and personally conducts more than a third of PCH’s Internet infrastructure workshops.  In addition to his research and education background, Bill was the network architect of an Internet service provider backbone in the United States and Europe for thirteen years. 

Mark Tinka has been one of the principal instructors and organizers of AfNOG, the African Network Operator’s Group, since its inception, as well as being the principal network architect of Africa Online’s network backbone in Uganda, Swaziland, and Zimbabwe, prior to joining AIMS in Malaysia. 

Barbara Fraser is the chairman of the board of directors of the Public Interest Registry, is an active contributor and working group chair in the Internet Engineering Task Force, is a past boardmember of the Internet Society, and has been a delegate to the G-8 cybercrime workshops on behalf of her employer, Cisco Systems.

The coalition's composition ensures its adherence to multi-stakeholder principles. Coalition members represent the governmental, NGO, civil society, Internet governance, and commercial sectors, from both developing and developed nations, and the northern and southern hemispheres. The three speakers represent three ethnicities and four continents, if you count origin and domicile separately.