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CENTR in 2017: a General Manager's perspective

News 22-12-2017

By Peter Van Roste - From the outside, 2017 has been a relatively quiet year for our industry. New gTLDs are not that new anymore, IANA morphed seamlessly into PTI, stats are meandering up and down but the trends are stabilising. However, at CENTR, it has been anything but a quiet year.

2017 was the year of our third Awards, an event that showcases the achievements of our industry. Awards require a significant investment and months of dedicated work behind the scenes and feedback for this edition was superb.

2017 was the year we held our first Leaders Day. This new meeting allowed the leaders of all full members to discuss and share views on a wide range of topics in a smaller group. It answered the need for an environment to discuss high-level strategic discussions. The group covered market trends, the value of domains as identifiers and the relation between ccTLDs and their Local Internet Communities.

2017 was also the year of renewed attention to our working groups. As illustrated in CENTR’s strategic plans, these groups are at the core of what we stand for: helping members to improve and grow by encouraging collaboration. 7 new Chairs and Vice Chairs (CVCs) took on the commitment to help their groups achieve this goal. Our annual CVC meeting in Brussels was yet again one of the most energising meetings we had throughout the year. The ideas and follow-ups will keep us very busy in 2018.

In 2017, a group of members established the Registry-Registrar Data Group (RRDG). An excellent initiative that within its short life-span has already achieved some concrete and useful results. CENTR is supporting this group with our in-house stats expertise, as these results are beneficial to the whole ccTLD community.

2017 was also a year where we yet again got stellar feedback and evaluations on the services we provide. As a GM this - of course - makes me proud of our accomplishments, but also weary for complacence. CENTR can only continue to improve if we dare to question and challenge what and how we have been doing things in the past. At the secretariat, we count on all members to give us guidance in our quest for excellence.

2018 promises to be equally exciting. We will experiment with remote participation to the working group meetings (thanks to the support of DNS Belgium). We are collectively facing the deadline of the GDPR implementation and are ready to support members. We will solidify CENTR as a confidential environment for information exchange. We are pushing our stats service to the next level (how many levels are there?). We will update our statutes and strengthen our budget. We’ll be pushing out new CENTR issues papers. And probably a few things that we can’t even imagine right now.

My thanks for your continued support and very best wishes for 2018!

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