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CENTR in 2017

News 15-02-2017

By Peter Van Roste, CENTR General Manager - You know that you are working in a great environment when every single time, at the beginning of year, you have the feeling that that year will be special and even more exciting than the previous one. And I do know I am not the only one at the CENTR secretariat who has had that feeling when returning to the office after the Christmas holidays.

Since the start of the year, we’ve already wrapped up 3 successful workshops (marketing, admin and L&R) and are gearing up for our 57th General Assembly in Riga. One of the things that we are changing this year is the way we plan and run our meetings. For too long, we’ve accepted that presentations or panels were the best way to transfer the knowledge in our community. Now it’s time to push for even more interaction, debate and even action at our meetings. Some of the working groups are already familiar with new formats and the effort is paying off. So expect to see this rolled out at every meeting. By the end of the year, everyone in the CENTR community will be familiar with sticky walls, flying mics and world cafés. We’re also going to introduce a new meeting for the members’ leaders to discuss more long-term strategic issues. That meeting will replace the second day of the GA on 5 October in Brussels.

2017 is also a CENTR Awards year. The last edition in 2015 showed again the incredible work done by this industry. The impact of some of that work can be felt well beyond the borders of the ccTLD community. The awards ceremony is also the perfect opportunity to invite registrars, people from the EU institutions and friends from the industry. The 2015 Awards dinner was one of the best events CENTR has ever organised. However, we can already assure you that we’ll top that achievement. So make sure to reserve your seat on time!

In terms of issues, it looks like the European institutions will serve us with an overloaded EU policy agenda. Security, privacy, content control and consumer protection might all affect not just ccTLDs, but the whole technical layer of the internet. Close coordination with other organisations such as RIPE, ISOC and ICANN will be required to fully understand the possible impact and to mitigate the biggest risk of all: ignorance of policy makers. Therefore, CENTR plans to scale up its educational efforts. So far, we have mainly provided training on the basics of how the internet works. But now, we’ll be building on top of this foundation to add more specific training modules such as DNSSEC or less technical topics such as Internet Governance mechanisms.

So what will 2018 be like? Well, our job is like a box of chocolates. But we can already tell that our twentieth anniversary will not go unnoticed.

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