By Linda Verhaegen, CENTR Office Manager - With nine CENTR events scheduled in the four coming months, CENTR is heading for the end of the year in a very busy mode. Without revealing too much and spoiling all the fun, an overview of what is to be expected could shed some light on this important part of CENTR’s activities.
The CENTR Administrative working group will kick off the meeting season on 15 September in Slovenia’s wonderful city of Bled to talk about Registrar services, domain services and other news in the domain registration area. Two weeks later, the CENTR Legal working group will gather in Gdansk, Poland on 28 and 29 September for a day and a half of legal & regulatory rich discussions on legal cases, Whois, data protection policies and much more.
October will start with two larger events. On 5 October, CENTR will hold its third Registrar Day, an open day for interested registrars to meet with registries and discuss key issues of common interest. In contrast with the two previous editions, which were held in Brussels, this year’s CENTR Registrar Day will take place in Belgrade, Serbia. One of the highlights on the agenda will unquestionably be a demo by CENTR’s General Manager Peter Van Roste on the brand new Registrar Portal that was recently launched on the CENTR website.
On 6 and 7 October, CENTR members will continue meeting in Belgrade for their 56th General Assembly. Besides the usual Registry updates and the CENTR housekeeping issues, attending members will be able to breathe again now that all other topics worthwhile discussing are post-IANA-transition in nature.
The second week of October will be dedicated to the CENTR Marketing working group. This close-knitted group of people will get together for their 21st Marketing workshop in Trondheim, Norway on 13 and 14 October. They will discuss their solo and even joint projects, their campaigns and market studies and look into the impact of social media on marketing and on traditional media.
Entering the third week of October, CENTR members will be attending the 12th CENTR Security workshop in Luxembourg on 17 October, the day before the unique hack.lu conference. Thanks to efforts made by, amongst others, Cynthia Wagner from the .lu Registry, some mutual exchange of speakers between the CENTR Security working group and the hack.lu conference will certainly add value to both entities.
As we will head for the fourth week of October, the CENTR Technical working group will gather in Madrid on 23 October for their standalone autumn Technical workshop. In line with previous years the workshop will take place on the day before the RIPE meeting. On the agenda, participants can expect to see, among other topics, more software architecture related topics this time.
Although for the past years the CENTR R&D working group only met in conjunction with the other CENTR working groups at the CENTR Jamborees, the working group will break with the tradition on 29 and 30 November for a day and a half standalone workshop in Prague. At this workshop, only half a day will be spent on presentations about members’ R&D activities. As the goal is to send the participants back home after the workshop with tangible and practical outcomes, the workshop will soon transform into a ‘hands-on’ one regarding two separate topics. It won’t harm anyone to already reveal that one of these topics is the big-data platform created by SIDN Labs: ENTRADA (or ENhanced Top-level domain Resilience through Advanced Data Analysis).
CENTR members can still register to any or all of the events mentioned after logging in to the CENTR website.
Now that 8 out of 9 events have been covered, it is time to end in style. The ninth scheduled and final meeting of the year is the smaller one of all CENTR events. It is a friendly, cosy and always fruitful day and a half face-to-face meeting between the Chairs and Vice-Chairs of the CENTR working groups. Together with the CENTR secretariat staff, this meeting is packed with various brainstorm sessions and a meeting facilitation training. With this gathering, the CENTR meeting year closes like a well-balanced loop and with an opening and eagerness to already continue the work of organising CENTR meetings, events and workshops again next year.
