Nominet Lunch (by alaric)
Today, I attended a Nominet Members Lunch.
Nominet are the organisation in charge of the .uk domain name hierarchy. My company is a member of Nominet, giving us voting rights, and a "tag holder", meaning we can create .uk domain names and are charged "cost price" by Nominet for running the root .uk name servers and administrative procedures.
It was brilliant - my company are a very small member, yet I sat and chatted with the Chief Executive about issues facing Nominet. There are not many systems about where a "little guy" who wants to discuss how something is run can have lunch with the Chief Executive and other staff (in this case, Nominet's IT and Marketing/Communications directors) and chat about it.
Yet I worry that, in theory, the 3,000 odd Nominet members could all sign up for the Lunches, drink free wine, eat free food, and discuss football. It's one of those wonderful things that works beautifully because nobody's thought to try and spam it yet...
I went, not because I have a particular political axe to grind, but because one of the points that came up at the EGM is that a lot of the members aren't getting involved in Nominet governance; and so I felt I, as somebody who will never make much money from .uk domain name registrations so whose views on it are purely from a making-the-Internet-cool perspective, should set a good example to others by making my voice heard. Plus, I like getting into a good debate. We discussed EPP, IPv6, Nominet's voting rights, expanding the scope of Nominet to bid for ENUM and .eu, and other issues.
Wed 17th May 2006 7:41 pm 
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