While the draft minutes will be made available shortly, the ADNA Board felt
that a short rundown on the results of the recent Board meeting would be
useful.

While some things are still waiting for the official wording to be applied,
and should be released within the week, the gist was the implementation of
two major initiatives.

The first is the second phase of public comment upon the proposed pr.au
name space.  A name space allocated to products - and thus coplementary to
the existing com.au name space - has been put forward to ADNA by numerous
sources.  Initial public comment was sought on an earlier more limited
version ofthe name space (tm.au) from the trademark community via two
public seminars in Melbourne and Sydney, and following subsequent
discussions we would like to seek further feedback from the wider
community.  A formal request for comment will be released next week,
including a draft allocation policy, but in essence the proposed pr.au name
space is designed for product names, and will operate largely upon a
first-come first-served principle, with some small modifications for
trademarks.  Assuming the wider community feels the name space is useful,
we would hope to see it implemented sometime around May-July, depending
upon the progress made with enabling competitive registrars to operate
alongside one another.  While I'm sure this will generate some questions
and comments now, and ADNA will do its best to answer, please allow us
until next wek to release the formal request for comments.

The second initiative is competition within the commercial name spaces.
More on this will also be forthcoming next week when the finishing touches
have been put on documentation, and will include criteria for registrars,
methods for ensuring consistent policy application, and a request for
proposals to put together the underlying shared registry software that is
central to the technical problems that must be solved for a competitive
system to operate.  A more detailed timeline for this implementation will
also be forthcoming, but we hope to have this a practical possibility
before July 1 this year.  We anticipate most of this time will be taken up
by implementation and testing of the shared registry software, and the
final date will depend upon the successful proposal for its development.

Minor issues also addressed included the ongoing effort to remove the
subjectivity from the application of the com.au policy, by reducing the
list of industry categories that are reserved to those categories found in
the Yellow Pages (more on this will also be available, and Peter Gerrand of
Melbourne IT may well have comment to offer here).

A notice will be posted to this list when the minutes of the meeting are
placed upon the ADNA Web site, at http://www.adna.asn.au.


Regards,

Luke Carruthers
acting Chair
ADNA