The Internet Society of Australia (ISOC-AU), the Australian Centre for Advanced Computing and Communications (ac3), and the Smart Internet Technology Cooperative Research Centre (SIT CRC) hosted the forum Connecting the Future'03 on Thursday 2nd October 2003 in Sydney.

Slides and abstracts from the presentations are available here.

The forum went extremely well. We had a fantastic collection of opiniated, experienced and very amusing speakers, whose talks complemented each other in unexpected and interesting ways. The venue was the old locomotive workshops at Redfern, now a modern business centre with the industrial skeleton of the old buildings - quite amazing! The day went very smoothly, mainly due to the sterling efforts of Lisette Cochineas from SIT and Phil McCrea, CEO of ac3.

We started with Loftus Harris's snapshot of the energetic and sophisticated NSW IT industry, then talks ranged from Fred Baker's amusing depiction of the troubled adolescence of the Internet, to Ramin Marzbani's irreverent analysis of current takeup of web services. Narelle Clark had some illuminating comparisons of wireless in terms of bandwidth, mobility and proximity. Martin Dawson and Tony Hain both focussed on emergency services as drivers of location detection in wireless and IPv6.

Paul Boustead described the challenges of scaling world-wide massively multi-player games (ah, the pain of research!), Tim Mansfield energetically revealed the mysteries of machines talking to each other, and Grenville Armitage called the Internet an "irritating, opaque (often antagonistic) companion"... and wants operators, developers, researchers and government to get together and make it invisible.

Our final session had Roger Kermode on the convergence of devices and home connectivity, Geoff Huston entertainingly examining the holes in the "folklore" of IPv6, and Mike Biber pointed out a few holes in Geoff's arguments too - but they agreed to differ and may get together for a fiery debate at next year's Linux conference and launch of the IPv6 Forum in Australia - an event not to be missed.

Many thanks to everyone who attended, presented, and helped arrange such a high-calibre conference, and thanks too to sponsors Optus, T-Systems and Cisco.

Kate Lance
Executive Director, ISOC-AU
7 October 2003

About ISOC-AU

The Internet Society of Australia is a non-profit, user-focussed organisation that promotes development of the Internet in Australia to benefit the whole community, including business, academic, professional and individual Internet users.

About ac3

The Australian Centre for Advanced Computing and Communications is a specialist centre providing high performance computing services to commerce, industry government and academia. The ac3 state-of-the-art supercomputers and mass storage are accessible by secure means over the Internet for computational or storage-intensive applications.

About SIT CRC

The Smart Internet Technology CRC combines research in Artificial Intelligence (AI), Social Interaction and Network Development to create enabling technologies for smart Internet applications that will allow users and network providers to manage this complexity.

The graphic at the head of this page is a detail from an Internet visualisation project named Plankton, a tool from CAIDA, the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis and IRCache, a project funded by the National Science Foundation.

The Internet is for everyone! This site is designed and hosted by the Internet Society of Australia. It aims to provide accessibility for all users and browser types - see the international web accessibility guidelines. Please contact Kate Lance with any comments or difficulties with this site. No email addresses of attendees will be published or used for any purpose apart from communication about this forum or optionally, about similar ISOC-AU events in the future.