Professional Canadians with committee experience and/or an interest in technology or the Internet are encouraged to apply.

According to CIRA, “the CIRA Nomination Committee plays a critical role in soliciting and selecting qualified candidates for the Nomination Committee Slate of CIRA’s Board of Directors Election. Its focus is to help build a Board of Directors that represents a wide range of views and interests, and ultimately contributing to the strategic direction of .CA and Canadian Internet policy.”

Applications will be accepted from January 3 to January 20, 2012. Visit http://www.ciraelections.ca for more information.

If you know of anyone you think would make a great addition to the CIRA Board, please consider nominating them for the upcoming elections. Applications will be accepted by CIRA from May 12 to June 10, 2011 at https://elections.cira.ca/2011/en/nom_com_nominees.html.

If you want to help spread the word about the CIRA Board of Directors nominations and elections, CIRA provides a PDF information sheet to help explain the process and why the CIRA Board of Directors is an important part of the management and stewardship of the .CA domain extension.

Partnering with Yola inc., CIRA, The Globe and Mail, Rogers, Canadian Chamber of Commerce, and Silver Lining Ltd, Google wants to shrink the gap between SMBs lack of online presence and their customers who are using the internet to find them. “Over the next year, we hope to help 100,000 Canadian businesses build websites and reach customers online” says Chris O’Neill, Managing Director Google Canada.

According to Google, there are over 2 million SMBs in Canada, and close to half have no presence online. These rock stars of the Canadian economy need the help to be where their customers are looking for them and this initiative gets them one step closer.

As someone who has been in online marketing for over 11 years, I am extremely excited to see the GYBO.ca program launched. SMBs struggle with lack of time, resources, amongst other challenges of starting a business and this initiative helps them conquer one important challenge, and that is an online web presence, with a price tag of FREE. We work with many SMBs, as our resellers do, and can relate to the challenges, so having a program that is focused on helping SMBs is fantastic.

Congratulations to Google, Yola, CIRA and the other partners who are giving small and medium businesses in Canada a leg up! Also, a special Thank you to Rogers for drawing my name to win a Blackberry Torch!

If you’d like more information, go to www.gybo.ca

Winners will receive a cheque for $5,000 from CIRA.

The .CA Impact Awards celebrate hose people who are using their .CA websites to make a positive difference in the lives of those around them. The impact can be social, cultural, political, technological or economic. .CA Impact Awards are available in four categories: E-Learning, Small Business, Not-for-Profit, and Web Technology.

Tell your Customers about the .CA Impact Awards

CIRA intends to email all .CA registrants about the .CA Impact Awards on January 19, 2011. If you are a .CA reseller, help get the word out and share this news with your customers! Feel free to blog it, tweet it, post it on Facebook or create an email campaign.

Who knows, maybe one of your customers will take home $5,000 from CIRA!

We thank all of our Resellers for their help and patience throughout the transition process. The result is a better experience for .CA domain registrants and a .CA domain extension that’s much easier to sell and support.

Locking your .CA Domains

We do have one important follow-up note for Resellers with .CA domains in their accounts. With the transition to the new platform, domain locking is now available for .CA domains. The default state for domains after the transition is “unlocked” so you will want to lock the .CA domains in your account to provide an added level of security to the registrants of those domains.

Using the “Bulk Domain Change Management” section of the Reseller Web Interface makes this a pretty simple task:

• Click on “Bulk Domain Change Management”. Then click “Bulk Domain Search” which will allow you to get a list of all the .CA domains in your account.
• Search for “*” and select .ca domains in the “Search for Domains by TLD” section. Add your email address and click “Results to File” to run the search.
• In a few minutes you’ll receive a list of the .ca domains in your account. Copy the list out of the email and then paste it into a text editor and save it as a .txt file with one domain per line.
• Return back to the “Bulk Domain Change Management” screen and click on “Domain Lock” to start the locking process.
• On the next screen, select “Upload a list of items” and then “Choose File” to upload the text file you just created. Add you email address to get a confirmation email when the bulk change is completed. Then select “Lock Domain(s)” and click “Submit” to lock the domains.

Here’s a quick screencast tutorial demonstrating how to do it:

The CIRA registry is unavailable throughout the 24 hour transition period. That means no new orders, or changes to existing .ca domain names. All .ca domains will continue to work at all times during the transition.

CIRA expects to be back up and live on the new platform tomorrow (Wednesday) at 9am EDT and we’ll resume taking .ca orders at that time.

In the meantime, you can stay up-to-date through OpenSRS System Status and here at the Reseller Blog. For a complete rundown of what’s changing, visit our CA Transition page.

You might also want to follow us on Twitter and CIRA also has a number of Twitter accounts that they use to pass along important information:

• @OpenSRS
• @CIRANEWS
• @CIRASystems – providing updates on the CIRA platform
• @cira001 – CIRA CEO Byron Holland

Test Environment Updated

Resellers with API integrations for .CA domains are encouraged to test them using the Horizon Test Environment which has been updated and is now connected to the new CIRA Registry Platform Test Bed.

The Reseller Web Interface (RWI) in the Horizon Test Environment has also been updated and now reflects what you will see after the Registry Transition takes place. Please familiarize yourself with the changes to how .CA domains are provisioned and managed.

For more information on timelines and to view a webinar held with CIRA about the changes, visit the CIRA Registry Platform Transition page we’ve setup to keep you informed.

Status Updates During the Transition

During, and after the transition, Resellers can get updates through OpenSRS System Status. You can subscribe to realtime status updates via email by visiting the System Status Subscription Centre.

CIRA’s President, Byron Holland described the relentless change on the Internet, year after year and the impossibility to predict that change. CIRA operates in a 100% uptime environment and has to be able to adapt and work in that kind of environment. A lot of changes have happened with the Registry over the past ten years and Byron committed his team will continue to make changes to improve the professionalism and operations of the Registry to ensure CIRA can adapt to the future needs of the Internet for Canadians.

In addition to panelist John Demco sharing a brief history about the Canadian Internet and a history of DNS from its original author, Paul Vixie, keynotes were delivered by marketing and branding experts, Terry O’Reilly and Mitch Joel,

Mitch and Terry delivered some great insight about the changing landscape of Internet marketing:

Terry talked about the importance about telling your story and the value of Canadian companies embracing a dotCA domain name. There’s a reason travelers sew the Canadian flag on their backpack– people like dealing with Canadians. The same can be true for businesses operating online in Canada.

Mitch, author of the best selling book, Six Pixels of Separation delivered on his promise of some crazy statistics which showed that clicks to banner ads have dropped more than 50% in the past year and grandparents than high school students are on Facebook.

The event was webcast and we’ll share the link once the archives are online. To learn more visit the CIRA Annual Report 2010 home page.

On a related note, the CIRA Board of Director election is also underway, so if you’re a dotCA member, we encourage you to review the candidates and participate in a process that can help shape the future of the dotCA.

CIRA is the steward of the .CA domain extension in Canada. Tucows has a long history of working with CIRA on its Board of Directors, and we encourage our Resellers in Canada to take an active role in CIRA, where possible.

You can visit this CIRA Nomination Committee webpage for more information about how to apply for a position on the Nomination Committee and the eligibility requirements. Feel free to pass this information around to other people that you feel might be interested or qualified to serve in this fashion.

For example, as of today, a WHOIS lookup on a personal .ca domain reveals only the Registrar and name servers, in addition to the creation and renewal dates. Yesterday, full information, including home address, phone number and email address was returned.

Back when the policy was announced, the general consensus was that CIRA had thrust itself to a leadership position in the area of WHOIS privacy. The Policy was lauded for the balance it struck between the rights of the Registrant and the rights of the public to access Registrant information.

However, it seems that some aspects of the new Policy, including backdoors for law enforcement and intellectual property owners, have resulted in some of those laurels being swapped out for darts.

As you would expect, Tucows’ OpenSRS domain name system is fully compliant with the new policy.