> Anything that we > can do to see a productive community meeting, a thoughtful > election, and meetings with the SC, PC and MLC that lead to a > better NANOG.
Quite frankly, if you are one of the uninitiated, and that includes the managers that decide whether or not to fund someone's travel to a conference, then it is a big mystery what NANOG is. I went to the website and looked around a bit. At first it sounded like a trade association but then the agenda at the meetings (aren't these conferences?) seemed to be mostly technical. Anyway, when you look at all the new groups that spring up around important Internet operational issues, like MAAWG, you wonder whether NANOG isn't cutting off its nose to spite its face when it narrows down its focus to only the topics that Randy Bush likes. 15 years ago, those were hot topics because everyone was struggling with the basics of routing, exponential traffic growth, need for figuring out what was happening in the network. But not, the vendors and their certified technical people can handle most of that stuff. It's no longer rocket science. It's no longer undocumented. It no longer requires building your own tools from scratch. As long as NANOG restricts itself to a narrow topic area, it suffers from marginalization. Why is network abuse not a network operational topic? Botnets? Spammers? I'm not saying that botnets and spammers must become NANOG topics, but I am saying that designing narrow stovepipes is anti network-operations. I wonder why NANOG didn't spin off a botnets list and a mail-abuse list that are tied into the larger area of network operations. Also, if you look at what the "operations" department of a network operator actually does, then NANOG is of marginal relevance. The industry has moved on from the days of startup companies running the Internet and now that is squarely the task of telecommunications companies. NANOG sometimes seems to be like a buggy-whip manufacturer railing about that newfangled automobile thingy. --Michael Dillon P.S. Anyone feel like continuing this thread in a brainstormy fashion?
