Hi all - I spoke up at the community meeting and during the NANOG Transition BOF at NANOG, trying to get a better understanding of what was happening with NANOG. I asked a few questions, and admittedly got caught up in the moment during some of the discussions. A couple folks got the impression that I was AGAINST the transition.
To be clear - - - I am NOT against the transition (of NANOG from a Merit activity to a new organization more tightly directed by elected members of the community). My issues are with how we got here. As I stated before, in the first Steering Committee I was pushing for the same thing (See slide 12 "Actual Results" of my NANOGHIstory slides from NANOG 37 back in 2007). The idea that the elected Steering Committee was merely an advisory role or meeting attendee advocate role just didn't seem rational - it provided the 'transparency' but lacked the 'accountability' aspect that we all required from the post-NANOG revolution phase. As several folks mentioned, there are indeed different interests at play between Merit and the NANOG community, as there in any partnership. My feeling was (and is) that this advisory form of Steering Committee-Merit relationship is not as effective as it needs to be. So the end state of some form of self-governed NANOG can be better. At this NANOG I had conversations with the NANOG Steering Committee members and the Merit folks about what led to this immediate transition. Based on what I learned, we have here is a classic inter-group conflict that could have been better handled with a mediator and informal discussions. The goals should have been ensuring buy in to cooperative transition, defining a plan and timeline for an orderly and coordinated community-driven transition plan. As is typical, the rationale from both sides included exaggerated perceptions about motivations and many assumptions about how the other side would react to various actions. In any case, instead, both sides have left the community with a transition where 1) the broader community was not brought along for the ride with identified problems and proposed solutions, it was a 'done deal' (this would have taken time) 2) the plan for this new NANOG was not shared broadly with the community (was not really developed fully), and yet 3) both sides agree the transition HAS TO HAPPEN now. So, as a community member, my opinion is that we lost an opportunity to do something really cool here: we could have taken the time to develop a newer and better NANOG organization while demonstrating the principles that led to the first revolution: transparency, accountability, as a newer, better NANOG, all done in a community-driven fashion. This would have taken time and some work, but it would have been pretty cool. But the past doesn't matter now, so Where are we now? Fundamentally, we all agree that the transition will happen, it will happen in a couple NANOGs, we all want it to be a success, we will try some new untested things. Just wanted to share where I am coming from, and I agree that the discussion should now be about what we should do. I look forward to that. Bill Sidenote - I would share in some of the blame in that we in the Steering Committees to date did not candidly describe some of these frictions in our meeting minutes; instead we all glossed over differences, and patted ourselves on the back for the progress and success of the meetings. It would have been helpful feedback back to the community how this SC-PC-MLC-NANOG experiment actually worked and where it didn't. As a result of lack of candor, we have nothing to point to, nothing for the successor SC to review that highlighted relationship challenges, what was tried to overcome those challenges, etc... in short, there is an absence of institutional memory for the future SCs and the community to highlight the problems and why the transition is the best solution to the problems identified. _______________________________________________ Nanog-futures mailing list Nanog-futures@nanog.org https://mailman.nanog.org/mailman/listinfo/nanog-futures
