Just to close the loop and for those interested in walking down memory lane
I found the original NANOG Business Plan (heh) and put it up here:
http://peering.drpeering.net/archive/Original-NANOG-BizPlan.htm
The original excel sheet is there as well:
http://peering.drpeering.net/archive/Original-NANOG-BizPlan.xls .
Summary
The original NANOG registration fee was $135 per person (up from $0 when it was
the Regional Techs meeting and/or NANOG funded by NSF).
I was charged with creating a cost-recovery business plan, and we accomplished
break-even by using fractions of 4 peoples time; a total of 1.6 Full-time
Equivalents . This group ran the NANOG activity, heavily weighted towards the
lower salaried admin support side. Merit salaries as a 501.3c were pretty
minimal too so that helped keep the salary expenses down.
Back then we were just starting to work with hosts who took care of the hotel
costs so we reimbursed some funds to the host, as the costs were so much more
than when the host used their own facilities. (NANOG went from 100 to 400
pretty quickly.)
The University of Michigan had a 52.5% overhead to cover portions of office
space, keep the lights on etc. as all UofM activities contributed to. Over time
there were tons of other little overhead things that NANOG had to contribute
to, like the servers and upgrades for the mailing lists, sysAdmin overhead for
the team, etc. Lots of little bits of expenses here and there were allocated
across projects, and projects benefited from having access to the folks spread
across multiple projects. It gets a little complicated pretty quick with
fractional FTEs and shared costs.
So, the point it NANOG started out pretty minimal 15 years ago, bringing in
about $150K to cover the costs of running NANOG at about $150K per year.
I'm still searching for the stats study I did that showed a very low
correlation between the quality of the presentations and attendee satisfaction
with NANOG, leading to the conclusion that the value of NANOG is proportional
to other non-presentation activities.
Bill
On May 31, 2010, at 1:28 PM, William Norton wrote:
>
> As to whether this is the right thing to do or not, today I see two sides:
> --
> When I was on the first NANOG SC, I right away wanted to make NANOG a
> separate entity. Part of my rationale was that the community had developed
> this elaborate and relatively fixed (codified) structure (SC, PC, Mailing
> List folks, charter, etc.) but had no organization to control. In my mind,
> the NANOG SC was an *advisory* board, and Merit could do whatever they wanted
> to really; NANOG was always fundamentally a Merit activity. I felt that the
> true SC should be allowed to drive and direct the boat, not merely be on the
> bridge suggesting what the passengers might like to see during the cruise.
>
> On the other hand, the boat needs a captain, not a committee of captains. I
> believe things worked pretty well when NANOG was chaired properly by an
> individual. I for one like to see changes, swift decisive changes. Trying new
> things is key to evolving. This is an agility that is very difficult for a
> committee to do; a group can always come up with more reasons not to try
> something that might fail than to try and learn from the mistake.
>
> Also, from a selfish and lazy perspective, Merit has a lot of what is needed
> to make NANOG happen, pretty much on auto-pilot. All the gear, staff to
> monitor/manage, accept credit cards, reserve hotels, network setup/tear down
> and record/archive, etc. All of these things should exist in the final state
> of the transition, and this is a ton of work. I think Dan Golding himself
> said in the last community meeting that the NANOG organizational structure is
> in place and we can just attending without having to worry about this stuff.
> I agree. And, the path of least resistance is to stay on the current path
> making changes as needed.
>
> I wonder if some other options were considered. For example,
> ---
> 1) Option #1: Stay with Merit - Identify the core issues that bother this
> Steering Committee, and apply pressure the change things to meet those
> expectations. I apologize if this has happened and I missed the
> discussion BTW - the NANOG-Futures list should have been active this
> whole time for these discussions about the real problems encountered with the
> community governance model. The Steering Committees to date have not used
> this valuable community tool effectively; sensitivities aside, a lot more
> should see the light of day for effective governance lest the population tune
> out.
> 2) Option #2: I know that ARIN had expressed to me interest in merging even
> back when I started chairing NANOG in 1995. They have deep pockets and could
