Re: [Nanog-futures] Proposed bylaws for NewNOG
Thanks for all the feedback received so far (and I'm sure there will be much more, which will also be very welcome). The membership section of this is a product of the Membership Working Group, chaired by Kris Foster. Everything else in the bylaws came from the Governance Working Group. I'll leave addressing the membership-related questions to them. On the other points: Rose Klimovich said: 3. On legislation, I think if the government wants input on proposed laws and regulations, Nanog can give that even though we are not a lobbyist. I'm assuming Rose was referring to the part of section 6 that says, No substantial part of the activities of the corporation shall be the carrying on of propaganda, or otherwise attempting to influence legislation, and the corporation shall not participate in, or intervene in (including the publishing or distribution of statements) any political campaign on behalf of or in opposition to any candidate for public office. That part came from NewNOG's attorney. I believe it is standard 501(c)3 boilerplate, as it looks very similar to what I've seen in the bylaws of other 501(c)3 organizations. My understanding is that there's a critical difference between giving advice, which is ok, and attempting to influence legislation, which is a disqualifier for 501(c)3 status. I don't believe answering questions when asked for advice would run afoul of that section -- indeed, it's arguably an important educational function. Handing out campaign contributions in an attempt to influence the Network Neutrality debate, for instance, would be. There are certainly some grey areas inbetween, which might require seeking legal advice, but I don't think this provision restricts us any more than any of the other 501(c)3 organizations that regularly have representatives testifying before Congress are restricted. Dan Golding says: I think there should be a codified budget and finance committee, to provide forward looking budgets as well as audit capability. I think these are important things to codify in the bylaws. That sounds reasonable. Should I use the following as the language for it, or would the current Working Group like the language to say something else? 9.5 Budget and Finance Committee The Budget and Finance Committee will be responsible, along with the Executive Director and Board of Directors, for NewNOG's budgeting and financial planning. 9.5.1 Budget and Finance Committee Membership and Selection The Budget and Finance Committee will consist of at least three members selected by the Board of Directors. Members of the Budget and Finance Committee may not serve concurrently on the Board of Directors. The chairperson of the Budget and Finance Committee will serve ex officio in a non-voting role on the Board of Directors, in order to facilitate communication between the two groups. Budget and Finance Committee members will serve a two-year term, with terms staggered such that as close to half as possible of the terms expire each year. No member will serve more than two consecutive terms, although additional terms may be served after a one-year interval. A Budget and Finance Committee member may be removed before the expiration of his or her term if at least five members of the Board of Directors vote for the removal. Michael Dillon wrote: Consider adding worldwide as follows: The purpose of NewNOG is to provide forums in the North American region for education and the sharing of knowledge for the worldwide Internet operations community. I think this helps clarify that although the focus for venues is on North America, that the focus of the work is not geographically restricted. We kept the same language there that's in the current NANOG Charter. It's certainly changable if there's a desire to do so, but I think the current language was the result of much negotiation five years ago when it was negotiated. Does anybody else have a strong desire to change that? Thanks, Steve On Sun, 19 Sep 2010, Steve Feldman wrote: The NewNOG governance working group, chaired by Steve Gibbard, has published a set of proposed bylaws for the corporation. These may be found at: http://www.newnog.org/docs/newnog-bylaws.pdf Please take a few minutes to review these and make any comments or suggestions. There will be a question on the ballot during the NANOG election next month to ratify these bylaws. Everyone eligible to vote in the NANOG election will also be eligible to vote on this. Thanks, Steve (for the NewNOG board) ___ Nanog-futures mailing list Nanog-futures@nanog.org https://mailman.nanog.org/mailman/listinfo/nanog-futures -- Steve Gibbard s...@gibbard.org +1 415 717-7842 (cell) ___ Nanog-futures mailing list Nanog-futures@nanog.org https://mailman.nanog.org/mailman
Re: [Nanog-futures] Moving Forward - What kind of NANOG do we want?
On Thu, 1 Jul 2010, Daniel Golding wrote: The way forward is to have sharp cut-off from having quasi-professional meetings and transition into having real events. Real events have real sponsorship models, not a few bucks for a break or a beer and gear. Real events are planned a year in advance, not a few months. Real events don't require hosts to dedicate a dozen staff members - they can just write a check. I usually find myself agreeing completely with Dan in these future of NANOG discussions, but the hard line on sponsorship makes me uncomfortable. I've certainly seen real events that function the way Dan describes. ISPCon comes to mind. I'm sure the model makes a lot of sense for their for-profit organizers, but for attendees it tends to put up a lot of barriers and prevent the sort of freewheeling culture that, for me, makes NANOG and the other less formal operator meetings so useful. NANOG, or NewNOG, or whatever it ends up being called, needs to bring in enough money to keep the organization running. It doesn't need to -- and as a non-profit it probably legally can't -- run a big surplus. Assuming we can make ends meet, I'd hate to prioritize money over creativity. -Steve ___ Nanog-futures mailing list Nanog-futures@nanog.org https://mailman.nanog.org/mailman/listinfo/nanog-futures
Re: [Nanog-futures] Membership, was Transition update
I went looking through old e-mails to see if I could figure out where the current membership system came from. The earliest e-mail I could find outlining it was this: Date: Mon, 22 Nov 2004 19:12:26 -0500 From: Daniel Golding dgold...@burtongroup.com To: Stephen J. Wilcox st...@telecomplete.co.uk, Hannigan, Martin hanni...@verisign.com Cc: nanog-ref...@nac.net Subject: Re: [nanog-reform] Draft List reform plan It doesn't have to be one person. Here's a possibility... - An elected NANOG committee. Merit would have a representative on this committee - They appoint a group of FAQ maintainers/list admins. Preferably they would have little to do, except for unsubscribing jabbering mail clients and what not. This is a group of volunteers. One member of the elected committee should be the lead. - They appoint a program committee to review presentations. This is a group of volunteers. One member of the elected committee should be coordinating this. Other members of the elected committee could work with hosts, face the conference, help steer the agenda. Merit would work with this group, handling registration, signage, room setup. I suggest an elected committee of 5-7 with staggered two or three year terms. Electorate would be anyone who attended a NANOG meeting in the last year (3 meetings). - Dan This looks looks a lot like what we ended up with. Steve Wilcox then wrote: On a related note, I was just thinking.. someone mentioned before an issue with committee elections in that nanog doesnt have members as such. There is a possible solution.. an annual membership subscription, there may be other uses to being a nanog member but in this context i'm thinking it would give you an electorate. Of course we dont want to increase overall costs so soemthing like a $300 annual fee would be given back to you as eg $450 of discounts to nanog meets (ie a $50 meeting discount assuming 3 meetings/ann as an incentive). And Dan replied: Here's the issue with an annual membership subscription - the only benefit would be a vote. The result would be a few purchased votes and a non-representative Steering Committee. And its not like Merit needs more money :) There was then a lot of discussion about how to keep the voting process from being hijacked by organizations sending too many people to the NANOG meetings. Dan suggested that the situation could be prevented by a secret ballot, such that employers wouldn't be able to check on how their employees voted. There were a bunch of proposals to prevent employees of equipment vendors from voting, to keep the vendors from taking over NANOG. Fortunately, that idea didn't go anywhere. Dan appears to have cut that discussion off with this: Date: Wed, 22 Dec 2004 19:03:56 -0500 From: Daniel Golding dgold...@burtongroup.com To: Adam Rothschild a...@latency.net, Steve Gibbard s...@stevegibbard.com Cc: nanog-ref...@nac.net Subject: Re: [nanog-reform] Issues to address The easiest way to define the electorate is this: Any person who has attended at least one NANOG conference in the last calendar year is entitled to vote for steering committee members. - Dan That appears to have settled the issue. Skipping forward to now, I kind of like the idea of having a professional organization with a more formalized membership. At the same time, the current system seems to have worked remarkably well, and I'm not sure how much sense it makes to mess with it. -Steve ___ Nanog-futures mailing list Nanog-futures@nanog.org https://mailman.nanog.org/mailman/listinfo/nanog-futures
Re: [Nanog-futures] Transition update
On Fri, 28 May 2010, Joe Abley wrote: I think it's quite within the SC's mandate to do this without a vote, and I also think there's no obvious mechanism within the bylaws to hold a vote on any particular issue (we had our vote; we voted for members of the SC). The NANOG charter, under which the SC was elected, says NANOG is an activity of Merit. It specifies a process for ammendments, which involves having a vote of the membership. Of course, any group of people can start up a corporation, enter into contracts, and host conferences (which none of us have to attend). Therefore, the NANOG charter probably doesn't technically apply to this situation. Still, the given that the charter is what gave the SC their unofficial legitimacy to contemplate such a move, it would be nice if they followed its spirit and held a vote. I'm also curious about the financial story here. If the corporation is signing hotel contracts, I assume it has some funds. Are those coming from the Merit NANOG accounts, or is somebody else putting up the money? If the membership were to vote to stick with Merit as the NANOG administrator, is that something Merit would still be willing to do? For the record, I'll say that if such a vote were held, I would probably vote for NANOG to become a standalone organization. I also don't think this move would have come as a surprise to anybody involved in the hallway NANOG governance discussions at the Austin NANOG. Given the questions that members of the Steering Committee were asking there, I don't think they rushed into at least the beginning of this process. -Steve -- Steve Gibbard s...@gibbard.org +1 415 717-7842 (cell) ___ Nanog-futures mailing list Nanog-futures@nanog.org https://mailman.nanog.org/mailman/listinfo/nanog-futures
Re: [Nanog-futures] [NANOG-announce] The Evolution of NANOG
On Thu, 15 Apr 2010, vijay gill wrote: I have been to a few and I read the notes. Still not quite sure what problem this is hoping to solve. As I said, I wasn't privvy to most of the discussions surrounding this. I don't really know what's being proposed, or what's transpired between the Austin NANOG (when I last discussed this with some of the people involved) and now. The catalyst for some of the discussion in Austin was that Merit had laid off some of the staff members involved in running the NANOG organization and producing the conferences. There was a lot of apprehension among some who had been previously very happy with the job Merit was doing of running NANOG about what this meant, and whether Merit would remain committed to NANOG and its open governance process. That's the end of what I know. What follows is speculation. The NANOG meetings, at least, are probably big enough that they do need professional coordination, no matter who owns them. It seems conceivable that NANOG Inc. could be an Ann Arbor based organization, hire the organizing staff that Merit has laid off, and continue with the meeting staff status quo. Or it could have different staff, be outsourced to some other industry organization, or contracted out to one of the many conference organizing companies. I'm interested in seeing which direction the Steering Committee wants to go on this, or if they've gotten that far yet. -Steve ___ Nanog-futures mailing list Nanog-futures@nanog.org https://mailman.nanog.org/mailman/listinfo/nanog-futures
[Nanog-futures] More information about this morning's announcement?
I'm wondering if there's any more information available about the efforts to separate NANOG from Merit (as announced by Steve Feldman this morning in mail to the main NANOG list). It sounds like there's already an effort to incorporate an organization. What sort of staff and budget is it expected to need? Where would it be based? Are there specific people lined up to run it, or is that more of an implementation detail than is being addressed now? I understand these things take time, and that the official transition proposal won't be released for a few months. Mostly I guess I'm just looking for raw data to satisfy my curiosity. Steering Committee minutes, if that's where this is being discussed, would be fine. But it looks like the most recent minutes on the Steering Committee website are from February 9, and don't mention this effort. Thanks for all the work on this. It was sounding from discussions at the Austin NANOG as if such a separation might be the right thing to do. I'm not questioning the decision; just wanting a better view of the process. Thanks, Steve ___ Nanog-futures mailing list Nanog-futures@nanog.org https://mailman.nanog.org/mailman/listinfo/nanog-futures
[Nanog-futures] Smoke at NANOG meetings
I'd like to thank the people at Merit and on the various NANOG committees for putting on what was for the most part another great NANOG meeting. However, for those of us with sensitive resperatory systems, the bar and lobby, where much of the important stuff at NANOG happens, were really unpleasant places this time. Even after making a point of leaving when the smoke got too thick, I was waking up the next morning with my nose and throat incredibly sore. Given how rare it is to find hotel lobbies in the US or Canada, or even in Europe, that still allow smoking, it doesn't seem like it would be difficult to adopt a policy of only holding NANOG meetings in non-smoking hotels. I'd like to request that Merit or the Steering Committee adopt such a policy. -Steve ___ Nanog-futures mailing list Nanog-futures@nanog.org http://mailman.nanog.org/mailman/listinfo/nanog-futures
Re: [Nanog-futures] [NANOG-announce] Election reminder - charter amendments
On Thu, 2 Oct 2008, Philip Smith wrote: Hello everyone, Please take a moment to look at the current charter amendment proposals for the October ballot at: http://www.nanog.org/charter/ If you have comments on the proposals, please post them on the nanog-futures list or send them to [EMAIL PROTECTED] in the next few days. A and B lok fine to me, although given that serious mischeif would require the participation of multiple steering committee members, I'm not sure how important it is that an individual one be easil removable. Most of the charter clean-up thing (C) looks fine to me. I notice that the last clean-up point in C turns the power the membership has currently to recommend changes to the charter into the power to actually change the charter. My recollection is that the recommended wording is there because having ultimate authority over the charter was important to Merit, who might agree to change it in response to recommendations. Has that changed? -Steve ___ Nanog-futures mailing list Nanog-futures@nanog.org http://mailman.nanog.org/mailman/listinfo/nanog-futures
Re: [Nanog-futures] [Outages] Outages have an Outage? (fwd)
I've been seeing two kinds of discussion on the NANOG mailing list about the Outages mailing list. I've seen people post asking about various outages and be redirected to the Outages list, and I've seen outage notifications saying that the Outages list has been down for days (or maybe longer) at a time. Is the Outages list of interest to the NANOG community? Should NANOG, which if I'm remembering correctly has a nice shiny new professionally managed mail server take over the operation of the Outages list in order to improve its reliability? -Steve On Tue, 17 Jun 2008, Gadi Evron wrote: Lightning storm, subsequent commercial power failure. UPS not up due to restructing. We are working on getting backup servers alive, as to DNS we used to secondary at vixie's, but due to IP changes and movements removed that for now. A comedy of mistakes. Details below. -- Forwarded message -- Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2008 21:18:45 + From: Randy Vaughn [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Jason Iannone [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [Outages] Outages have an Outage? Hi Jason et al! The rack restructuring was only able to proceed as far as one rack and did not make to the point of attaching the isotf server to a UPS. As luck has it, our provider's location lost commercial power this morning. The remainder of the rack restructuring will be announced once we have a firm timeline established for that activity. On a slightly different matter. I appreciate the problems caused by high list volume. Digest mode is one potential solution, list moderation is another. R On 14:55 Tue 17 Jun , Jason Iannone wrote: We weren't able to resolve anything on amigostecnicos.net. isotf admin care to elaborate? ___ Outages mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://isotf.org/mailman/listinfo/outages ___ Outages mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://isotf.org/mailman/listinfo/outages ___ Nanog-futures mailing list Nanog-futures@nanog.org http://mailman.nanog.org/mailman/listinfo/nanog-futures
Re: [Nanog-futures] The Peering BOF and the Fallout?
I'm sorry to be a bit contrarian here, but... Looking at the crowd that assembles for the peering BOF, it's clearly one of the more popular things on the NANOG program. It may not draw the raw numbers of people that the general session does, but it does tend to pack whatever room it's in. People in the room tend to be attentive and engaged, whether or not they have anything to do with peering. It's a lot of fun, and it's clear to me that enough attendees want it on the program for it to be worthwhile. That said, while the latest one struck me as a vast improvement over the last few, I can't say I've actually learned much from most of the recent peering BOFs or from the last few exchange point operator forums I've been to. The agendas tend to strike me as entertaining but recycled filler, perhaps useful for getting people into a room and talking, but not nearly what they could be. When I think back to the peering BOFs and exchange operator-sponsored forums of several years ago, I used to come out of them with some better understanding of how peering worked. There were talks on things like how much of peering traffic was P2P back when that was new and scary. Large parts of the program were made up of peering personals, where I would learn who was looking for what sort of peers. In addition, there were exchange operator-sponsored forums, in which people would give talks about peering-related issues they had faced and how they had solved them, observations about how peering worked in other parts of the world, views into highly secretive tier 1 peering operations, and the like. The exchange operator-sponsored forums are now gone, having been replaced by parties where the content consists of fake game shows. The peering BOF content now consists of things like the great debates, which while it's entertaining to to see people trying to justify extreme positions, never feel to me like they get anywhere close to establishing what the right answer to the question being debated -- presumably somewhere between the two extremes -- would be. So, I wouldn't suggest that the current peering BOF or exchange operator-sponsored forums go away. They're good fun social events and NANOG could often use more of those. But I don't think we've run out of new things to say, or new issues to address, in the areas of peering and other forms of interconnection. It would be nice if there were some more serious forums as well. (And yes, I know, this counts as sniping from the sidelines. The big impediment to what I'm asking for here is presumably having somebody step up and organize it). -Steve On Sun, 24 Feb 2008, Ren Provo wrote: On behalf of the NANOG PC: Nothing has been submitted in the NANOG tool and nothing has been declined. The survey results from NANOG42 this week have not been made available to the PC yet. We would like to review community feedback on this topic. Hallway discussions this past week in San Jose suggest some would like to see a more diverse selection of topics at the very least. Bill was asked on Wednesday not to make commitments until we, the NANOG PC, are able to review feedback and perhaps expand the cramped format into a track. Thanks, -Ren Provo, NANOG Program Committee, Vice-Chair On Sun, Feb 24, 2008 at 8:00 PM, Patrick W. Gilmore [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Feb 24, 2008, at 12:57 PM, Joel Jaeggli wrote: Chris Malayter wrote: Would you ask the PC to release the minutes from the SJC nanog and any meeting since. Given that the pc last met on tuesday at lunch, I think the minutes when released will prove to be a poor source the sort information you're looking for. Let's stop dancing around the issue. There was discussion regarding the Peering BoF amongst the SC PC. There is no reason to hide this fact - just the opposite. And there were at least some provisional outcomes from those discussions. I am unclear on why those decisions are not being announced to the community. The question is where we stand in the process. If the PC does not have an official stance, then we should all stop speculating until there is an official stance or (hopefully) an official request for input from the community. If the PC has an official stance, then the community needs to hear it ASAP. Either way, gossiping on a mailing list is not the right way. We had a revolution, let's follow our own rules. As Randy like to proclaim every 14 ms, let's have some transparency. What was said, why was it said, and what decisions were made? SC / PC members, please step up, so we can all go back to arguing over leaking deaggs. :) -- TTFN, patrick ___ Nanog-futures mailing list Nanog-futures@nanog.org http://mailman.nanog.org/mailman/listinfo/nanog-futures ___ Nanog-futures mailing list Nanog-futures@nanog.org
Re: [Nanog-futures] Objection: RE: [admin] Re: EU Official: IP Is Personal
On Tue, 29 Jan 2008, Robert E. Seastrom wrote: Pete Templin [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: And seriously, can we stop with the if you don't like it, you must volunteer to serve on it to effect your desired changes mantra? Why? The people who bellyache and the people who have skin in the game are by and large a disjoint set. As someone who's put up (in more ways than one), I encourage those who are not willing to put up to shut up. Speaking as somebody who has put up a few times, and who has been more recently shutting up most of the time... For the record, I don't care if that particular thread dies; it'd strayed off-topic. However, I think the policy interpretation is too strict and warrants clarification. Reasonable people may disagree with any particular MLC action, however, I don't think that overall policy interpretation is too strict right now. It seems to me that there are two issues, topicality and quality. I'm not generally finding the NANOG list worth reading these days, and that makes me sad. I don't think I've noticed anything particularly off-topic recently. The mailing list committee must be doing a good job of dealing with that sort of thing. What I am seeing is discussion threads going on and on and on, long after there's nothing new left to say. Mostly this seems to be a fairly small group of people who appear to feel compelled to voice strong opinions over and over again on every topic that comes up, whether it's something they know anything about or not. I don't think those people add any value to the discussion, and I don't think the hordes of people who generally jump in to argue with them from different but equally uninformed perspectives do either. But, most of the time those people are on-topic. They're just not useful or interesting. I'd be quite happy to see the list administrators going to some of the most frequent posters and asking them to post less, whether on topic or not. -Steve ___ Nanog-futures mailing list Nanog-futures@nanog.org http://mailman.nanog.org/mailman/listinfo/nanog-futures
RE: proposed NANOG charter amendments
On Thu, 27 Sep 2007, Michael K. Smith - Adhost wrote: Proposal 2: Shall program committee members be permitted to skip rating presentation proposals that do not fall into their areas of expertise? Wording: Change the third paragraph of Section 8.3.2 as follows: Old version: Each member of the Program Committee must review all presentations submitted for each meeting. The Chair may excuse a member from one meeting's review cycle due to extenuating circumstances, but if a member misses two meetings in a row, he or she may be removed from the committee. New version: Each member of the Program Committee must review all presentations submitted for each meeting and rate those presentations which fall into their areas of expertise. The Chair may excuse a member from one meeting's review cycle due to extenuating circumstances, but if a member misses two meetings in a row, he or she may be removed from the committee. It seems like you're talking about two totally different things here, punitive actions for missing meetings and requirements for PC Members to audit presentations. Unless it's really worth defining both separately I would scratch the whole thing. If you need to define punitive actions, why not just say a simple majority may take action to remove a Program Committee Member for cause. The first sentence, taken alone, could be listed as a portion of PC Members assigned duties (if such a thing exists). Since we're amending an existing document, this would be two separate changes. The one being proposed here is supposed to reduce the requirements for Program Committee members (although, rereading it, I see that in the old version there wasn't actually a requirement for members to rate anything, as opposed to just reviewing things, so maybe it accidentally adds more requirements instead). It does that by adding a few words to an existing paragraph. The other thing being debated is the language about the procedure for removing Program Committee members. That's in the same paragraph, because it's how we wrote it a few years ago, but it's not really related to this proposal. If it needs to change, that should probably be done via a separate amendment. I don't have strong feelings on the merits of either of the proposed amendments (and as long as I'm drafting charter changes at the request of an elected committee I'm not part of, any strong feelings I might develop should probably be kept out of this). I can talk to some degree about the initial intent of the charter, with the caveat that there were lots of people involved and we may not have all intended the same thing. My intent, which was fairly influential since I was the last one to do major editing on the document, was to to make sure the Steering Committee selection process was very clear, to give them some power, and beyond that to give them a pretty free hand. They were going to be elected, while those of us working on the charter were self-appointed, so any decisions they made were going to have a lot more legitimacy than the decisions we were making. Others had some very strong concerns about the operation of the Program Committee, so that got specified in probably more detail than I would have preferred. So, in that vein, it seems to me that that the vagueness in the Program Committee member-removal text is ok. The Steering Committee is in charge, and if there's a desire to remove a member of the Program Committee, the procedure ought to be whatever they say it is. But, that said, we also intended the charter to be changeable if people felt the need to do so. That's what the Amendments procedure is there for. -Steve
