North American Network Operators Group
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Re: Publish or (gulp) Perish

  • From: Howard C. Berkowitz
  • Date: Fri Mar 26 13:04:46 2004 
At 10:45 AM +0000 3/25/04, [email protected] wrote:

 >> Powerpoints have a hard time matching the depth of a refereed journal

 submission, because with the powerpoint, soundbites tend to take
 precedence over content.



Vijay hit it on the head - have we all been foolish by trying to put our
collective expression of service provider best practices and network



design



into an archive of Powerpoint? To quote the Magic Eight Ball, "All
indications point to yes"



It's true that a lot of slide presentations don't have any other
information to back them up. When a researcher presents something
you can almost always go to their published (or pre-published) works
for more information. But this is less true of operator presentations.

So, should NANOG sponsor a document series, like the RFCs or the RIPE
documents, that would form a body of knowledge for IP network operations
best practice? If we did do this, it wouldn't spring into being
overnight, but the program committee could give precedence to
presenters who submit a paper backing up their slides.

Or is this all too academic and too formal for this self-organized
criticality that we call NANOG?

--Michael Dillon




Maybe, maybe not. While RIPE and NANOG aren't exactly the same, RIPE
(as distinct from RIPE-NCC) does seem to publish things.



I've offered several times to help organize, edit, etc.



Indeed, there may be a possible increment that I've tried personally.
Right now, I just have www.netcases.net set up as an anonymous FTP
server (I'm pretty HTML illiterate but am supposed to get help).
I've put my NANOG PowerPoints in a directory there, along with other
directories for other presentations and publication.



What I have done is, at least, make corrections to the original slide
presentation, and I've been intending to update some and perhaps
cross-reference. Backing them up with some papers could be a start.
Maybe this approach can be a testbed to see what a minimalist
supplemental paper might look like.