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Community Meeting Notes

  • From: Matthew Petach
  • Date: Mon Oct 24 11:29:58 2005
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(oops--sent this out last night, but forgot to change the
sender to the subscribed-to-nanog address first,
gomennasai minnasan)

Matt


I took some notes at the NANOG community meeting
tonight, and thought I'd share them with the list members
in the spirit of transparency--apologies for the
typos that may still exist, I'm heading to the social now.  :)

Matt



2005.10.23 Steering Committee

Randy Bush, IIJ, Tokyo
current chair of the steering committee

Steering committee progress/status Randy
Program committee report (steve)
financial report (betty)
mailing list report (chris)

Other than vetted presentations, each speaks
as individual.

Microphone is open throughout.

How do we progress forward?

Steering committee report

what was asked for?
what has been done?
what should or will be done?
what does the community want?

REferences:
Dan Golding's "Why REfport NaNOG"
httpH;//ww.nanog.org/mtg-0501/pdf/golding.pdff
[email protected] mailing list archives
dissucions withing comjunity
charter is up

Mailing list
problem: contining problems witn NANOG mailing list
 administration
solutions: you asked for even moderation,
transparency, fairness, clue

So far: we now have a mailing list amdin group,
drawn from voluneers from the
community, tasked with moderating the list
Need: documented process, appeal, ... ie transparency
Philip Glass from Cisco, Bill Norton, Billo

Mailing list commitee: Rob Seastrom, Steven Gibbard,
Susan Harris, Chris Malayter,

Mailing ilist issues
SC process re ML comittee not in charter
terms
selection
prolicy and process review and approval
ML policy and process: document, get
c ommunity feedback and modify
ML appeals preoss: to SC

Program comittee
joe abley,
bert russ,
bill norton
pete templeton?

problem: percieved as being out of touch with
the general operator community, community powerless

solution: empower community to select content
so far: OPC transition from 100% merit select o sec
  selecte 8 from exsiting PC, 8 from comminity
 nominations with fixe gterms
so far: clearly identify PC members (nametags)
engage them: orange blobs on their badges!
To do: Steve will give PC reprort

PC selection by SC
Call for volunteers 12 re-ups and 18 new
PC/SC call to discuss new volunters
sub-SC formed of SC members who were
not also PC members
SC and sub-SC took input from public
and PC
sub-SC met and decided the eight to keep
Full SC met to decide which eight new
 volunteers to add
Too many good candidates!

2006 PC
returnign
bill woodcock
chris morrow
dave oleary
hank kimler
joe abley
kevin epperson
steve feldman
ted seely

new
danield goldin
jenniver rexford
jel gaeggli
josh snowohrn
pete templon

Charter
No proposals recived for this year
formalizing of ML for next year

General
Problem: no tranpsarency in the way NANOG is run
Solution: segmenting problem and externalizing
  tranaparent processes
Steering comiitee is ultmately accountable to you
 --we own this one
so far: SC selected PC
so far: Merit/NANOG financial statements available
 @NANOG
SC and PC have private butdirecty accesible mailing list
[email protected]
and [email protected] specifically for community
 interaction with these two groups
SC minutes are publically archived

Still to Do
First time through this process (new PC,
SC working with Merit, etc) trial and error
Mailing list moderation still a challenge
need documentation and community discussion,
exploration of policy and proceedures
BLOG /Wiki/SlashNOG
Trial of new tech gear at NANOG

Adminstrative mailing lists
engineering and ops discussion only
[email protected]
open meta discussion
[email protected]
steering committee: [email protected]
program committee: [email protected]
ml admins [email protected]

Discussion?
Why do people come to NANOG?  What is it that
brings us together?

Meet face to face with people we interact with
electronically,
find out new trends, new developments, find out
where the internet is going around the world.
Find out how to do her job more effectively.
Would like longer breaks--15 minutes is really
tough for syncing up with people.

USENIX facesavers--put faces to names would
probably be a nice thing to add on.

Good to get operational information *off the
record*, not just from

Bring back the lunches!!!  box lunches would be
easy, and would let people meet and greet.
Requires less time, allows for better interaction.

Good opportunity to meet with peers, people we
want to peer with, or people we need to smack for
bad peering.  :D

What about a calendar online for while we're at
NANOG, so people can schedule time to meet.

Susan Harris talks about lunch challenges--box
lunches would be better, less of a logistics
challenge than getting sitdown space.

Steve Wilcox suggests that maybe trying to cut
down on the evening talks to allow more time to
talk to people.

Mike Hughes points out it's hard to have a program
that fits for 400 people as well as allows for
smaller gatherings.
He's also a wG chair for RIPE, and had trouble
scheduling things.  WG chairs met halfway between
each meeting, tried to sort out things face to
face between meetings, there's really no substitute
for it.

Blend of premeditated meetings, and ad-hoc meetings
that happen.

Brokaw notes that knowing what other people do, as
well; check off a box with your interests.

Company names should be larger!!  Also put AS numbers
as an option after company name.
And list your interests!

Todd Underwood notes that it'll be more successful as
an organization if we make it so that people who come
to their first one get useful exchanges, so they want
to come back, so that they find the whole process
open and accessible.

Bill Norton notes the survey form results are now
being put up online, so that people can see what
the sentiment from the crowd is.  Now, you can see
what the sentiments are from everyone else.

Pete Krukenberg, Utah education network, he's one of
the people Todd was talking about.  Small network,
they don't peer anymore, middle of nowhere.  They
hosted NANOG in Utah, about 250 people showed; those
would be the hardcore crowd.  The other half are the
show up once, then don't come back, the ones who
aren't here for peering--having longer breaks, and
non evening stuff won't attract the non-peering members
to come here.

Dan Golding notes the peering people and security
people are well organized and vocal, but there are
lots of enterprise people who would be well served
to show up and meet their carriers, and the network
engineers who support them.
Possibly revitalize the ops track, the third leg of
NANOG?   The SP and peering community leaders are
easy to spot, they run the BOFs, etc.  Need some
good ops people to lead the charge.
The depeering, IPv6 stuff is very timely; that'll
be one of the major measurement points for ops
folks; if it's actionable, if it's stuff they can
use immediately, it'll attract them more than the
researchy-type stuff.
WBN summaries: education is part of it.
DGold; many large enterprises are learning BGP, or
have inherited BGP folks from the ISP bust who are
now doing VPNs over MPLS, etc, the cool stuff we could
learn from as well.
Need to figure out how to get those people engaged.

Pete Templin, texlink?  Second time here--some folks
he wants to meet, he's in a company of 45, 2 run IPLS,
MPLS network; one runs and deploys it, and shows up
in the morning; so he's looking to gather deployment
tools, learn from mistakes of others, etc; combo of
tutorials, faces to meet, and somewhat worried about
tracks as that fragments the community.
4-pop network, N+1 is a tough proposal for him to
conquer.
Mat Bouncett?, canadian internet registry thingie
Tiny edge network, don't care much about the huge
migration stories, but the smaller networks, smaller
ISPs, etc, stuff that's interesting.
Albert Hu, Bloomberg, financial type enterprise--he's
here as an enterprise, used to be at Arbor; there's
good network engineers there, very complicated stuff,
why don't they come here?
There's a perception that enterprises run differently
from ISPs.  Legacy bits like RIP that ISPs look down
on, treat as second class networks.
Moving from ATM to MPLS, how to measure traffic on
those LSPs--seemed like a perfect reason to come
measure traffic in their tunnels--netflow with MPLS
labels, snmp, etc?
point to multipoint multicast, many things that would
seem to be out of the reach of ISPs.

Richard Hill--guest of Tom Vest; internet governance
debate in the newspaper, works for ITU now.  Used to
be with HP, notes that offline discussions are part
of the big meeting draw.

Raman shu?  CW, out of Phoenix.  Find more peering
partners in Phoenix; about 2.5 gigs in phoenix, they
want to find more peers in that area.

Josh will do a photobook for the unified peering
forum, for example, so that people can recognize
each other.
>From the datacenter perspective, thermodynamic
issues are cascading, might have a talk about it
next time, how do datacenter people handle these
growing issues?  We all face the same BTU challenges,
the same space challenges, etc.
24x7 exchange is dedicated to datacenter guys, might
be interested to do a joint meeting with them.
Mike Hughes reminisces about history of trying to
keep things cool at LINX 8 or 9 years ago.

Bill Norton summarizes as: more datacenter topics,
esp. around network deployments and buildouts.

John Springer, outside Seattle, small telco.
Long time list lurker; learn what is reasonable and
what is possible.  Much stuff coming down the road,
hope to learn from people who have been along the
paths already.  Tutorials and sessions are main
values, since they're so small, not as

Mike Kolestrin?? small midwest, transplant from
Silicon Valley, wondering how most people come
here?  How do you justify to your management
the need for showing up here.
He's glad the first-timer question was raised;
Todd underwood asks what about the website could
be improved.
Conference goes from Monday to Wednesday, but
the agenda doesn't show much detail up front,
hard to show value add as takeaway.
Asks if there's a way to group people together
into areas of interest?
Dgold asks if we could have a mentor-mixer type
meeting, to get the first timers somewhat paired
up with people who can help them through the
conference.
Back to Mike, can it be polished up for beancounters?
At least with general topics.

Mike Hughes notes transparency helps; the whitebox
was a bit hard to stomach for some people.

Randy notes we're running short on time, if we want
to get to the rest

Jeff Robo, RCN, justification issue, even old timers
have to justify it to the beancounters.  Many people
end up covering it themselves, because we just know
it really, really is worth it.  We might need to just
add another day, rather than just trying to squeeze
everything into 2 days the way we are now.

Todd Christell, small companies tend to interbreed,
often clue is lost, think their way is the best way.
He's from a municipality, but because he gets good
information, good knowledge from the meeting; he
sets out to learn at least one thing he can take
back from NANOG and directly apply to his work at
the company.

Richard Lamb, state department, DECnet, old timer,
This is a powerful group of people on the backbone,
policymakers will need to interface with this group
over time to understand how the network works to
set policy reasonably.

Spencer Dawkins, ask these questions on the list; the
people here are self-selected as those who were able
to make the justification.  The changes happening in
the community are making it easier to sell to management.

Michael Sinatra, UC Berkeley.  Helps researchers, but
doesn't actually do research.  Not all edu people are
researchers, some have real operational challenges
same as the rest of us.  But doesn't find as many
reasons to talk to people in the hallway, because
there isn't as much in common at the moment.  Do we
want more EDU folks, or less?  It's a two-way street,
why don't more EDU folks _want_ to come?  He comes
once a year, finds the general sessions helpful,
he has colleagues here, not as useful as if he
were at CALren/CENIC organization, per se, but the
general session is useful, and he shows up for that.
Surprised Mike Van Norman from UCLA should be here,
the USC folks should be here, would like to encourage
them to come at future meetings, would like to see
more critical mass from educational institutions.
Sometimes sessions help justify things they were
wanting to do anyhow.

Matt Ahmed, University of Puerto Rico, reprents the
PRIX, Puerto Rico Internet Exchange, changed the name
now.  Not trying to do something new from an absolute
sense, but new for him, and new for Puerto Rico, so
wants to learn from those of us who have gone through
the same learning curve.

Jason Chambers, CENIC/CALren, first time, technical
and social aspects, won't be a problem finding a
drinking partner, the face picture idea would be
interesting to partner with something like linkedin
or something like that.

Josh Snowhorn wraps up the microphone by saying
it might be good to have some designated ambassadors
for each category to introduce people.

Leo Bicknell, microbofs, get small groups of people
together, many bofs at the same time forces you to
choose what's really important to you.  Keep them
small and fast.

Program Comittee Chair report
Steve Feldman

PC selection process:
Call for presentations
Deadline
Ratings: each PC member rates each
  submission on a scale of 1-5 and adds comments
Conference call to determine consensus

Comments go to other PC members and back to the author
as well, useful in both directions.

Accept, reject, or conditional.

Program process part 2
Second round of comments
second round confrence call
anything after that deadline is chair's discretion

NANOG 35:
41 submissions, up from 29
 26 accepted
 1 withdrawn
second round: 5 new, 4 conditional
4 very late, 1 accepted

Areas for improvement
Keep track of time throughout the process
Tool improvements
 self-service submission web interface
 reports

Program Format:
Tracks
 -not possible with this hotel layout
 -we'll try again next time
Free evenings
 -BOFs moved to Monday afternoon
  evenings are free
  Less general session time
  Comments?  FILL OUT THE BLASTED SURVEY!

Program Format 2
Lightning talks
 - a good idea but...
 - no time in this program
 - we'll try again next time

Feedback:
Talk to us!
PC memebers have orange dots.
Email us!
 [email protected]
 [email protected]

WBN notes program chair is a difficult, difficult
task--big thanks to Steve Feldmen to donating years
of his life to making it a success this past year.
Huge thank you to CNET for letting him do this as
well.

Mike Hughes notes going heavily tracked is it
fragments the community.
RIPE went into too many tracks, got hard to
schedule it.

NANOG35 Community Meeting
Betty Burke
Project Manager
Merit Network

Special projects at Merit:

NANOG 34 meeting budget report
JUne 30 2005 Year end budget report
New activities at Merit
Planet Marin is audit company for Merit;
once done, will be on web

NANOG 34 seattle june 2005
meeting budget
revenue             214,530.00
expenses
equipment/supplies    7,744.56
merit staff travel   12,915.72
nonmerit staff travel 2,609.46
speakers and comps   24,957.80
Hosting(Hotel)      103,674.82
Merit Hosting        67,217.99
Total expenses:     219,119.36
Meeting balance      (4,589.36)

speakers and comps are a lost revenue expenditure,
rather than a true expense, but it does come off
the books as an expense.

FY 2004-2005
Year end budget report

REvenut
 carry forward          223,719
 sponsors/registaratino 712,000
revenue total:          935,719

Expenses
 Salary                 114,116
 Equip/Gen               27,990
 Hosting(Hotel)         278,409
 Travel                  41,992
 Merit Hosting          201,166
Expense total           693,673
Balance                 244,046

Committed to reserve of 200,000 to 300,000 to
cover extended hotel contracts, as the contracts
need to be signed for hotels 18 months in advance,
to cover insurance.  There is a surplus, but it
is to cover the 18 month plan.

New activities at merit:
Voting process
Wireless network tools (in case hosts can't do it)
improved meeting archive and video server upgrades
multicast support
meeting broadcast into break area
discussion forum trial
projects in the works
  presenters website
  nanog list server upgrade
  nanog web registration improvements

The broadcast of the meeting out into the breakroom
allows for ad-hoc meetings, and speeding up encoding
so morning session will be available by the afternoon
so you can watch it at home.

Now working on be able to inhouse do multicast, as
university of oregon isn't able to continue doing it
moving forward.

Discussion trial, some different tools being tested,
based on feedback from Las Vegas.
Trying out slashNOG format, see how community
reacts to that as a discussion venue.

Want to make it easier for presenters to put
material up on the web, an authenticated area
where they can put the material up as they go, and
make sure latest are up there.

Make sure NANOG list is operational, that it is
up and performing well, so they continue to look
at the hardware, and make sure the listserv is
well architected and run.

Sounds like there's still some room for improvements
to the NANOG registration process on the web, they
may add some additional fields as well.

Thank you!
NANOG Community
Merit Staff (Betty, Susan, Carol, Dawn, etc)
NANOG Program Committee
NANOG List Admins
NANOG Steering Committee
 (conference calls every other Thursday, meeting,
  learning how to make the process transparent while
  keeping Merit a close part of the loop and fulfilling
  their needs).

As soon as numbers are audited, they will be put up
on the website--so, note these are PRELIMINARY numbers.


Rob Seastrom, from Mailing List committee.
No slides, under the impression Chris Malayter would
be doing the powerpoints for it.  :D

They watch the list, listen for people sounding
unhappy about the process, and talk to the ones
who seem to be making other unhappy, and try to
avert situations that might be cause for needing
to remove people from the list.
Gotten pretty good results to date.  In the months
the committee has been running this, only 2 people
have needed to be removed.

Processes are somewhat informal still; taking complaints
and observations, and try to take a minimally invasive
course of action.  Jared set up a Wiki where process
is being developed.  Appeal process also in flux.

One thing that wasn't clear to start with; membership
term length and replacement.  Martin Hannigan was
replaced by Rob Seastrom, he was asked to find someone
who would be willing to replace him.  It worked in
that case, and it seems to be working in the next
case.  But would like to move to a public call for
volunteers, similar to the other positions, and the
Steering Commmittee would pick from the volunteers.

Term length seems to be indefinite, but that's not a
very democratic way to handle things.  Would like to
have a means for having rotational offset so that
there's carryover from each transition.

It is the current team's opinion right now that the
current way to handle appeals is directly to Merit;
in essence, passing upstairs to Betty and Susan, which
would put Merit in a much more hands-off mode than they
are today, and would be brought in to deal with appeal
situations.

Any questions from audience?

Bill Norton asks--when you kick people off the list,
there is hopefully a large documentation list on the
warnings that were issued, so any appeal to Merit
can refer to a paper trail to determine what was said
by whom, etc.
Rob notes all exchanges are archived for reference
if there are debates about what transpired; there isn't
a more formal documentation trail yet.
So, how many warnings does it take before someone
reaches the limit?
The main list doesn't get CC'd on the warnings, and
most of the warnings are couched in terms of requests
to correct behaviour, so there is a lot of activity,
but they are nonetheless loathe to swing the big
axe, and it requires fairly egregious transgressions.

Rob reads all messages on the list, as required, and
refrains from the urge to killfile threads.  They spend
substantial periods of time, 30 to 60 minutes a day to
make sure they can be reactive in a timely fashion.

This is one of the more thankless jobs, as it's mostly
invisible, and can attact much ire. 

No term limit was set, due to concerns about burnout;
thus far, nobody has lasted a year at it.
dgold notes that it would be good if moderation
happens to a thread, the subject line gets adjusted
to let people know they shouldn't reply to the
threads.  But on long threads, people won't see the
closure of the thread when hitting replies.

Steve Gibbard notes he's in the process of being
replaced, as he's hit burnout now.  The lack of
term was there because he anticipated nobody would
want to do it for very long, and so far he's been
right; if there were term limits, they'd be very
short.

If you have opinions, voice them on the nanog-futures
list!!  :)

Back to Betty for clarification on Merit's role.
She is on the admin list, and watches the threads,
to keep a heartbeat, and takes the comments back
to the committee as well.  Susan Harris is more
actively involved, and Sue Joiner deals with the
mechanics

Sue Joiner is pulling together the stats and
information about the list admin details, the
volunteers do most of the work.

Back to Randy.  Should we do this again next time?

Open mike midpoint a problem?  Not so long a general
flow is maintained.

Hard Rock Cafe, end of citywalk.  out, down the street,
take the stairway to the right, follow that across the
bridge across the road, and then five more minutes
to hit the cafe.

Meeting wraps up around 1931 hours as people head
to the social.