Hi everyone - apologies for a rather long message, but I wanted to bring you up-to-date on some steps the Program Committee and Merit have taken to evolve NANOG since our community meeting in Las Vegas. *Many thanks* to those of you who attended and gave us feedback - we learned a lot and look forward to working with all of you to maintain the high standards we have come to expect from NANOG.
Second, the NANOG Program Committee has elected a new chair - thank you Steve Feldman! Steve will now handle speaker communications that deal with content, and will make any last-minute decisions about what to include on the agenda.
Third, we are creating a new email list, NANOG-futures, to discuss NANOG's evolution. We hope you'll participate - watch for a message later today or tomorrow about subscribing and a proposed time-line for moving us forward.
In the past, I've suggested (and volunteered for) NANOG to have a more extensive publication program, not simply an archive of presentation. There are some extremely valuable pages on the NANOG website, but I believe there is value to having a slightly more formalized publication process. RIPE and RIPE-NCC have done so for some time, with very useful outputs. It has been suggested that the IETF RFC process can serve, but there are problems with that. IETF's process is optimized more for developers than operators. It also can be slow, not from controversy but simply from administrative process and workload. I'm sure I'm not the only author to see a year or two elapse between working group consensus and final RFC publication. Betty, would you see this discussed on NANOG-futures? Is it worthwhile to reopen exploratory decisions on the main list?