Community Meeting Notes

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,

(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 nanog0futures@nanog.org 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 sering@nanog.rog and nanogpc@nanog.org 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 nanog@nanog.og open meta discussion nanog-futures@nanog.org steering committee: steering@nanog.org program committee: nanog+pc@nanog.org ml admins nanog-admin@nanog.org 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. 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! nanogpc@nanog.org nanog-futures@nanog.org 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.