Dear members of the NANOG community, Since its inception in 1994, the North American Network Operators Group (NANOG) has had its meetings and activities organized under the auspices of Merit, providing an incredible service to the North American region, and in fact, to the global Internet engineering community. The value of this work can not be easily overstated – it is likely that, absent Merit’s involvement, the pace of global Internet development would have significantly slowed and that the high levels of Internet performance that we all enjoy today would not have come to pass. Several periods of evolution have marked the Merit/NANOG relationship. The most significant inflections have been the sharp growth in NANOG attendance in the late 1990s, the increasing importance of the NANOG mailing list as a method of inter-carrier communication, the utilization of NANOG meetings as a conduit of communications between major government entities and the Internetworking community, and the 2004-2005 Charter Process where NANOG took a significant step towards self-governance while remaining a Merit activity. Through the successive evolutions, Merit has stayed loyal to the ideals of NANOG, providing staff to administer conferences; administer servers to host presentations, mailing lists, and archives from the early days of the Internet; funds to pay for all of NANOG’s activities; and, equally as important, entering into contract obligations on NANOG’s behalf for meeting venue hotels, at times taking on significant contract liability. Since the beginning of this relationship, one constant has been the gratitude of NANOG’s membership and governance communities towards Merit for their dedication, hard work and financial commitment. Starting from the ratification of the 2005 NANOG Charter, the membership of NANOG has worked hard to establish self-governance institutions including our Steering Committee, Program Committee, Communications Committee, and Marketing Working Group. These institutions have acquired experience and resilience over the past five years and matured to the point of self-governance. The Steering Committee believes the time has come for NANOG to continue its natural evolution toward an independent organization. We are therefore beginning the process of creating a non-profit, tax- exempt entity that will produce NANOG conferences, administer the NANOG mailing list, and expand our educational mission. A re- structuring of the NANOG/Merit relationship allows each organization to focus on the direct needs of its respective constituency. This effort is still in the preliminary stages. Our intention is to work jointly with Merit to devise a transition plan and a transition timeline before NANOG 49 in June of this year. This transition will be gradual and designed to ensure a seamless handover of responsibility to the new entity, minimizing changes seen by the community as a whole. The governance and committee structure will be left largely intact, with our current charter converted into a set of governing bylaws. We expect to hold a community vote to ratify the new bylaws and structure during the annual October election. We expect there will be many questions and concerns raised regarding this process, and suggest that the nanog-futures mailing list is the appropriate venue for discussion. (See https://mailman.nanog.org/mailman/listinfo/nanog-futures for subscription information.) We also encourage you to share reactions directly with the Steering Committee. In the next few days, the Communications Committee will create and post a Frequently Asked Questions page. We will also hold an extended community meeting during NANOG 49 to review progress and discuss the transition. One thing that won’t change throughout the course of this next evolution is the gratitude of the NANOG membership for the hard work and support that the Merit board, staff, and member institutions have provided to us over the course of the last 16 years. For the NANOG leadership, Steve Feldman (Steering Committee chair) Patrick W. Gilmore (SC member) Sylvie LaPerrière (SC member) Joe Provo (SC member) Robert Seastrom (SC member) Duane Wessels (SC member) David Meyer (Program Committee chair) Tom Daly (PC vice chair) _______________________________________________ NANOG-announce mailing list NANOG-announce@nanog.org https://mailman.nanog.org/mailman/listinfo/nanog-announce