On Mon, Feb 19, 2024 at 7:37 PM, Randy Bush <randy@psg.com> wrote:

We actually had an IETF "Help Desk" at NANOG 63 (San Antonio, 2015) and NANOG 64 or 65 ―
https://www.internetsociety.org/blog/2015/01/chris-grundemann-nanog-63-talking-bcop-ietf-and-more/ and
https://www.internetsociety.org/blog/2014/11/operators-and-the-ietf-update-from-ietf-91/
We hoped to answer questions such as:
“Why should I participate in the IETF?”
“How do I get involved in the IETF?”
“What is the difference between an Internet-Draft and an RFC?”
“How do I submit an idea to the IETF?”
“What is the IETF working on in <foo> space?”
“How do I comment on an existing IETF document?”
<your question here>
perhaps the internet would benefit more from the inverse, a help desk at the ietf for "what is internet operation and how does it actually work?"

Yup. This was all actually an attempt to try and get operator feedback **into** the IETF to provide that information to IETFers. Chris Grundemann's survey ( https://www.ietf.org/proceedings/90/slides/slides-90-opsawg-8.pdf ) showed that lots of operators didn't know how to participate (~58%), many didn't know that much IETF work happens on lists (31% and 40% didn't know how to join a list), and many (~50%) didn't know how to participate in a meeting.

Much more concerning (to me at least) is that 43% of operators surveyed didn't feel that their input would be welcomed. The helpdesk was sold as an attempt to help operators understand the IETF **if they wanted to participate**, but much more of my interest was to try and get feedback along the lines of "This thing you are working on… it won't work / isn't useful in the real world / cannot be deployed, because xxx...".

We (Benoit Claise, Spencer Dawkins, Alvaro Retana, Lee Howard, Jeff Tantsura and myself) presented at NANOG 72 on work which we hoped might elicit feedback (https://pc.nanog.org/static/published/meetings/NANOG72/1616/20180220_Howard_Operators_And_The_v1.pdf) , and asking specifically for feedback on"

Specific drafts you have concerns about or issues with

Other introductions with the authors or IETF participants

Something like a BoF / Track at NANOG 73 in Denver

Anything else related to the IETF

and "We need your help to build what you need.

Come tell us what that is!"

We also presented at a later NANOG, and at two RIPEs. We'd planned to present at an APRICOT, but COVID happened.

This was somewhat successful - we did get a few more operator folk showing up, but it's clearly far far from enough — if anyone on the list has any feedback on any of the IETF work, please let me know (off-list). I'm more than happy to help people participate, or, failing that, simply proxy information back (note the the latter is much less compelling — "Someone on a mailing list said that this protocol sucks" is less useful than having people actually engage and explain how and why the protocol sucks…)

randy