Sounds pretty good to me as well, including the openness and self-organizing aspect of a group with strong operations/engineering focus, as Peter outlines, open to all service providers. Hans-Werner

this sounds pretty good

m

Hi,

As many of you have noticed there is an agenda item for the Ann Arbor Regional Techs meeting dealing with the future of the regional techs.

The regional techs is a useful forum for coordinating the US Internet, it has participation by most US Internet providers including the regional techs, CIX members, ANS, US Federal Network operators, etc. Thus in some way, the name "regional-techs" does not do fully reflect the membership of the regional-techs mailing list and the attendees of the regional-techs meetings. Merit has done an excellent job of organizing the regional techs from the beginning, and running the mailing list and meetings as a function of the NSFNET project to date. It seems to me that the regional techs will continue to exist, independant of whatever occurs due to the result of the pending NSFNET solicitation and awards. In that spirit I would like to put forward the following outline of a strawman proposal:

Regional Techs relabels itself to US-NOGIN, the US Network Operators Group for InterNet. (the actual name is subject to change ...)

US-NOGIN organized in an ad hoc manner. This would leave it with the current constiuency and with an open "membership"

Central topics for US-NOGIN:

Coordination of US NIC functionality CIDR relationship to top level NIC

Coordination of US Routing Coordination Routing Registries Technology Deployment Inter Provider coordination Info sharing

Interexchange coordination (e.g. Mae-East, etc.) (network operators as customers of NSFNET NAPs)

Structure of US-NOGIN meetings: Organizers of each meeting selected by US-NOGIN, would circulate on a meeting by meeting basis, probably based on what the pressing issues at that time were. Location: try to collocate with other meetings: IETF, InterOp, etc.

Relationship with other organizations: Peer with RIPE, etc. as members of a federation which constitutes the IEPG. Loose (undefined, but recognized) overlapping relationships with FEPG, CIX, FARNET, etc.

Funding -- most costs are carried by membership and sponsors of meetings.

Other operational issues? trouble resolution NOC to NOC handoff operational standards/IETF ORAD activities information sharing

I would welcome any feedback, especially if someone would like to help flesh this out.

cheers and see you in A**2,

peter