At our meeting in San Diego (the regional-techs gone public meeting), we decided to discuss a name change via email. Since we will be discussing the "new" operations group, we have a new mail group - TOFONA (pronunciation is toe-foe-na). In fact that is one proposal for a name. TOFONA - The Operations Forum of North America. Have at it :-) --Elise
Elise Will you provide us with a list of the proposed names? The name of the group should, to some extent, indicate the type of business in which the group is involved. (It's another matter if you want to be ambiguous intentionally.) All of the names, have the words North American, Operations, group/forum/congress, in them but few of the them (as I recall) have the key words -Internet -network -IP in them. Take, for example, TOFONA - The Operations Forum of North America. To an outsider, this could be the intelligence operations forum, the trucking operations forum, the manufacturing operations forum, ...etc. With the insertion of one of the keywords: The Internet Operations Forum of North America or The Network Operations Forum of North America however, the group's charter becomes much more obvious. I propose a modified TOFONA: NOFONA (The Network Operations Forum of North America). -Jane
I agree with Jane's analysis and would propose going one step further... Before we start discussing specific acronyms (although I kind of like NOFONA, when pronounced, it sounds a bit like we're working on telephone bypass technology, hmm maybe we are :-) I think we need to think a bit more about the charter and about what specifics want to make it into the name. To start that off, I'll offer my analysis. These are the things that I think (off the top of my head, I may change my mind if I _actually_ think about this :-) should be included in preference order (i.e. first should _definitely_ be in the name, later ones are more tentative): Technology (what it is the group discusses), one of (this is my preference order): -Internet -Network -IP -(Data) Communications Activity, some combination of: Operations Engineering Planning Type of organization (may be in the name or as an adjunct, i.e. the original "NANOG" might also be "The NANO Group"), I believe from the discussion last week that we want to lean to a word that implies less formality, one of: [Can you detect Roget's hand in this list? :-] Group Gathering Crowd Organization Gang Forum Scope (likewise, this might eventually be an adjunct rather than an integral part of the acronym): North America
As an amateur lexicographer I've thought a little bit more about the name question(*). I've tried a number of permutations of the words I like, and three interesting new combinations which form real words are: - the Forum for Internet Operators in North America (FIONA) - the North American Internet Forum (NAIF) - the Network Operators Meeting for the Internet in North America (NOMINA) For some reason I kind of like the first one, the second has some connotations we may not want, the third _is_ an interesting choice of naming :-). -MAP (*) the discussion seems to have died down, but I've been thinking about it anyway, something to occupy my brain on the long drives to and from work (after all, I wouldn't be a good Boston driver if I paid attention to the road :-)
participants (4)
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bmanning＠is.rice.edu -
epg＠merit.edu -
Jane Hsiung Wojcik -
Michael A. Patton