Here's my notes from the community meeting from last night; sorry about being a bit late with them, the meeting ran long, and we dashed straight out from it to the social, which had already started by the time we wrapped up. ^_^;; Apologies for any typos still in the notes, I did a quick proofread this morning while jotting down this morning's notes, so it wasn't terribly thorough. Bcc'ing to nanog-futures@ as well, as it is germaine to both lists. Notes are also available online at http://kestrel3.netflight.com/2010.10.03-NANOG50-community-meeting.txt Matt NANOG50 2010.10.03 community meeting notes AGENDA: Steering committee report -- steve feldman Progream committee report dave meyer Communicatons commitee report This is a dialog, not a lecture; come to the mic with questions, comments, etc. steering committee report -- steve feldman blue badges are steering committee highlights since nanog49: day-to-day nanog stuff has Just Been Working thanks to hosts and merit for that! prep for 2010 election Postel network operator's scholarship preoparation for this and future meetings, through 2011 and the transition After NANOG50 select new PC members select new CC members (nominations still open) start on planning for 2012 meetings and the transition Mailing lists...look at website for list. Dave Meyers, Program Committee Report PC has yellow badges; if you like things on program, come let yellow badge people know. PC members really pull the conference together. PC committee member list Communications Committee Report, Mike Smith Red target badges! List of CC members is shown. They try to take a light hand when running the list; nanog-futures is a great forum, please do speak up. They are very much in need of more people, so make sure to nominate your friends (or enemies!)! Marketing Working Group -- Cat Hoffman members listed.. Full sponsorship attendance at NANOG49 sponsorship appreciation lunch and pre-promotion for NANOG50 Atlanta NANOG50 full sponsorship promotion attendance pre-promotion of NANOG51 Vendor Collaboration check it out in Chastain Room (may be called NOG room) Merit Report -- Andy R. Thanks to meeting host, TelX network connectivity, engineering power in general session onsite meeting staffing 2 socials! Other contributors for logistics Break sponsors, breakfasts, etc. Beer and Gear is Monday evening, they double as breakfast sponsors as well. Vendor collaboration is Comcast, Arris, A10, [and one more I missed] Merit Network Team Larry Blunk, David Bilbertson , DSue Joiner ,Dawn Khan, Rob Levitt, Carl Wadsworth. Pete Hoffswell NANOG 49, SF Attendance 607 total (record!) 505 PAID 102 WAIVED 199 newcomers (32.7%) 9 students 26 countries 31 US states plus DC NANOG49 revenue 409,061 expense, 423,340 balance -14,279 hosting was 184,221; SF was about 80,000 more than previous meetings; expense place to host, about 34% more than other locations. 2 big staff transitions at the beginning of the year, from Merit, put against the revenue from meetings, cost of about 40,000. 2 meetings upcoming NANOG51 Jan30-Feb2, Miami FL, Terremark NANOG52, June 12-15, 2011 Denver, CO, Alcatel, Lucent NANOG Election election process SC candidates NANOG charter amendment NewNOG charter Election slide, giving eligibility instructions should be on NANOG page; you can vote any time up to Weds morning. Announced Weds at lunch. Please, if you have opinion, please vote! SC candidates, 5 for 3 positions Thanks to Joe Provo who is aging out after 4 years. Rob Seastrom Richarch Steenbergen John Osmon Michael K Smith Patrick Gilmore Order is random, don't read anything into it. Rob Seastrom starts off with his statement, listing his experiences and background; his position statement is on the web, you can read it there. He'd like to help make Nanog stand on its own, and has some 501(3c) experience. Richard Steenbergen is up next; he's been on PC for 4 years, he's termed out there, so now he's running for SC. He thinks NANOG's been doing good job on the reform process that last 4 years; he'd like to help make the transition go smoothly, keep mailing list on topic, make it a good place for engineers to get information. And if you vote for him, you get custom-printed M&Ms. :) Michael K. Smith--chair of communications committee; been on SC as non-voting member for past year, working to make newNOG a success. Has been working on doing business modelling for the organization, and wants to keep doing it! Patrick Gilmore--he helped start newNOG, and wants to see it through; there's five really good candidates, so whomever you pick, newNOG will be in good hands. If you like what he's done, vote him back; otherwise, vote him off and signal a desire for change. SC members will become newNOG board members, btw. New Charter Amendment on Ballot Lets Merit wind down, and newNOG wind up; it's an endorsement for newNOG organization. If you're in favour of it, vote for it. :) There is also a newNOG election happening at the same time; everyone from NANOG will be eligible to vote for newNOG as well. Merit is running that as well. Shall we adopt the new bylaws as drafted by Steve Gibbard? Yes/No? Otherwise, the hastily done ones from Steve stay in effect. Bylaws do allow for amendments, so mistakes in either case can be rectified over time. That's it for the NANOG section of meeting. Now over to Sylvie's slides. Transition report--newNOG that's a placeholder name, once we have rights to a better name, we'll use a better name. milestones next activities reports from WGs created 5 working groups membership WG (kris foster) governance (steve gibbard) development (chris quesada)--getting revenue stream finance (dan golding) -- budget to spend the revenue technical (richard steenbergen)--support technical needs of the organization Sept 24, applied for 501(c)(3) with IRS; that will take many weeks, as it was a very, very thick sheaf of documents. Loan by ARIN to fund an executive director position Merit has loaned money to hire the executive director newNOG treasury income: donations: 11,125.00 other income 102.11 Expenses: hotel deposit 5,000.00 IRS application [get rest of numbers online] Executive director search accepting applications until Oct 15th http://www.newnog.org/ Form an RFP working group get involved!! send mail to board@newnog.org Issue RFP by end of Oct to contract Association management services IT services Conference Management services Membership-wg@newnog.org Ren got drafted to do this. But Joe can stand in for her. membership-wg, hammered out membership structure to fold into the bylaws Basic overview of different member models used in different organizations following nanog49 (thanks Janine!) fine print listing of qualifications for newNOG membership is put up. There was discussion on newnog-futures about the types of memberships. Steve Gibbard, governance working group, notes that the life member was no longer 10x, it's now at board discretion. Joel Jaegli, on 9/2, failed to get a rise, he's not sure he'll vote against them, he would have preferred different language in them. The other bearded one is not here to voice his thoughts. Joe agrees that this will be an iterative process over time. Joel notes that once success from last time around was that we left a lot up to the discretion of the various orgs responsible for them; that is a useful model to consider going forward, such as membership models and dues. Kevin Oberman, ESnet, he's been here for many years; the logo used to be a drawing of a necktie with the words "official member"--those who had an interest paid their money, and showed up. Why do we need to have requirements for demonstrated professional competence as part of the requirements? Why can't we simply let anyone who wants to pay, show up to the meetings? Why can't we let it be as open as possible? Joe notes that the openness idea is to have paid attendance separate from 'membership' status. Dan Golding--not part of membership working group; the weasel words were so that anyone who wanted to join could; you need to have some definition for membership for non-profits for IRS. Otherwise, you have to list it as "those with interest in topic area X". Some are happy with outcome, some are unhappy. We got the best output we could from 14 person team; with larger group, it's hard to come up with output everyone likes, or is comfortable. When you have larger working groups, concensus is challenging. Also, membership working group was pretty vague, pie-in-the-sky for its goals. Lessons learned; fewer people, more input from the board, more constrained choices. Fellow members selected by board, for outstanding service to the community. Board doesn't have to actually *add* any fellows, but the option is there; it can be dropped if people don't think it's useful. Martin Hannigan, man who wears many hats. Neutral with respect to NANOG to newNOG; not subscribed to futures mailing list; heard that randy made some interesting comments about it. He doesn't really support it; he appreciates it's hard work; but it sounds kind of obnoxious. A good deal of his advancement came from NANOG, and it would have been much harder without access to it. Joe: boilerplate was from IEEE, the front loading of the lifetime membership was to build the bank. difficulty with travel allows for people who can't make the meetings to still participate. the membership is to establish an eligible pool for voting on corporate matters, not limit meeting attendance. it also establishes a revenue stream. And a way to recognize one's peers. fundamentally: Need members who can vote Need revenue stream from members John Springer--are we all members? At present, yes, for the first member. After the first election, you have to join to be a voting member. So, as of Wednesday, if we pass this, then we all cease to be members. Current interim bylaws leave it up to the board. Bill Norton asks--the vote for bylaws is thumbs up or down; it's an all or nothing vote right now, no way to vote down on membership. RS asks Martin Hannigan about his question; turns out he was asking why we needed a membership structure at all? Turns out that for non-profit organizations, you must satisfy some prerequisites to become a member, like for a credit union, you must belong to a legally qualified category to qualify for voting. Martin is happy to understand that, and will vote yes, as he thinks that this group can pluck a turd out of a punchbowl; but he thinks that membership qualifications are problematic, and would be happy to have one that's just pay $50 to get a membership card. Steve notes that there's sufficient disagreement on the topic, we'll probably need to go back and adjust the membership topic some more. Matt Petach from Yahoo asks how we vote for changes to membership rules if we pass the new bylaws, and cease to be members at that point? If we pass the new bylaws, people will have to pay the $100 to become members again in order to vote for changes. Better is the enemy of good enough; are we moving in a positive direction, as we refine this, year over year? David Farmer, UofMinn--this is eligibility for voting that we're talking about; when he first looked at it, it wasn't clear it was about voting, it seemed that applied to those who could participate. We need to be very clear what the restrictions on membership imply, and what participation people can or cannot engage in. The IEEE model is *not* that way, so we need to be clear if we point to it as the boilerplate that we used for this. Michael Sinatra, UCB, is there an intent to provide discount for meeting fees for NANOG members? It has certain negative impacts; perhaps extend earlybird pricing for members? Once we have membership, we need to streamline it, and codify the benefits that paid membership brings with it. If you are going to do that, you have to be very careful that there is decoupling between membership and participant status, so that we don't put participants disenfranchised or feel turned away. Perhaps, but we do want to make people want to become members. Dan Golding notes there was some discussion about the breakeven point between membership and meeting costs. Joel Jaegli notes there are people who participate who do not attend meetings; this will allow them to participate more in the process. Financial slides will be online after this. How can you help? participate in the process; it's expected to be iterative, there will be refinements as we go along. Governance working group, Steve Gibbard herding cats to get bylaws drafted. The working group was thrown open to everyone who wanted to join, and got a large list. He puts up a list of the major contributors. Draft by-laws were written up; but they didn't write up the membership section, that was the membership wg. :D rest of section was mainly merging NANOG charter with interim newNOG charter. Took structure from existing charter. There is an elected board that has actual power; executive director will serve as board member, for tie breaking, and to keep voting the same. Executive director selected by elected members of the board; the board can remove the executive director. Added some extra committees: membership/development budget/finance Amendability--by majority of membership or temporarily by the full board. Assumption that we got a lot of things wrong, so goal was to make it as amendable as possible. The ability of board to temporarily amend was mainly done to allow for adjusting rules to make IRS happy for the first year; after the first year, it expires unless specifically revoked. It sounds like there's a lot of concern about the membership rules, but not as much about the rest of the bylaws. If the new bylaws are passed, we have a provision to allow the new members to vote them out or to change them over the coming year. Bill Norton notes that we're putting faith in the steering committee to make changes to the membership rules. If we vote thumbs up on bylaws, we note that we may have the board changing the rules over time; if people pay lifetime membership now, will they be immune to changes in the future, based on their payment? The fellows, setting of fees, etc. was all left to the board. The board could decline to set a fee, or set the fee so high nobody wants to pay it, if they want to take it off the table. Could people be amended out of their membership? That depends on what the board says, and what amendments people bring to the table. Patrick notes that it's a membership org; so there's nothing stopping the members from voting to change the structure after you buy your lifetime dues. If you don't have faith in the org, pay the annual dues; if you do have faith in the org and your fellow members, then go ahead and pay it. It really comes down to a matter of how much you trust the other people in the room. Don Welch, Merit networks; if the ED serves at behest of board, it will be with some longevity, while board cycles out. The ED and assistant will have institutional knowledge, compared to short term limits of the board. Patrick notes the ED will be very powerful, as they will have a seat on the board, as well as outlasting the rest of the board. It's a matter of making the right choice; the membership can make an amendment to remove the ED if they can get a majority to approve it. development wg; Chris couldn't be here, but Sylvie can talk about it. Betty Burke, Chris Quesada, Valerie Wittkopf sponsorship highlights: additional sponsorship programs little change from attendee perspective beer and gear, breaks stay same, marketing, sales, still limited more flexibility for sponsors multiple sponsorship program, sponsors can provide for a calendar year, rather than just a single break or event. Finance working group, with Dan Golding Dan Golding, Bill Norton, Michael Smith, Tom Daly, Duane Wessels, Board liason. Remit: Budget--create cash budget for now through 2012, a cash budget based on sponsorship, revenues, etc. Budget is done, waiting for board approval create financial controls and systems to make sure finances are being handled properly. Budget is complete, submitted with IRS application, board will review and vote on it this meeting. Efforts ongoing for financial controls and systems. Budget determined by looking at membership structures, determine probable membership and meeting attendance. provided a sounding board for development WG as they created sponsorship models for 2011 and 2012 conferences. (models were very conservative, we should be able to hit those numbers). Expense side; pretty limited data on what it costs to run a conference; we have aggregate totals, but specific breakdowns. Extremely conservative expense model, buffer for all line items, and assumes no discounts. Some areas will not be clear until we've run a conference. still pretty confident. This was done as openly as possible; only requirement was financial or accounting knowledge all volunteers accepted lots of collaboration with other working groups If you are dissatisfied with this, please step up and volunteer. Small group, but everyone contributed spectacularly to the overall effort. most difficult issues: which sponsorship model to use shift from traditional "ala carte" to industry typical "bronze/silver/gold" model should make sponsors happier and easier to budget for. Staffing level of the organization small staff (ED), augmented by event assistants "Hooks" in budget for association mangement an option Is the newNOG org financially viable? Yes, though this was not a starting assumption. If everything comes together, sponsorships, membership in reasonable numbers, etc. This should be viable for 6 figures a year, which should be enough to keep us afloat in case of bad events, acts of god, and horrible conferences. David Farmer, UofMinn--association management; are they looking for a for-profit or non-profit doing it, some other organization do it? this will be part of RFP going out; it will be open, it could be for profit, non-profit, etc; there's no preconceived notions around who may apply. We'll be looking for someone who is very good at doing it. Martin Hannigan--if buckets don't fill, what's the contingency plan; do we have a line of credit, so that the meeting can still happen in spite of poor revenue stream? A: Dan notes that was one of the biggest concerns about this. ARIN provided a good sized loan to fund the ED position, thank you ARIN, that will get the ED piece off the ground. But for the conference numbers were put in, they were worse than what we are achieving today. We tried to be as disciplined as possible about any assumptions. Between the ARIN loan and the conservative assumptions, we should be OK. Holly Jacobson, Cisco, this is great; one caveat, there are some organizations that like to host events in their home town; IETF has that kind of issue. A: Chris Quesada is pretty good about this; if you want that type of privilege, you'd really pay for it. So, if someone wants it that badly, they can get it, but it'll really cost them. Right now, NANOG gets what's left for sponsorship budgets, since we don't plan in advance. Now that we're planning more than a year in advance, we should be able to get into people's budgets well in advance. Mike Hughes, Google, there's often some provision to restrict signing authority for the ED; they're likely to have primary signing authority. There don't seem to be any financial restrictions or expiration terms around it. A: we'll probably add those in within a separate document, requiring a second signature from someone else in the org above a certain threshold. Steve Gibbard jumps in to note intent in bylaws was that board was final authority, and would decide on what those limits were. Patrick notes those limits aren't meaningful, since ED can sign binding contract in spite of limits in the bylaws. John Curran said ARIN put a quarterly note at 30,000 note, 2%, payments begin 25 months after initiation. Each quarterly payment is contingent upon report of progress, including financial controls; so an ED that goes haywire will find that the payment 90 days out will simply not happen. The controls ask for audited financial statements, etc. The ARIN note amortization is shown on screen. Pat P. financially strapped student; right now, membership only buys you a vote; he's unlikely to be able to spend the money. Dan Golding notes he shouldn't get a membership; $100/year for a vote is probably not a good tradeoff. But those who feel really strongly about it, may make the choice. Right now, the assumption is 100 members to start with, topping out at 250 in 2012. There's probably 40-50 people just in the steering committee, program committee, working groups, and the recently rehabilitated. At end of first year, end of 2011, 100 members, 2012, 250, 2013, 500 were the target member counts. Social started 10 minutes ago. Joel Jaegli noted a student served on the program committee, so we should not count them out. We should consider a discounted rate for students. Election for bylaws; donny roiseman; vote is for bylaws in full; in section 9, lists four committees, but details five; how do we deal with errors like that? Look at controlling section of it; 2 mechanisms to fix them; board can make adjustments with unanimous vote; or wait a year and put it through the full process; depends on severity of the error, and community support. Dan Golding: When charter came out in 2005, there were at least as many errors, and over next 24 months, they were slowly corrected. with any effort like this, there's going to be errors that we'll find over time, it's part and parcel with this process. Louis Lee, will be a member for sure! OK, we'll wrap up and go (late) to the social! We wrap up at 1729 hours Pacific time.