Powerpoints have a hard time matching the depth of a refereed journal submission, because with the powerpoint, soundbites tend to take precedence over content.
Vijay hit it on the head - have we all been foolish by trying to put our collective expression of service provider best practices and network design into an archive of Powerpoint? To quote the Magic Eight Ball, "All indications point to yes"
It's true that a lot of slide presentations don't have any other information to back them up. When a researcher presents something you can almost always go to their published (or pre-published) works for more information. But this is less true of operator presentations. So, should NANOG sponsor a document series, like the RFCs or the RIPE documents, that would form a body of knowledge for IP network operations best practice? If we did do this, it wouldn't spring into being overnight, but the program committee could give precedence to presenters who submit a paper backing up their slides. Or is this all too academic and too formal for this self-organized criticality that we call NANOG? --Michael Dillon
At 10:45 AM +0000 3/25/04, Michael.Dillon@radianz.com wrote:
Powerpoints have a hard time matching the depth of a refereed journal submission, because with the powerpoint, soundbites tend to take precedence over content.
Vijay hit it on the head - have we all been foolish by trying to put our collective expression of service provider best practices and network design into an archive of Powerpoint? To quote the Magic Eight Ball, "All indications point to yes"
It's true that a lot of slide presentations don't have any other information to back them up. When a researcher presents something you can almost always go to their published (or pre-published) works for more information. But this is less true of operator presentations.
So, should NANOG sponsor a document series, like the RFCs or the RIPE documents, that would form a body of knowledge for IP network operations best practice? If we did do this, it wouldn't spring into being overnight, but the program committee could give precedence to presenters who submit a paper backing up their slides.
Or is this all too academic and too formal for this self-organized criticality that we call NANOG?
--Michael Dillon
Maybe, maybe not. While RIPE and NANOG aren't exactly the same, RIPE (as distinct from RIPE-NCC) does seem to publish things. I've offered several times to help organize, edit, etc. Indeed, there may be a possible increment that I've tried personally. Right now, I just have www.netcases.net set up as an anonymous FTP server (I'm pretty HTML illiterate but am supposed to get help). I've put my NANOG PowerPoints in a directory there, along with other directories for other presentations and publication. What I have done is, at least, make corrections to the original slide presentation, and I've been intending to update some and perhaps cross-reference. Backing them up with some papers could be a start. Maybe this approach can be a testbed to see what a minimalist supplemental paper might look like.
participants (2)
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Howard C. Berkowitz -
Michael.Dillon＠radianz.com