-------Original Message-------

From: "Edward Lewis" <Ed.Lewis@neustar.biz> Subject: Re: ARIN, was Re: 72/8 friendly reminder Sent: 24 Mar 2005 12:20:08

At 17:01 +0000 3/24/05, Andrew Dul wrote:

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I agree, I'd certainly like to see more people actively participate in the process. If nanog folks believe that the ARIN membership is not getting the right stuff done... How do we fix this problem? How do we get more operators involved and active in the RIRs?

In the spirit of cart and horse, it's not about getting more operators involved in ARIN. It's about getting operators to use ARIN as a resource in the proper way. (I'm addressing operators here as this is NANOG.)

I think its also about getting operators who aren't active participants in ARIN or NANOG to use the numbering resources in a "good" way. In my mind that probably means creating systems to reduce the misconfiguration issues which started this thread in the first place.

ARIN staff has begun work on documenting the registry service level agreements, there was a presentation on this in October. There has been little discussion on this by anyone since the presentation. If WhoIs is out, reports fly on NANOG. But has anyone ever tried to quantify what level of service is expected of ARIN's computing facilities?

Or an even better question...what should be in whois? There are some who feel that whois as we know it today should go away? Is that what the operators want? What if there were legal forces that created an environment where ARIN couldn't publish whois information.

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I think colocating 1 ARIN meeting/per year with Nanog in the fall has been a help.

I would caution that "attending meetings" is neither a sign of contribution nor a sign of progress. Don't get me wrong, making meetings easier to attend is good, but we shouldn't attend meetings because it is easy, fun or entertaining. I prefer to have fun at home.

There is something about being at the meeting that at least forces me to pay attention to part of what is going on. It is real easy to ignore email storms, but face to face interaction has value IMO.

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We could of course create a huge beuarcratcy with lots of people to study the issues and make policy, but that hasn't been the way the Internet has developed and is counter to what many operators think is best for the Internet. That also requires money. Is that what people want? I don't think so, but I could be wrong.

One the one hand, what built the Internet isn't what will maintain it. A bureaucracy will be needed, the challenge isn't to prevent it but to build the best one possible.

True, I was trying to keep the flame-thrower set to low. It seems to me that anytime someone brings up the idea of "organizations" with structure/policy/rules/etc people get real nervous. There is an inherient "trust" issue that I think exists among operators. "Don't trust authority", but there has to be some set of rules that we will live by as the Internet becomes more & more critical to making everything work worldwide 24x7x365. Andrew