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