Hi,
As many of you have noticed there is an agenda item for the Ann Arbor
Regional Techs meeting dealing with the future of the regional techs.
The regional techs is a useful forum for coordinating the US Internet,
it has participation by most US Internet providers including the
regional techs, CIX members, ANS, US Federal Network operators, etc.
Thus in some way, the name "regional-techs" does not do fully reflect
the membership of the regional-techs mailing list and the attendees of
the regional-techs meetings. Merit has done an excellent job of
organizing the regional techs from the beginning, and running the mailing
list and meetings as a function of the NSFNET project to date.
It seems to me that the regional techs will continue to exist,
independant of whatever occurs due to the result of the pending NSFNET
solicitation and awards. In that spirit I would like to put forward
the following outline of a strawman proposal:
Regional Techs relabels itself to US-NOGIN, the US
Network Operators Group for InterNet.
(the actual name is subject to change ...)
US-NOGIN organized in an ad hoc manner. This
would leave it with the current constiuency and with
an open "membership"
Central topics for US-NOGIN:
Coordination of US NIC functionality
CIDR
relationship to top level NIC
Coordination of US Routing Coordination
Routing Registries
Technology Deployment
Inter Provider coordination
Info sharing
Interexchange coordination (e.g. Mae-East, etc.)
(network operators as customers of NSFNET NAPs)
Structure of US-NOGIN meetings:
Organizers of each meeting selected by US-NOGIN, would
circulate on a meeting by meeting basis, probably
based on what the pressing issues at that time were.
Location: try to collocate with other meetings:
IETF, InterOp, etc.
Relationship with other organizations:
Peer with RIPE, etc. as members of a federation which
constitutes the IEPG.
Loose (undefined, but recognized) overlapping relationships
with FEPG, CIX, FARNET, etc.
Funding -- most costs are carried by membership and
sponsors of meetings.
Other operational issues?
trouble resolution
NOC to NOC handoff
operational standards/IETF ORAD activities
information sharing
I would welcome any feedback, especially if someone would like to help
flesh this out.
cheers and see you in A**2,
peter