AltDB?

Sat Jan 8 16:57:25 UTC 2011

> From: David Conrad <drc at virtualized.org>
> Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2011 23:11:32 -1000
> 
> On Jan 7, 2011, at 10:24 PM, Paul Vixie wrote:
> > the price of changing what ARIN does is, at a minimum: participation.
> 
> Another view is that ARIN's whole and sole reason for being is to
> provide services to the network operators in the ARIN region.

yes.

> As such, it would be ill-advised for ARIN to change those services
> without consulting the community that ARIN serves and getting their
> buy-in.

that's very much what i mean by participation.  arin could never exist
without a community to serve.  if there are better ways to serve the
community or better ways for the community to participate in steering
arin's services, then i'm very interested in discovering them.

> Hopefully, there's a middle ground.

this *is* the middle ground.  we're beyond the span of decades when a
couple of smart engineers could bang out a working solution that the
rest of the community would just adopt out of opportunity and inertia.
and let's not just blame-the-lawyers for that.  the stakeholders in
the infrastructure of the information economy now number in the 'many'
and their views and needs have to be represented in the decisions that
get made by places like ICANN, IETF, the RIRs, and similar.

> > i hear in what you're saying a desire to have a way to impact ARIN's
> > behaviour outside of NRPM edits and perhaps ARIN does need to address
> > this with some new online forum for things which aren't allocation
> > policy but which should still be decided using community input.
> 
> Yep.  Not sure it should be an ARIN-operated thing (nor am I sure that
> it shouldn't be), but something a bit more focused on the operation of
> services ARIN provides than ppml might be helpful.

count me as 'intrigued' and expect me to be thinking more about this.