Creation of working groups within NANOG

Wed Dec 4 00:52:21 UTC 1996

Dave O'Leary and I were discussing how large the attendance at
the Ann Arbor NANOG had become and musing on how a single forum
for NANOG was becoming somewhat unwieldy, if not less effective.

What is the feeling of the NANOG participants (and the Merit
folks) of modifying the NANOG meeting format, and creating
different working groups? This would accomplish various
goals:

 o Allow smaller, more focused groups;

 o Allow discussion/debate/presentations on more topics;

 o Cater to specialized interests & disciplines;

 o Reduce the number of humans in a single room at any one
   given time.  ;-)

One of the downsides to this approach is that it would
require meeting sites to have facilities with more than
just a large auditorium (ie. real conference rooms, or
something resembling them anyway).

Although I hesitate to mention this, it has been suggested
that some/most of the work being conducted in the Operations
Area of the IETF should be conducted in regional forums
such as NANOG, APRICOT, RIPE, etc. 

I'm not really sure how this would all work out, but I
thought it was certainly worth mentioning & worthy of
discussion.

- paul