Publish or (gulp) Perish

Fri Mar 26 18:01:13 UTC 2004

At 10:45 AM +0000 3/25/04, Michael.Dillon at radianz.com wrote:
>  >> Powerpoints have a hard time matching the depth of a refereed journal
>>>  submission, because with the powerpoint, soundbites tend to take
>>>  precedence over content.
>
>>Vijay hit it on the head - have we all been foolish by trying to put our
>>collective expression of service provider best practices and network
>design
>>into an archive of Powerpoint? To quote the Magic Eight Ball, "All
>>indications point to yes"
>
>It's true that a lot of slide presentations don't have any other
>information to back them up. When a researcher presents something
>you can almost always go to their published (or pre-published) works
>for more information. But this is less true of operator presentations.
>
>So, should NANOG sponsor a document series, like the RFCs or the RIPE
>documents, that would form a body of knowledge for IP network operations
>best practice? If we did do this, it wouldn't spring into being
>overnight, but the program committee could give precedence to
>presenters who submit a paper backing up their slides.
>
>Or is this all too academic and too formal for this self-organized
>criticality that we call NANOG?
>
>--Michael Dillon

Maybe, maybe not. While RIPE and NANOG aren't exactly the same, RIPE 
(as distinct from RIPE-NCC) does seem to publish things.

I've offered several times to help organize, edit, etc.

Indeed, there may be a possible increment that I've tried personally. 
Right now, I just have www.netcases.net set up as an anonymous FTP 
server (I'm pretty HTML illiterate but am supposed to get help). 
I've put my NANOG PowerPoints in a directory there, along with other 
directories for other presentations and publication.

What I have done is, at least, make corrections to the original slide 
presentation, and I've been intending to update some and perhaps 
cross-reference. Backing them up with some papers could be a start. 
Maybe this approach can be a testbed to see what a minimalist 
supplemental paper might look like.