once again, network hardware vendors spamming...

Dean Anderson dean at av8.com
Wed Oct 1 20:32:45 UTC 2008


The size of a mailing list can be judged from its participants over a
long time, and from meeting attendence records.

Every participant in a list eventually sends at least one message to a
mailing list.  Those who don't ever send a message are just monitoring
the list;  those people aren't participants.

>From the meeting records and about 10 years of mailing list archives, I
count about 600 active participants in NANOG, with about 200 core
members who continue year after year, while the remainder of
participants will quit participating.

NANOG doesn't report the size of its mailing list, but does report its
meeting attendance and its budget. NANOG spends about $180,000 per year;
$50,000 of this appears to come from ARIN [improperly--the transfer
violates ARIN 501(c6) tax status, and was approved by NANOG-affiliated
Board members with undisclosed conflict of interest in the transaction].  
However, this amount does not represent the budget of a very large
organization.

Considering that there are about 3000 members of ARIN, and many more ISP
like organizations that don't have their own direct allocations, or who
are legacy block owners (which aren't ARIN members automatically);  
considering that even limited to just the North American region of ARIN,
there are tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of ISP operations
employees; NANOG represents a very, very few. But the core 200 members
are unusually influential, and this is a matter of some interest.

		--Dean

On Fri, 26 Sep 2008, Joe Greco wrote:

> > Now, I know you, but there are way too many people on this list to  
> > know them all, or for them to all know you (or me, or anyone else).
> 
> This caused me to go "aha" and I counted up unique accesses to the URL
> of the rack diagram I posted yesterday, and came up with 185.
> 
> Assuming that most people aren't using clients that automatically display
> URL's in non-HTML e-mail, and that power strip configurations within a
> rack is a topic of interest to a small subset of subscribers, it seems 
> apparent that there are probably thousands of people reading NANOG traffic
> on at least a daily basis.
> 
> It is often easy to forget how many people you're sending to when you're
> sending to a mailing list.
> 
> ... JG
> 

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