NANOG67 - Tipping point of community and sponsor bashing?

Thu Jun 16 07:53:35 UTC 2016

> Cough cough ARIN cough. I don't know why they need to meet face to face 2
> or 3 times a year. But, i am sure ppml will tell you it is a ground up
> process and these people on ppml like traveling and talking about
> policy.... And they do what members want.

I don’t speak for the organization or even for the Advisory Council, but I can
tell you that we get more focused community input and participation during those
face to face meetings than we do during the rest of the year.

Like it or not, when trying to get interactive participation from more than 5 or so people,
there’s really no useful substitute for the face-to-face meeting. Every existing
alternative is less useful and comes with significant drawbacks.

So, yes, I believe ARIN does what the members want, but more importantly, I
believe that the face to face meetings are a useful mechanism to preserve the
bottom up nature of the policy development process.

> Much of our industry can be gleened by googling pictures of "peering
> cruise". At my office, we joke about that a lot. Peering cruise …jeeshhh.

I suppose you can joke about anything you want. Personally, I’ve never been on a
peering cruise, but I will say that it’s a pretty classic fallacy to discount the
value of the social times at conferences. In fact, I find those times to often
be when most of the real work gets done and when most of the benefit of getting
everyone together in the same place is realized.

While NANOG puts on a good technical program, my company gets far more benefit from
the time I spend meeting with network partners, suppliers, and potential customers
during the conference than they will ever see from my time in the sessions. So much
so that I generally attend the sessions on an as-available basis  when I’m not able
to schedule a more useful meeting. There are, of course exceptions. Some of the
sessions (maybe 3-4 per conference) are worth holding my time open to attend, but
most are not.

This does not mean that I don’t consider NANOG valuable, just that the primary value
is in the ability to meet with other attendees rather than directly in the technical
program itself.

I don’t mean this to be insulting to NANOG. I think the PC generally does a fine job
of putting on a good conference with great content. Most importantly, it’s good enough
that it draws in a large selection of people I need/want to meet with in a concentrated
time frame in a single location.

Peering fora, peering cruises, and the like have a similar effect.

So scoff all you want, but if you imagine that these events are silly junkets where
nothing gets accomplished, then you are seriously underestimating this community, IMHO.

Owen