[69117] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Publish or (gulp) Perish
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Howard C. Berkowitz)
Fri Mar 26 13:01:59 2004
In-Reply-To:
<OFCB055F6F.2D475043-ON80256E62.0033D3CB-80256E62.003B1F5D@radianz.com>
Date: Fri, 26 Mar 2004 13:01:13 -0500
To: Michael.Dillon@radianz.com, nanog@merit.edu
From: "Howard C. Berkowitz" <hcb@gettcomm.com>
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
At 10:45 AM +0000 3/25/04, Michael.Dillon@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.
