Another option of course is to ask the question: Has NZNOG done its dash? The list rarely contains anything of real interest, there's a real struggle to get good papers for presentation at the meeting and the major ISP players don't really care or take part. Of course, on the upside there's a couple of nights on the piss at the annual conference to balance against those negatives. I'm serious, by the way. andy

On 1/04/2013 10:14 p.m., Daniel Richards wrote:

I guess the question would be WHY don't the major ISP's take part? What needs to change for them to do so? (Either at said ISPs/teleco's or outside them)

My opinion, and I may be wrong, is that people senior enough at the major telcos to be able to contribute are careful not to be caught saying anything in writing that could be taken to represent the views of their employer. I still remember a posting many years ago on this list that was picked up by the media and taken completely out of context. A mailing list is a bit more discreet than say, twitter or facebook postings, but is it really safe in this day and age to express an opinion in writing, archived for the world to read for years to come ?

Unfortunately most big telcos stuff is classified confidential and even if it wasn't then they'd need a damn good reason to release it to the general public. As you rightly point out, no individual employee could take it upon themselves to present any part of a commercial project without permission from their employer. On NZNOG, the reason that it exists from my point of view is to promote the sharing of information relevant to the operation of networks. The reality of this however is vastly different. Most content on this list is either argumentative, a pissing contest or spam disguised as beer. My $0.02 Tim Price On 1/04/2013, at 10:41 PM, Tim Hoffman wrote: On 1/04/2013, at 10:23 PM, Ian Batterbee wrote: On 1/04/2013 10:14 p.m., Daniel Richards wrote: I guess the question would be WHY don't the major ISP's take part? What needs to change for them to do so? (Either at said ISPs/teleco's or outside them) Throwing in my $0.02, bearing in mind i've sadly not made it to the last couple of conferences; It's got to come down to buy in. We have to educate the Telcos/ISPs as to the benefits of both sending their staff to the conference, and encouraging their staff to present quality programs. One of the issues I see is that in many organisations who gets to go is decided at the last minute, resulting in many of us being in a position where while we'd like to put together a really decent presentation, we're unable/unwilling to commit to it early enough. We don't have a lack of talented/clueful people in NZ, and hearing the interesting things our peers have been up to / learning new things is always a win. Additionally, from an employer's perspective, compared to any course that you can send network staff on it's really really cheap. Content isn't the only benefit though. As much as we may jest about the nights out together, it's valuable time to catch up and maintain those lines of communication that can be invaluable once in a while when you need to get hold of that clueful person at **that organisation** when the normal channels aren't working. Cheers, Tim _______________________________________________ NZNOG mailing list NZNOG(a)list.waikato.ac.nz http://list.waikato.ac.nz/mailman/listinfo/nznog

On 2013-04-01, at 05:14, Daniel Richards wrote:

On Mon, Apr 1, 2013 at 10:12 PM, Andy Linton wrote:

...

Another option of course is to ask the question: Has NZNOG done its dash?

The list rarely contains anything of real interest, there's a real struggle to get good papers for presentation at the meeting and the major ISP players don't really care or take part.

I guess the question would be WHY don't the major ISP's take part? What needs to change for them to do so? (Either at said ISPs/teleco's or outside them)

Years ago when I was at CLEAR, I used to simply post without reservation. It's easier to ask for forgiveness than it was to ask for permission. You may have noticed. Actually things haven't changed that much (for me, I mean; I can't speak for TelstraSaturnNetlinkParadiseClearVodaHUG). My impression from the brief periods I've spent in-country since CLEAR had a simple name is that the kinds of people who are happy to speak freely have no problem finding people to speak to without using this list. That's a symptom of the fact that the New Zealand operator ecosystem is smaller and more tightly-knit than in other places. If you can hit people up over twitter or jabber or text or e-mail directly, why bother using a list? Perhaps the list no longer fills a need, and perhaps the lack of involvement of "the major ISP players" is a symptom rather than a cause. I will say that the NZNOG meeting continues to have the best speakers and the best content of any NetOps meeting I attend. I think the meeting has great value, beyond the beer even, regardless of the usefulness of this mailing list. If the meetings have value, then it follows that the meeting materials have value. I agree that not making those easy to find is a mistake that should be fixed. There's an inference in parts of this thread that there are volunteers who are offering to help and who are being ignored. The communication aspects of that situation also need fixing, if that's what happening. Perhaps the right thing there is to act more like a community and less like users of a service, and send such suggestions (and pointers to work done, etc) to the public list, rather than to any perceived management layer. Joe

I agree with Jonathan, Jamie's response sounds very political. Too many chiefs and not enough indian's involved in the picture is the impression that I get. Perhaps the org committee should check their email, I offered to help sort it out, but never received a response to my email, refer below ----------------------------- From: Stephen Sheehan Date: Thu, Feb 7, 2013 at 11:58 PM Subject: Volunteering for the org committee To: info(a)nznog.org snip If there is any grunt work or similar that you need doing up this way, or anything more general (*sorting out theNZNOG website archives comes to mind*) let me know and I will see how I can help out and put my 10 years of experience to some use. On Mon, Apr 1, 2013 at 7:59 PM, jamie baddeley wrote:

Thanks Jon,

The voluntary nature of the trustees means that from time to time we do drop the ball on things like this. This is not the first time that something like is has been pointed out. So since that last time we've managed to recover almost all of the program details from NZNOG's past. We have about 95% of that info going back to 2006 or so. And big thanks to the video archive that Richard Naylor has built over the years.

One of the trustees actually put forward a proactive proposal a month or so back to sort out the NZNOG conference website once and for all, but it was the consensus of the trustees that it wouldn't be right to simply sign off and assign funds to that development as the process needs to be competitive, or at least have a couple or three choices as to how the new website gets sorted.

So right now we know know what we need to do, but we just don't collectively have the time to do it right now. Like right now.

If someone would like to volunteer some time to helping us run a process where we select an outfit to get us some nice online bling, and then it actually happens, that'd be great. We'll assign a small budget to get the site developed. We're also working on a plan to ensure that this new website is well maintained amongst other things. More on that later..

Jamie

On 1/04/2013, at 12:13 PM, Jonathan Brewer wrote:

...

Hi All,

Two months ago we had a conference in Wellington. Since then the website has still not been updated to reflect the programme on the day.

Previous conference websites have disappeared from the Internet.

I understand the trustees have funds at their disposal, and I call on them to take one of the following actions:

1.) Hire someone to sort out the site 2.) Find someone who will do it for free 3.) (or) step down and appoint someone who cares

Sorry guys, I like you as people, but your performance here has been abysmal. Fix it please.

If you don't want to do anything, I put my hand up for taking over a trustee seat.

-JB

_______________________________________________ NZNOG mailing list NZNOG(a)list.waikato.ac.nz http://list.waikato.ac.nz/mailman/listinfo/nznog

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NZNOG mailing list NZNOG(a)list.waikato.ac.nz http://list.waikato.ac.nz/mailman/listinfo/nznog

On 1/04/2013, at 10:18 PM, Juha Saarinen wrote:

Maybe it's time for NZNOG to migrate to Facebook?

Wash your mouth out young man! Next minute somebody will suggest we stop using IRC. regards Peter Mott LocalCloud Limited Business Critical Application Hosting +64 21 279 4995 -/-

At 01:48 a.m. 2/04/2013, Michael Fincham wrote:

On Mon, 01 Apr 2013 22:18:02 +1300, Juha Saarinen wrote:

...

Maybe it's time for NZNOG to migrate to Facebook?

I hope this is some kind of April Fool's insanity.

I took it that way. Sadly we seem to have a generation (and the Media) who think that Facebook *is* the Internet. Its important that we keep this list going as an open tool/forum for operational/funny and discussion reasons. The conference has always had some underlying issues of organisation. All voluntary organisations have that issue with their conference. Committees rise and fall with enthusiasm. Thats very common. But the value of the conference is without doubt great. We have some issues with the website - perhaps we could ask InternetNZ if they could host the site. Then maybe all of us could think about what we could post to stimulate discussion. Right now theres heaps going on and maybe we need to be a little proactive about how this could affect us both at work and at home. For example UFB is rolling out pretty well ( the abf tubes are almost 3 doors from my house) How will UFB affect us all ? Will peering change ? Will usage patterns change ? Will the beer go flat ? Richard

On 02/04/13 11:34, Joel Wirāmu Pauling wrote:

At one point we farmed out the Website tasks to Students at the University (NZNOG2006) hosting it. IIRC that year went well, there were embedded web feeds with slides and speaker bios readily available, and the proceedings were fairly well organized.

Likely wasn't NZNOG 2006... as I hosted that one myself. I still have it, in fact. There was an attempt by someone to rip the entire site out of the CMS it was built in (Drupal) to Flat HTML, which is what can be found at http://2006.nznog.org, unfortunately it didn't seem to 'work right' - and I still have the original site sitting on my webserver 'just in case' (aka I havn't gotten around to nuking it yet).) I do support keeping the Universities, etc, involved, as we also have to recognise that one has to start somewhere in the networking biz... but whether it's appropriate to lump the NZNOG website together with the sites that're built for conferences... ? I suppose the trap is that you have to find someone with the right cloo level, the right availability and the right approach - the points about the avalability of volunteer time have all been well made, and this I understand too (having been 'that guy' many times). Given that the Trust has a budget, I feel that identifying someone who can take the work on in return for some financial compensation, would be the best move. Obviously most of the work around the website tends to coincide with conference and there must be a case to budget for so-many-hours per annum in return for a retainer or something? This could potentially cover both the main website, and web material published for conference purposes, and an ongoing budget could also cover maintaining the data for posterity. Mark.

I would imagine that industry consolidation and increased automation have played a very large part in silencing NZNOG, both of which were to be expected. Hei konā mai, -- Juha Saarinen AITTP Twitter: juhasaarinen http://juha.saarinen.org