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Below you'll find links to results and analyses from various NANOG
cummunity Frequently Asked Questions. We hope that making the
results widely available will give you some insight on what's been
suggested so far, and what needs to be done to keep NANOG headed in the
right direction.
Question 1: Why does Merit run NANOG meetings?Answer 1:The reasons for this mysterious circumstance are buried deep in the mists of time.
NANOG grew out of meetings Merit held with the U.S. regional networks during the
NSFNET project,
which ran from 1987-1995. Merit managed the backbone service, and in that role held periodic "regional techs" meetings with the operations staff at mid-level networks such as SURAnet, NYSERnet, BARRNet, Westnet, and many others. In 1994, the "regional techs" group revised its charter to include a broader base of network service providers, and subsequently adopted NANOG as its new name. Merit continued as the coordinator of the group, and still plays that role today.
Elise Gerich and Mark Knopper were the founders of NANOG and its first coordinators, followed by Bill Norton, Craig Labovitz, and Susan Harris.
Merit Network, Inc., is a non-profit organization governed by Michigan's four-year public universities, and operates the state's regional network. You can reach the
NANOG staff at Merit
by sending email to
.
Question 2: OK, so Merit runs the meetings. How are the agenda topics and speakers selected?Answer 2: The NANOG Program Committee publishes a Call for Presentations as well as proposes topics that address current operational issues. The committee's criteria for selecting talks are outlined on the Call for Presentations: the talks focus on large-scale backbone operations, ISP coordination, or technologies that are already deployed or soon to be deployed in core Internet backbones and exchange points. Popular topics include traffic engineering, applications of new protocols, routing policy specification, queue management and congestion, routing scalability, caching, and inter-provider security, to name a few.
Question 3: Why doesn't Merit do a better job of choosing cities and getting big enough rooms for the BOFs and tutorials?Answer 3: Meeting sites depend on the location of NANOG hosts -- the wonderful organizations that volunteer to find a hotel, provide Internet connectivity, equip the terminal room, build the hotel network, and provide lots of helpful staff during the meeting. Merit tries to alternate NANOG meetings between coasts so the meetings are 'close' to everyone's home cities once in a while, but it's not always possible to work things out the way we'd like.
As far as hotels, the main requirement is a ballroom or other space large enough to accommodate 600-odd people, the number of attendees we had in Atlanta in February 2001. Depending on results from the survey in Atlanta, where we asked attendee opinions about the size of the meetings, we may eventually see even bigger meetings, requiring even larger hotels.
At the past few meetings we've seen an increase in the number of people attending BOFs and tutorials, and the rooms have been gotten to be fairly crowded. We're increasing the room size for these sessions accordingly, and there should be ample seating for everyone from now on.
Some of our hotels have provided Ethernet connections in the guest rooms. This is great when it happens, but we don't have the luxury of using it as one of the major criteria for selecting a hotel.
Learn more about hosting a NANOG meeting.
See the Hotel Logistics page for details about NANOG's requirements for conference hotels.
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