Re: Some thoughts on the "Restructuring of RIPE"

[Willem van der Scheun <]

Mike,

> Many thanks to Willem for his fine thoughts on the aims
> and structure of RIPE.  His mail demonstrates yet another
> of the good features of RIPE - the quality of the discussion
> on its various mailing lists.  These lists enable the 
> functions of collaboration and information exchange between
> meetings and have been of great assistance to many of us.
> 
> The areas of activity that Willem lists deserve consideration
> as it is about time that we tried to align activities with
> reality.  These are some minor comments:
> 
> 1.  Where does "routing registries" belong, under routing or
>     under registries?

The term "routing registries" may be not the right one, as this poses
just the question you asked. I meant the work ala ripe-81, thta clearly
belongs in the routing area. To phrase it more generally, the issue is
what kind of information needs to be registered in order to facilitate
routing. The registries area has of course interaction with other areas,
just as now the database wg has to agree with changes and additions
proposed by other wg's. For routing, the registries area f.i.  could
look at ways to distribute routing registries, as part of the more
general case of distributed registries.

> 2.  Is there room for an area related specifically to broadband
>     technologies?

Or more generally, just technology? I think this could be merged with
what I call the infrastructure area.

> 3.  While security merits its own area of activity, I would hope that
>     this does not give the impression that it is of no concern to
>     other areas.  Security is a serious issue and it pervades
>     almost all other areas.

That is kind of an organisational issue. CERT type of things are clearly
a coordination and information exchange matter. Security issues related
to specific topics could perhaps be better homed in the area that deals
with this topic. On the other hand, most of us (and I voluntarily
include myself) tend to "forget" the security issues.

I can make a comparison with the role of marketing in an organisation.
While you see a seperate marketing department, the marketing theory says
that marketing should pervade the whole organisation and can not be
treated as a seperate issue. Like you can not have a department for
customer satisfaction, as this is a key responsibility of all employees.

> I agree with Willem about the size of meetings - the bigger the
> better, as far as the attenders go, as this offers us more 
> opportunities for information interchange.  Of course, growing
> numbers pose problems for the organisers and we must listen to
> their problems and suggestions.  Personally, I find the schedule
> of three 3-day meetings a year just right, but there have been
> large imbalances in the attendances at parallel WG meetings.
> A re-alignment of the areas along the lines Willem suggests
> would help to rectify this.
> 

Another issue on the organisation of the meetings is how much time
should be allocated for plenary sessions and how much time for parallel
session. I must confess I have no really clear idea about that at the
moment.

--
Willem