RARE Update 12

Apologies for the cross-posting


A RARE UPDATE                           no. 12, July 1994
                                    (Double Summer issue)


COA Information

RARE members gathered in Darmstadt, courtesy of ESOC, on 19 and 20
May 1994. Meetings included a joint meeting with the EARN Board of
Directors dedicated to the proposed merger between RARE and EARN and
subsequently the 29th CoA meeting.

The joint meeting was perceived as very constructive. The Executive
Committees of both organizations had provided the members with draft
Statutes, Rules and Regulations, a Charter, a Technical Structure and
a budget, encompassing proposals for membership fees and voting
rights. The conclusion of the meeting was that the merger was
feasible and should take place still during 1994 and this event is
scheduled to take place at the event of the next (and last) RARE
Council of Administration meeting on 20 October 1994, in Amsterdam.

A call for a new name for the merged organization has been issued and
several proposals are under investigation.

During the CoA meeting, the RARE accounts were - as is traditional
in May - presented and 1993 financial year was closed with the
approval of the Council of Administration of the accounts 1993.
Two networking organizations were unanimously accepted as RARE Full
National Members: UNICOM-B from Bulgaria and UNIBEL from the Republic
Belarus.

The CoA has asked the Executive Committee to reorganize the RIPE
NCC's management structure by the creation of a management body that
is representative of the whole customer base in order to enhance
cooperation with the RIPE NCC's commercial customers. This management
body will be involved in the fund raising for the RIPE NCC.


RARE Technical Programme

The most recent main event for the RARE Technical Programme was
the INET'94/JENC5 conference, organized by RARE and the Internet
Society (ISOC), which took place in Prague in mid-June.
All the RARE Working Groups took the opportunity to
meet at the conference and were able to present their work to
visitors from across the whole world.

The Working Group on network operations (WG-NOP) was relaunched
under its new convenor, Manfred Bogen. The new convenors of
the Working Group on Information Services and User Support
(WG-ISUS), Dave Hartland, and the Working Group on Network
Security (WG-SEC), Ruediger Grimm, were able to introduce
themselves in person.

Also at the conference, the final stages of two RARE projects
were reported. The task force on Computer Emergency Response
Teams has presented plans for a European coordination centre
for liaison between the front-line support organizations dealing
with network security incidents. This is now being developed
into a business plan (which will be the subject of a call for
tender) for approval by the CoA on 20 October 1994.
The project of the Working Group on Character Sets, which is
developing software for conversion between a wide variety of
coded character sets, was presented at the conference in the
form of a live demonstration of the conversion program.

Two new RARE Technical Reports are in the course of production.
RTR12 on Writing O/R Names is a revision of the guidelines of
the Working Group on Mail and Messaging (WG-MSG) which takes
into account recent international standards in this area. RTR13
is a Status Report on Network Information Retrieval, a
regularly-updated report which gives an overview of the "state
of the art" in this field.
RTR8, 9, 10 and 11 are currently available in printed form
and can be ordered from the RARE Secretariat.

RARE has recently entered into contracts with INRIA to work on
the integration of directory-service access with the World Wide
Web. RARE is also contributing to the support and development of
the World Wide Web project which is seen as a key element in the
development of information services for researchers.

Looking to the future, RARE has launched its UPTURN (Umbrella
Proposal for Telematics for Users and Research Networks)
initiative to encourage participation in the European Union's
Fourth Framework Programme. The Fourth Framework offers the
possibility of European funding to assist in collaborative
projects between commerce and researchers which will result in
the delivery of telematic services which add to the productivity
of industrial and academic researchers. RARE is providing
information on the programme and is assisting in the information
exchange between potential participants via its UPTURN mailing
list. To join this list, send electronic mail to
mailserver@localhost containing the text:

        SUBSCRIBE UPTURN your-first-name your-last-name

replacing your-first-name and your-last-name as appropriate.
Once you have joined the list, you can send mail to the other
subscribers at the address upturn@localhost.

A large, common RARE Working Groups Meeting is planned for
December 1st and 2nd, in London, subsequent to EARN's NSC
conference, November 28-30, 1994.

Information about the UPTURN initiative, and about RARE's
technical programme, can be obtained from:

- ftp.rare.nl (by anonymous FTP)
- gopher.rare.nl (by gopher)
- http://www.rare.nl/ (by World Wide Web)


Conferences and Seminars


INET'94/JENC5

RARE's annual Joint European Networking Conference (JENC5) was
held this year in Prague (Czech Republic), in conjunction with
the Internet Society's (ISOC) annual INET conference. In every
respect it was considered a great success. The participants
numbered around 1200 and came from over a 100 different countries.

The Czech Technical University and the Czech Educational and
Scientific NETwork (CESNET) were responsible for the local
arrangements. They furnished the terminal room with over
70 workstations, terminals and desktop computers with worldwide
Internet connectivity. The technical staff also supported the
connectivity in the demonstration area, where up to 12 highly
advanced networking applications were presented to the public
at large. With the support of various sponsors leased lines
with a total capacity of 2.5 Mbit/s connected the conference
centre to the rest of the world. This connectivity allowed
interactive Mbone broadcasts of the plenary sessions of the
conference to hundreds of sites in many countries.

That the conference was a truly global event also became apparent
in the more than 100 presentations and panel discussions in six
different topical areas: user support and training, distributed
applications, policy issues, regional issues, network engineering and
network technology. The programme presented the developments in
technology on ATM, Multimedia, IPng, Routing and Addressing, Network
Information Tools, Broadband Technology, Performance Analysis,
Electronic Documentation, Networked Simulation and Virtual Reality
and Future Generations of Internet Technology, to mention only a
few of the subjects covered.

These new technological developments, and the exponential growth of
networking in the last few years are bringing past side issues to the
foreground. Policy issues are becoming more and more important
with the increasing number of active Internet users and its broader
scale. Also new user communities are emerging every day, and each of
them has their own specific demands with regard to service, support
and training. The conference proved a good discussion platform for
all of these important issues.

A full set of proceedings was distributed at the conference and a
number of selected papers of high quality are being prepared for
publication in a special issue of Computer Networks and ISDN Systems.

Preceding the conference there was a one day tutorial on ATM
(Asynchronous Transfer Mode), organized and sponsored by Digital
Equipment Corporation (DEC).

The week prior to the conference the workshop for Technologically
Emerging Countries took place at the Czech Technical University.
A selected number of participants (approx. 170) from around
80 countries had the unique opportunity to learn how to access and
use worldwide Internet resources, as well as build and manage
national networks in their own countries. The Soros Foundations
funded participation of many Eastern European and CIS attendees.
RARE, with the financial support of NATO, took direct responsibility
for the Network Navigation and Services Track.


JENC6

With the Prague event still fresh in memory, preparations have
already been made for next year's conference that will take place in
the new Dan Panorama Convention Center in Tel Aviv, Israel from 15-18
May 1995. The Programme Committee, under the leadership of Jose 
Barabera (FUNDESCO, Spain), has already prepared a Call for Papers 
that is available from jenc6-sec@localhost.

The conference theme, "Bringing the World to the Desktop", may be
looked upon as a metaphor for two major changes under way:
- the increasing penetration of daily research/educational work and
practices by networks and networking technology;
- the new set of requirements that desktop networking implies for the
underlying technology and the structures of service provision.

The goal of this conference is to survey the current situation in
networking, to illuminate major unresolved issues and technologies,
but most of all to stimulate discussion on possible future
directions.

The local arrangements are taken care of by ILAN.

Further information

For more information about RARE contact:

Internet: raresec@localhost or kiers@localhost
X.400: C=nl; ADMD=400net; PRMD=surf; O=rare; S=kiers
X.400: C=nl; ADMD=400net; PRMD=surf; O=rare; S=raresec

fileserver: gopher.rare.nl, ftp.rare.nl or http://www.rare.nl/