[ppml] Re: Independent space from ARIN

[william at elan.net]

Lets try to summarize this thread....

The way I see is that many think there are various operational issues with
ARIN (note - OPERATIONAL - something that may not be policy fixable).
Some particular issues are listed in: 
http://www.arin.net/mailing_lists/ppml/1521.html
There is also perception of large portion of ARIN community that ARIN does 
not help/address issues, does not properly use money collected, does not
listen, etc, etc - bad public image.

So what we want is to:
  Identify how serious these problems are (and on the way identify actual 
issues...). This probably requires doing survey of people who have dealt 
with ARIN recently and paying particular attention to those who have 
not found it to be satisfactory. Also would require an easy way for 
somebody to complain about problems (again probably survey-like web form).
  It would be necessary to clearly identify issues, group them by general 
areas and also identify issues that are most important and have to be 
solved first.
  For each issues way to approach and solve it have to be gathered from 
suggestions from those who had problems, what ARIN staff sees how it can
work on the issues and what other organizations have done, etc
  This all have to be discussed at mailing list and some meeting. Things 
like this can not be solved quickly and would require time to do some 
kind of research on the issues which is more then just yelling from people 
on ARIN and mentioing of problems on mailing lists and afterwards it would 
time to actually decide how to fix things, but quicker we start, quicker the 
problems can be fixed.
  And also ARIN needs to work on its image (public relations?) along the 
way letting people know it is listening and how.

Although I'm not big fan of the AC (don't think they have right ideas 
on what they should do within ARIN and had been more of a problem), I do 
not see any other larger constant group that can actually work on ARIN 
operational problems (other then ARIN staff which many see as a problem). 
So the way I see it is that AC should volunteer to look into ARIN operational
issues and first of all work with ARIN to identify for certain what the 
problems issues are (taking the thread from NANOG as a starting point).

So if AC is here and listening I think you should consider spending a lot 
more time on the operational issues and problems and not bother going 
after policy making (you're not parliment here) - leave that to people 
actually making proposals. This is in fact what I see as proper role for 
AC - identify ARIN operational problems and assist arin in solving them 
(with new policy making being left to general community).

----
William Leibzon
Elan Communications Inc. 
william at elan.net