RE $50 Million NSF windfall??

[John Curran]

At 11:57 3/13/97, Jim Fleming wrote:
>
>Here is a piece of the review. I think it is very kind
>to the NSF. Note that the bottom line is that the NSF
>was advised to hire experts and not to wait 2 years to
>make a decision.

Hiring outside consultants to manage a complex,
multi-party award seems to make perfect sense
(although I have no idea what it has to do with 
the discussion of ARIN on this list.)  

ARIN will be one entity, complete with dedicated 
mgmt and an advisory committee to guide it.  This
is a very different situation than the past triad of
InterNIC awardees.  I do believe you're advocating
to reproduce the multi-awardee management challenge 
10 or more times with your plan, no?  Do you know 
how many consultants will be necessary to provide
the recommended oversight?

>With respect to IS, DS, and RS. I would
>suggest that you closely study the merits
>of that InterNIC "model". I have.

I'm very familiar with it, and don't see how it 
applies in the least.  Frankly, I prefer that 
critical Internet funcions be performed by a single
organization in straightforward manner rather
than multiple interlocking awards and the 
coordination/management issues that result.

>Again, I assume that you have read all of the
>NSF InterNIC documents.
>        <http://rs.internic.net/nsf/nis/proposal-toc.html>
>                "Network Solutions believes NSF's objectives will be met
>                most effectively by the award of the bulk of the services to
>                a single contractor."
>...
>In order to understand those management issues
>you have to study contracts and agreements and
>business documents and business management
>not RFCs.

Absolutely.  It helps even more if you'd read them when
they first came out and had sufficient background on the
circumstances when they were written (for example, several 
of the information services bidders submitted individual 
proposals which had them doing the majority of the tasks 
_and_ then also participated in one or more team proposals).
BBN was in some (as we ran the NNSC at the time) and I 
heard that some of the commerical ISP's of that day had
submitted some interesting options.   I've never heard 
of a Unety or Fleming proposal, but they only tend to 
release those which are awarded.  No need to worry -
I've both read and written these documents in addition 
to RFCs.

Are you really going to advocate a structure (IS, DS, RS) 
of which you only have second-hand knowledge?  You have a
tendency to include text (such as the NSI proposal above) 
showing a remarkable lack of context.

/John

p.s. Apologies to all; take comfort in the fact that
     there's only 1 more message (from me :-) today.