Re: AltDB?

[David Conrad <drc () virtualized org>]

Paul,

On Jan 7, 2011, at 7:33 PM, Paul Vixie wrote:
> > The definition of what comes under the "public policy mailing list"
> > umbrella has always been a bit confusing to me.  Too bad something like
> > the APNIC SIGs and RIPE Working Groups don't really exist in the ARIN
> > region.
>
> do you have a specific proposal? i've noted in the past that arin tries
> hard to stick to its knitting, which is allocation and allocation policy.

Yes. This is a positive (IMHO), however it seems that occasionally, ARIN's knitting tangles up folks who don't 
necessarily involve themselves with ARIN's existing interaction mechanisms (at least directly).

> it seems to me that if some in the community wanted arin to run SIGs or WGs
> on things like routing policy arin could do it but that a lot of folks would
> say that's mission creep and that it would be arin poaching on nanog lands.

The issue I see is that there are non-address allocation{, policy} topics that can deeply affect network operations in 
which ARIN has a direct role, yet network operators (outside of the normal ARIN participants) have no obvious mechanism 
in which to comment/discuss/etc.  Examples would include reverse DNS operations, whois database-related issues 
(operations, schema, access methods, etc.), (potentially?) RPKI, etc.  It doesn't seem appropriate to me for these to 
be discussed in relation to addressing policy nor are the issues associated with those examples necessarily related to 
address allocation, hence I wouldn't think they'd be fodder for ppml.

In the other regions, the RIRs host the discussions (e.g., for reverse DNS-related discussions there is dns-wg in RIPE 
and dns-sig in APNIC, not sure if there are similar constructs in LACNIC or AfriNIC) and the RIR staff provides input 
but (as far as I know) do not direct results.  Since the (non-ARIN) RIRs typically perform some action based on input 
from these hosted discussions (or explain to the community why they can't/won't), this works reasonably well. In the 
ARIN region, for reasons that you mention among others, I'm unclear whether there is sufficient trust (on both sides, 
ARIN or the ARIN-region network operations community) for ARIN to do something similar (note I'm not saying there isn't 
trust, just that I'm not sure that there is).  One alternative (which I suggest being blissfully ignorant of either 
politics or establishment mechanisms in NANOG) would be for some sort of joint ARIN/NANOG "interest group" (or 
whatever) for areas that impact ARIN and network operators in which folks have interest such as routing 
policy/security, dns operations, registration data representation/access, etc.

So, in other words, no, I don't really have a specific proposal.

Regards,
-drc