What we do
We want to help you. Whether you’re an established NOG who would love a bit of help with the dull administrative side of things, you’re just starting and need some support to get off the ground with a new NOG, or you’re a lone network operator who wants to find your tribe, the Global NOG Alliance is a not-for-profit organisation which is about giving anyone who needs it the right kind of assistance to make their NOG what they need it to be, for the good of the internet. We offer our assistance and resources to NOGs and tech communities completely free of charge.
We’ve only just started, so we are keeping our immediate goals and costs modest. We’re using an agile approach: taking small steps with demonstrable results, and learning from each step. That way we will make sure that we spend our funds and efforts as efficiently as possible.
Current activities
Task Forces
We have several taskforces currently on the go, aimed at helping places in crisis due to natural or conflict-related causes.
- Our Keep Ukraine Connected taskforce is collecting money and equipment to keep the internet running in Ukraine.
- We are starting to build support for Sudan with our Keep Sudan Connected taskforce.
- We are launching another taskforce around Disaster Recovery, in response to the rising number of natural disasters around the world.
Supporting NOGs
We have formed a specialised team, responsible for supporting NOGs the world over. This team is who you should contact if you plan to organise a Network Operator Group Meeting, or if you need support with starting up or growing your NOG Meetings.
We offer many service for free, along with the benefit of our long experience.
Tools already available include: website hosting with membership logins, registration for events, calls for presentations including rating and judging for the programme committee, a Zoom License, and Jitsi Conference Calling tools.
We are also happy to facilitate any introductions to sponsors.
Board member Florence is the first point of contact for NOG support.
Email her here: nog-support@nogalliance.org.
Encouraging cooperation
Many NOGs are in places where it is difficult for members to travel or for others to come to their events. This isolates them, wasting their time with reinventing the wheel. Let’s work together!
We have started a Facebook discussion group which anyone can join. The RIPE region has it’s own well-established NOG mailing list, and they have agreed to allow NOGs from around the world to join it and benefit from their experience. Contact us to be introduced and set up on the RIPE mailing list!
Planned activities
Programme tool development
Organising a NOG event is hard work. Putting an interesting programme together is an important part of that. RIPE NCC has developed a Programme Committee Submission System (PCSS) for managing talk submissions and agenda planning that they have made open source WordPress plugin. We want to offer this as a hosted service to all NOGs.
There is some work to be done though. The open source version of PCSS is still very rough and needs some polishing. Once we have some funding available we want to contribute to PCSS and help with its development, either by outsourcing some work to professional WordPress developers, or by financially supporting volunteers who work on it.
Finding speakers
The other important part about putting together a programme is to find good speakers. We want to create a list of speakers that NOGs can contact. That list will be composed by and for NOGs. When you have had a great speaker recommend them and we’ll add them to the list!
This is a planned activity, so we haven’t started yet, but if you have good experiences with a speaker feel free to put them in touch with us! With a bit of help this planned activity can be implemented quickly!
Special project: Sustainability
As sustainability becomes an increasingly important topic in IT, we want to be the link between environmental professionals and network engineers, and translate the requirements into the language of our NOG community so we’re all on the same page.
What does “Sustainability” mean to us as Network Engineers and how can we be Sustainable?
First we will create an archive of information and share information. Our primary goal is to make this topic mutually understandable. We will build a network of sustainability professionals and create guidance that is understandable for network engineers.
The second part of our plan is to organise workshops during NOG meetings where we’ll share knowledge, and work to make sure that everyone understands that we meed to do more to protect the environment. No greenwashing here.If you are interested in becoming involved in this project, please email us: sustainability@nogalliance.org.,
Future goals
Best practices
There are many differences in how networks are operated around the globe. The constraints on building networks can differ quite a lot, and with different constraints come different solutions.
We want to collect all the experiences with those solutions and share them around the world to let network operators learn from each other. Based on those experiences we can document what the best practices are, both in general and for specific circumstances.
Support open source
The internet is built using lots of open source software and hardware. There are many tools that are very valuable to network operators that are developed in people’s spare time or as side projects inside companies.
We want to support those open source projects that are important to the internet, network operators and NOGs but have little or no funding, so that their continued existence and development can be ensured.
Training courses
Many NOGs organise training courses before or after their main event. We would like to help by providing training material on relevant topics that can be used freely by NOGs
Such training sessions often also require technical support, for example for running lab environments. We would like to offer such environments as an online service for NOG participants, network operators and other people interested in network technology.
As an extension of this goal we would like to be able to send small computers (Raspberry Pi, Intel NUC etc.) to NOGs that don’t have enough internet capacity to use the online version as well.