NOG in a Box - So you want to start a NOG?

[Music] hi my name is sean pastrinsky i'm one of the original shinec organizers since 2013 and also the program committee chair um i've been at the nada program committee since 2018 and various committees within openix i have over 18 years of network industry experience and currently i'm the senior director at oracle hi everyone my name is ben solendro sure you've all seen me i'm currently on the board of directors for nanog as well as i've been on the program committee serving as chair vice chair and also on the shynag program community there with tom i've been around a bit have worked over at northwestern university as an operator uh spent different roles over at juniper as a uh engineer uh head of stanford dell and then currently back at juniper as a senior account manager so you know you're at anag so what you probably begged the question why start a nog uh if you weren't aware there are quite a few local dogs in north america there's shynag and vinog bosnog nynog that's chicago nevada boston new york just to name a few i know that there's other out there and if you want to give a shout out to your knob please put the name in the chat window where wherever it is on your uh screen there there are many reasons why these local nogs exist if you ever thought of starting a nog this presentation aims to encourage you to pursue forming that local nog reasons benefits to your local community and help you with that process all right let's get started we'll begin with the reasons to start a nog as well as the flip side why not to start a nog we'll define a nog go through who should start a knock then i'll hand it over back to tom who will talk about how he started china he'll give you pointers on where to start build local community tips on how to hold that first community meeting and then uh followed up by different growing phases of knobs and finally the nog blueprint so if i were if we were in person i'd ask raise of hands or again put it in that chat how many of you is this your first time attending nanak how about first time to any nog this is about the first time or think about the first time you participated in an event like this in person what were your reasons was it purely to learn from each other was it to watch a speaker present on best practices lessons learned or perhaps a new technology or upcoming trend or were you invited to give a talk share something that you have some expertise in was it to interact with other like-minded people in the networking industry maybe look for a job looking for a mentor maybe to collaborate on a project or an idea informally learning real world unfiltered experiences from others if you think back though to that first time were you excited maybe traveling to that conference excited to meet lots of new people new faces or while being excited did you have a slight feeling of intimidation some angst may be mixed in you had to get on a plane to travel to the conference tired by the time you got there lots of people new faces maybe didn't really know anyone there what's great about local nogs are that you can define your own community i'll be referencing it as local nogs since there's a lot to be said about geography or locality as we saw earlier there are a few nogs based upon large metro cities but that doesn't mean you can't start a nog based upon i'll call it a specialty or vertical such as cdns cloud maybe utilities oil and gas gaming enterprise you can start a nog based upon any shared commonality going back to that first nog experience and i can only speak for myself but i fell into that ladder excited with some intimidation mixed in that is why local vlogs make sense usually they are smaller in size more intimate and there is a bit more focus either by the vertical or just by the nature of the location and you'll see what i mean about this in a bit being geographically closer also means probably not getting on a plane maybe a short drive to attend the local nog it's much easier for us to connect when we are geographically closer one thing we've talked about at nano is the nnp next networking professional but look back when you first started maybe you're just starting out now put yourself into that junior engineer's shoes or perhaps someone who's not a network engineer and just has interest or is interested in becoming that nnp again think of why you wanted to attend a nog then think of when you had to ask whomever's approval to attend the event what questions were asked what were your justifications well how much is it where is it at how much is the airfare hotel rental car how long will you be out of the office the whole week these were some of the barriers that i know i and others had to overcome but not everyone got approval how about if the narrative changed and your responses were the following oh i'll be gone just one day or just the afternoon and it's just a short drive would asking getting approval be much easier then being local helps remove travel as barriers to attend and opens the doors for many others to join that community while you may not be an nnp maybe mid-career are looking to change fields whatever stage you are in knox are a great way to find a mentor or be a mentor grow and collaborate also while this may not be the case a hundred percent of the time but being local and having a more intimate group makes it much easier to talk to everyone attending while also being able to introduce oneself and not feel like a total outsider how many times have you attended a conference and you finally saw someone but only on the last day wishing more time to connect how about when individuals are meeting the first time and introducing your themselves what's uh a common question it's where are you from and and why is that it's because as humans we want connections we ask this so that we can make personal connection oh i've been there it's a great city beautiful during the summer or that's one place i'd like to visit when you narrow down the geography this probability or commonality goes up the conversation then turns to oh there's a great restaurant at the corner of x and y have you been there maybe we should go grab brunch or something this is that sense of local community and geography isn't the only reason but usually a strong one to create a nag around one of the main reasons for a nog is to build the people-to-people social network the face-to-face network look someone in the eye and have a conversation network and locality does help in that regard one of the positive side effects given kovid and the events of the past year nanog and others shifted events to be virtual we've seen that this opened the door to a wider range of attendees that wasn't possible before these attendees always wanted to attend nano but couldn't just due to travel and budget constraints now that that's a great thing but i think one thing that all these virtual conferences have in common and i've heard this from several attendees at various conferences is they want that in-person feeling and really nothing at the moment beats being live and in person face to face so we've gone through just a few reasons of why to start a dog but let's take a moment on reasons not to start a nog monetary if you look at successful nogs they are non-profit if your goal is to make money by holding dog events just just don't you're doing it for the wrong reasons and not in the spirit of helping others forming a community promoting or marketing content were hit all day long with marketing unsolicited calls if i wanted to attend another marketing pitch i'll just go ask my vendor to give it to me we want to listen to technical content we want to hear unfiltered experiences from attendees the good bad and ugly people will see that you're trying to gain something versus building something now a short story here it was nanog77 i just happened to sit next to a first-time attendee i believe it was during the opening session i had asked uh i see this is your first time attending nanog and i had introduced myself and at the time i was the vice chair of the program committee i went on to ask uh you work for a large oil field services company uh that's not the typical uh company we see in attendance here at nano can i ask what interested you and what brings you to nanag and i'm paraphrasing this but the answer was short and sweet i'm looking for a non-vendor-specific technical conference where i can learn from the presenters about technology and talk with other network engineers that have real world experiences without all the marketing or being one-sided nano is the closest i found to that we've gone through the reasons why and why not to start a nog well we've never really defined it when tom and i were putting this presentation together we never intended to put a definition slide in this was actually a last minute edition but when you compare this definition coming from wikipedia uh to the why start a nog we on through earlier you'll see much of the same core tenants and principles highlighted country based or regional mutual interest networking profession and others those whose jobs are network engineers and i wouldn't restrict it to not only those in the research and technical communities think about those that are just looking to get into the field the next networking professional basically anyone who has an interest in networking and related technologies update each other on their work share news and updates exchange best practices discuss new technologies or protocols teach and learn from others network with other members of the community and discuss current network and internet related issues and challenges so we spoke of the why and what now it's who should start a knock if we were all in person i would say look to your left then look to the right then get out your phone take a selfie because everyone here should be looking to themselves first looking into the mirror to start or at least participate contribute to a local nog you are all here part of the nano community but think about your local community again let's start with geographic locality region as we talked about is probably the easiest to begin with but we also said a nod could be any commonality maybe a vertical service provider enterprise gaming finance utilities oil and gas cdn these are just a few there's plenty more out there each one of these communities has a specific requirement specific issues and challenges that are unique to their own vertical enterprises deal with campus access connecting campuses wi-fi mobility and over the past year dealing with work from home gaming what what comes to mind low latency scaling on demand finance and high frequency trading that's another low latency requirement cdns quickest path to data reducing redundant traffic again scaling on demand oil and gas energy industrial requirements just to name a few and let's not forget security covers or encompasses crosses all these verticals so while there are some unique challenges within each vertical uh if we were to build a venn diagram of sorts you'd see that there would be a good overlap common problems that span all it would be a good idea to get diversity within a nog so that others can see how they have solved the same problem why they took the path they did and get a different viewpoint avoid group mind thinking we've seen it with spine and leaf in the data center migrating to evp and vxlan into the campus as well into distributed router models another reason to start with local nogs uh take for example an nyc shy la i mean these are financial hubs right but if you look at these locations they're also big enterprises then server service providers ixps due to connection requirements usually you'll also find cloud companies and cdns in these colos i take those cities for example but that model where there's the intermixing of various networks together is basically ubiquitous at this point right and if it's not it's going to be but i digress back to the topic who should start a nog if you were to search for a local nog on the internet or a nog specific to a vertical and can't find one then you should consider starting one again our goal is to help enable you to start a nog i encourage you to think about it and if worst case particip participate in your local nog i'm going to turn it now over to my good friend tom where he'll talk about how he started and grew shynok thank you vince next we'd like to talk about a use case of chicago network operators group and share with your experiences it was started over nine years ago in 2013. now who started it back then it was brian mcgann jason craft and me that started how did the idea come about um basically we met at brian's one of brian's classes he was teaching and realized um we have a nice local community in chicago we didn't even know we all lived in the same city um so we wanted to start something and talk about what we can do to bring the community together next i would like to take you through the the growth and what we did over the years as an example as a use case example china one we started in 2013 that was just an informal meeting it was more of a get to know others and the community we had no speakers or any content we wanted to get the feedback on the direction of the group and see if there was any interest then we had china ii that was our first meeting with an actual speaker it was a meet-up type of an event um and that's what started building the community with more people attending we had about 16 or so then we had china three that was our second event in 2014 first time we had three speakers and our attendance doubled and that momentum started building we partnered with a new um ixp being launched in chicago at that time as well there were some lessons we learned from from the event date selection is critical we scheduled it on a father's day a weekend also a weekend it was harder harder for everyone to attend during the week we also learned that we have to ensure there's some nominal registration fee we had a lot of people that registered that didn't show up um so some nominal fee um is was kind of required to have better attendance that means schedule is important our speaker went a lot longer and we literally had university security guards standing outside the door to kick us out and close the building then we had shine for our third event in 2013 we also had three speakers this was with uh with an official sponsor launching the their chicago ixp it was the first time we also did t-shirts so that helped as well um there was another lesson uh lesson learned on the date selection make sure you don't schedule uh your event close to your son's birth we had some false alarms but the baby came six days after the event so shineek5 was the first event we went to a full day format our speakers grew to 14. we maxed out the room capacity and to close down the registration early on with 125 people after this one we realized we had to find a venue that could accommodate much larger crowd scheduling date was a lot better this time we followed another big conference in town itw with our event that brought a good number of visitors and sponsors we had our share of challenges over the years um we're dif which we're definitely building the momentum which i'll talk more about later getting the fun funding to cover the costs and finding uh the venues to fit everyone i'll touch up on these in the future slides covered 19 also had a big impact on us we cancelled um china 10 in 2020 and weren't able to do a virtual event yet but we're planning to be back next year so what do we currently do every year so we have a one annual event uh doing multiple per years seemed uh too often especially with the time it takes to plan it our attendance has settled around 200 attendees give or take usually we shoot for 16 speakers doing 30-minute presentations in the afternoon we usually have two tracks to support the event we have about 11 sponsors of varying levels from diamond gold and silver sponsorship break even the cost of the event our content is vendor neutral we're pretty strict about the selection and adhering to it and i have to apologize to some of our speakers in the past over the years pushing back on on that that point making sure there's is a lot of logos or marketing content in there um usually every event starts with a general program with presentations and ends with a social gathering that we have all of our sessions are recorded and posted on youtube now how are we organized so currently we have a program committee with four members uh we have an executive role that does the funding sponsorship contracts and social media we also have an event management company that helps us with the venue and speaker management next i want to show a few pictures of our events you can kind of see the the growth throughout the year starting from the second one where it's a small group all the way to the eighth one and um and you can see the the growth of it throughout the years so if you want to start a nog where do you start what does it take to start one it doesn't really take too much to get started initially you'll need two to three dedicated organizers doing it along is very hard so try to find some driven co-workers or friends next what you want to do is schedule the first planning meeting for organizers this is a very very informal meeting just for the organizers to set up things like group name and all these different next steps we'll talk about during this meeting you want to establish a couple of key principles to follow present vendor neutral content this was a very important principle to us we want to make sure that the talks aren't just another marketing presentations like you try to sell something also seek to educate rather than market product products this will go a long way to build the reputation of the organization next um set up some online presence you know for example have a wordpress site where you can place all the information the latest information for everyone to check you'll have a twitter handle make sure you use that to communicate um from the news linkedin group that's probably one of your best sources to find community members and we'll talk about that next also youtube channel to post your presentations um slack so um you can use slack to keep in touch outside of the events but also during the conference to ask speaker question discuss content and kind of have things offline next you want to start building a local community spreading the word of the group which we'll cover next so how do you how do you actually go about building a local community this is this is the majority of the groundwork for the organizers until you build a good momentum this is what most organizers will be doing you'll you'll want to ask co-workers former colleagues and use your social network you want to seek out people via social media professional websites to invite them to the meetings for example i would look up people that were network engineers or as a title had certain certifications such as ccies send them invites to our events some will get ignored some will gain traction also to help you you can also get help from already established national organizations this is where groups like nanog shynog might be able to help and we'll talk more about that uh you also want to announce your events on mailing lists you'll want to announce save the date when you're having the event call for speakers what you're looking for what type of speakers also once you have the agenda and any details on the date and location also once you get to the point of having sponsors also help them ask them for help advertising events um it brings them benefit um to to obviously have more people attend as well uh and they might be able to send messages to their local contacts within the region also posted on their social media um you might also want to search based on technical certification or professional titles um so you might be searching for network engineers ccies jncis network architects or other other titles and linkedin was a great tool for that you want to reach out to local universities they might have an alumni group professors could keep in touch with graduates invite students to get them interested in industry as well and building the local community is one of the hardest parts of the organizing a local nog but at the end is the most rewarding it will take creativity that will slowly grow and build momentum becoming easier throughout each event next you'll want to organize the first community meeting the first community meeting basically just to get started and announce the group it's very informal usually small group 10 people or so meet and greet everyone that's interested get some feedback on the direction of the group and gather ideas um you might also brainstorm ideas on what to do the next meeting like watching party with videos of other conferences you may also ask for speakers ideas to present the other thing you'd want to get a good idea of the audience this is mostly an audience that that works in service provider enterprise cloud industry it's also a good place to ask for volunteers and most importantly don't forget to celebrate uh accomplishing the first step in starting the note which is it is next i'd like to quickly talk about uh some of the growing phases of a dog not my might follow these phases a meetup phase a full day conference phase a multi-day phase most knowledge will be successful in the meetup phase so when you talk about a meetup phase uh in terms of the content you have about three presenters live or recorded with some dedicated networking time um organizers will be doing most of the seeking out to get the presenters um and events are usually held during the weekday in the evenings have to work meeting venue could be someone's office conference room university hall or a library usually you're probably going to be around 20 to 40 attendees style is informal but structured where you have some schedule costs like beer pizza or something very small you don't really need sponsors for this and a frequency you would want to do three times a year to kind of build that momentum at this point you could say mission accomplished you have a non if you get this far that's that's all it takes um now back to the use case of shannon um we had china two three and four in this meetup phase and again our goal was to build the momentum and grow the community so next you would move to the full day phase this is where your content you have uh 10 to 12 live speakers you can do a single track or split the track um you still have organizers reaching out to speakers but you can also rely a little bit more on call for presentations meeting venue because it is a lot larger you're talking about 50 to 200 people you would need to start looking at hotel conference rooms this is more formal and structured you have specific time and schedule to follow and the costs are significant um significantly more because of the the venue also food and beverages have significant costs as well room rental and ap and you're talking about anywhere from 50 to 100 000k you definitely need sponsors at this point you need to come up with packages to cover these costs in terms of frequency um once a year you can do it once a year since organizing is a lot of planning um you could outsource something event planning and again going back to shannock use case um phi was the first one that we went with a full day we used the universal university conferencing center as our venue then we had to move to much bigger hotels and then again for a full day event you might want to plan eight months to a year in advance when you knock enters a more structured group usually when doing a full day event there are additional things you want to consider such as having committees or more dedicated volunteer for these responsibilities and these are basically like a program committee marketing finance budget and sponsor development so i won't read all that but um you could either have um certain people main organizers take on these responsibilities um or you could have volunteers and slowly build committees for that with a full day event you need to consider a few things like having a separate business entity to handle the contract uh taxes and finances so within the us they're count two main options one is setting up an llc the other one is a nonprofit lsc is very quick to set up not a lot of restrictions around it but it does have tax implications nonprofit is a little bit harder to set up need to formalize the appointment of a board but lesser tax implications for the organizers now quick disclaimers i'm not definitely not giving you legal advice here um you have to be crazy to trust me on that one um you also need to consider funding um sponsorship packages uh you'll need to come up with something basically the per person cost goes up significantly could be anywhere from 150 to 250 for food and beverages um you would want to have the sponsors cover the majority of the event where you develop different levels such as gold diamond and silver you would want to define these sponsorship benefits clearly and ensure that there's a separation from the presented content and in terms of ticket sales you want to make sure that the amount is big enough to ensure attendees actually show up when they register but low enough for everyone to attend so the next phase um the last phase this is i'm not going to be in a multi-day event this is what nanak does again in terms of content it's multi-track meeting venue is a large hotel room where you have more than 200 500 a thousand attendees style again it's formally structured everything's kind of scheduled cost a lot more than a single day event some of the other things you have to look at is uh room rental blocks and you can talk about anywhere from a hundred thousand dollars or more sponsorships sponsors you will need sponsors but you need to raise a lot more potentially three times more frequency you can do it once a year three times a year but if you if you if you're doing it three times a year you need to hire staff or outsource it so so far we talked about uh why and how to start a non with the use case of how china was started now we like to announce what we're doing to help other nons get started on their own we would like to pilot a non-blueprint program objective is to help other organizers get started within their community the goal is to provide a written blueprint for local organizers at the end of the pilot we would like to provide experience and guidance grow the networking community reaching local levels for interested organizers would like to set up a meeting at the next in-person nano we are also working with nano to see how we can collaborate nanak is committed and is investing in helping dogs develop as one of their initiatives and we're working through collaboration details with them so um basically we are looking for community organizers who want to start the nogs and join our pilot program so if you're interested email us local dash now gotcha.org in summary um we talked about reasons how to start a nag and not to start a dog what is a nog why and who should start one we highlighted use case of shynog a local nog then we talked about how do you get started what do you do how do you build that local community how do you get started the first meeting and then what can you see as you grow through the meetup phase full day uh phase and multi-day phase and uh lastly we we introduced our non-blueprint prog program

Channel: NANOG

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Length: 32min 19sec (1939 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 22 2021