On Wednesday, Jul 30, 2003, at 22:42 Europe/Dublin, Hans Petter Holen wrote:

Hmm, we did form a special task force for this matter to work with the RIPE NCC with the process etc. (References in Leos message)

As chair of this working group I would really like to know what more we can do to interact more closesly with the community - please feel free to suggest to the list or approach me personally with suggestions !

Hans Petter, Thanks for your encouraging words. I've been away for a couple of weeks and am still mining the e-mail mountain. During second half of July, I've had some off-list exchange with Leo, and found him really eager to be helpful. I still have some sense of the "blind man and elephant" problem, in both directions. As I'm not involved in a LIR, I missed the formation of the task force. In addition, I couldn't travel to Barcelona. In any case, a TF involving LIR-WG and RIPE-NCC is likely (as seems FWIS to be actually the case) to focus on managing the production line rather than on managing customer expectations. It's worth bearing in mind that ERX customers are likely, for the same historical reasons by which they have become ERX customers, to be involved directly with the RIR rather than via their ISP as LIR. [ Hmm, the emergence of the Address Policy WG seems to be just what I needed. ] It seems to me that a useful view of the ERX project and its progress would be a set of graphs derived from a table like the one below; needless to say, my numbers can't be related to reality except by co-incidence. Reporting Period (Month or Qtr) 2003.01 2003.02 ... Estimated work (contact count) 8000 8251 ... (estimate may evolve) Estimated work (network count) 215 216 ... Completed work (contact count) 0 57 ... Completed work (network count) 0 16 ... The graphic would show clearly, for two different measures of the work involved, both the estimated and (cumulative) completed work at each reporting instant. The gap between the estimated and completed work would show how much was left to be done. Hopefully, the curves would converge! I haven't been able to find such a simple overview in the material I've located on the web, or in the nice Member Update which Leo has kindly had sent to me. I think presentation of this kind of information would help customers anticipate ERX progress in the foreseeable, rather than indefinite, future. It would also be useful to know in what order the different /8 blocks are to be dealt with, what criteria have led to choosing this order, and how soon each /8 is expected to be finished, at least as planned at present. I expect that the plan may evolve in the light of experience, and that some blocks of space will prove more troublesome than others. There may be scope for taking advantage of the usual 80/20 result/effort ratio. I expect that the information I would like to see presented must already be in use to manage the project, and so should not require significant extra effort to prepare. It's probably a good idea for me to say that I'm just looking for information, not trying to paint anyone into a corner. [ As you can probably guess, I'm really only interested in 137.43/16, 8-) ] I hope these suggestions help. I expect to come to Amsterdam for the first week in September, and look forward to seeing some nice graphs! Best regards, Niall O'Reilly PS. FWIS: From where I sit.