I recently had the pleasure to join the 64th NANOG (North American Network Operators’ Group) meeting in San Francisco, which can be understood as one of the largest Internet engineering conferences at all. It takes place three times a year at different locations in North America.
What I personally like about NANOG is its strong collaborative and cooperative character. It is not about single persons and also not too much about spectacular projects but more about discussing technologies, ideas, challenges and numbers. Every talk has a comparatively large time slot reserved for discussion, which is often more than fully used. Discussion is typically actively focused and is more time-consuming (and even more relevant) than the talk itself. Which often is intended by the community. The climate of discussion is almost always impressively polite and constructive, even for controversially discussed topics.
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