CURRENT MEETING REPORT Reported by Joyce K. Reynolds, ISI Minutes of the User Services Working Group (USV) A "thank-you very much" to Ryan Moats of the InterNIC who provided me with his notes of the USWG session. They were invaluable in compiling these minutes. Discussions/Reports o A report on IETF User Services Area activities There are eight working groups active, RUN has closed down and their work is out as FYI 28. ISN is working to update FYI 22. ISN related comments can be send to jodi@hawaii.edu and sellers@lupine.nsi.nasa.gov. o Reports on related global liaison group activities and international conferences IESG and USV Area status and updates at the RIPE meeting plenary were provided by Joyce. Tel-Ed Conference, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida ISN held an interim meeting at this conference, chaired by Jennifer Sellers. Joyce attended the meeting to into other education on-line magazines and National Educational Conference (NEC) for 96 is in May. Are Educators interested in ERIC via the Internet? This job might be easier because there are national education organizations for disseminating information (e.g., in Germany, schule.de). The Asian IAPs will be holding the Apricot Conference, January 18-24, 1996 in Singapore. This may be a place to obtain additional input. o Info Scout Update-Susan Calcari The IS side of the InterNIC was shutdown at General Atomics. Susan and her job are now located at UW-Madison. She has been hiring personnel, including Tom Newell as NIC liaison. She and has also hired a librarian. Send mail to scout@internic.net for the Scout Report. The Scout Toolkit is now located at: http://www.internic.net/scout It will be announced after this IETF meeting. o InterNIC Report-Tom Newell/NIC Liaison (tomn@internic.net or liaison@internic.net) There have been many conferences attended in the last few months (ACM-SIG, CNI, EDUCOM, etc.) where InterNIC outreach has been done. The primary finding is that the ISP's think that the InterNIC should be doing more for them. The most specific or common answer was, "We don't know, but the InterNIC should do something and let the community critique it." Tom mentioned that the InterNIC's original focus was service to the R&D community. The InterNIC is looking into how to expand the focus to a broader community. Specifically the commercial folks. A new project has been undertaken. The NSFnet newsletter will be resurrected as the InterNIC News. It will be published on a monthly basis, stored in a variety of electronic formats, etc. It will have the same focus as the newsletter had before, but with a broader audience. The two places where the InterNIC previously helped was small colleges and local libraries. The proposed format includes: key interviews, technical topics, Newbie topics, and InterNIC information. A second project in development at the InterNIC is the "Fifteen Minute Series". These would be packages that take 15 minutes to present to folks from "what is the Internet" to "what tools are available", etc. This includes the concept that the InterNIC can act as the "glue" or "clearinghouse" of internetworking information. Another project that might be performed by the InterNIC is hosting regional conferences with a focus on either the ISPs or discussing registration and information aspects of the InterNIC. The mailing list of nic-support@internic.net for posting your thoughts and comments. o Discussion/Participation of USWG projects and USV-Web Updates http://rs.internic.net/usv-web.html Janet Max reported that the ds link to http://rs.internic.net/usv-web.html seems to be broken. There is a gopher link broken in one of the ds machines (i.e., the fyi-index.html does not come up). The InterNIC folks will check these out and report back to Joyce on the status. Joyce and Tom will take the action to look at the USV-Web pages and update them. Also, it was suggested that the USV-Web page should be more visible then where it is currently nested, and that USV Area Internet-Drafts should also be listed on the web, along with the FYI RFC finished products. The discussion then turned to the status of the NIC Locator project. This was a discussion of the problem of the ISPs sending information to the InterNIC to be included in the NIC-Locator database. The problem is how appropriate is it to list "commercial" entries. A question was raised on how often do the NIC-Locator pages get hit? It is thought to be not very often. Also, there is already a "list.com", which pretty much provides the information that the NIC-Locator originally provided. It was decided that the NIC-Locator will be killed off. o The HTMLing of FYI RFCs Janet Max, who did all the work in HTMLing FYI RFCs for the USWG and Internet community has agreed to continue to do this, and also provide support at least for the next year or so. (YEAH! - thanks JLM!) Jon Postel has constructed up web pages, which access the HTML FYI RFCs, among other items: RFC-Editor page: http://www.isi.edu/rfc-editor IANA page: http://www.isi.edu/iana o Butterfly Glossary from Italy This is located at http://www.pi.cnr.it/ODI/Glossario/glhpage.html A. Blasco Bonito (GARR-Italy) wants feedback from USWGers on how they like it. o UserGlos Working Group Update Gary Malkin provided a brief presentation regarding the UserGlos Working Group status. It has been canceled at this IETF because he has been ill, has not had enough time to get ready for the session, and there has been no almost no activity or input by working group members. However, new entries are being filled in and an I-D will be put out in a month to finish at the next IETF in March in Los Angeles. o Any other business AIDAT (African Internet Development Action Team) is a volunteer organization mainly based in South Africa working to bring the Internet to Africa. The question that comes up is that there is a need/niche for some documentation (FYI RFC?) aimed at developing countries for an organization (country/university/etc.) to get access to the Internet. This could be something for the USWG to work on as a project. On another topic, request for information on setting up or running a regional or country NIC would be useful. After a round of discussion, it was decided that this will not be followed up because information on dealing with governments is not what the USWG or the IETF should get into.