Best Current Operational Practices Task Force (Proposed Charter)

Abstract

The Best Current Operational Practices Task Force was formed at RIPE 67 in October 2013 to initiate and coordinate the process of documenting good common operational practices in networking. The BCOP TF brings together people to identify operational issues and motivate operators to document good operational practices that are agreed upon between two or more parties. In its process, network operators and engineers present and discuss operational issues, and identify and level barriers for deployment of new technologies.

The main interest of the task force is that current operational practice are captured and documents are published. In this process, a substantial amount of work will take place within the Working Groups for expert review and community input. The resulting RIPE documents will be published as result of WG and BCOP TF.

Documents published by the BCOP TF

Charter

The Best Current Operational Practices Task Force aims to:

• Identify and discuss operational issues among the operators and to produce document series that capture the best practices for operationalising Internet technologies.
• Provide a way to make good operational practices reference documents easily available, e.g., via RIPE Documents series.
• Documents should be produced by experienced operators.
• Provide a place for operators to identify, discuss, and communicate their operational needs, and if there are no standards for this problem, channel these to the standards process.

The BCOP TF activities are:

• Presentations from operators that lay out their issues using existing technology, protocols, standards, and implementations.
• Shepherd document that capture good current operational practice:
• Find two (or more) operators to work on a document.
• Collect community input by presenting document in appropriate WG, making sure that document is technically sound (this can imply that different iterations of the document are discussed in WG).
• Coordinate with other BCOP activities in other RIR regions (e.g. at NANOG), for overlap or conflicting documents, etc.
• Publish document in RIPE series with attribute to WG.
• Open discussion of what operators need to ease the deployment of new technologies—features and mechanisms needed in the real world.

The BCOP Task Force is intended to capture the current operational practices used in the networks today. In effect, the TF does not produce a (single) document that concludes the work of the task force, but rather facilitate and/or stimulate the process of documenting good current operational practices. These documents are written by others, not by the TF co-chairs.

The TF does not start new and future work, this is not in the charter and should take place at the other WGs. It is an overarching, coordinating activity, and will make certain that content-wise the documentation process receives WG community interest and feedback.

Timeline

Although BCOP is a continuing activity, the effectiveness of the TF will be evaluated during the period RIPE 71 – RIPE 73 to ascertain it is still serving its purpose.