Proposed Charter for OpenSource WG

Dear RIPE community members!
I hope many of you were able to follow Martin's presentation during
today's plenary. For the others I am sending a short summary how this
idea emerged and also a text of the proposed charter. We will
appreciate any feedback from you.

Originally, the open source routing developers of Quagga and BIRD
wanted to have a space to meet with their product users and therefore
organized two BoFs at the RIPE meetings. Both BoFs where quite
successful with reasonable high attendance about fifty people. We had
very interesting discussion and live exchange of ideas between open
source developers and users. And it helped to improve both mentioned
products as some of the requested features were implemented and
therefore it also helped some of the participants in their
deployments. On those BoFs an idea of forming RIPE WG emerged. However
if was felt that to focus only on routing daemon software would be to
narrow. So the idea was modified to create a working group discussing
all open source project relevant to RIPE community. This proposed
working group charter follows:

---
The aim of the Open Source Working Group is to foster discussion among
developers, ISPs and other RIPE community members about Open Source
projects related to the RIPE community. The working group believes
into the future benefits of Open Source in the community and regularly
discusses new features and advices on developments on selected projects.

The idea of this WG is really focused on open coordination and
feedback between developers of Open Source Software and the RIPE
community. We want to sustain a platform where developers from a
project can present recent updates, discuss their plans and get
feedback on their work.

We do want to limit the coverage on projects related and of interest
to the RIPE community. Example of Open Source projects which we
believe are a good fit for the group are Routing products like Bird,
Quagga, OpenBGPd, XORP and other projects relevant to the community
like DHCP, Network Management tools like RRDtool, Ntop or Nagios.
---

To test if this idea might work, we propose to have yet another one
BoF during the next RIPE run similarly as a regular WG session. And in
case of success we would propose a formation of a new WG.

Thank you for you comments!

	Martin Winter and Ondrej Filip