[routing-wg] MERIT Darknet Experiment and RPKI alerts

On 23.11.2012, at 9:28 , Shane Kerr wrote:

> 1. This link was not posted *in advance*. The reason I proposed in
>   advance is partially so that we could get review and feedback such as
>   Wilfried's, and prevent future issues.

That is true and an oversight on my part for which I take responsibility. There are many reasons why this particular experiment got started too quickly and why it included address space that was not "dark". We can discuss them over a beverage or at the next working group meeting if anyone wishes to make a point of this particular oversight. I will not waste mailing list bandwidth unless there is a strong call to discus these reasons here.

> 2. It was not sent to any of the RIPE mailing lists until after
>   problems were reported. RIPE Labs is cool, but AFAIK the RIPE
>   community still lives & breathes in the RIPE working group mailing
>   lists.

That was also an oversight and not intentional. Usually we indeed announce these articles on the relevant working group mailing lists. It has not happened this time, but it is certainly an exception.

> 
> 3. There is apparently neither a procedure nor a policy concerning  notification of experiments.

Does there need to be a *policy* on everything? 

Look: we made a mistake with this one. It did not have any real consequences. Yet we corrected it very very quickly and without hesitation once the mistake was apparent. Don't you trust the RIPE NCC anymore to do the right thing without a policy? Do we need to invoke the policy cannon for everything until our community does nothing else but make policies and the RIPE NCC does nothing else but make sure to make no mistakes running afoul of all these policies?

I think we should be very conscious about when we invoke the policy process. In areas like address space distribution and registration formal policies are vital. However, invoking the policy process whenever anyone has an issue with what the NCC does or did is not the right thing to do. 

Daniel