In October 2018, during APNIC’s IPv6 Direct Community Assistance in Ulaanbaatar, Dr. Philip Smith, Tashi Phuntsho and Klee Aiken invited a number of local network operators and engineers to get together. It was anopportunity for us avid networkers to socialize in an environment removed from our day jobs, where many of our employers are in competition with each other.
Tashi shared his personal experience of the beginnings of btNOG in Bhutan. He said that for them it was a challenge just to get everyone in the same room. It took about two years of informal meetups like this one before they could eventually start btNOG. He encouraged the group to continue meeting, and we appointed a few people to help organize future meetups.
Tashi remarked that it was a very positive sign to see the group, with so much local knowledge and technical experience, come together and start sharing experiences and making new connections.
Progress continued quietly until APRICOT 2019, where talks about mnNOG 1 began. After coming back from Daejeon, we started a mnNOG mailing list (which APNIC offered to host) as our official communication platform. This was a great first step forward!
Local engineers came together at an informal meetup in October 2018.
Word spread through our networks about the new developments, and in late March, 30 of us (including Tashi remotely from Brisbane) met at a university lecture hall to officially establish mnNOG and to agree to hold our first conference in September 2019.
At the meeting, a tentative schedule for mnNOG 1 was set and a number of attendees volunteered their time to work on the Program Committee (11 members) and Coordination Committee (10 members). It was great to see so many supportive and open-minded members of our community coming together to work towards a common goal.
DataCom, NSRC, APRICOT chair, APNIC, GemNet, ICNC, Erdemnet, C net, G-mobile, Mobinet, Unitel, Citinet, Mobicom, Univision, Skytel, School of Information and Communication Technology, System center,