melinda, i assure you that operations being 'owned' by vendors is not restricted to the geographically isolated. one small example. i was asked to consult on a global deployment by a global fortune whatever company whose name you would all recognize. there was no real management, and the decisions were all done by a mid-level IT tech who was 'owned' by a vendor. when it was clear to me that i was there just to rubber-stamp an ill-considered and ridiculously over-built solution, i walked.
otoh, i have worked in some pretty darned isolated environments where the engineers worked very hard to get clue, participated in operator fora, ... come to the afnog workshops in two weeks. > Perhaps we should be thinking about some alternative to engaging > operators by trying to get them to schlep to meetings. Something > along the lines of a liaison process or creating a pipeline between us > and NOGs. actually this has become a popular sport in some segments of the ietf community. a bunch of ietfers come to nog meetings and participate on nog lists. after they got whacked for talking down to operators (the two classics i loved were multiple cases of explainng what the ietf was, and then one arrogant ipv6 ivory tower bigot "the HD ration is a hard problem because operators do not know what a logarithm is"), the interaction has been very useful. i know a highly reputed security researcher who took a year sabbatical and actually worked in ops. some iesg members have been very persistent about gaining ops clue. all in all, there is much more transfer across the membrane in both directions than there was 15 years ago. of course, as most things in life, we could do better. randy
