CURRENT_MEETING_REPORT_ Reported by April Marine/NASA NAIC Minutes of the Network Information Services Infrastructure Working Group (NISI) Thanks to Carol Ward for the notes from which these minutes are derived. Agenda There were four main topics on the agenda: o Update on the NIC Locator project o Update on the InterNIC's ``Briefcase'' o Discussion of NIC Guidelines document o Future business NIC Locator Susan Calcari of the InterNIC presented an update on the NIC Locator service that the InterNIC DS group has been supporting. This is a service that allows users to search a database of information about Network Information Centers to find an appropriate NIC from which to get assistance. Susan presented the information that there are 69 profiles in the database now. That includes 17 new profiles beyond what was transferred to the InterNIC from Merit and updates to many of the existing profiles. Access statistics to the NIC Profile information for the month of November: Gopher/WWW: 2187 file requests 2258 directory scans FTP: 534 profiles downloaded WAIS: 3211 access requests to the database Susan talked about the variety of places the service has been advertised, including the net-happenings list and various conferences she has spoken at. Planned improvements to the service include improving access via the Web, including links to the NIC's services, an automatic system to send e-mail to the contacts to remind them to update their templates, and additional outreach. InterNIC Briefcase This is a hardcopy handout the InterNIC has created to explain what the Internet is, what services it provides, and how a user can connect to it. It is designed for people not yet connected to the Internet. The InterNIC makes the Briefcase available for other sites who wish to tailor it to their own customers. Government, educational, and US research sites are granted a no cost license. Commercial sites who might wish to use the material will be granted a very low cost license. For more information, send a message to mailserv@is.internic.net with send /faq/briefcase as the body of the message. NIC Guidelines Document Most of the meeting was taken up with a run through of the topics currently included in the NIC Guidelines document, . The group stepped through the table of contents and discussed which sections should be kept, which deleted, and which modified. Suggestions included removing NASA-specific references, clarifying that the ``staffing requirements'' section addresses staff roles, not head count, delete detailed configuration information for information servers, add a point about getting approval for publishing information on-line, add a disclaimer saying the resources section will surely go out of date quickly, and differentiate between NICs, NOCs, and NISes. The NAIC, who wrote the document, will tweak it and submit it again as a draft, then probably as an RFC to update RFC 1302/FYI 12. Future Business The chair observed that once this document was completed, the group did not seem to have any concrete task to accomplish, although many people see a benefit in having a forum for NIC people to meet. The IETF forum does not support having working groups without the group having clear goals and milestones, no matter how useful it is for people to talk to each other. It would seem then, that in the User Services tradition, that NISI will close down for now and go back under the umbrella of the User Services Working Group (USWG) until such time as there is a need for it to be resurrected. USWG will provide the forum for people to keep up with what is going on at various sites. This is not a firm decision, but the thought will be put to the list to see if the membership identifies any new goals. Plus, the Area Director does not support closing working groups until any documents they are working on have completed their publishing cycle, which the NIC Guidelines document has not yet done.