Topic Leader(s)

• Beth Cohen
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Topic Description

Topic Overview

As the incoming Chair of the LF Networking’s End User Advisory Group (EUAG), I have taken on as one of my first tasks to reach out to the membership to make sure that the group's charter and purpose is in alignment with its membership's interests.  Over the past few years the group has mostly focused on research and publication of whitepapers.  While there is clearly value in those activities, overall participation in any of the EUAG activities, such as meetings attendance, whitepaper writing, and general representation of the telecom perspective to LFN projects, has been declining.  During this session we will discuss the future direction of the EUAG and its role within the LF Networking community.   

Official charter of the EUAG: The Governing Board of LFN has established the End User Advisory Group to assist and support LFN.  The LFN-EUAG is made of individuals from end-user organizations, including telecommunications carriers, cable operators, network, application, compute or storage service providers.

Slides & Recording

• Live Interactive Session

Please link slides here.

Agenda

Discussion of EUAG Future Direction

• Is the EUAG relevant to the LFN Telecom community? 
• Has it's functions been replaced within the projects?
• If so, what should it be focused on?
• How can it best engage with the other projects such as ONAP and Anuket?  

Minutes

• Purpose of this session: What should the EUAG be / is it still relevant?
• Survey was sent out to individual EUAG members
• Feedback was generally that the EUAG seems to have lost its way.
• Scott Blandford AT&T stopped seeing much value - focus on white papers was not the direction desired.
• have to align resources on projects is one area of focus that would be beneficial
• Providing input on what feature/functionality is an area that need to re-engage in
• Creation of the whitepaper was to try and get SPs on the same page - that was the intent anyway
• Communication vehicle became the work, rather than an artifact of the good work being done
• Surveys see, to be valuable - summary of 3-4 pages seems appropriate
• Did the survey influence any LFN work?  Anuket Thoth project kicked off as a result of AI survey
• Randy Levensalor Cablelabs sees similar issues to that AT&T expressed.  How can the projects engage with the EUAG now?  The outreach is missing and the dialog with the projects is not happening.  Can we articulate missing features or features that have never been used and provide that feedback to the projects?
• Had a good amount of momentum with the OPNFV EUAG that didn't carry over to LFN
• As an end user have not been able to being in the correct Subject Matter Experts (SME) all the time. Often internal challenges in doing so.
• EUAG is not having any conversations with the projects anymore.  Sounds like that these conversations do need to happen.
• Anuket is very end user centric with regards to input
• Ken KANISHIMAnotes that the developer community is not the same as the user community.  Open Source is mostly developer driven.  Most of the LFN projects are not connected to the Operator community.  Is the users voice getting into the projects?  Answer is less so than before.  He participated in the ONAP requirements before. Kenny Paul  used to be a tight connection with ONAP and EUAG, that is no longer happening.  This is a gap.
• Pankaj Goyal Make EUAG be the channel for the voice of the end users: end user review of project direction (prevent projects becoming echo chamber of the participating developers).  WPs may be more useful for smaller operators rather than the larger operators who have dedicated people scanning and evaluating a wide swath of technology developments.  Telecom rep at what level -- we have developers but we may need a different level of rep's for directional and adoption purposes
• Each project needs to have a telecom representatives and then have the EUAG serve as the coordinator across the projects.
• Whitepapers are valuable, but what are the steps AFTER that?  
• Research papers are NOT positioning papers.  Should not confuse them.  seems to be one of the issues - research papers are less valuable to the operator representatives on the committee. 
• EUAG members that are more interested in whitepaper/research paper creation did not join today's session to provide input.
• Al Mortoncomments – Surveys can be difficult to translate into action.  Example of ETSI NFV where some operators wanted turnkey products, while others wanted to participate directly.  EUAG is an ADVISORY group.  In reality (like all OS projects), those who show-up drive the work that gets done.  Anuket's attempt to encourage direct and useful feedback/input from EUAG on the Anuket-Assured initiative was unsuccessful: few EUAG'ers attended, and they didn't know what Anuket was...
• Single operator driven efforts/papers should not receive LFN branding - companies can create whatever they want themselves and have always been able to do that.