EARN BOD 01 85

EARN Document

Title:      Minutes of EARN Board of Directors meeting March7, 1985

Author(s):  Not Known

Date:       1985/3/7

Committee:  Board of Directors

Document:   BOD1 85 EARN-MIN LISTSERV@UKACRL

Revision:   0

Supersedes:

Status:     Final

Maintainer: Board of Directors

Access:     Board of Directors

——————————————————————–

EARN Board of Directors Meeting

Madrid, 7 March 1985

  1. Opening Mate:  welcomed the participants to the meeting.
  1. Agenda:  the proposed agenda has been accepted.
  1. Minutes of last meeting:

On page 2, the last line has to be modified as follows:

Foundation group:  Mr Bryant, Ms Carlson, Mr Ippolito.

  1. Report on the Foundation of EARN Association:

On 6 February the EARN Association was founded at a meeting in Paris.   The officers selected at the last BOD were formally appointed, ie

President:          D Lord

Vice President:     D Jennings

General Secretary:  S Trumpy

Treasurer:          J C Ippolito

The other members of the Board present at this meeting will now be formally established as Directors.

  1. Date of the Next Meeting:

The proposal to have the next BOD meeting in Stockholm on 24 and 25 July, in connection with Landweber meeting, was accepted.   The BOD meeting will start at 14.00 on the 24th;  for the first part of the meeting of the 25th, subgroups will meet in parallel to examine specific topics.   For the rest of the morning and the afternoon up to approx 15.00 the Board will meet in full to discuss the reports of the subgroups and any remaining topics.

It was also proposed that the following BOD meeting take place in Israel in the second half of October or early November 1985.   D Lord will contact Cohen to see whether he is willing to organise this meeting.

  1. Report on the Meeting of the Technical Co-ordination Group (TCG) at RAL (19-20.2.85).

P Bryant presented the relevant items discussed in the meeting.

H Budd in a formal letter has proposed to the co-ordinator of the TCG to start a technical committee with the participation of IBM experts to plan a migration to ISO protocols.   On this point, after a discussion, the BOD decided to:

-create a committee (ISO Technical Committee, ITC) of four or five people, all network and standards experts, co-ordinated by P Bryant to:

-contact the IBM experts in L Gaude,

-contact other European manufacturers of OSI standard products,

-report to the next BOD meeting.

Italy, France, UK, Germany and CERN have volunteered to provide one expert each.

The Board accepted the TCG’s proposal for mode naming.

Concerning routing table management, the BOD decided that it was essential to have one single agency that should generate all the routing tables for nodes in EARN and BITNET.   This agency would also co-ordinate the introduction of new tables into operation and would also check proposed names for new nodes to ensure uniqueness.

  1. Review of the Statues of the EARN Association:

All the objections on the EARN statutes should be reported to B Hultzsch or B Carlson or J L Ippolito;  they will either answer directly or will bring to the attention of BOD problems that require clarification or decisions.

  1. Reports from the countries:

All the countries reported the major events since the last meeting.   Appendix A contains the updated EARN status report.   The line Rome-Geneva will be activated soon,m the problems with the Italian PTT having been solved.   The Rome node presently located at IBM’s Scientific Centre, is to be moved to a non-IBM location.

The Spain country representative from now on is Miguel A Campos, he is located in Barcelona.

A Auroux reports that Portugal, Greece and Austria will joint EARN by end of 1985;  furthermore, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the Emirates are forming a network and are interested in connecting to EARN.

Concerning the procedure for accepting new country members, the BOD decided that:

-any request have should be presented to BOD for approval.

-the charter must be revised in order to make more clear that every new member accepts the role of transit node with no discrimination on the origin and destination of data.

  1. Mail Standard:

The BOD proposes to:

-adopt immediately a mail standard agreed upon with BITNET

-take as a strategic policy the adoption of the CCITT X400 series of recommendations as the future mail standard for the network.

The Technical Committee will present a proposed solution to the October BOD meeting.

  1. News from BITNET:

I Fuchs reported various items of news from BITNET, in particular:

-BITNET is studying whether and how RSCS can be used over X25 networks.

-BITNET may well also adopt the CCITT X400 series.

To ensure a close relationship between EARN and BITNET the BOD adopted the following resolution:

the EARN Board invites BITNET to nominate a Director to the EARN Board.   The EARN Board requests that BITNET extends a permanent invitation to the EARN Board to send a representative to the meetings of the BITNET Board.   I Fuchs indicated that this was already the case.

  1. The Future of EARN

After a long discussion, important points of the EARN’s future evolution can be considered as the following:

  1. make the network operational as currently planned,

 

  1. publicise the network and encourage people to use it,
  1. increase the services,
  1. what is to be EARN’s role vis-a-vis the national networks;  does it have a contribution to make in the integration of these networks.
  1. Financial Planning:

The Treasurer agreed to prepare an estimation of the total running costs of EARN and of a possible membership fee.

  1. Poster and Publicity Material:  examples were presented and were approved.