Mostly Harmless

I was lucky enough a week or two back to get a day away from the screen up in London to attend Nominet’s registrar information day. The event had a sensible start time of 9.30 for registration (presentations starting at 10.00) making travelling up the same day just about possible (i.e getting up at 5 is the very earliest I’ll entertain). I would have been there bang on time if not for a tube derailment (nothing to do with my deciding to travel I might add, gypsies curses not withstanding). Walking up a quiet Oxford street in some rare sun was really rather enjoyable.

The event itself is a strange hybrid, in some ways it would be appropriate as an Induction for new Registrars but there is also useful content in most of the segments on recent developments and a presentation on future technologies at the end and these are appropriate for anyone at a registrar who needs to keep up to date and indeed there were several attendees who had been before or were even regular to the event.

The attendees were a mixed bag or management, techies and administration staff, comprising those interested in being registrars only if they can fully automate the process to those working for small development and consultancy outfits still composing emails to register domains by hand. This made the fact that Jay Daley (whose rather scary blog on control freak techniques is well worth a read) managed to do an overview of some fairly technical subjects (DNS-Sec, Enum) before going home time without some of the less technical members of the audience beginning to foam at the mouth rather impressive.

In general the staff seemed to recognise that the organisation has an image amongst some of it’s registrars as old fashioned and bureaucratic and indeed the organisation has added a “Key Account Manager” position so that they can keep in touch with and get better feedback from the registrar community. One expects these sorts of days to be well choreographed but all of the staff I spoke to certainly gave me a more positive view of the organisation than I had had previously as well as being able to put emails addresses to faces, something which is always handy.

The staff were pretty honest, when queried on the precise rules behind a technical process involving merging account Nominet were happy to say “we’re still having fun playing with that”. Obviously it would be nice to have live systems fully documented but not being honest about why they aren’t documented yet would have been worse than confirming the details are still being set.

The concept of getting the technical team to blog along with their technical challenges as part of their objectives seems a good way to make their work more visible as well as documenting technical humps traversed (I’ve got no idea whether Nominet have an internal knowledgebase but it always surprises me how many places don’t for various reasons) and indeed publishing some of that knowledge is a pretty admirable goal for a team working at a high level. Customer facing technical teams in commercial organisations often can’t blog about recent challenges in case these reveal details about a particular incident they’d rather the customers didn’t know about for reasons of confidentiality or business prudence so it is good to see an organisation that has the opportunity take advantage of it.

Ultimately the day was worth attending and will probably be worth revisiting at a set interval or whenever there are interesting developments at the organisation that will affect the business.

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