Going Solo: Why I’m Building NOGnet

I spent seven years with the Global NOG Alliance, from 2019 until earlier this year. Most of that work never had my name attached to it in public, which is fairly normal for this kind of community role. The project I’m proudest of from that stretch is Keep Ukraine Connected. I handed it off a while back to someone I trust to run it better than I could at this point, and it’s continuing without me. That’s how I wanted it to go.

Earlier this year I went solo, without much drama. No falling out, no big announcement. Just a decision that the next chapter of this work needed to be mine to run on my own terms, mistakes included, without routing every call through a committee first. What I’m doing now is NOG Support work, and the flagship of it is a platform called NOGnet.

NOGnet is a support program built around the full lifecycle of a NOG event, from the early planning calls where nothing is decided yet through program building, sponsor outreach, the event itself, and whatever wrap-up and reporting happens once everyone’s gone home. It isn’t a new idea I came up with this year. It grew, organically, out of event tooling I’d already been building for NOGs over the last three years. What started as small scripts to make my own life easier at events kept growing every time another organizer asked to borrow them, and eventually the borrowing outgrew the scripts.

What’s in it so far

The core is a single profile an attendee fills out once and reuses across every event on the platform. Submit a CfP talk, register, use the meeting tools, and it all draws from the same profile instead of asking people to re-enter who they are each time. That sounds small. It’s the piece that made everything else possible.

On top of that sits a meeting tool that knows what an attendee and their company actually do, and suggests people worth meeting based on their profile and whatever goals they’ve set for that event, rather than handing over an alphabetical attendee list and wishing you luck. There’s a sponsor support module that helps organizers figure out who to approach and how to make the case. There’s a program committee module that surfaces strong submissions and flags topic gaps a PC might not catch on its own, by comparing against what other events have already covered. And underneath all of it is a layer of notes and history that persists across events, so context from two years ago doesn’t quietly evaporate once everyone’s moved on to the next one.

Every module is built API-first, on purpose. A NOG that already runs its own website or its own tooling can pull in just the piece it needs, the meeting tool, the CfP form, whichever, and run it embedded in their own setup instead of adopting the whole platform. I’d rather NOGnet be useful in pieces than sit unused as a whole.

I don’t have a fixed monetization plan, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. The approach for now is community-first: build the thing, let organizers actually use it, and look for people or organizations willing to support it financially over time as it proves its worth. I genuinely don’t know yet if that’s enough to sustain it long-term, and I go back and forth on whether I even want a fixed plan at this stage or whether that would just constrain decisions I’m not ready to make. It’s probably not the fastest way to build a business. But it fits how this community works, and right now that matters more to me than speed.

I build and run all of this alone, in whatever hours are left after a day job. That means progress is slower than I’d like, and it means the pieces aren’t at the same stage. The profile and CfP tools are solid at this point. The meeting suggestions work, though I keep tuning them. Sponsor and program-committee support are newer and rougher, more scaffolding than finished feature. Some weeks I get three solid evenings on this, some weeks none, and the platform’s progress tracks that unevenly. I’m still figuring out how much of this any given organizer wants versus what I assume they should want, and the only way I’ve found to answer that honestly is to ship the rough version and watch what people do with it.