What a NOG Is, and Why I Stayed for Seven Years

If you have never heard the term NOG, you are not missing some niche hobbyist scene. You are missing a layer of how the internet actually stays up. A NOG, short for Network Operator Group, is a regional or national community of the engineers who run the internet’s plumbing: people from ISPs, data centers, universities, and other networks who get together periodically to compare notes on what is breaking and what is working.

I spent seven years, from 2019 to 2026, embedded in this world through the Global NOG Alliance, and this year I went out on my own to build tooling and support for the people who organize these events. So I have had a long time to think about why this particular corner of tech culture holds together the way it does, and why I kept showing up long after I had learned everything a first-timer needs to know.

The format itself is unglamorous. A rotating program committee, made up of volunteers from the community, puts out an open call for papers and picks what gets presented. Nobody’s employer runs the show. There is no vendor with a logo on the main stage deciding the agenda. That neutrality is the whole point: engineers will talk honestly about an outage or a bad routing decision in a room where nobody is selling them anything, in a way they never would in a vendor-sponsored webinar.

But if you asked me what these events are actually for, I would not point to the talks. The talks are fine. Some are excellent. Most of them you could read as slides later and lose almost nothing. What you cannot get from the slides is the hallway conversation before the first session starts, or the fact that half the room already knows each other from a decade of these meetings, across different employers and different countries. That familiarity is the actual product. It is the reason someone will pick up the phone during a real outage because they recognize your name from years of showing up to the same rooms, not because of a support contract.

It took me a while to feel that from the inside rather than just observe it. The first couple of years, I was the person on the edge of the group photo, nodding along to inside jokes about incidents I had not been part of. This world has its own cliquishness, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. The same names keep turning up on program committees. Newcomers have to earn their way in slowly, mostly by being useful and being around, and there is no shortcut for that. I do not think that is a flaw exactly, trust that took years to build should not be handed out on day one, but it does mean the community can look, from outside, more welcoming in principle than it sometimes feels in practice.

The other thing seven years teaches you is how fragile all of this is. Volunteer-run means exactly that: the person keeping the mailing list alive, or chasing sponsors for the coffee budget, or maintaining the registration system, is usually doing it unpaid, on top of a full-time job, because they care. When that person burns out or changes jobs or just gets tired, things can quietly stop working. Nobody is contractually obligated to keep a NOG running. It survives because enough people decide, year after year, that it is worth their evenings.

The project I am proudest of from those seven years is one I built and ran called Keep Ukraine Connected. I have since handed it off to someone I trust to keep it going without me, which is its own kind of test: whether something built inside a volunteer community can outlast the person who started it. I expect it to. That expectation is itself a small vote of confidence in how this world works, even with all its cliquishness and its precariousness.

Going solo this year to build NOGnet keeps me in this same world, just no longer inside a single alliance structure. I am building for the same organizers who spend their spare time keeping these meetings alive, because the unglamorous back-office work of running an event, like the registration forms and the sponsor invoices, deserves better tooling than duct tape and someone’s personal spreadsheet. It is a narrower thing to build than a whole alliance, but it is the part I understand best after seven years of watching this world hold together, occasionally by not very much.

I still do not have a tidy answer for why I stayed this long. Some of it is genuinely the technical content, the operational stories that never make it into any postmortem write-up. Most of it, honestly, is the people, and the specific kind of relationship that only forms when you keep showing up to the same unglamorous rooms year after year.