What Keep Ukraine Connected Actually Was

I spent seven years with the Global NOG Alliance, from 2019 until this year. A lot of things happened in that time, but one project mattered to me more than the rest. I called it Keep Ukraine Connected. I built it, ran it for years, and earlier this year handed it to someone I trust to carry on without me.

I've put off writing about it, mostly because I'm not sure how to talk about it without either saying too little or saying more than I should. What I can say honestly is this: it was a community effort focused on supporting the resilience of internet connectivity in the region, during a period when that connectivity was under real strain. I'm deliberately not going to get into how it worked, who else was involved, or what it did in any specific moment. Some of that isn't mine to share, and honestly, the mechanics were never the part that mattered most to me anyway.

What mattered was simpler than the project probably looked from outside. I happened to be in a position, through the NOG community, where I could do something. Not everyone is. The network operator world is small and oddly personal, people know each other, trust gets built up over years of shared incidents and shared conference hallways, and when something breaks somewhere, that trust is sometimes the fastest infrastructure available. I had some of that trust. I understood, technically, how connectivity breaks and gets pieced back together. So I used what I had. There wasn't much more of a plan than that. A moment came where doing something seemed better than not, and I was close enough to act on it.

Running it

I kept it going for years after that, longer than I expected when I started. It became a steady, mostly quiet part of how I spent my time in the NOG world, running alongside the more visible things I did there. I won't pretend I always knew what I was doing. I mostly figured it out as I went, changed course when something stopped working, and kept it running because stopping felt worse than the discomfort of doing it imperfectly.

Handing it off

Earlier this year I stepped back and passed it to someone I trust. I'm not going to name them or describe them; that isn't mine to do, and it isn't really the point here either. What I want to say is more ordinary: handing off something you built and cared about for years feels strange in a very specific way. You spend a long stretch of time being the person who holds a thing together. Then one day you aren't, and the thing keeps existing anyway. That was always the intended outcome. I wanted the project to outlast my involvement in it. Wanting that and actually doing it turned out to be two different feelings.

Mostly what I felt, doing it, was trust, and I mean that as a description, not as a softer word for something harder. I trust the person running it now more than I trust my own capacity to hold onto any one thing forever. Seven years is a long run for a side project. Part of building something worth keeping is eventually admitting it will last longer if it doesn't depend entirely on you.

I don't have a neat way to close this out, and I'd be suspicious of myself if I found one. Keep Ukraine Connected existed because the moment called for it and because I happened to be close enough to help. It belongs to someone else now. That feels right.