At the TF-CPR meeting

I'm over at the SURFnet offices in Utrecht in the Netherlands today for the TF-CPR meeting from TERENA.

For the uninitiated TF-CPR might not mean much, so the meeting this morning started off with a game of guess-the-acronym. It turns out that TF-CPR stands for the TERENA Task Force for Communications and PR, which has been set up to share ideas about marketing and PR issues. This is different but related to PSP, or partnership service promotion, which is a communications task within GÉANT.

Talking about GÉANT, a question that's often asked is what exactly is the difference between GÉANT and TERENA, something question I asked myself only yesterday. A simple explanation would be that GÉANT is the name of the project while TERENA is the name of the organisation. GÉANT refers to the physical pan-European research network which connects 40 million users in over 8,000 institutions across 40 countries.

This morning we've heard from how a number of organisations communicate their messages to their user communities as well as the wider world. EGI.eu told us about how they're mobilising the grid community to hold discussions on their new blog while SURFnet demonstrated the SURFconext collaborative environment for academic institutions (take a look at the video here). Right before lunch we heard from RIPE NCC who have been getting quite a lot of publicity lately thanks to recent stories about how the internet has run out of space. RIPE is a policy forum for internet addressing and distributes IP addresses, in Europe, the Middle East and parts of Central Asia. Chris Buckridge from the organisation told us how they're positioning themselves in the media as a trusted source of data - and how they're explain just exactly what's going on with the transition to IPv6.