Originally a LinkedIn post, but I thought it deserved better posterity:

#GRNOG18 marks the 10 years of GRNOG. Faidon Liambotis, going through his email archives traced the roots of GRNOG to two (sometimes ovelapping) groups of people: The greek IPv6 working group, then led by Athanassios Liakopoulos and the Greek Postmasters mailing list (for which I lent a hand):

It was Angelo Karageorgiou (then leading the technical capability of a now defunct ISP) who reached out to me because UCEPROTECT was including lots of Greek address space by the buckets and refusing to delist them and asked whether we could gather fellow Postmasters to work on the thing. I knew some of them and reached out and a meeting was held at the OTE building, facilitated by the ever so nice Pandelis Papanikolaou. Faidon and George Kargiotakis were also there on behalf of GRNET – Greek Research & Technology Network and offered to host the mailing list (I think on Sympa?).

Two more meetings / dinners were held by the Greek Postmasters and eventually traffic on the list died out (ISPs were being absorbed, people, including me changed jobs, other ISPs outsourced their email to Microsoft). It was then that Andreas Polyrakis took over and provided the necessary energy with the rest of the team, merging the two groups and possibly a few more and the rest is history as they say.

Looking back, I have to say that I could have never built such an amazing community as the one Andreas, Faidon, Kostas Zorbadelos, Michalis Oikonomakos, Tasos Karaliotas and whoever else lent them a hand.

You guys rock and I am a proud observer of your work. Don’t ever change.

Enough with the pre-history; history is made by those who are doing the work (ie, not me).