[44net] Education about networking (Was Re: Inviting you to ARDC Grantmaking Survey + Community Jitsi Call)

I don't think the most important question is about selling BGP or any particular technology (I'm well versed in internetwork engineering and worked in that field professionally for many years; I'm in academia now). I'm writing this because education was a specific question in the survey. The reason that we have amateur radio is to enable experimentation with using the radio spectrum in a way that is otherwise not permitted or practical. With the Internet, there are certain things that are only possible to experiment with if you have your own addresses and other network numbers. AMPRNet is (perhaps that's too strong, and we could say, "can be") a way of enabling a kind of experimentation on the Internet similar to what we do with the radio spectrum. Putting the Internet on a similar footing to radio as an object of experimentation is not what every amateur radio operator wants to do -- for some, their interests and even their identity is bound up in radio. The Internet is something else. For others, the interest is in ways of communicating and they have a very similar character. Much of what we learn from radio is about point to point communication. A QSO doesn't classically involve an intermediary. But then we have repeaters and digipeters that pass traffic. Those are single intermediaries and are very simple to understand. Beyond that, sometimes we invent ways of networking repeaters (typically very differently from the way that packet-switched networks function). That starts to get into territory that is not well-understood by many of the users, or indeed some of the operators of the repeaters. We also have an old practice of manual message passing. That process resembles packet-switched networking in some ways, though the rule for how to decide where to pass a message to is not always clearly defined. There is, it seems to me, a cluster of topics that can be described as, "how can messages be passed across a network", that most amateur radio operators, and most users of the Internet are never exposed to. How does these actually work in practice? Where does this mysterious thing called BGP that people seem to think is so difficult fit in? How can messages be passed between all of these different networks to get to their intended destination? This is a gap that could usefully be addressed by developing material within or around AMPRNet. 73s William VE0HAK