012.30.2 Germany by Ruediger Volk Efforts are underway to keep Internet services up and under control of the best representation of the German Internet user community we can identify. This is driving an effort to create some formal representation of the community at the national level. On 6 December Friday, a meeting will be held in Munich to establish a German Internet users' group, which will be called "Deutsche Interessengemeinschaft Internet" or for short "DIGI". The invitation to this meeting so far resulted in a quite overwhelming response: more than 100 participants from academia, large and small companies, and even several large and important public sector organizations (several branches of the PTT and the mail service, chambers of commerce, etc - all expecting to become large scale IP users!) signed up for the meeting. There are three areas of possible activeties of DIGI: - helping users (i.e. the administrators of networks connected to the Internet or just using Internet technology) get information; help exchange of experience etc. - funding and caring for a German NIC, housing administration of domain DE, running a delegated registry in close cooperation with RIPE NCC - help to create and maintain a competetive and fair market of IP services with proper interconnectivety for all parties Due to the international scope of Internet Society and IETF DIGI will not need to care much for the "developers". Nevertheless DIGI is intended and needs to keep all sectors of the Internet community involved; particular emphasis will be on the users (i.e. network administrators). DIGI related information is available by anon. ftp on host deins.Informatik.Uni-Dortmund.DE (192.35.64.34) under Directory /DIGI . Of course you will see a lot of German text there; documents of possible interest are: /DIGI/meetings/ziele.ascii and (less interesting) /DIGI/meetings/einladung-911206.ascii . The general DIGI mailing list is digi@deins.Informatik.Uni- Dortmund.DE (with digi-request for the list maintainer); most messages will be in German - - but you can assume readers to understand English. To get in touch with DIGI please address digi-info@deins.Informatik.Uni-Dortmund.DE . Parties involved with planning DIGI certainly are used to act cooperatively and have been involved in the global networking community for a considerable time. We hope to spread and extend the spirit of cooperation we enjoy at the global level within our country. Of course we also will care for cooperation with related activeties in other countries or on international levels. Universitaet Dortmund, Informatik IRB (DE NIC) in Dortmund, Germany.