How to Join SwiNOG: Mailing List, Meetings, and What "Membership" Means

Updated

You join SwiNOG by subscribing to its mailing list, [email protected]. There are no membership fees, no application process, and no political or lobbying requirements — the site states plainly that subscribing is what membership means in this community. Meetings are also open to everyone, so you can attend without subscribing first, though the list is where most of the ongoing activity happens between events.

Subscribing to the mailing list

The mailing list is the core of SwiNOG. It runs on Mailman 3 and is archived publicly on Hyperkitty, so you can read past threads before deciding to join.

To subscribe:

  1. Go to the SwiNOG site and find the mailing list section.
  2. Enter your email address in the subscribe field.
  3. Confirm the subscription through the email Mailman sends you.

Expected result: you start receiving list traffic. The site describes the volume as low — "quiet on quiet weeks; loud when something catches fire" — with high signal density. Typical topics include outages, peering, MTU issues, and fibre cuts.

There are also related lists mentioned on the site:

List Purpose
swinog Main list
swinog-antispam Working group
swinog-jobs Job postings

The main list has 1k+ subscribers.

Attending a meeting

Meetings are held roughly once or twice a year, usually in Berne and sometimes elsewhere in Switzerland. They are single-track days of operator talks plus a hallway track and long social events, and they are open to everyone.

The next meeting listed is SwiNOG #42, October 20–21, 2026, at Enter Technikmuseum. The site notes it is "in planning" and has an open call for help, including a call for talk submissions (CFP) and a search for a new logo.

To attend or speak:

  1. Watch the SwiNOG site for the #42 meeting page and registration details.
  2. If you want to give a talk, submit through the CFP for #42.
  3. If you have design skills, you can also submit a logo proposal — the site asks for no AI-generated submissions.

What you get from the archive

Every meeting since SwiNOG #1 (Berne, 18 October 2000) has slides, and most have recordings. That is 41 meetings of public material you can dig through without joining anything.

Recent talks from SwiNOG #41 (28 April 2026) include:

  • "The Network Automation Map: Navigate Your Journey with the NAF Automation Framework" — Damien Garros, OpsMill
  • "Building a Vendor-Agnostic E2E Testing Ecosystem with Netlab" — Leandro Lerena & Andy Griesbeck, Zebbra AG
  • "EVPN Unleashed: Scaling Multi-Domain Fabrics with EVPN Gateways" — Remi Locherer, modus one ag with Arista Networks
  • "An Introduction to ASPA – Validating AS-Paths with the help of RPKI" — Max Stucchi, SwiNOG
  • "25 Years of SwissIX – A Quarter Century of Peering in Switzerland" — Arist Volger, SwissIX

Common sticking points

  • No fee does not mean no commitment. The community expects list participation to stay on-topic and useful; it is described as non-political and not a lobby.
  • Meetings are not a conference product. They are informal operator forums, so the value is in the hallway track and social events as much as the talks.
  • The list is the membership. If you only attend meetings and never subscribe, you are still welcome, but you will miss the between-meeting discussion that the site calls "where it happens between."

SwiNOG was founded on 24 February 2000 and has held 41 meetings since. If you run, design, or operate Swiss networks, subscribing to the list is the lowest-effort way in.