The Peering Coordinator job is a multi-disciplinary one. Their skills span the technical, social, business and legal domains.

Technical. Peering Coordinators need to convince others that peering with them will provide more benefits than it will cost.  If a peer doesn’t have a strong technical staff, it may take more time and effort to get the peering session up than it is worth. A technically skilled Peering Coordinator communicates a depth of technically savvy staff that will not drain the resources of the peers staff in setting up, maintaining and upgrading the peering sessions.

Social. The core individuals in the Peering Community tend to know each other and see each other at many of the events around the globe throughout the year. Seasoned Peering Coordinators have built their reputations and relationships over the years - this is one of their core values to their employers.

There is also a more practical side to maintaining relationships in the Peering Community. When things break in the middle of the night, and escalation needs to happen, these individuals with whom trust has been established can sometimes more quickly facilitate the repair of problems. History has proven that personal relationships and the people trust model helps smooth the way through troubled Internet operations waters.

Business. Peering has to make sense financially, and business cases are typically made for network expansions, particularly in troubled economies.  So, Peering Coordinators often work with spreadsheets to calculate the cost of peering, the amount of traffic peered, the capacity of circuits, the growth rate, the ASes to approach, the IXes and expenses involved, etc. These are business and communication skills.

Legal. Some peers require peering contracts, which require some degree of discussion internally, negotiation externally, legal edits to documents, or the decision to simply accept the other sides peering agreement.

Travel. It may take several operations fora for a Peering Coordinator to establish their identity and some trust relationships involved with peering. Unfortunately, out of a sense of fairness, some ISPs have alternated sending different people to the various peering fora. The problem with this strategy is that these people won't be recognized as a repeat attendee representing the company until a maybe a few years elapses. This has proven to be an ineffective technique for establishing peering.

Since Peering Coordinators need to travel so often, they often have the best travel tips. Here are some seasoned Peering Coordinator Travel Resources.

A lot of really good resources to explore are here at the #IX page.

Lots of good neteng/peering consultants available at the DrPeering Clinics in the Boston, Silicon Valley, Los Angeles, Virginia/DC area, Toronto, and Iceland: consultants@DrPeering.net