Dear colleagues, I am pleased to announce the formation of the DNS-OARC DNS Operations Trust Group. This group is an evolution of a previous secure operations mailing list and is intended to enable and encourage secure exchange of operational information about the DNS for the purpose of promoting and improving the security and stability of the global DNS. New participants will be vetted by the existing membership with the intent to produce a group with the greatest level of trust possible. The new platform this trust group resides on has much better mechanisms for vetting members and managing the list members, which we believe will lead to better communication for everyone involved. The trust group's scope is the identification, discussion, and mitigation of anomalies, threats or incidents related to: the DNS protocol, operational infrastructure and provisioning of the DNS, and operations of high volume or high profile DNS authoritative servers, caching resolvers and validators. DNS-OARC trust group participants must be in a position to directly affect the overall security of the DNS infrastructure through hands-on control of infrastructure or through contributing critical security information or wisdom. The pool of participants may include operators of critical DNS infrastructure, DNS security experts, technical representatives of DNS software vendors, as well as researchers and experts in DNS operations and members of the law enforcement community. Membership in DNS-OARC is not required. The initial membership was bootstrapped by the DNS-OARC board and comprises approximately 25 members from the various roles listed above. All were vouched for by the entire board. The board also serves as the initial steering group, which provides oversight, guidance and arbitration of the trust group's policy and governance issues. The board will transition out of this role and the steering group will be selected by the membership itself after the trust group reaches critical mass. If you believe you would be an appropriate member of the trust group, you may nominate yourself for membership consideration by sending email to dns-ops-trustgroup@dns-oarc.net. New members will require three positive vouches from the existing membership. A vouch indicates that the member personally knows and trusts the vouchee. The intent is for the membership to be as inclusive as possible while still preserving an atmosphere of mutual trust. Please be aware that a nominee's not receiving an invite is not necessarily a sign of distrust. It could be that the nominee has not been known long enough or widely enough to receive sufficient vouches. This situation might change over the course of time and the nominee may receive an invite at some point in the future. We believe the DNS Operations Trust Group provides a much-needed venue for critical and sensitive discussion about the global DNS, and DNS-OARC is pleased to be able to initiate it. We are grateful to OPSEC Trust (ops-trust.net) for providing the infrastructure for the group. Matt Larson Chairman, OARC, Inc.