RIPE 83
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Community Plenary
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Thursday, 25 November 2021
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10:30 (UTC + 1)
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MIRJAM KUHNE: Good morning. So far so good. At least I can see my slides. I can see me. I hope the same applies to you. I am pretending I am in a room and people are walking into the room in the real world like we used to have. There we have Niall O'Reilly.
NIALL O'REILLY: Ten people have walked into the room in the last couple of minutes. You're not wrong, Mirjam.
MIRJAM KUHNE: I have slides here, so Niall is going to help with the moderation and monitoring the Q&A and the chat later on. And I'll be giving a presentation and we'll have a number of topics.
My name is Mirjam Kuhne, I am the RIPE Chair. I think this is the fourth online event we're having and the third one Niall and I are chairing. So, it's a bit of a tradition now in the Community Plenary, we'll give you a quick update of what the RIPE Chair team have been up to over the last few months. That's our first agenda item. Then we'll have an announcement by the Rob Blokzijl Foundation about the upcoming Rob Blokzijl Award and, after that, Hisham Ibrahim will talk about the ideas and plans he has for the community. After that, Hans Petter Holen will talk about the Number Resource Organisation and the plans for next year.
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And then after that, in the end we'll have some time to dive a bit more into the revised RIPE Policy Development Process that we have sent to the RIPE list some weeks ago.
Right. So, let's dive right into our update. Before we do that, I was reminded to present the slide to you for those of you who haven't seen it in other sessions, of course. The session is recorded and all the material will be online, including the chat and the Q&A and the slides, of course, and the recording and video, and if you have any questions after the presentation, there is a question mark on the left top that you can use for to type in your questions, or you can also request audio or video and audio on the top under your name, you'll see the buttons there. And there is a participants list, it's now ‑‑ you can see the number increasing as people are coming in and there is also a chat, you can see the icon there, and you can detach that from the screen so you can have that open on the side. I won't be able to watch the chat while presenting but I'm sure Niall is going to keep an eye on it.
Right. Now, we can dive into our update.
So, the community has actually been which quite busy over the last few months. We have a new RIPE Code of Conduct in place that we have consensus on, a big thanks to the Code of Conduct Task Force that have done a fantastic job in building that with the consensus of the ‑‑ of the community, and the Code of Conduct has now been published as RIPE‑766. You have probably all seen it. It also applies to other communication channels like mailing lists and the chat, you also ‑‑ and the meetings, yes.
So there are two other milestones, they are working on that already, which is the composition of the RIPE Code of Conduct team, and the reporting process, implementation process.
The other task force that has been really active and they have published their final report is the RIPE Database Requirements Task Force, they have come up with a number of relations and they have presented that throughout the weeks in the various Working Groups relevant to the set of recommendations in the final report. And now it's on us to basically take that report and the recommendations and run with it and see how ‑‑ if and how we want to address each of these recommendations. And I am going to have ‑‑ I have asked the RIPE NCC to publish a page also with the list of recommendations, similar to what you have done with the Accountability Task Force recommendations, if you remember, so that we can keep track of it and mark our progress as we go along.
I would like to use this opportunity again to give a big thanks and applause to the task force, the Ripe Database Requirements Task Force members, Bijal, Shane, Peter and Nick, Sara who had to stop half‑way through, and we had support from Maria, Boris and Ed from the RIPE NCC. A big virtual applause for the task force, please, and we have now closed the task force and the task force members can go back to all the other roles and tasks and activities that they are actually doing for this community.
And now it's back to us to further work on the recommendations that they provided.
Come back to maybe more what Niall and I have been doing over the last few months. I mean, as I said earlier, the RIPE visibility and inclusion is kind of a big thing for me, also personally, and it's one of our goals, to make RIPE, you know, accessible and inclusive and also visible to others in kind of, that aren't part of the core community, maybe. One thing we have done, the RIPE NCC staff has been great in helping us with this, with this goal overall, and one thing they have been doing is to reach out to the Working Group Chairs and recorded some introduction videos for each Working Group, it's not done yet but some Working Groups have already recorded the ‑‑ it's just a few minutes ‑‑ with a short introduction that we have uploaded to the Working Group pages, but also here to the meeting pages, if newcomers come to the meetings they can see what these Working Groups are about, without having to read and find the website. So it's a bit more ‑‑ it's just a different medium that we are hoping that attracts ‑‑ you know, speaks to different types of people.
So, then more Working Groups videos will pop up as we go along.
We have always reached out to other groups. I have been presenting at a number of universities, student groups and other industry events, to promote RIPE and to encourage participation, explain what we do, what all this is, the coordination of the Internet infrastructure, and I plan to continue to do this in the future as well.
And we have also started to do an activity with the RIPE NCC staff, and to participate in on‑boarding of new staff; it is, of course, open to existing staff. We had a presentation, but I think we all agreed that it was really ‑‑ we had a really engaged discussion and we reached the students on a regular basis, every few months or so, basically to provide some more context about what the community is and the role of the RIPE NCC within the community, and we'll see how we maybe include also other community members in the future as we go along. But that's an important activity, I think, to include the RIPE NCC staff in our community activities.
The NCC staff has also been great in helping us update and improve the RIPE pages on the ripe.net. There is one thing, for instance when you go to the ripe.net now, you see the RIPE logo in the middle of the page, you can click on it and you can dive into the RIPE section of the website. It was a bit hidden before but now it's maybe a little bit easier to find, and then once you are into that section, you will see these kind of pages now, they look a bit more pretty and you can find information a bit easier with these buttons there at the bottom and all the different elements of the RIPE community. That's the kind of the front page of the RIPE participation page, and then if you dive, you click, for instance, on "Working Groups", you will see it like this, you don't have to go through, like, /ripe/participate/working group and then see all the links, and lists, and all the Working Groups on the left margin of the page, but you can see them now in one go and you can click on the Working Group and you can type right into it. We continue to work more on making these pages just a bit more accessible, a bit more pretty and modern.
Another topic that we have been working on over the year, last year, is to document like our governance processes and our practices and customs, and next on the list is a document to describe responsibilities and the definition of the task force, so what's a task force. Apparently, we didn't really have that documented before. I mean, there is information about the Working Groups, but there was no clear definition and responsibilities of task forces, how they are set up, how they communicate, what their role is, milestones, time lines and so forth, and we have documented this and we have put together a document that we posted on the RIPE list. We received some feedback that we will incorporate and then plan to publish it as a RIPE document soon.
We also worked on the revised version of the policy development process, and I'll get back to that in more detail at the end of the session. We can talk about that then.
And you might have seen this in the Opening Plenary; we keep thinking constantly about our RIPE mission, our values, principles of participation, and I showed a slide in the opening that I'll just repeat here in a second. Maybe just as a reminder for those of you who are new also, please subscribe and watch the RIPE list where we are making all these updates and where these kind of overarching community topics are discussed.
There is a link to the RIPE list and there is also ‑‑ you can find it on the website.
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Just as a reminder, this is what we showed earlier in the Opening Plenary. These are kind of values that we are currently discussing, and, you know, just starting to introduce. Openness, you are all familiar with, RIPE is open to anybody and values expertise from different backgrounds and I think also one of the core values from the start is collaboration and cooperation of our activities and make sure our contributions are useful and kind of goal‑driven.
Transparency is important. That's why we always ask people to say who they are and, you know, even I forgot sometimes because we kind of get used to ‑‑ get lazy to introduce ourselves properly.
And the last thing we have put here on the slide is integrity, which is mostly related to things like conflicts of interests. If you are aware of a conflict of interest that, for instance, would apply to Working Group Chairs also, if, you know, if a Working Group Chair comes up with a proposal, then maybe the other Working Group Chair would take over the consensus building process to make sure there are no conflicts, and we have continued to work on this. I was interested to see the discussion in the Cooperation Working Group where Chris Buckridge from the RIPE NCC presented something on community principles, which was a different angle, it's more like what are our principles kind of as a community to the outside world, how do we defend an open and fragmented Internet and things like that. There is a really interesting RIPE Labs article that I would recommend you to read, where he describes that in a bit more detail.
So what's next. Well, we have a lot to follow up from the RIPE 83 meeting. Even though it's virtual, of course there is a lot happening and we talked to a lot of people and during the breaks and so there are things we will pick up after the meeting. We'll work with the Code of Conduct Task Force and these two next milestones that I mentioned and we'll be following up with the relevant Working Groups on the Ripe Database Requirements Task Force report, the PDP, we hope to find consensus and publish soon, so we have a new updated version available for policy proposals. We continue to work on these web pages with the NCC and just generally to include ‑‑ to make the website more modern and accessible and pretty.
And yeah, I mentioned the mission and the core values, we'll continue to think about that.
And, of course, we're also going to continue with outreach and presentations and interviews. I have also been invited to the ‑‑ to be a part ‑‑ a speaker in the opening session of the Internet Governance Forum in a couple of weeks in Poland, which is a great opportunity also to promote RIPE and to ‑‑ and the technical community as a whole and to, you know, present our values there.
And that's pretty much it from us. If you want to follow what we are doing in a bit more detail, we'll be updating regular ‑‑ we'll be publishing regular updates on RIPE Labs, pretty much every month or so, and you can find in a bit more detail what's happening in the community there.
And that's it from us for now. Just our contact details if you want to contact us. If you have any questions, but I think we have some questions ‑‑ some time for questions now, if there are any.
I don't see any. I don't see any in the Q&A, and no, none in the audio queue. No, I see the next speakers, they are already ready, that's great. So, I will stop sharing, and then Carsten and Eileen can upload their slides.
CARSTEN SCHIEFNER: All right. I guess it's the two of us, Eileen, now.
EILEEN GALLAGHER: Yes.
CARSTEN SCHIEFNER: Good morning, everybody. This is Carsten and Eileen speaking and presenting the call for nominations for the 2002 Rob Blokzijl Award. So, Eileen and I would act as the co‑moderators of the committee, and so, in total, we are 13 at the table, and I will start to read all of them, to read them out ‑‑ to read out all of them in alphabetical order.
It needs to be said that no one has been picked by any, say, affiliation or professional background or what have you, but just in their respective personal capacities.
So, the 2002 Award Committee consists of Joe Abley, Randy Bush ‑‑ and oh, and excuse me if I would pronounce one or the other first and/or last name of any of the committee members in a weird manner. So my apologies beforehand.
It's Joe Abley, Randy Bush, Anja Feldmann, Maria Isabel Gandia, Elise Gerich, Paul Hoogsteder, Benno Overeinder, Antonio Prado, Sander Steffann, Suzanne Woolf and Jan Zorz.
All 13 of us, I have to say, were selected by the Board of the Rob Blokzijl Foundation. The Board members are Nigel Titley, who acts as the Chair; it's Daniel Karrenberg, Niall O'Reilly and Falk von Bornstaedt.
MIRJAM KUHNE: Can I interrupt you. Are there more slides?
CARSTEN SCHIEFNER: So, yes, of course, my apologies. So, here we have ‑‑ we have the Award Committee, the 13 members of the Award Committee. My apologies.
And so ‑‑ it was the Board who issued the ‑‑ the Board of the Rob Blokzijl Foundation, that needs to be clear, who issued the call for nominations and self‑nominations to be on your Board committee, already in May this year, and obviously the Board has decided by sometime in October, late October or even early November, I don't really remember, but that is the 13 of us, and we are going to accept, or we're going to go over all the nominations that's going to be made between now and some day in March, which Eileen will explain later on.
So, what is this all about? What is the Rob Blokzijl Foundation and what is the award? And to be as precise as possible, we wrote this up, or actually Eileen wrote this up, and so I am tempted to read this out to be ‑‑ as I said to be as precise as possible.
The Rob Blokzijl Foundation was initiated to recognise and reward individuals who:
Made substantial and succinct technical and operations contributions to the development of the Internet in the RIPE NCC region and/or supported or enabled others with the development of the Internet in the RIPE NCC region.
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That is what is specifically targets the awards considerations.
And then what's the general goal of the Foundation?
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As one of the RIPE founders and Chair of RIPE for 25 years, Rob Blokzijl dedicated a huge amount of his energy, intellect and time to the development of the community. Following his passing in 2015, the community of RIPE sought to recognise the significant contribution of Rob and celebrate his determination to be a positive force in bringing together those who cared about the development of the Internet in the region. Alongside Rob's rich contributions which stretch from the physical networks of the Internet also to social fabric of the Internet, aka the community, he helped build the wisdom he injected into the community made up from the beginning, the Rob Blokzijl Foundation serves as his enduring legacy.
So, we hoped that this would sort of shape the scope of the foundation and also of the award that's going to be given out in May next year, in case you are not really familiar with that anyway already, so just to give a foundation of what the committee is based on and how we are meant to work, and with that, I would like to hand it over to Eileen now. Thank you.
EILEEN GALLAGHER: Thank you, Carsten. So the 2002 awardee will be someone who reflects the same characteristics that Carsten spoke about there, that Rob had during his time. We're delighted to open the nominations today for the awards, and the 2002 awardee will be announced during RIPE 84, which everyone, I think, hopes would be physically in Berlin.
So, in addition to the characteristics that Carsten discussed earlier, the Awards Committee are particularly interested to receive nominations of individuals who, in addition to their own contributions, have also helped others anywhere around the world to help to develop the Internet or the Internet community. We'd also like to encourage those making nominations to consider not only those who are in the later stages of their careers and are widely known, but also people who may have contributed greatly in the springtime of their career, or discretely for the greater good. So not just the obvious candidates, but also the quiet people in the background. We're open to all of those and very enthusiastic to hear those stories.
In terms of the mechanics of how this will work: Self‑nominations or nominations from a proposer are both acceptable. However, members of the Award Committee or the Foundations Board may not be nominated. So, Carsten, do you want to go through the actual requirements there for the submissions.
CARSTEN SCHIEFNER: So, the URL with the call is on the screen right now, and so this is where all the details and what Eileen has already elaborated right now, can be found in greater detail, and I will walk you through the technical details now.
So ‑‑
NIALL O'REILLY: Just a moment, Carsten, also in the chat and also the nomination mailbox.
CARSTEN SCHIEFNER: We are going to have this on a later slide, so it's like two slides. So this is where the call is, and ‑‑ okay, this is where the nominations should go. Thank you, Niall.
So, each nomination must include at least the following material:
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The name and contact details of the nominee, and of course those of the proposer, if that's different. Self‑nominations are obviously allowed, and it's not a problem at all. That if they are different, then obvoiusly the contact details of the proposer should be be there as well.
‑ A statement of whether the nominee is aware that the nomination has been made.
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That obviously is only the case if nominee and proposer are different. Why is it important? Because if the nominee is eventually selected for the award, then it might be helpful to know whether this would come to their total surprise if the board eventually would approach the nominee over there ‑‑ this is something the nominee might be aware of that it's coming down his or her way eventually.
‑ A statement in as much detail as the proposer considers appropriate, setting out how the nominee meets the requirement for the award, a description of the proposer's relationship to the nominee.
‑ The fourth is a brief summary, hopefully not longer than, say, 79 or 80 words, because that might go on a plaque, of the nominee's contributions suitable for the award document,
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And also, that's not a requirement, but it's considered to be helpful by any means, if available, a professional biography or a CV of the nominee can be submitted as well if available only. Nominations should be submitted only by e‑mail to nominations@rob‑blokzijl‑foundation.org.
The deadline is in March, but for that I am going to hand this over to Eileen again.
EILEEN GALLAGHER: Thank you very much. I see the 19th is on the slide but we have the 18th on our document, so I think I need to double‑check that date. So forgive me on that.
So, the nominations are in the middle of March, just after Saint Patrick's Day, and the nominations, as Carsten said, can be sent to nominations@rob‑blokzijl‑foundation.org.
You know, what we have tried to communicate today is that we are keen to hear stories from the entire community, but who, as community participants, believe have contributed significantly to the development of the Internet in the RIPE NCC region. Often the greatest stories go untold, so please take the time to send in the nominations of the people that you believe should be the 2002 awardee. You know, we'd be delighted to read those stories, so please put some thought into who it is, who this is that you feel should receive it. I see Fergal Cunningham saying that nominations made on Saint Patrick's Day should be treated with caution. There you go. I might actually check, while you are finishing up I'll just check what we have on the website for the final day.
CARSTEN SCHIEFNER: I guess it's mostly said ‑‑ everything has mostly been said anyway already. Again, we would like to encourage everybody in the RIPE community to spread the word as wide as possible, and also to go into their own distinctive own communities like network operators group, commercial Internet exchange point groups, etc., etc., to spread the word as much as possible, and also think about nominating respective and respected community members to ‑‑ for the award.
EILEEN GALLAGHER: The deadline, I just checked, and the deadline is the 18th March, not the 19th. Forgive me, that's a typo on the slide.
CARSTEN SCHIEFNER: Thank you. With that, I guess I am almost done. The entire committee can be reached via award2021 [at] robblokzijlfoundation [dot] org, or also 2022, so there is an alias to that, I'll put that in the chat any time soon, as soon as we're finished with our presentation, and I guess, in the name of the entire committee, I'd like to thank the Board of the Foundation for selecting each of us on the Award Committee so that we are able to undertake this selection process to eventually advise the Board, on behalf of the community, who, according to our findings, the awardee next year shall be.
Thank you very much. It's a prestigious task and I say that we take it obviously very serious, and will do our best to come up with the excellent person for this award. Thank you so much.
EILEEN GALLAGHER: And hopefully present it in person in Berlin. Thank you all, thank you, Carsten, thank you, Mirjam.
MIRJAM KUHNE: Thank you, too, for presenting this, I am really excited that we are opening another award in Rob Blokzijl's name and I hope we'll get a lot of good nominations in. Thanks for that.
Carsten, if you could please stop sharing your slides, then I can introduce the next speaker. That's Hisham Ibrahim from the RIPE NCC, the chief community officer.
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HISHAM IBRAHIM: . Good morning, everyone. As Mirjam introduced me, I am the RIPE NCC's chief community officer, and this is the chief community officer report that I have here.
A little bit about myself for those of you who have not met me yet or don't know me. I do recognise a lot of your names and I am sure we chatted before, but I have been with the RIPE NCC for seven years. I have been part of the team that was hired to be based out of Dubai to focus primarily at the time on building the community in the Middle East and trying to get a lot more community efforts and technical initiatives up and running.
Over time, that scope expanded to then have more engagement with southeast Europe and caucuses and central Asia, and then, as my career developed with the RIPE NCC, I became the community development manager for the entire service region and, as of a few months ago, I became the chief community officer.
I want to start with the, what I shared with my colleagues when I was first interested with this position. I mentioned to them that these are my three top priorities as chief community officer for the RIPE NCC, and I did think it was important to also communicate that as well here.
For me, they read as follows:
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The first one is institutionalising the knowledge and the understanding of the local communities in our service region. We have a lot of information and I want to make sure that that information is actually not just working in pockets throughout the company, that we actually have a better understanding and can build things that can make sense for the development of the local communities throughout the service region, focusing on them all, not on any specific regions specifically.
Restructure steams so that we have better work flows and more meaningful impact, and impact is something that you will hear me talk about hopefully in other talks as well, where basically we're talking about what value delivered and what value capture do we get from all the engagements we are doing.
As the slides continue to read, as you have picked up the activity plan and budget you can see already there is some efforts along that of redefining the different difficulties we're doing along purpose rather than the activity itself, so the why instead of the what or the how.
And last but not least, building ecosystems around our ‑‑ the data services that we have. We have, again, a lot of really good vantage points of how the Internet works and developed over the years and we are planning ‑‑ we really depend on the community, not just for hosting these services but also to engage and do a lot more with them. This is an effort that we'd like to see a lot more of. You have heard Emile talking about this in other talks talking about some of the other data service that is we have.
Now, focusing on community and why do the we need community engagement and development. What we found is ‑‑ so, when I first joined, I went around the different departments and the different teams within the RIPE NCC asking them about why do we do the certain department function or activity that we're doing. And what we ended up with coming together was a set of different purposes. The first one would be community building and engagement, right. And basically that's, as you can see from the logo here, which is that continuous feedback loop of creating and fostering environments for us, dialogue and change and to bring common understanding together. This covers everything from community development aspects, working on the national level and building that up, or even community pegs feedback interest groups and working with them on developing their interests.
There is also the membership engagement element of this, which, you know, Fergal is leading, and it covers stuff from membership satisfaction to also collecting a lot of data that we have and making sure that we're building things that make sense to you. One of the nice things that came out of this is the roadmaps that we're publishing now and I'm happy to see the engagement from the community on them, it keeps us honest in delivering on what we promised to deliver and it keeps the community engaged in helping us design and build things that makes sense for them.
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Good of the Internet efforts and activities. You heard Hans Petter talk about community project funds and the work that we have done there. And of course, the events, we are all here, virtually of course, because of the great work that Alex Vos and the whole events team has been putting into making this meeting and other meetings possible.
We have managed to do MENOG this year, we have managed to do an SEE open house and we have managed to do an ENOG and all this takes a lot of time and effort from the teams to be able to continue to have these dialogues and environments for discussion.
One of the things that I wanted to mention here was the impact of geopolitics on this and it came up in some of the comments and questions throughout the meeting. But this slide I had put in before, because we definitely are seeing this. Whether we like it or not, geopolitics is impacting how communities interact. It's very hard to ignore sort of political turmoils or conflicts, but there aren't or just political and just acting like, you know, they will not impact how communities interact or even how we are staffing our organisation, especially if it impacts individuals and their livelihoods. For that, we're looking into doing a lot more engagement on the national level and that makes perfect sense. I mean, community work in general, it just pretty much oscillates between building on a small level and then growing it up to maybe a regional level but then maybe breaking it down and focusing a little bit more non‑national, that's exactly how we ended up doing things when we were revamping MENOG and we see this happening time and time again, even within communities that, you know, start at the coalition phase and then they mature and then you find them breaking off into smaller communities and mytosis and res tarting the cycle all over again.
One of the things we need to be doing here is redefining what we mean by regional engagements and activities. Do they still make sense? Are there barriers to entry and what is the scope and how do we define the criteria for their success?
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And you can expect to hear a lot more from me on this, moving forward.
Now, the second purpose that we identified was learning and development. And again, this is one of the strong arms of community work that we have here. The learning and development team has been doing great work for years in building that community knowledge and understanding of things.
We have several delivery mechanisms that were developed over years that the team had the first sight of looking into stuff like e‑learning activities and certifications well before anybody else was talking about them and developing them, which allowed us to, when Covid his, very easily shift towards going virtual very, very quickly.
This diagram shows some of these delivery mechanisms that we have, whether synchronous stuff like the training, the face‑to‑face ones or the webinars that do require certain resources to be there and inter‑activity, or the asynchronous stuff like academy that is getting more and more popular today with excellent quality content that's being built there and it's more and more recognised by people that are taking not only the modules but also taking the certifications as well, and if you haven't so far, I ask you to go and visit it, it is definitely worth taking the time and seeing the great work that the team has been putting there.
I also know that in the goodie bags we have given away some vouchers for certifications as well, so take advantage of that as well.
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The last of the different distinct purposes that we found was community coordination collaboration and I heard Mirjam talking about that as well. This is something that we have also figured out and defined and it's presented here by the puzzle piece and how we fit into the bigger picture, and that's ‑‑ there is great work that's being done by the public policy Internet governance teams, you have heard different talks from Marco and Suzanne and Chris and others, you have seen articles from Athina on how geopolitics and regulation mismatches and sanctions are impacting building of one unfragmented Internet. And there is definitely room there.
One of the comments that I saw during the meeting was that there was a lot of EU focus in the presentations that were given. I'd like to reassure you that, you know, sitting here out of Dubai, having colleagues that sits in southeast Europe, central Asia caucuses, Russia and Ukraine, we are very much involved with what's happening there. We do publish regular updates on regulatory impacts that we're seeing there and analysis. The board is also briefed on these things. And we do have a set of engagements coming up, I think the first one that will be coming upright after this meeting is the eastern European caucuses and central Asian governmental rounds table. We also have a middle eastern one coming after that and then early next year we will be doing the European one. So we're definitely doing that. There is also the inter‑governmental organisations, the ITU and the other, that's Marco and his team are very much engaged with OECD and the others as well as the IGF.
And at the end of day, it kind of looks something like this. The psychedelic affect, the triangle there has, is intentional, the colours are meant to bleed into each other because it's very hard to define where one of these activities and where does it end, which is why it took us some time to actually be able to define them, as intuitively as they seem and simple as they seem, it did take sometime and effort into really defining what the purposes are and what are we trying to achieve out of this and it's still an ongoing effort. As you can see it built a nice triangle pyramid for us; the pun here being, I am Egyptian so Pyramids is part of my DNA, I guess.
As you can see, the base there is community‑building and engagement and learning and development. With having a strong base on these two ‑‑ this is how we build the foundation for this, and when we have them built proper, then it allows us to do a lot more co‑ordination and collaboration in a meaningful manner, and that's basically how we have been doing our budgeting, restructuring and other stuff that we're planning to communicate moving forward.
I mentioned the roadmaps and some of this will be be reported there as well as other regular updates, learning and development. I remember Ferardo doing this call, gave some good talks during the Anti‑Abuse Working Group, and there was a BoF that we got a lot of really interesting feedback from you, and definitely we are planning, starting next quarter, of adding yet another roadmap to the ones that we published which is what training we are working on developing and getting more feedback from the community on, and I appreciate everybody that either spoke to me during this session about their thoughts and my colleagues, of course.
This is my last slide here, and it basically ‑‑ Fergal pointed out to me that there is room here to say how can, you know, the community members do more to help develop our community, and this nice list was compiled to me and I think it makes a lot of sense.
The easiest and the first step here would be to sign up for a Working Group mailing list and take part in the discussions. I think not only has it served, time and time again, as an excellent historical record for the work that has been done and the discussions that have taken place, but it also is a very low barrier entry for people in the community to come in and participate, especially in times where we cannot meet face‑to‑face and have these discussions and we are seeing the effect of us not being able to meet face‑to‑face in different ideas and different thoughts taking a form of their own and this is a nice way of bringing people together when it comes to this.
Talk to or mentor RIPE fellows and, basically, attendees. One of the nice metrics that comes out of these meetings is the number of newcomers that come in and attend and we're seeing a lot more academic talks and young attendees that weren't necessarily part of the RIPE community as long as some of us have been. And it's really good to see that people are taking time to do the mentoring.
We have seen, I think, for this meeting, a little bit of a decline in terms of people signing up for that. It's understandable because of the virtual manner of this meetings, but we would still like to see people volunteering for this and doing more there.
Take part at regional community meetings, ENOG, MENOG, SEE. Those are the ones that if you want to get a lot more understanding on what is happening at that level, we get a lot of really good talks about what can happen there. Remember, the SEE meeting in Sarajevo, we talked a lot about how they can build a NOG and exchange point and even at NREN that the country doesn't have, and at least two of the three has happened, I think at the last one they were also talking about signing of certs.
At MENOG, there was a great recap about different efforts that were happening in the region, whether from Lebanon and how they are dealing with the situation there, or hosting the World Cup next year, and with ENOG as well, we had a really nice first try for that part of the world of doing remote hubs, we have been doing this for MENOG for some time, but with ENOG it did work with remote hubs seeing participation from different countries for that event and we're planning on keeping up to innovate with this. But please, your experience and knowledge is really useful in those areas.
Taking it one step down as well, local NOGs, we do have a NOG coordinator list. You can sign up for that. If not, you can find your local NOG and participate or participate with other NOG or NOGs, it does go a long way.
Attending the open houses, hackathons and other community events. Open houses has been one of the nice ways we dealt with Covid. We were agile in turning the concept of member lunches into open houses. I am very happy now that people use as a proper noun, we'll just ‑‑ or a verb, we'll do an open house day event. It's been very useful in keeping people talking, I think that's an important thing.
Write a RIPE Labs article. I think out of the all of things I said, and I know I say a lot of them are important, but I think this is one the most powerful tools in our arsenal. I personally love these, I read them all the time and I share them and they get a lot of good feedback. So ‑‑ and I am very happy with the developments that we have done in this area. So please share your experience, share your thoughts, and so that others can pick them up and learn from them.
Last point, but I think it's as important as ‑‑ and all, if not more, is tell people when you think they are doing a good job. We heard a talk on the first day about how we can actually get into a more friendly environment, or how it's needed to be more welcoming. And I think just showing a little bit of appreciation for people that are trying and doing their best is ‑‑ goes a very, very long way. I already see this in the comments that I see on the chat and I know this from the RIPE community, it does go a long way and people really feel appreciated when you appreciate their work.
And these are my thoughts. I appreciate you taking the time to hear them and I am here if anybody has any follow‑up questions. Thank you. Mirjam, back to you.
MIRJAM KUHNE: Thanks, Hisham. That was a great overview. We are a little over time, so, if I don't see any questions now, can I ask Hans Petter to get ready for the next presentation, and maybe we have some more time at the end. Thanks.
HANS PETTER HOLEN: Thank you, Mirjam. Let's see if I can find the presentation here as well. NRO report.
So, again, my name is Hans Petter Holen, and today I am here as the Chair of the NRO Executive Council. So, what is the NRO? We want to be the flagship and global leader for collaborative Internet number resource management as a central element of an open, stable and insecure Internet.
We are the Number Resource Organisation. We are formed by the MoU, by the RIRs, AFRINIC, APNIC, LACNIC, ARIN and the RIPE NCC, and it was formed in 2003 to coordinate the RIRs and joint activities.
So, we also have an MoU with ICANN where we act as the Address Supporting Organisation.
The NRO Executive Committee, where I am currently the Chair, Oscar from LACNIC is the Vice‑Chair and secretary and John Curran is ‑‑ from ARIN, is the Treasurer. Paul and Eddie from APNIC and AFRINIC respectively are members this year.
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Now, the positions here rotate every year, so the next year it will be different roles for everybody. We have a permanent secretariat, our secretary, German Valdez, based at APNIC, and Laureana Pavon based in LACNIC.
We also have a number of coordination groups for communications, engineering, registration services and public safety and we have informal groups for public affairs, policy, financial officers, legal staff, human resources, etc.
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We do publish global Internet number stats, so there is an Internet number resources status report which is updated quarterly which has global stats on IPv4, v6 and ASNs. That's updated daily. And RPKI adoption report by IPv4 and v6, which is also sort of per economy, and that's also updated daily and you can find that on our statistics page. We also maintain a comparative policy overview so that you can easily look at what the policies look like in the five regions. We have a budget of US$480,000; that covers travel and support for the ASO, the NRO and IANA Review Committee, secretariat support, some communications, like telecom, for instance, ASO AC Chair travel and coordination expenses. The travel and meeting expenses have been really low this year, but we anticipate at some point in the future we will start to travel again to meet in person.
We do contribute to the IETF in the range of $150,000, and we have a contribution to ICANN at $823,000, which is the IANA contract of $650,000 and a voluntarily contribution of $173,000, which has been in place from the early days of ICANN when ICANN hardly had any funding. Today, ICANN has significant funding from the domain industry, but the RIRs started supporting ICANN in the very early days.
There is also a joint stability fund, with the pledge of over 2.1 million, and if you are interested in that fund, you can find for information at the below URL.
The cost is split between the RIR based on registration service revenues, so here you can see the different percentages and this is updated on an annual basis based on the accounts of the previous years. So, the RIPE NCC pays 39.91% of the total NRO budget.
The IANA Review Committee advises and assists the NRO EC in its review of the service level of the IANA numbering services provided to the Internet number community. So, it has three members from each region: two community‑elected members and one RIR staff representative. You can find the public archives and minutes on the below URL. And there was a report published in March that you can also see. So IANA performs a coordination job for the RIRs, registering which numbers are distributed to each RIR, and then this committee overseas the performance of that function.
The Review Committee consists of the people that you can see here, the community‑elected people. You will also find on the ASO EC and the staff members are normally involved in the Registration Services in the respective RIRs. From the RIPE NCC, we have Marco Schmidt working as a manager in Registration Services and we have James Kennedy and Nurani Nimpuno up until now.
There is also an empowered community in ICANN which oversees the board. So, the NRO EC adopted the ASO‑empowered community procedures, and there is a procedure for approval actions, rejection of actions, removal of ICANN director, and standard practice for community activities.
We do have an ASO MoU, and that was reviewed in 2011, 2017, and we have a review scheduled for 2022. So the MoU states that we shall do a periodic review, and we have the next one planned in 2022.
We have also looked at and addressed the findings in the last report, so the upcoming review is going to be interesting to see if there are still things that needs improvement, which there probably is
So one of the things is ‑‑ you can have a look at here is the status of the different recommendations.
We do have some ongoing projects right now. The NRO has initiated a review of its own MoU, and then we are also doing a strategic review and the plan is to conclude this in April next year. And then, as I mentioned, the ASO review is scheduled in 2022, so hopefully after the NRO MoU.
And that was all I had. Are there any questions?
MIRJAM KUHNE: Thanks, Hans Petter. That was nice and short. Yes, there is one question in the Q&A, I will read that out, by Jordi Palet Martinez: "I have commented about this already a few times. The RIR policy overview, maybe it's because it's trying to summarise, it's not very good, and consequently, instead of useful, I think it may confuse people. I am not sure it is worth the effort. I have caught many mistakes when I try to compare any specific policy aspects among different RIRs. At the end, I prefer to go straight to each RIRs policy manual or set of documents. I think the NRO should consider dropping it and instead having linkings to each policy manual or at least clearly state that it's just a summary and that the original manuals should be looked at carefully."
HANS PETTER HOLEN: Thank you for that feedback, Jordi. If you find errors in this, we are more than happy to receive a feedback and improvements suggestions. As for whether we should drop it entirely or not, I will bring that back to the discussion, but I do believe that it is a useful tool for those who just want to have a simple overview and not have to read the whole policy manuals. Of course, as you say, we should make it clear that the policy manuals are the documents that you need to consult if you want to act there. But if you find errors there, feel free to give us feedback, contact us so that we can incorporate improvements. Thank you.
MIRJAM KUHNE: Thanks, Hans Petter. I don't see any other questions, neither in the Q&A nor in the audio queue, so, I guess that's it. Thanks again.
HANS PETTER HOLEN: Thank you.
MIRJAM KUHNE: And then we can move on ‑‑ we have plenty of time. So we can move on to our last agenda item before the AOB, and that is the RIPE Policy Development Process, which I have sent to the list, to the RIPE list on 28th October. And just to give you a quick summary of the mail changes. I have also put that in the e‑mail in some more detail, just to set the stage here.
We shortened the video introduction a bit to clarify that this document deals with policy only, no other best current practices or other types of documents. We have also updated the appeals process ‑‑ we clarified the appeals process and, based on the input received after the first appeal last year, the first appeal that the RIPE community ever received to a policy, so we have gathered a lot of input and published a number of documents specifically to that at the time and we used that input and updated the section in the PDP document.
We have re‑introduced an informal step before the formal process starts, and as I understood from, when talking to earlier Working Group Chairs, that that was the initial idea of the first, that's now kind of the formal first step in the PDP, is to kind of have an informal discussion, the proposer would kind of share the ideas with the relevant mailing list and see if there is some traction, some support, some interest in this, formulate the problem statement before it then enters the formal process. It's not a requirement. It's just from experience, we felt this would be a good step, a good guidance for proposers to go forward in the future.
Then we have also clarified the role of the Working Group Chairs, because that came also up during the appeal. The Working Group Chairs need to clarify after each phase where we are at in the process, what the status is, to possibly repeat some of the arguments and make sure what the next steps are so that the community members know that, for instance, if they need to restate their positions or change their positions, possibly in the next phase.
We have added a new section at the bottom of the document clarifying how the PDP is changed. I believe there was one incidence where the PDP actually went through the PDP itself, but in the past, in other instances I remember it was basically authored by the RIPE Chair and sent to the community for review and consensus, and so I believe the PDP in itself is a RIPE governance document, the document is how we deal with policy, and I don't think it needs to go through the PDP itself because it's not a policy in itself, it's a governance document.
We have also included a small section in the template at the bottom in the appendix just to clarify that the policy proposal should also contain a motivation or, like, a problem statement to make sure we all understand what the problem is we're trying to solve.
And then, last, we made some editorial changes to clarify the roles. Like, sometimes it wasn't clear if it was the role of the policy development officer of the NCC to support the proposer or if it was the role of the Working Group Chairs in question and so we tried to clarify that.
So the document is out as a draft, and it's linked from that e‑mail on the slide, and I just saw that the discussion has started on the mailing list, Jordi had sent a mail to the RIPE list an hour ago, and so I hope ‑‑ but we can have a bit of a discussion here, but I also hope that we will have a really good engagement on the mailing list after the meeting.
So if there are any questions at this point?
NIALL O'REILLY: There is a late question from Kurt Kayser about the NRO and I propose we take that later on after we come to the end of this, and I hope not to forget it, and in the microphone queue, there is Jordi Palet Martinez and Shane Kerr. Jordi was in there first, so I'll give him the microphone.
JORDI PALET MARTINEZ: Hi. I sent already an e‑mail this morning. I had two major disagreements. The other ones are probably something that we can solve. The main problem I have is that we have commented on this before already, the PDP is not authored by the RIPE Chair. It's one more document from the community, so the way it's being worded, it looks like the only responsible for that is the Chair, and I think that should be amended.
The other problem I have is that I don't agree you recently say that ‑‑ I don't agree that this is a community governance document which should be a separate way to update it, and in fact I put the link in the e‑mail. We have recently updated already the PDP, I think it was 2018 or something like that, by the PDP itself and this is the way it's being done in the other registries, so why we are going to have it different?
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This is related also somehow to my point that you are taking out of the PDP some of the documents that, up to now, they were following also the PDP process. Why we want to have different processes for different kinds of documents. We are based on bottom‑up consensus process, everything should be the same. There is no reason to change things, to have different timings. It's a mess, it's very difficult to keep up with that way. Anyway, I understand that we may not have sufficient time today and we may need a webinar or something to tackle all the points, but I think ‑‑ I tried it, it was a little bit inrusted [sic] at the beginning of the session but I tried to describe all the points I have seen up to now in my mail. Thank you.
MIRJAM KUHNE: Thanks for summarising, just maybe a quick response to both items. I do believe that each document should have an author, and I have understood from the past, I understand the PDPs, I agree with you, it's a consensus document by the community, but it's usually authored by the RIPE Chair, but obviously other people can make suggestions too. So we can definitely discuss that.
In response to your other point, I don't agree that everything is a policy and I do think that we should make a distinction between policies and other types of documents, as the policy is a very ‑‑ has a very kind of strict and agreed and rigid process that we fall in for policies, which I agree we have to fall in place for policies. There are other types of practices and interactions that the RIPE community does that don't necessarily have to go through the PDP, I believe, whereas I think the policy document in itself is not a policy, but we'll see what other people think about this maybe on the mail, and we'll see ‑‑ I think I would like to have the discussion on the e‑mail list first and see if we need more time, we can maybe organise an online session about this. That's a good suggestion, thanks, Jordi.
We have, next, Shane. Shane, I can see your picture. I cannot hear you.
NIALL O'REILLY: While Shane is getting ready, I'll give the microphone to Rudiger.
RUDIGER VOLK: A short remark towards Jordi. I note that, actually, the policies all have natural person authors, and that might be actually sometimes a problem, so having the RIPE Chair as the author of the PDP I think is not really a problem. On the other hand, I think that ‑‑ and well, okay, I'm German, so process and precision is a consideration, kind of having an undefined and undocumented process being used for an almost constitutional document like the policy development process, well, okay, actually having that completely loose I think is not a good thing. If we want to have different process for documents in a different class from policies, we actually ‑‑ we actually, at some point in time, address the question of what are the processes, and at the moment for the PDP it might be a good idea to essentially follow the PDP process for establishing the consensus to actually finalise and conclude the definition. Just having an undefined and open process for doing that, at least from a German point of view, looks murky.
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Thanks.
MIRJAM KUHNE: Thanks, Rudiger. I don't agree that the consensus‑building that we have going on on the mailing list is undefined, but I take your point. Thank you.
And, Shane, I think you have made it work.
SHANE KERR: I think it's working now. Okay. So, I thank you for making this set of refinements and clarifications. I was involved with this a little bit, helped discuss with the various people the suggestions that you presented here, and I think, basically they are all great. I basically just wanted to say that in case anyone is concerned that this is yet one more step for adding a lot of bureaucracy and rules and everything to the RIPE process, I think it's completely the opposite. I think it should make it simpler and more clear exactly how the process is going to work. So, if you're worried that this is somehow making things more complicated or adding extra steps, I think it's completely the opposite, is should make things better and hopefully we'll never, ever have to use any kind of appeal process or anything like that again.
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Anyway, that's it.
MIRJAM KUHNE: You were involved in that. I understand. Thanks, Shane. Niall, I don't know exactly who was next, was it Peter Koch was in the audio queue, there is also questions ‑‑ let's do Peter first.
PETER KOCH: Thank you, and hopefully you can hear me. So, this is Peter. I work for DENIC, I should say, but what I am contributing is on my own behalf, of course. I would like to thank the Chairs for putting this forward. I was a bit concerned about the nonexistence of discussion on the list and this, like, sliding through with little attention, and I think the discussion is good to have. I have sympathies for what the previous speaker said, which is no surprise, he was my boss 25 years ago, in terms of applying the PDP to the PDP, but I think that is, for the moment, a minor issue. I am not saying that it is a minor issue in total. I think the current suggestion addresses some of the important observations that we had with the previous ‑‑ with some previous invocations of the PDP and I think that is important, and maybe it shouldn't try to boil the ocean, I think we have deeper issues, and that goes back to what Chris proposed in the core Working Group about the principles and values and so on and so forth, that might suggest we have a bigger review of the process and so on and so forth.
The moment in time is probably good for doing things like that because, to the best of my knowledge, we don't have PDPs in flight, which is good for changing the process, or clarifying it, as I would say, because many of the things that I see there have been discussed and are observations from previous invocations that caused probably a lot of frustration in parts of the community at least.
What I would appreciate is a bit more guidance, like a red line version and so on and so forth, to help people really understand and grasp. I trust your summaries, based on the intentions, but having a side by side‑view, and I am old, I can't do HTML comparisons, so on and so forth, so if we get in that direction I would support further discussion and we'll chime in and please don't take that as a threat. Thank you.
MIRJAM KUHNE: Yes, we can definitely do that. Thanks for your comments.
I see there are some questions in the ‑‑
NIALL O'REILLY: There is two questions from Jordi. Would you like, Mirjam, that I read them out and you take it?
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I think I'll take the second one first because it's more a comment than a question.
And it's this:
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"Clarification of the authorship. I'm not saying not to have an author but not inside the document itself. It's a community work and the document should not say it is owned by the Chair because it is a community document."
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And before ‑‑ I'll seize the moment before you give your answer to that, Mirjam, or before anybody else does, and this is:
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Yes, we know this is something where it's difficult to find what is obviously the right thing to do, and I'm certainly happy to take input from all over the community about the best way to combine a clear attribution of responsibility for the current version of a document, on the one hand, and the open source of the document, on the other, and it's ‑‑ I think there are two conflicting kinds of attribution that we have here and that we need to resolve.
MIRJAM KUHNE: Yes. Thanks. I don't think I have anything else to add to that.
NIALL O'REILLY: And the other question is also from Jordi and he says:
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"If we don't want to call it policy, that's fine, but all that goes via community consensus should have the same timings and the same process. Why does RIPE want to have a different way than the other RIRs?"
MIRJAM KUHNE: That's a bit ‑‑ that's a philosophical question, why are there different RIRs? And I think it's good that we have ‑‑ all the time, we have built processes that fit our community and that works with the community culture, history, you know, development, pace and so forth, and obviously we're also looking at how other RIR communities are ‑‑ you know, what processes are being used there. But, as far as I remember, we had a discussion, a similar discussion earlier on that. Also, people really appreciate the diversity and the kind of well, you know, kind of goal‑driven, you know, process that we have, and it's not a goal in itself, I think, to unify all the processes in all all the regions. Obviously if we can learn from our processes, then by all means we'd be happy to incorporate those.
I hope that ‑‑
NIALL O'REILLY: There is another comment ‑‑ another comment from Jordi is that:
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"Having the PDP updated as a policy proposal, as we have done before, will show the red line that Peter said."
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And for myself, that's absolutely true, but I'm not sure that referring to one of the many updates to the PDP for which the PDP itself was used is necessarily a precedent for how the ‑‑ necessarily establishes how the PDP ought to be modified. There have been some half a dozen, maybe even eight, but more than a handful of updates to the PDP over the years, only one of which has been done using the PDP itself. So it's, at least, to me, not at all obvious that the PDP is the means for modifying the PDP.
MIRJAM KUHNE: Thanks for answering that. Sorry, there is a bit of noise here in the background. They are fixing the street. I hope it's not too disturbing, and yes, no, I agree, there was one case where the document went to the PDP, but I definitely take the point that you need some kind of a process to also maintain and work on these governance documents.
And we can definitely provide this kind of red line version of the document, I am sure Angela can help me with that too, to put that on the website, or the NCC staff.
Are there think other questions? Oh, I don't see the participants. I don't see anybody in the audio queue.
NIALL O'REILLY: There is one more question, but it's not about the PDP. It's going back to the NRO. So, let me know when you are ready to take that and I'll read it out.
MIRJAM KUHNE: I think we're ready. I don't see any questions on that topic any more. Please go ahead.
NIALL O'REILLY: Hans Petter may need to be ready to catch this comment. It's a comment from Kurt Kayser, who gives his attribution as private, and he says:
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"Yesterday's comment about ARIN's VIP services to provide ASNs, I highly warn of competitive RIR services, that is when RIPE NCC staff is busy with lots of complex transfer tasks."
HANS PETTER HOLEN: So, thank you for the remark. I don't see a question there, so I don't know if I have a good response right now.
MIRJAM KUHNE: All right. Thanks. Right. I think we are on to AOB. Is there anything else you would like to bring up? Anything you want us to focus on, any concerns you have? Anything you are missing? Now is your time. Speak up!
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Early coffee break, lunch break.
NIALL O'REILLY: Before we go, there is a comment in the chat also from Kurt Kayser saying: "Okay, if we don't make a question, a comment will not be discussed. That's news to me." I am not sure what you expected Hans Petter to say, Kurt. Do you want to take the microphone? Okay, he says: "Never mind." So, we'll ‑‑ there are mailing lists, I guess.
MIRJAM KUHNE: Hans Petter is back but he is on mute again.
HANS PETTER HOLEN: I need to get used to the interface, if click the camera button, then ‑‑ yeah, I don't know.
So, the RIPE NCC provides services not only to organisations in our service region, but to any organisation that has a network presence in our service region, I believe that is the wording in our policy. Now, that differs from the other regions where they, I believe, require presence in their region. So to some extent, the RIPE NCC is actually competing, to use that term, with others, which is, in some cases, good because then there is less of a monopoly thinking since you actually have a choice of which RIR you can go to.
As for different service levels, the ARIN philosophy, after the latest changes, is different from the current philosophy in the RIPE NCC where we believe that we provide all the members the same service, as our philosophy, although we did get some input yesterday that maybe we should reconsider that, and that's also, of course, something that I will discuss with the board again, following this.
So, no, we're not competitors, although we do not want to be seen as a curtail either of monopolists, because that has legal implications, so this has a very delicate balance where we need to stay fully coordinated but not cooperate in ways that can cause a breach of anti‑competition laws in different jurisdictions.
So, if there is anything else on this, I am happy to discuss. If not, it seems like a discussion with myself. But I am happy to ‑‑
MIRJAM KUHNE: Thanks for taking it. Thanks, Hans Petter.
No one else running to the microphone, typing anything in? I don't see anything.
Well, in that case, we are five minutes early, but it was good to have that discussion on the PDP and also thanks for all the updates given by the other speakers, I think that's relevant to the community. And I wish you a good break and a good rest of the day.
(Coffee break)
