As noted in a previous RIPE Labs article, work has been underway for some time to establish a process for selecting future RIPE Chairs with the requirement that the process should be open, transparent and endorsed by the RIPE community as a whole.

After we published the Proposal for a RIPE Chair Selection Process here on RIPE Labs in July 2018, there was a constructive discussion on the RIPE Chair Discussion mailing list. Based on the consensus reached during this discussion, this is the final RIPE Chair selection process.

The RIPE Chair Selection Process

It has been agreed that the selection process should be lightweight and easy to implement but documented for clarity and accountability purposes. Most importantly, it should be determined by consensus within the RIPE community. 

NomCom

The RIPE Working Group Chair collective will be responsible for forming a Nominations Committee (NomCom). It will ensure that the NomCom is representative of the RIPE community and can be productive. There are no constraints on the size and composition of the NomCom. WG chairs can serve on the NomCom.

The candidate pool

The NomCom will solicit nominations from the RIPE community and publish a list of suitable candidates.

The selection process

After a shortlist of potential candidates has been identified, the NomCom will hand it over to the WG Chair collective.

The WG Chair collective will actively gather feedback from the RIPE community about each candidate. Based on this feedback, the WG Chair collective will select the best candidate for the job.

The RIPE community will endorse the candidate put forward by the WG Chair collective.

Tenure

The RIPE Chair will serve a five-year term with a two-term limit.

Vice Chair

A new RIPE Vice Chair role will be created to support the RIPE Chair. This role will be filled according to the same process as that used for the RIPE Chair selection. There is no assumption that the Vice Chair would automatically become the RIPE Chair by default, but they would be free to put themselves forward (to be considered by the NomCom) for a vacant RIPE Chair position.

Next Steps

This process will be presented at the plenary session at the upcoming RIPE 77 meeting and then published as a RIPE document. After RIPE 77 the process described above will come into effect. That means a NomCom will be formed and a call for candidates will be published. It is expected that this will be done before RIPE 78 in May 2019.