Get Ready for RIPE 86

Next week, the RIPE 86 meeting will take place in Rotterdam. Preparations are in full swing and the full agenda for the plenary is up. Working Group agendas will follow soon and will be linked from the RIPE 86 Meeting Plan.

There will also be two BoF sessions on Tuesday afternoon: one will discuss latest developments in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning and what impact they could have on the way we do network operations. The other will bring you some news from the Internet Engineering Task Force and will provide information about how you can best participate.

I would also like to draw your attention to the Best Current Operational Practices session on Monday afternoon. This group is currently working on a document describing how to building resilient network infrastructure in times of natural disasters or war.

New to the RIPE Meeting?

If this will be your first RIPE Meeting, we recommend you take a look at the information at the Newcomers webpage. It might be useful to participate in the online preparation session on 16 May at 16:00 (UTC+2). And I hope to see you in person at the Newcomers introduction session on Monday, 22 May.

I would also like to point out that this time we would like to hear from the younger voices in our community during our Diversity in Tech session on Thursday afternoon.

Social Networking

Apart from doing hard work, the RIPE Meetings are of course also a good opportunity to meet socially. The RIPE 86 official social events have been posted on the website. Traditionally, there are also a number Do-It-Yourself social events such as climbing, running, chocolate eating. I created a thread on the RIPE NCC Forum where you can announce your DIY Socials.

Pre RIPE 86 Event for Students

On 9 May, we held another online session for students featuring some great speakers and interesting topics (you can watch the recording and the slides online). There was good participation and interaction and we expect to see some of the participants at the RIPE Meeting. This is an important activity to get young people into our community.

RIPE Code of Conduct Team

Another essential component of our meetings and especially important for new participants is a Code of Conduct to make sure everyone can feel safe. In addition to the actual code of conduct, we now also finalised the reporting procedure and the document describing the responsibilities of the Code of Conduct Team. We found excellent volunteers who will form the RIPE Code of Conduct Team. We will send out more details shortly. This team will replace the Trusted Contacts that have served us very well over the last years. I would like to thank all the Trusted Contacts very much and especially Rob Evans who served in this role a lot longer than he had initially anticipated.

Looking for volunteers

Our community is largely based on volunteer work. Volunteers work for instance in Task Forces, on the Programme Committee and as Working Group (WG) chairs. We are currently looking for volunteers for the following roles:

• IoT WG co-chair (see announcement)
• Database WG co-chair (see announcement)
• Routing WG co-chair (see announcement)
• Members of the RIPE Programme Committee (see announcement)
• Members for the Rob Blokzijl 2023 Award Committee (see announcement)

Working Group Interim Sessions

Some RIPE working groups held interim sessions. If you were not able to participate, I would recommend you watch the recording in preparation for the RIPE Meeting:

• Address Policy WG: Future of the RIPE IPv6 Address Policy - Session 1
• Address Policy WG: Future of the RIPE IPv6 Address Policy - Session 2
• Cooperation WG: The Global Digital Impact
• Cooperation WG: European Commission Consultation on the Future of the Electronic Communications Sector and Its Infrastructure

Remote participation

Not everyone will be able to participate in person and we are constantly improving remote participation functionality. We continue to use meetecho as our meeting platform. Based on the feedback provided after RIPE 85, we made some adjustments for this upcoming RIPE Meeting:

• We won't be using SpatialChat anymore as social platform during the sessions. Instead the hallway chat room on meetecho will be available at all times so that everyone can interact with each other no matter if you are at the meeting in person or if you are participating remotely.
• We have decommissioned the RIPE Networking App (see the announcement sent to the RIPE List). You can now use meetecho to find other participants and book side meetings.
• All official sessions will have stenography and will be streamed.
• Session chairs are reminded to include remote participants as much as possible, especially during the Q&A.

RIPE Governance

Over the last few month, we continued to work on our governance structure and I am happy that as a community we agreed on a number of important documents that will help us to build a strong foundation for the future of RIPE.

RIPE NomCom recommendations

The last RIPE Nominating Committee left us a number of recommendations that we addressed in the meantime:

• The RIPE Chair Selection Process has been updated (ripe-787)
• The RIPE Nominating Committee Process has been updated (ripe-788)
• Principles for the remuneration of the RIPE Chair and RIPE Vice Chair have been agreed (ripe-797)
• Principles for RIPE NCC Staff Participation in the RIPE Community have been drafted and are published for review

NRO NC election process

The Number Resource Organizations' Numbering Council (NRO NC) Election Process has been updated and published for review. Each region selects a number of members for this council. The way these members are elected is determined by each regional community. The process for the RIPE region had been discussed and agreed some twenty years ago, and it was time for the review. We already received some positive and constructive feedback and will publish a new version after the RIPE Meeting.

I'm really looking forward to a great meeting next week and I hope to see many of you there! There's lots of interesting and important discussions to be had and, as always, it's going to be great to meet with colleagues, friends, and lots of new faces from across the RIPE community.