The RIPE Chair Team Reports - April 2022

RIPE 84

It is our last update before our RIPE 84 Meeting in Berlin where I hope to see many of you in person. This will be our first face-to-face RIPE Meeting in two years and many things will be different. Compared to meetings before the pandemic, we will have much better facilities in place to allow for online participation. Those of us who will be there in person will still have to deal with the fact that the pandemic is by no means over even though the regulations in most countries have been relaxed. We will provide masks and self-tests for everyone and I would like to urge you to be responsible and to also accept other people’s preferences, for instance when it comes to keeping distance. You can find more information on the RIPE 84 website. We will also have to deal with the fact that there is a war going on in the RIPE region which affects us all in one way or the other. This is reflected in the agenda.

The RIPE Programme Committee has published the agenda for the plenary sessions. The working groups agendas are also filling up. You can find all information linked from the meeting plan.

The RIPE Code of Conduct Task Force will hold another BoF. The main focus will be on the Code of Conduct Team, including details about its recruitment and training procedures. Please also note the questions Leo Vegoda, the chair of the task force, sent to the RIPE Discussion List.

Until the Code of Conduct Team will be in place, the RIPE Meeting Trusted Contacts will continue to be there for you. For this RIPE Meeting two Trusted Contacts were added to the team. All Trusted Contacts have received training for this role.

Another BoF is looking at Properties of Today’s and Tomorrow’s Internet: What Do We Want From Our Networking Protocols?

The BCOP TF will also have a meeting this time, and they have a full and interesting agenda.

There will also be a Women in Tech session on Tuesday during the lunch break. We will talk about data collection, bias in datasets and the percentage of women attending RIPE Meetings over time.

Pre-RIPE 84 student event

On 3 May, we organised an event primarily aimed at students. Bert Hubert challenged the audience by asking "Who controls the Internet?" and Franziska Lichtblau, who is also the chair of the RIPE PC, spoke about the importance of Internet measurements and showed some interesting data collected during the pandemic.

We hope to make RIPE better known to students and in this way attract new and younger participants to the RIPE community.

Working groups co-chairs

Some working groups have issued a call for nominations for new co-chairs. The MAT Working Group has finalised the process: Brian Trammell will step down and Massimo Candela and Stephen Strowes will join Nina Bargisen as co-chairs. In the Address Policy Working Group, Erik Bais’ term expired. He was nominated for another term. Constanze Dietrich will step down as co-chair for the IoT Working Group. The call for nominations is still open.

All new co-chairs will officially start during RIPE 84.

You can now also find the current start and end terms of the co-chairs for each working group on the respective working group pages.

Revised Policy Development Process

After RIPE 83 we held an online session to go over the proposed changes to the PDP. Based on the feedback we received during that session and on the mailing list, we made some changes and published a version 2. After the deadline, we reviewed all comments received and made some adjustments and published a version 3. The next deadline is 27 May so that we also have time to gather feedback at the RIPE 84 meeting. We plan to issue a last call for comments after the meeting.

RIPE Task Forces: Definition and Guidelines

After we published the last draft version of the Definition and Guidelines for RIPE Task Forces, we received a number of constructive suggestions that we incorporated into the text. The next version will come out soon. Please watch the announcement on the RIPE List.

Industry Events

South East Europe (SEE) 10

I gave a short welcoming speech at the SEE 10 meeting. Unfortunately I could only participate remotely, but with the constantly improving Meetecho platform, this was a positive experience.

I really enjoyed the meeting, and especially the panel on the history of Internet infrastructure in ex-Yugoslavia. It was a great way to bring together technology, history and the user perspective. You can find the recording on the SEE 10 web pages.

SEE 10 was organised as a hybrid meeting and was an excellent test for this new meeting format. We received useful feedback after the meeting that led to some adjustments for RIPE 84.

NOG Organisers

The organisers of Network Operators Groups also met again online. You can find the recording here. It was great to see some new faces and to hear experiences from those who started meeting face-to-face. We also took time to discuss various initiatives to help operators in Ukraine and how the NOGs could contribute, for example by maintaining a list of local contacts and a template for logistics and distribution.

RIPE NCC Onboarding

We held another onboarding session for new RIPE NCC staff. It gives new staff an opportunity to meet the RIPE Chair Team and to get a little history lesson on RIPE and the RIPE NCC. It’s always a pleasure to meet new staff members from various teams and departments and to answer any questions they may have.