The RIPE Chair Team Reports - Highlights from RIPE 90

I hope you all had a successful RIPE 90 Meeting, and that everyone who was there in person made it home safely and is recovering from a busy week in the lovely city of Lisbon. I certainly enjoyed the week, the great content and the many good conversations. Many thanks again to everyone who contributed!

Here are some personal highlights and some updates and next steps. For more details please refer to the very informative (and fun) Daily Meeting Blog the RIPE NCC published on RIPE Labs during the meeting.

Common themes

The plenary programme started with a very well-received presentation by Maria Farrell about Rewilding the Internet followed by Timo Hilbrink’s talk about Setting up an ISP from scratch - two talks that highlighted, in different ways, why and how the Internet community can and should strive to maintain diversity across the networks. Both were referenced throughout the week and the theme was returned to again on Friday in Anna Wilson's Lightning Talk on How not to get overwhelmed.

Another recurring theme was the importance of resilience: how the network routes around damage (for example during the cable outages in the baltic sea), the determination with which engineers in Ukraine keep Internet infrastructure running, and the creative solutions people in Spain and Portugal came up with during the power outage in April.

Now it's time to think about topics you would like to see on the agenda or RIPE 91. The official call for proposals will be opened soon, and some WGs are already issuing requests for topics. Get your topics or presentation in early!

DEI

The Diversity in Tech session covered two topics: this time accessibility and mentoring. It was agreed that it would be useful if the community would help the RIPE NCC to review the check list the events team uses when selecting RIPE Meeting venues. Regarding mentorship, we heard a lot of good feedback and suggestions both from mentees and mentors on how we can improve the mentorship programme and make it more widely known in the RIPE community. We will certainly follow up on that. As a next step, we will organise another feedback session for newcomers on 3 June. We will also reviewing the RIPE Academic programme (RACI) and see how we can better integrate the RACI and other fellows into the community.

RIPE governance

We usually deal with a number of governance topics such as PC elections and WG co-chair selections during the RIPE Meeting. At RIPE 90, a number of working groups selected new co-chairs:

• Franziska Lichtblau (Address Policy WG)
• Yevheniya Nosyk (DNS WG)
• Anna Maria Mandalari (IoT WG)

Welcome to the team and many thanks to those co-chairs who’s term ended: Doris Hauser (DNS WG), Peter Wehrle (IoT WG) and William Sylvester (DB WG).

Doris’s term on the PC also ended and the community elected Amadeo Beck Peccoz and Clara Wade (for a second term).

The RIPE 2025 Nominating Committee is tasked to select the next RIPE Chair Team and was actively seeking feedback during RIPE 90. During the plenary session, the lack of diversity on the NomCom was discussed. It was suggested that next time we will need a lot more volunteers so that the random selection will come out with a good representation of the community.

The ASO Address Council continues its work on reviewing the ICP-2 document. There is now a draft document on RIR Governance. At RIPE 90, a BoF session was held. Please find a summary in the mail Hervé Clement, the chair of the AC, sent to the RIPE List recently. You can still send your input to the RIPE list before Tuesday, 27 May 2025.

Other industry events

Over the next few weeks and months, both Niall and I will participate in a number of events:

Internet Governance Forum (IGF) Ireland: Niall participated in the IGF Ireland on 22 May.

IGF Netherlands: Mirjam will participate in the IGF Netherlands on 4 June.

ICANN 83: Mirjam will be at the ICANN 83 Meeting in Prague.