RIPE 91 brought the community together to take stock of where the Internet is heading while staying true to the values that keep it open and resilient. A newly elected RIPE Chair Team shares highlights from the sessions, talks us through the policy changes, and give us updates on other industry events.
I hope you all had some time to recover after a busy RIPE 91 Meeting in Bucharest. It's been ten years since our last meeting there - RIPE 71 - which was also hosted by InterLAN, the Internet Exchange Point in Romania.
For Niall O'Reilly and me, this meeting also marked the end of our time together as RIPE Chair Team. Although I'll continue as RIPE Chair, Anna Wilson will now join me as RIPE Vice-Chair. The official hand-over was quite an emotional moment. It was great to see that Niall got a very warm farewell and standing ovation during the community plenary at RIPE 91. He certainly deserves it. That said, I look forward to working with Anna in the years ahead and I would like to take this opportunity to thank all other candidates for stepping up.
We also had elections for the NRO Numbers Council (NRO NC) that saw Constanze Bürger selected for another term. Franziska Lichtblau and Valerie Aurora's term ended on the Programme Committee. Annika Hannig and Matt Parker will now join the PC. And we welcomed two new WG chairs: Wolfgang Tremmel, as co-chair in the IPv6 WG, and Ulrich Wisser in the DNS WG. Rob Evans will continue for another term in the RIPE NCC Services WG.
Some highlights
The overall meeting agenda covered a wide range of topics: technical, regulatory, research and community-driven and more. Unfortunately I was not able to sit in all the sessions, but here are some personal highlights from what I was able to attend. For more details, please refer to the archives linked from the meeting plan or read the RIPE 91 Meeting Blog provided by the RIPE NCC.
During the RIPE NCC Services WG, we saw a panel on the potential use of Artificial Intelligence by RIPE NCC staff. The resulting conversation raised important questions about how we're all grappling to keep up with the influence of AI - whether the bubble is set to burst or not - and further discussion is expected to continue on the WG mailing list.
The Diversity in Tech session featured two great speakers, focussing on the ever-essential human aspect of our community.
And then it was good to see some representatives of the Internet Engineering Task Force leadership at the meeting who gave an overview of ongoing IETF work relevant to the operators community. Similarly, a presentation by IANA was well received.
I would also like to highlight a presentation in the Address Policy WG that looked at the evolution of RIPE documents in an interesting mix of data analysis and history. RIPE documents are one of the main products of our community and don't only provide an important paper trail of our policies, BCPs and community governance documents but also nicely mirror the professional development of our community over time.
More generally, throughout many of the working group sessions, it was great to see a lot of engagement and active discussion. I feel that the WG chairs really found a good balance between interesting presentations and leaving enough time for debate.
Policy discussions
The policy Revocation of Persistently Non-functional Delegated RPKI CAs reached consensus and was published as ripe-847.
The Address Policy working group (AP WG) discussed the following ongoing proposals:
- IPv6 Initial Allocations /28 and extension to /28 (2024-02)
- Revised IPv6 PI Assignment Policy (2024-01)
- ASN assignment criteria revisited (2025-01)
You can find all current proposals and their status on the policy web page. And, even better, you can now also find all current RIPE policies in one place.
In addition to the policy proposals above, a new idea was presented on the AP WG mailing list (Clarifying the non-transferability of legacy status), which is particularly interesting to the holders of legacy address space. The proposers are now seeking feedback before deciding if this will become a formal policy proposal.
Feedback
The feedback form for RIPE 91 is still open and I would like to encourage you to tell us what you liked or what you would like see improve in the future.
During my talk in the community plenary, I mentioned that the use of the childcare we provide during RIPE Meetings seems to be going down. I would really like to hear from those of you who made use of this service in the past or who are considering to make use of it in the future: is there something we can do to make it more attractive?
Rob Blokzijl award
The Rob Blokzijl Foundation that was set up in the name of our first RIPE chair to award community members who support and enable others. The board of the foundation is planning to hand out the next award in 2026 and is now looking for volunteers for the award committee. Also, if you already have ideas who would deserve such an award, please do not hesitate to contact the foundation board members.
Industry events
RITE 2025: I was invited to talk about RIPE and give a short summary of RIPE 91 at RITE 2025, the Romanian Internet Technologies Event.
ICANN 84: Anna Wilson attended the ICANN 84 meeting in Dublin where she mostly followed the discussions related to the Address Supporting Organisation.
IETF 124: I will be at the IETF 124 meeting in Montreal which is usually a good place to find interesting topics for the next RIPE Meeting.
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