The RIPE Chair Team Reports - Highlights from RIPE 92

I hope you all enjoyed the RIPE Meeting and recovered from a busy week of meetings and social interactions. Unfortunately, I was down with the flu right after the event, so this summary comes a little later than usual.

RIPE 92 in Edinburgh was one of the biggest meetings we've had yet, with over 1,000 attendees onsite and online. We had a warm welcome by the Lord Provost of Edinburgh who addressed the community during the opening plenary. This was followed by a number interesting technical presentations that kicked off the meeting with a bang.

On Monday morning, before the official start of the meeting, we had two tutorials: one technical, about VXLAN and EVPN on Linux (with BIRD), and another on public speaking, which was organised by the RIPE NCC (in addition to the tutorial already available online). We are considering providing this tutorial on a regular basis and I can only recommend that anyone who would like to improve their presentation skills should make use of this offer.

Community Plenary

We had a packed agenda for the community plenary and could have easily filled more time. Topics such as working group chairs selection procedures, RIPE meeting fees, and an update on the RIR Governance document sparked lots of feedback and discussion. Also, a call for documenting how to deal with our digital legacy was met with interest and might lead to a best current practice document.

We tried to allow time for discussion but at the same time needed to be mindful of speakers later in the agenda. This was a recurring theme during this meeting: session chairs often struggled with keeping the schedule thanks to the number of comments. This can be a tough balance to strike. We absolutely want to hear from an active and engaged community, and yet it can be hard to predict in advance which topics will attract the most discussion and so plan adequate time for them. We’ll keep working to find that balance.

Diversity in Tech

This time the DEI session focused on challenges in the workplace with a number of very interesting and thought-provoking presentations. Again, we ran a bit over time because the community had lots to contribute on this topic.

Policy discussions

There were a number of discussions related to address policy, not just in the Address Policy WG, but also in the RIPE NCC Services WG where the RIPE NCC shared some experiences with PI address space holders, multiple LIRs, and legacy address space and asked the RIPE community to consider reviewing related policies.

Birds of a Feather sessions

We had two interesting BoF sessions. One was organised by representatives from the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) with a series of speakers who provided a lot of information about IETF work items that could be interesting for network operators. This already led to a new activity where IETF participants participate more actively in RIPE WGs and share information relevant to the specific WG. The other BoF highlighted practical aspects of artificial intelligence that could potentially support operators in their day-to-day work. We might see more about this in the future.

Research and RIPE

Finally, we experimented with a "Research Exchange" where operators could provide potential research ideas to researchers. We will evaluate this initiative and see how to move forward with it. We already received feedback to bring back the poster sessions we had organised at the last RIPE Meeting and to generally provide more visibility to fellows, and especially those who attend through the RIPE Academic Collaboration Initiative (RACI).

You can find more details in RIPE 92 Daily Meeting Report. And if you have not done so already, please share your feedback with us. With that, we hope to see you all at RIPE 93. Registration is already open!