RIPE NCC Services
29th November 2023
At 2 p.m.:
KURTIS LINDQVIST: It is 2 o'clock, I am Kurtis Lindqvist, I am one of the Working Group Chairs. Twenty years ago, there was a ‑‑ we will start all over. Twenty years ago, we, there was a debate in the RIPE community about a lot of things and at the end of that debate one decision was to split something called LIR Working Group, very amply shared by Hans Petter into two, one was called NCC Services Working Group and the other one became Address Policy and I think it was Daniel and Hans Petter I think it was who approached me and asked this NCC Services Working Group surely we could use someone to Chair it and we thought you'd be good for it and I laughed and thought well, first of all they can't be serious, sure I will do it for a short while. And that's 20 years ago.
So fastforward to today. This is the end of 20 years of bad jokes, it's the end of 20 years of rather poor time‑keeping, and 20 years, end of silly slides. I also realised, I mean walking ing up here, quite a few people came up to me and said we are really looking forward to this, I am not quite sure how to take that but there is a one thing I thought I didn't actually include in my slides that I should issue a special thank you to is, it is apparently 15 years of the stenographers mostly keeping up with me talking, and
(Applause).
Thank you from me to the stenographers for doing it.
So, for the last time, from me at least, this is your favourite Working Group, the NCC ‑‑ the most favourite Working Group, the NCC Services Working Group, right.
So the agenda of today, we are going to go through some admin matters, I should have brought my glasses ‑‑ that's what 20 years does for you! We are going to go through the RIPE NCC survey, this agenda is slightly reordered from the original posted because we had to do some logistics and Brenda is going to do this remotely and then we have the registry update and the RIPE NCC update by Hans Petter and we are going to have the RIPE NCC Services Chair selection. Now, this Chair selection process was written by me 20ish years ago, maybe 18 years ago, and it made perfect sense when I wrote it 20 years ago and you lot all agreed to it by the way, so if there's any flaws in it it's not mine. We have two candidates to replace me, we have had very few expressions of support on the NCC Services Working Group mailing list so by the process when I step down at the ‑‑ which is at point E, Bijal will take over and run the Chair selection and we will ask for a hum in the room for support what comes under the mailing list. I will come back to that when we get to that point.
And then the new Working Group Chairs will run the microphone and any other business.
So, I realised I forgot to find out who is the scribe but usually the NCC assigns the scribe who hopefully there is someone otherwise we have a bit of an issue. There we go, okay.
Agenda, is this agenda fine? Any additions, comments, thoughts? No. Good. Minutes of the last time there was no comments as far as I'm aware so I guess you all approved and with that I am going to hand over to Brenda, who is going to do this first part on the survey remote for 15 minutes and we are then going to hand over to the in‑room part if I understand this correctly. I am going to get off stage, at least.
BRENDA MAINLAND: Good afternoon everyone, are and I hope you can hear me okay, and that you are having a good time at this annual meeting of the RIPE NCC. My name is Brenda and I am going to provide an overview of the key findings of the 2023 RIPE NCC member survey.
We conducted this survey in ‑‑ between May 22nd and 30th June 2023. This survey actually follows on from one that we we conducted in 2019, obviously before the global pandemic, and so as you will see as we go through these, whilst some of the findings have stayed the same or improved, there are some changes and differences and mostly largely attributed to the result of the pandemic.
We received more than 4,000 responses and after data cleansing, which is quite standard in research, around 3,900 responses were analysed. So this gives us 95% confidence that the actual result within a plus or minus 2% margin of error.
The survey was fielded in ten different languages other than English this year, and more than half of the responses were completed in other languages, and this is again higher than in 2019, where I think around 44, 45% of completed surveys were completed in a native language.
Over half of the responses came from Western Europe, 17% from Eurasia, 12% from Middle East and 7% from central Europe and southeast Europe.
So I am going to take a look at members' opinions about the performance of the RIPE NCC in delivering the registry and other services first.
So, as you can see, satisfaction with the RIPE NCC's performance across a range of core measures remains high. So quality of service delivery, quality of resource registration services and interaction with customer service, with the RIPE NCC, are all extremely high, at around 9 and 10.
Speed of responses from the RIPE NCC has increased 5 percentage points to 86% and in a new question that was asked in 2023, satisfaction with invoicing and billing processes, are high at 83%.
We ‑‑ the Net promoter score methodology examines attitudes about either the propensity to recommend a product or service or organisation to somebody else or to speak highly of an organisation to others, and as you can see here, at 43% the RIPE NCC's overall NPS is very high for what we would normally see in a member‑based organisation like the RIPE NCC.
Central ‑‑ western ‑‑ sorry, Eurasia in particular has a strong propensity to speak highly of the NCC to others.
So despite these high satisfaction ratings with the core registration services provided by the RIPE NCC and the high NPS score, there are a couple of areas where members are less satisfied, ratings of value for money have dropped six percentage points, to 69%, while satisfaction with the RIPE NCC's use of member funds has also fallen 10 percentage points to 66%. These ratings are largely driven by responses from participants in central and Western Europe, with these two areas significantly less likely to rate the performance in these areas as either good or excellent.
When we looked at the comments provided by members about the reasons for their ratings, there are some concerns about the appropriateness of the annual budget. And some concerns over lack of transparency in budget allocation.
And while some comments suggest a reduction in non‑core activities by the RIPE NCC to reduce ‑‑ to help reduce overall member fees, others are of the opinion that the membership fee structure overall needs to be adjusted, perhaps to more fairly reflect the resources that they have.
Ratings of governments still remain high, though, around three‑quarters of respondents are satisfied or extremely satisfied with the Executive Board's leadership of the RIPE NCC, the General Meeting and the governance documents. There's a slight fall in perceptions of engagement with members and members comments that were provided would like to have more opportunities to meet and talk with the RIPE NCC Board members and executives, perhaps more formally and more frequently than the current General Meeting allows.
I'd also just like to mention that there were quite a lot of don't knows in response to all of these questions, with around 30% of respondents feeling that they didn't know enough about these questions to provide a rating, and these ratings that you will see ‑‑ that you are seeing are, once we have we removed don't know responses.
So, we will move on and have a look at some of the more strategic findings from the survey.
We asked respondents to tell us the most important activities that the RIPE NCC performs aside from obviously the core functions of register and resource services and around 60% saying the provision of information services, RIPE Atlas, RIPEstat, RIPE IP map is one of the most important functions aside from registry services. Interestingly, around 50% or 49% say that working to defend the global Internet registry system is an important activity of the RIPE NCC, and I think that these results provide an interesting perspective, while registry and core information services are always likely to be the most important of the RIPE NCC's activities, from a broader perspective, working to maintain the goal of an open, stable and secure Internet for all, is more important than some of the other services that are offered by the RIPE NCC. You can see there's quite a big gap between these first two important services to the next most important, which is K‑root and DNS services.
I would like to say, though, that when we combined all of the different education and learning and development opportunities offered by the RIPE NCC, when we combine the three of those 45%, I believe that webinars, workshops, training course, the RIPE NCC academy and the certified professional programme are all important to to members.
We also asked respondents to tell us in their own words about how effectively the RIPE NCC is working to meet their strategic objectives, and we received over 3100 comments that were provided and a majority of those say that ‑‑ show that members are largely satisfied with how the RIPE NCC is working to meet its strategic objectives, are and provided positive responses.
Of those that had a different perspective, costs of membership communication were frequently mentioned, along with IPv4 scarcity.
So, again, when we asked to ‑‑ members to describe in their own words the challenges of maintaining a stable, open and secure Internet globally, concerns about cybersecurity and information security and the threats posed by cyber attacks are top of mind for most of the respondents. There were also numerous comments about governments attempting to exert control over the Internet and this, I think, alongside geopolitical concerns, are mentioned as challenging the wider Internet governance model and seen as disruptive to the goal of Internet neutrality. Another comment was the influence of large multinational organisations and their economic interests on Internet structure and governance. There are concerns that corporate and monetary interests provides them the ability to control and influence the Internet globally.
There are also concerns about fair access to the Internet for all, and the existence of a digital divide across the globe.
Obviously, there are technical limitations to Internet accessibility in some places but there are also human‑induced restrictions that make Internet access difficult for many.
When we asked ‑‑ turning to more internal individual organisational challenges for the RIPE NCC members in providing Internet services, again, the problem of information and cybersecurity is evident, so, similar to 2019, 42% are concerned about information and network security and as well, unchanged from 2019, around a third of respondents are also concerned about IPv4 scarcity and this is particularly apparent in Eurasia and the Middle East regions. There were two new challenges confronting members in 2023, are skills shortages and the overall costs of operations or the costs of actually doing business, and it's interesting that these two issues are common at the moment and most other research that we have conduct since the pandemic, with many industries and professions feeling a lack of qualified staff and inflation and the cost of living increases making it much harder for businesses. So costs of operations is a much bigger issue this year for RIPE NCC members than it was in 2019.
So, again, when we ask what role can the RIPE NCC play to help address some of these issues, most of the comments are focused around the scarcity of IPv4 and the challenges with IPv6 adoption.
There is a perception that there are a large number of unused IPv4 addresses being held by some organisations and members would like the RIPE NCC to help reclaim these for redistribution.
They would also continue to encourage the RIPE NCC to concentrate on education and case studies and training in IPv6 adoption and transition.
The provision of education and training and knowledge‑sharing in general is also another way that is seen as important for the RIPE NCC to provide for members to assist with their challenges.
It is also worth noting that around a third of the comments from respondents, though, indicated that there's either nothing that the RIPE NCC can do beyond what it is already doing to assist these or they, you know, believe that these are issues somewhat out of the RIPE NCC's control.
When we asked about assistance with IPv4 transfers, around 3 in 10 respondents want guidance on transfer policies and procedures, more streamlined processes to minimise and overheads and for the RIPE NCC to facilitate connections between buyers and sellers. Some, however, as you can see, believe that there is no new activities that are needed and nothing that the ‑‑ nothing new that the RIPE NCC can do to assist.
I will move on to operational findings, lastly.
While around 50% of respondents have deployed IPv6 in their networks, are and those in central and south‑eastern and Western Europe are more likely to have done so, so to better understand the reasons why they deployed and also the challenges that they faced in that deployment, we also asked them what the drivers of IPv6 adoption was, and you know, two‑thirds say they wanted to be ready for a future IPv6 demands, 58% wanted to gain experience with IPv6 and around a third said that it was required by either their partners or their customers.
Interestingly, only 13% adopted IPv6 because they had no more IPv4 resources available.
So, when we asked what the biggest challenges were to implementing, ensuring feature parity between IPv4 and IPv6 is the primary issue when implementing or deploying IPv6 but again, interestingly, managing misconceptions is a common problem, with around 4 in 10 saying that changing the IPv4 mindset within their organisation was an issue during implementation. For those who have yet to deploy IPv6 in their networks, again, and this is common and has been common for a number of years, respondents say a lack of time, a perception that they don't need IPv6 or a lack of organisational knowledge is hindering or barriers to them going ahead with IPv6 implementation.
About a quarter of respondents have implemented RPKI, which is the same as in 2019, and the most common reasons for not adopting or implementing RPKI is a lack of knowledge about it and how it works.
So lastly, engagement and satisfaction with training, events and meetings organised by the RIPE NCC is relatively high, the blue bar here shows you those who have attended different meetings or activities, hosted by the RIPE NCC. And of those that are most attended, satisfaction is high, satisfaction with training courses, the RIPE meetings and RIPE NCC organisedy events is very high. Usage or attendance at open houses, hackathons and those sort of things is lower; however, as you can see, satisfaction still remains relatively high.
So suggestions to improve engagement activities included conducting meetings and events in different countries and regions, offering training and events in multiple languages, to make sure they are open for everyone and not a barrier for those who are not familiar with English. Reduced reliance on e‑mails or member lists as a communication method was also suggested with clients, that use of social media rather than member lists might be more meaningful.
So just to conclude, we had a high response rate and I think the, you know, field in the survey in multiple languages contributes to that. The RIPE NCC's performance ratings remain high for those core services around registry and resource services. There are concerns about value for money and suggestions that the RIPE could maintain a bigger focus on registry services, but converse to that, there are concerns about cybersecurity, government influence and, you know, the maintaining an open, secure and stable Internet globally.
Information security, IPv4 scarcity and transition to IPv6 remain common challenges amongst members and encouraging adoption and reclaiming unused IPv4 are ways that the RIPE NCC could help with those challenges. Thank you very much for giving me the opportunity to present these. I'd now like to hand over to Adonis and we can collectively take some questions from here.
(Applause)
ADONIS STERGIOPOULOS: Hello, my name is Adonis Stergiopoulos and I work for the RIPE NCC, are so I am just going to take over for a couple of minutes just to say what that means for our side. I have been involved with this survey since the beginning of this year, with Fergal Cunningham who cannot be here today, and we have been involved with like designing the survey and then going through the data and now we reach the stage where we are today.
I don't know how I change my slides so... Here we go. Based on the report we just saw from survey matters and we publish online we further analysed the data and then we' have identified some key findings, there are 40 specific areas that the RIPE NCC is going to be looking at, so there are things that we will consider and some actions that we are going to take and I want to say that this is kind of forms the basis of how we went to design the draft activity plan budget that you will hear more about today and you can find a list on our website, it's been there for a week now and what are the next steps.
So, as I said, we identified 40 key areas and now in the next while we are going to propose some actions that the RIPE NCC is going to take and then just respond to some of them, that we will not be able to. Then, this ‑‑ over the course of the next two years, we will be reviewing that list and just update you on progress through the RIPE meeting updates and mailing lists or any other mechanisms that we have, and then we will make adjustments if necessary and at the end, we will provide you with the outcomes of ‑‑ and the work that we carried out over the last three years and then we carry on with the next edition of the survey.
So with that, I'm not sure if we have time for questions.
KURTIS LINDQVIST: We can take some quick questions. Any questions? No. Thank you.
ADONIS STERGIOPOULOS: Thank you, and thanks to Brenda.
(Applause)
KURTIS LINDQVIST: So next as an outcome of the survey is on the website we are going to have Phillip Oldham from the RIPE NCC to talk about the website, I believe.
PHILLIP OLDHAM: Hi. Hello. I will start with a quick introduction because I am a new face at the NCC, I am Phil, I joined back in July, and I bring with me over 25 years experience in web development and delivery practices. I am the new manager of the web services team, web services is, amongst other things, responsible for the technology behind the NCC's public websites, this includes the websites that supports the RIPE meetings such as this one, and dub dub dub.ripe.net, our main website.
This has been the focus for the team over the last 12 months, as part of a redesign and replatforming strategy which we started with a similar project back in 2022, for RIPE Labs.
Why are we doing this work? Primarily to improve the usability and overall experience for our visitors, especially visitors using smaller screens and assisted technologies. We also want to raise the prominence of the content relating to the RIPE community. The NCC and the community have a very close relationship and we want to better represent that on the website.
The site is also somewhat overdue for a design refresh, we want to bring it in line with the NCC's other recently updated tools such as the LIR Portal, RIPE Atlas and, as previously mentioned, RIPE Labs.
How are we achieving this?
In June, we retained a design agency to bring a new perspective to the process, we will be working with them until the end of the year. One priority we gave them was to focus on accessibility, to make the website easier to use across all types of devices in order to promote openness and inclusivity. In parallel, the team is moving the content to more modern platform so we can make changes to respond better to the needs of the community and we are following development best practice so the website will be more efficient and responsive across devices.
We faced some interesting challenges along the way. For example, we have been accumulating content for 30 years now, and such an important resource needs a lot of care and attention to make it ready for the new platform. We want to keep the website familiar for our regular visitors during this refresh, so that we don't disrupt any established work flows too much. Unfortunately, familiar and new can sometimes be in conflict, but rest assured we are not going to move too many things around initially.
Eventually, yeah. And the website in its current form has over 5,000 pages, you probably won't see this, a lot of this is hidden from the main navigation menus and is only accessible across the web via a direct link. We want to make this more discoverable. To do so, is really tricky on smaller screens, reduced, so this is definitely somewhat of a battle.
However, we are making progress. There's still a lot to do, though.
When will the community see these things? Unless we uncover any major issues in the coming weeks, we are on track for a release in January. This release is only a milestone for the team and for the project plan; it's not the finish line. We still have lots to do. And as is the nature of this type of project on long‑established websites there may be some rough edges shortly after the release but we will be monitoring and we will be fixing as a priority. And we will continue to make improvements during the next year.
And that includes the content side. Once the community is familiar with the new design, we will start to improve content organisation and clarity.
But with all of this we need help from the community. Your feedback is invaluable. We want to make sure the updates to the websites serve your needs both now and in the future. So where can you get more details?
There's a Labs article out already, I think that went out last month, and I will be at the feedback stand near the baristas most of the day tomorrow, I will be happy to help with any specific concerns you have, to note down any improvements you'd like to see or discuss the technical aspects in depth.
If you would like to get involved in some user testing, that would be wonderful, I will be happy to take your details at the desk as well and finally, we will continue to provide updates using the usual channels.
And that was a brief update. Thank you.
(Applause)
KURTIS LINDQVIST: Thank you. We do have a question online, so we are going to go to Liman.
LARS‑JOHAN LIMAN: From Netnod in Stockholm, I definitely do have opinions about web pages and usability, how do I reach out to be part of the testing team, because I am not there I cannot walk up to your desk and you take my details.
PHILLIP OLDHAM: That's fine reach out to us at ws [at] ripe [dot] net, that will come to me and my team and we can discuss further.
LARS‑JOHAN LIMAN: Thank you so much.
DANIEL KARRENBERG: I am co‑founder of RIPE and RIPE NCC staff member so I am a colleague but I am also a user and I am responsible for Version 1 of the RIPE NCC website which ‑‑ I'm not proud of. It was useful at the time. My question, seriously, my question is will we have an improved full text search function or search function where we can find stuff because that's one of the sore points of the current implementation?
PHILLIP OLDHAM: Yes, this has been a challenge for the team as well. We are moving forward with a different search engine, we are going to trial it initially. The technology that we were using was not very good, basically. We are trialing this new version but we also have plans to trial a couple of separate versions in parallel and we will pick the winner and hopefully that will be better for the community.
DANIEL KARRENBERG: Thank you.
KURTIS LINDQVIST: Any more questions? No. In that case, thank you.
PHILLIP OLDHAM: Thank you.
(Applause)
Next up is James Kennedy with the registry update.
JAMES KENNEDY: Afternoon everyboy. I am very happy to say that since September this year I am the new chief registry officer for the RIPE NCC. I am quickly scanning the room and I recognise many faces, and it's great to see you all again, those of you who I haven't had the pleasure of yet meeting I hope I can do so before the week is out.
So, shall before I get started, I think it's only right I quickly introduce myself, I have been working in our wonderful world of Internet numbers and the RR system for over 15 years at this stage and on both sides of the registry I have worked as well so many moons ago I was an IP resource analyst within the RIPE NCC, a couple of pictures to prove the point. Here we are managing the original IP version 4 run‑out, of the free pool, I think in 2012, I believe.
Since then I have worked for a number of organisations in the community, namely Liberty Global, AWS, Virgin Media and I have also been quite a busy participant of the community, volunteering for different things and here is some familiar faces from the ASO AC earlier this year.
So what can you expect from me of the registry with me at the helm, so to speak. So we do have a five‑year strategy at the RIPE NCC, we are now coming towards the end of year two of that strategy and we continue to work towards the goals and objectives as outlined in that strategy.
I can say that high on my priority list is stability and accuracy of the registry. Why do I say stability here? We have come through quite some challenges across the region in recent years and who knows what's around the corner. But no matter what the future holds I can say that we are absolutely committed to 100 percent ensuring as much stability, resiliency, accuracy, within the, within the processes in the data that we maintain and manage. Also high on our priority list are service excellence, our service levels are very important to us, what we provide to our members, and ensuring that we adhere to our various compliance obligations within the frameworks that we operate.
So, service levels, how are we performing?
Our objective here is to provide world class service to our members. We use common industry standard customer satisfaction metrics to measure if we are on track. Those are namely, net promoter score, customer effort score, and ticket response times. So, essentially after every interaction with the registry is complete we send a brief survey to the member and we kindly request that they fill back ‑‑ provide their feedback and scores accordingly.
Net promoter score, our objective here is to hit 80, is to reach 80 score. Just for context, anything above 0 is actually seen as a positive, it's possible to get negative scores in NPS, industry standard categories include like over 30 is seen as great, over 70 is seen as excellent, top percentile so we do set the bar high and I believe Apple are scoring 72 and KLM mid‑50s so we are keeping good company with our current scores. Q4 is very high and we are happy about that but no champagne bottles one month into that quarter so hopefully we will keep that going.
Customer effort score here we ask members to what extent do you agree or disagree with this statement, the RIPE NCC made it easy to handle my issue.
Our target here out of a total ‑‑ on a scale of 7 is to reach the point of 6 .5 consistently. Anything between 7 ‑‑ 6 to 7 is seen as strongly agree in customer effort scores. So, yeah, again we are happy with the track that we are on here. Q2 a little bit below bar but it is known as being a bit of a tricky period with billing reminders to please pay your bills and generally people are not overly happy to receive those but generally we are happening.
Our goal is to respond to tickets within one business day.
The average for the year so far is 99.3%, the lowest score we have had on a monthly aggregate is 98, we have reached 100%, so I do want to emphasise that we do prioritise quality over quantity, so we don't want to be sending empty replies just to hit, you know, a fine ticket response time but yeah even with that priority we are still have this metric and we are happy with the performance so far.
So registry accuracy. The objective here is to ensure highly accurate and compliant registry. I have always found this part very interesting because we all know and want an accurate registry but how can you quantify and how can you measure and how can you deliver on that on a regular basis and I can't claim, lay claim to this, it was already in place but we have good metrics here, to verify all members within five‑year period, same for end users, so those providing provider independent resources, verify them every five years and to complete 2,400 ARCs annually.
Verifying registry information. So, here, we, for both member and end user information, we use official sources such as chambers of commerce, online registries, and verification checks can be triggered in many ways, both proactively and reactively.
The information that we have for members with Dun number, we have a monitoring system in place and whenever any change is made to legal company address or status, we get notification and we handle each ticket individually.
An important metric is the last verification date, so each ‑‑ once a verification is performed, we see at that moment in time that the in was is correct in the registry, we make sure that it is, if there are any changes that are necessary. And then the results for all members and end users are in three categories with that time stamp of verified within two years, two to five years and those not verified for over five years.
So to quickly illustrate how we are doing with the members, our goal here is to again verify all members within five years, you can see in the blue line is those over five years, we are progressively moving towards that key target of 0 so we want to get no blue line, at the moment we are at 4.1%. And with end users, similarly we are making progress, we are now at 1.1% of end users. That have not been verified within five years.
Now, this I found fascinating when I arrived, the amount of ticket types that trigger a verification is ‑‑ I have even grouped these, there are multiple more but these are the high level. If anyone wants to know more or see more we are happy to put together a Labs article but here is an overview of the array of types of verifications and how they are triggered. And similarly for end users, those holding PI resources.
Moving on to assisted registry checks. So the primary goal of the ARCs are to keep members ‑‑ keep their data accurate and make them aware of what their responsibilities are, what their expectations are, are on them, but basically we all do many other activities, we promote or we speak about the policies and services we provide during the ARCs, so we target those with the oldest verification dates so those are a slide over five years for ARCs. So far this year we are on track, slightly shy but on track we are accelerating towards the end of the year as well.
And just for reference on an average 200 per month but 2,400 is our target for the year.
Other updates:
So, the level of diligence in this area has genuinely impressed me since I arrived, rejoined the organisation. So, as an association under Dutch law, the RIPE NCC must comply with sanction regulations imposed by the Netherlands and the EU. All current members and end users have been screened and are actively monitored. We get an alert from the monitoring system if ever there's a change in the status of a member in relation to sanctions, at that moment had the resources are frozen and the case is individually picked up by one of the team to investigate. When I say frozen as well, resources, they are not open for transfer.
And sanctioned entities are prevented from registering resources once confirmed and resources frozen.
Handling this workload on a manual effort one by one, it's quite large and it's spread across teams so thank you to the legal team but yeah, also with the registry team working together on this considerable and important effort.
And just so, you know, there's always a quarterly sanctions report, transparency report, that's published and that contains info on how members, end users and legacy holders are affected by sanctions while respecting their confidentiality and privacy.
External audit, as directed by the Board, we are conducting an external audit and we are going to do this every two years, we are in the middle of one now, we are hoping to complete before the end of the year. The goal here is to assess the integrity of registry procedures and data so to ensure that we are compliant and processes are safe from intentional or unintentional oversight, errors, fraud and to make sure our data is also true to legal entities.
And yeah, depending on the outcome of the audits we will put together an implementation plan, if you can ‑‑ there's areas for further improvement in our work.
So you have just seen the survey and the results are good, we are pretty happy with the registry results so far but we don't use it to pat ourselves on the back. We use this an as an opportunity to see where we can improve further. We did see that some feedback was in regards to consistency, personalising responses, we do have a continuous improvement mechanism in the registry and we do pick up all of these ‑‑ we are looking into each of these responses individually but also whenever we receive feedback to a ticket, for example, with suggestions of something could be done better we look into it individually and we appreciate all that feedback, it helps us to get to where we need to be.
And also we have heard ‑‑ we have listened to the community earlier this year and for next year's budget we have made I think some positive cutbacks, that's going to save us 200 K compared to this year's budget, around software licences have been reduced, compliance, tooling, has been optimised, consultancy and travel has been cut as well.
Finally, I sent an update to the NCC services mailing list earlier last week, and update that the Board resolved to decommission both of these services on the brokers list and IPv4 transfer listing service. The brokers list was seen to be not achieving what it set out to do and the cost to maintain, to keep their high standards was very high, the listing service, it was intended to give more control over transfers and the software itself was needed, yeah, a full rewrite and ‑‑ but again the resources were not available.
On these points, I really want to emphasise this, that we are going to have a community consultation early next year, the details of which have not been planned or discussed yet but as soon as we have information we will of course relay through our communication channels, I really want to reach out to everyone to contribute in this discussion, we want to hear from everyone around what the NCC's role with respect to the IPv4 market should be in future. Again it's very vague, it's very high level but it's more of a teaser, heads‑up that we will be looking for your feedback and discussion in the new year.
So, in summary, our service levels are reaching world class. We would say as we classify in our metrics. Registry accuracy is increasingly closer to our targets, operational efficiency and sanctions compliance is high on our priority list. The decommissioning of the brokers and IPv4 transfer list and consultation about our future in this area next year. Finally, but not least, a huge thank you to the registry team for your tremendous work this year once again, since day one that I returned I have been impressed by the level of expertise, diligence and, yeah, it's really ‑‑ it's really a pleasure to work alongside such a great team and such high level of delivery. With that, questions?
(Applause)
KURTIS LINDQVIST: Any questions?
BIJAL SANGHANI: Hi, it's Bijal Sanghani, Euro‑IX. I am here as the ex RIPE database task force Chair. It's good to see the ARCs are going on, and 200 a month is really good, it was one of the recommendations from the task force, as you know. And my question is, is that an increase from previous years or has it stayed the same?
JAMES KENNEDY: I know in recent years the last couple of years at least, it's been the same but I think we have an expert in the room who might be able to give a bit more of a historic perspective.
XAVIER LE BRIS: From the RIPE NCC, I am the coordinator for the ARC and basically we have been reducing the ARC over the years with the amount of due diligence, and it means that we do a lot more checks that we used to do in the past and this is also in a matter of database, contact and stuff like that. And we take the time also to explain how it works to the membership, because this is also the lacking of information.
BIJAL SANGHANI: Okay, thanks.
KURTIS LINDQVIST: Any other questions? No. All right. Thank you.
JAMES KENNEDY: Thank you, all.
(Applause)
KURTIS LINDQVIST: And next up is, I realise I forgot to say this, after this we have a break and after the break we have the RIPE NCC General Meeting, if you haven't registered for that now is too late probably but you could always run and pledge and cry with the registration staff, if I would have said it at the start you might have had a chance but anyway.
It's a reason to get rid of me!
So the next presentation, I was going to say Hans Petter is going to do the RIPE NCC update that is considered part of the General Meeting. Over to Hans Petter.
HANS PETTER HOLEN: Thanks for that, I am so glad that you asked everybody who is a bit late to run out of the room now before I start, that's much appreciated.
So, giving an update on what we have done since last time but looking into the future because most of the work we have done is work on the activity plan and budget.
What I hope that you will have as the takeaways after my talk is that at the last meeting I said we want your input, we have listened and another comment or another element into our planning process is that we do have less income and we do have increased costs, in 2023 the income will be around 38 million, not 40 as we had budgeted and two‑thirds of you voted to not increase member fees for next year so that means our budget next year is going to be at 38 million. That's the basics of the story.
So, taking you back a bit, who are we? Then an update on what we have been doing, looking back before run‑out, transitions and disruptions and how we plan and what exactly is it that we have planned.
So trying to give you the context of how we are doing this as well.
Who are we?
If you go and read the Articles of Association the RIPE NCC association is about registration, it's about coordination, it's about administration and new activities. It's not only a registry. So we say that registry is important, some way it's the most important, but really, the RIPE NCC is set up as more than a registry.
Together let's shape the future of the Internet. That's been our vision for quite a few years now, established before I started as Managing Director and the mission has three elements, to be the registry, unique authority on Internet number resources, to enable you to operate and develop the Internet; secretariat for the RIPE community, to be a trusted steward of the open, inclusive and collaborative Internet model and engaged you, the communities and people, and also, be a neutral source of information, knowledge and actively contribute to the stability and evolution of the Internet so three pillars and they have been there, this was developed by the Board before I started as Managing Director but we did polish a bit when we made the strategy for 22 to 26 so this was a job I started shortly after I started in 2022, and after long discussions in the Board, the Board decided to put the community first in the strategy. The community set up the RIPE NCC and the RIPE NCC is the secretariat of the community. Then, the community decided that they wanted the registry in Europe, it was so inconvenient to call to the US to get IP addresses so the RIPE NCC built a registry, Niall that told me in between there was the RIPE database coming before the registry but I guess that's implementation details.
Thirdly, we want to enable all of you to operate one secure, stable, resilient and global Internet and that's the C, the network coordination centre, we are helping you to coordinate in order to make sure that the Internet works.
In order to do so we need to be a stable organisation and we need to have robust governance system and proper funding and a Board elected by the General Meeting to oversee what we are doing and none of this is without without having engaged, competent and diverse staff. That's the five elements in our strategy.
So what happened since last time? You just saw my new chief registry officer, he joined us at the RIPE NCC earlier this year and had a flying start, attended strategy session with the executive team before he started and it's great to see you are up to speed, James, we much appreciate this. We did reorganise at the beginning of the year, we have one technology department consisting of former software engineer, resource we have moved out of the technical corner and into the community on engagement so we get, you know the researchers closer to the community but they have to work really close with the technology department who is sitting on the data and making the tools and so on, just as software engineering still has to work really closely with the registry because they are developing the services there so in a modern world we cannot work in silos, we have to work across the organisation.
Having a CTO responsible for all technology things is so much easier for me because then I was point at the CTO and say fix that.
So, that means that my executive team now looks like this. Athina is here, you can see her around, Simon is here, you will see him present numbers later at the GM, Philip is in Brussels getting married, I mean, right. Hisham is here and Daniella is here, she organised the meetings with the APNIC Board who is also here this time on Saturday and she is helping out at the reg desk and trying to keep me organised as well. Of so that's the part of my team here. Caroline is back running the RIPE NCC to make sure the people are okay and security is in place.
So, I want to repeat James's presentation, but the key take‑away really here is that you know, the NPS and CS that's not about the numbers, it's about methodology, we ask you after you have completed the ticket and engagement with you, I mean how easy was it for you, can you recommend us to others? And yes, it's great to get positive feedback but if you have issues and you tell us because there is a free form there and you give us a score, we actually use that as a learning exercise so that's why we are doing this on every tickets and not only every three years as you saw in the other survey in order to use this as a learning exercise. Accuracy is important, we need to continuously work on that, operational efficiency and sanctions is important, this is about keeping me out of jail. And then we really need to have a substantial discussion with you, the community, what should the RIPE NCC be in the transfer market, are we a pure ‑‑ doing only registrations, what's our interaction with the listing services, is that completely outside our ‑‑ do we work with the brokers and accredit them and all those things. What we had didn't really answer any of those questions so rather than trying to work further on those we decided to censor the old tools in order to start with the clean legislate after discussing this with you.
Technology, since Philipe isn't here, I got the honours of doing technology update as well. The biggest newsworthy thing since last time is probably the K‑root server officially launched, national TV and vice minister was there and it really got a high profile thing. This is important to the Internet. The root servers. And the RIPE NCC is doing root servers so you have some assurance at least part of the root is operated in a secure and resilient manner, we do that for you. We have also modernised the SSO, we have changed the back‑end there and deployed it in a mod ‑‑ more modern architecture.
Technology department is then a melting pot and has been put together two different departments and cultures and they have come up with their objectives for the coming years. To provide world class services to our members and users, to increase employee engagement and engineering culture across all the team, increase flow, agility and observability. Ensure security and compliance and keep costs within budget so that's the five principles that are going to guide the technology team in the year to come.
One of the things that on the engineering side that they have had a deep dive into is this back end for some of our measurement services. First and foremost, Atlas storage if you went to the MAT Working Group on Tuesday Robert made a presentation on this and got more in‑depth on that so I will just give some of the technical details here again.
The existing Atlas storage is bursting at the seams. It's not being invested in, since before I started, I don't think I have seen anything on that, so it's been running and maintenance has been increasing, are not really good but that's the fact. Now we need to do something. The RIS storage is very similar, however not really at the point of bursting yet.
So we need strong long term solution for this.
And after reviewing different architecture and looking at costs and the complexity, the team came up with a recommendation on the most cost efficient way of doing this, to go into tiered storage, depending on how recent data is. So, are if the data is recent, such as less than a month old it will be stored in a newly built on premise cluster, that's the same technology we use today it, the historical date will put on some cheap Cloud SWS S3 or similar, we plan to do this by renting bare metal servers, we don't really know the size of this one month and as Internet doubles every year or every two years then the number of measurements has an exponential growth as well so flexibility there in the first version is important.
And then to give you a sort of a quick architectural overview, it will be the hot storage, the red one which is fast but then also customer and you have the slow slower, slowest, down to what is it, some of these provides, Glasier, you put it on face but it's really cheap and takes a week to get access to it. Whether we will go that far and have it that unaccessible is something that the Board suggested we would ask the MAT Working Group to have a task force to establish the principles for this. Robert did ask that question yesterday and I hope the Working Group can engage in setting the principles for how long and how accessible should the data be.
And there is a RIPE Labs articles on that. Of so this may sound like a small thing but doing this complete reengineering things and exploring all the options takes a lot of effort and discussion.
Providing world class services, and really, you know, the RIPE NCC I think when you started, Daniel, you had one server or four or five servers the first year and they doubled the workstations so, and I remember those days. We are not quite there any longer, we are running something we don't want to label as critical services, what we are doing is pretty critical for the operation of the Internet.
And that's kind of the one end. The other end, as I think both the survey said and Randy mentioned in his keynote on Monday, why do I need training to use these services, should be really self explanatory and we are going to work on improving that. Next is RPKI dashboard and we will look at other services in the LIR Portal as well.
Technical capabilities, sort of nurturing the engineering capabilities in the organisation is important. And this is about it beious delivery, delivering software in production. 15 years ago, 20 years ago within I started my last job it was all about you got software twice a year, there was a summer release and the Christmas release. Today, it's more about how many releases do you do a week or a day, how do we make sure that we have continuous integration delivery and automated testing, we have the maturity, so lifting that to a common level is going to be a focus area for the next year and we know that disruptions will happen, all of you are running some kind of networks and yes, when we get good we have less incidents but they do happen and we need capability to detect it, ideally before it has a consequence for the users, and then we need to fix it. That's also important.
Security and compliance, and you will hear me repeat this many times through this presentation, that is become increasingly important. When I started my last job, we did security, anti‑virus, tick tick we are done, it's a bit more today. So, I will come back to this later on but doing security thing in the systems is one thing, demonstrating, having somebody else to look over it and doing the external audits is another thing that's become increasingly important for us.
Now, the Internet is kind of the common, it's not owned by by anybody but we all depend on it, we need to look after that together. So, we engaged with you at two RIPE meetings, when I joined the community it was three a year, which was a pain to get to travel approval to go to three meetings a year so then I was so happy when it was reduced to two meetings a year and then we added the ENOG, MENOG so went from three meetings to five meetings a year. The most one is the countries are landlocked so in the connection and peering is visitly important there. How can they work closer together in order to be left dependent on the countries alone?
I think doing a parallel to Norway back when I built networks, all the connections in Norway went through Sweden. Friendly country but they had different surveillance laws, Swedes looked at all traffic, so not being dependent on only one neighbour is really important. Taking out all the geopolitical things here, of course you can look there is one particularly country that all of these are dependent on but making sure you have resilient multiple connections and ways out is a good way.
We met in Middle East, that's a more mature regional meeting, 212 attendees and as you can see we had more attendees in Uzbekistan when we met there which is really great for the second meeting in that area.
We also do local days, NCC days in Sofia, we have two Internet measurements day and we also engaged with governments since the last RIPE meeting in Montenegro and in Dubai, that was heads of regulators in the Middle East countries, the IT minister for Palestine was there and it was interesting to sit with them and hear their concerns. IPv6 deployment, RPKI, is sort of common interest where we work with the governments in order to build capacity in the countries.
Learning and development. We have changed to a better exam platform and it's more cost efficient so yes, we have positive feedback from people that they appreciate the ability to also get the documents saying we have done this training and we made sure that we can provide that in a cost efficient manner. We have launched a recertification problem, the RIPE database certificates are the first to expire and we have done in cooperation with Mirjam and the Working Group Chairs created e‑learning training, five modules so far, there are more to follow on how to be a Working Group Chair so that's to raise the barrier for those of you who are interested in maybe becoming, you can sign up to see what does it take and how it works. Those of you who have been Working Group Chairs for 20 years may want to have a look, oh maybe there are things I missed, you don't have to admit that publicly you can look at that from your home, right
Then we improved exams for BGP security and IPv6 security.
Country reports, central Europe and Turkey, we have published and this is taking the data and providing them in some way that can be easily accessible for members and decision‑makers in the countries.
Collaboration and cooperation, and this is where we come to another area where the ARC chart doesn't really follow the activities because collaboration and cooperation is a cooperation internally between the internal engagement community and legal so I have the same content here in two places so I just put them together here, we are work here to defend the global Internet registry system and 49% of the survey respondents said this is a very important activity, not that many people think it's that important we talk to governments but in order to defend the registry system we have to talk to the governments as well but it's not we talk to governments for the sake of talking to them, we are talking to them to make sure if they are going to make decisions that affect the internet ‑‑ I talk to one of our colleagues in Dubai who said over the engagement with the governments in the area we have now come to the point that they actually come to us and they ask questions when they want facts. It's not necessarily the most friendly region when it comes to multistakeholder or how we do things in ITU at least we have dialogue and we have their ear, that doesn't mean they do as we say but without this dialogue we would be in a very different place.
Sanctions, it's not only legal, it's also in the engagement part, it's a lot of interactions with the Dutch authorities, with EU, and with the community in general, we funded research project that was presented at the last RIPE meeting so we have done a lot there to build knowledge in general around the effect of sanctions. We have, I'm happy to say, removed sanctions‑related restrictions, the freezing for 49 members and end users following new sanctions exemption. It wasn't made for us but for telecommunication services but finally the minister for foreign affairs confirmed our services are covered by this exemption and we are transparent in this area by providing, publishing a quartering sanctions report.
Legal compliance is not only doing sanctions as it kind of sounds like that and it's not only legal doing sanctions, that's across the whole organisation sometimes. The ePrivacy law or the cookie law has been sort of implemented to a larger extent than before so we should be compliant there and it's a fun fact I went through my mailbox now and there was a paper from Gardener saying three most important things to think about as CTO one is implement the cookie law thingy, so we are ahead of Gardener's recommendations, are clearly.
Digital Services Act, we have updated terms of services which ‑‑ in relation to submitting contents on the website so there is a lot of these regulations that we need to follow and see how does this apply to us and then find practical ways of implementing them. I think Randy made some excellent points on Monday saying that we really need lawyers that are solution‑orientated and figuring out to implement things rather than stopping things or litigating.
Updating the RIPE database terms and conditions to include the geofeed as purpose for the RIPE database.
I have ten minutes left, I wanted to have a check there.
Information security, risk and compliance. So part of this is about technology, right. Reducing vulnerabilities, actually detecting them is the first thing and figuring out to do that, the most trivial thing is patching but that's not always that trivial. Bug bounty programme, standardisation of security, so that's the technical side.
There is a human side to this as well, with doing awareness training, both digitally for all employees so we know that everybody has had some exposure to security training and we are doing, sending e‑mails with links to click on and yes, I was among those that clicked on please update your Zoom client because I am told to update my client so I click on everything that comes from security. After that I stopped clicking on links altogether, can you please approve this purchase order, I won't click on links.
And then we do more specialist security trainings for develops as well so it's not a one‑size‑fits‑all.
Compliance initiatives. So having an information security management system, ISMS, building that on the ISO and eventually getting certified during next year, that's one of the objectives here.
We are slightly further ahead on the control framework based on SOC2 controls where we will have an auditing firm doing an assessment of that and providing report in the format of an IS AE 3,000 assessment report, that will state whether ‑‑ to what level RPKI service is compliant with these controls and I believe that these are important steps because some of the regulations that we see from EU and others, like the NIS 2 directive which we are not subject to but one of the things we could be subject to if the politicians change their mind and decide to regulate those, is a right to audit, rather than having all the governments saying oh we need to audit you, we are providing third party audit reports. That's my goal. The other part is reporting on incidents which we already do publicly so that should be easier to do. It's not since I worked in security and loved doing audits that I am doing this for the sake of doing audits, part of it is improvement and another part is documenting this to third parties.
Also risk management we have had the risk management in place before I started and that has now been modernised and will be presented to the Board in the next Board meeting in two weeks.
I mentioned bug bounty programme there was a Labs article published on Monday this week where we have gone public with this, this started in 2014 with the responsibility disclosure programme which is pretty standard in the industry. Many companies have done by invitation bug bounty programmes where we invite security researchers and ask them to test things. Now we have opened that up so now we have a public bug bounty programme which is really, not that many companies that do that.
Human resources, I don't normally talk about this internal part but one of the major changes there is we now have a third party that provides us ability to hire people in other countries. And we have also done a lot of optimisation on HR systems and staff safety and I also want to do a shout out here to the works council which is an elected body which under Dutch law has some rights for advice and approval and it's really been great to work with them on a lot of these things that comes to HR processes so I am mentioning it here so the community should feel, should know that staff actually has a way to management and influence a lot of this, so it's not that I don't want the community to care about the staff but rest assured that the works council is pretty agile on that.
Finance, what do they do? They control the costs. There has been major work on the budget for 2024, you will see slides many times. Banking relations, you have heard about customer relations so vendor relations, banking relations is a thing especially when you come to banks that are risk‑averse or don't want to deal with sanctioned countries or ultra high risk countries and onboarding of external treasury party for managing our investment portfolio and ‑‑ it's not we are going to gamble with the members' money but have a third party doing this in a consistent way with professionals.
Looking back before I started, looking back at RIPE NCC, growth of 154% over 2013 to '19, cost increase of only 66%, inflation over the years of a total of 10% and a reduction in membership fees of 35%, this is why I took the job, this is easy peasy, no and then came the disruptions, sanctions, regulations, banks, scrutiny, Covid‑19, wars, energy crisis, inflation, it's not that you can sort of say this has no effect on this, this has changed the way we work. From '19 to '22 the number of LIRs declined with 7%.
The total costs increased with 9% while we had 17% inflation during those years. So yes, it's painful to say that I have to charge you more, well ‑‑ but, you know, this is the reality of life. There has been inflation of 17% during this years so we are kind of in line with that.
How do we plan, we are here at the end of the year with activity planning and budget, we are going into Board approval in December and you have seen this been published, we have had an open house, you have seen the take aways from the survey already presented, we have followed parts of it already, we haven't analysed everything fully, Adonis has shared the findings we will work on but these have been taken into account. We have not cut any services or activities yet, we are focusing on outreach in our service region, we have reduced the budget, we continue to invest in security, we are continuing to invest in e‑learning and on security RPKI and v6. And we work to improve the applications, that's sort of already in the plan for next year. The Executive Board gave a direction in June so we start this process with the Board giving input to the management team so we don't go off in the wrong direction, focus on cost savings and aim for a break‑even budget and our forecast is 38 million for next year.
We then had management retreat and looking at the existing strategy, not inventing a new one but picking four elements of that strategy that's already there, to be a centre of excellence for data, to make sure that we can share insight and act on facts, both we and you, ensure organisations stability and financial strength, that's of course important when we see the inflation and everything that's happening around us, be resilient on the political side, we are not still not done on the sanctions side and there are unfortunately more wars popping up around us. And we need to continue to work on security.
Following this, the budget that we have presented is a 36% reduction in consultancy, 18% reduction in information technology, 14% reduction in outreach, 19% in contributions and 20% in travel. That is compared with this year's budget. Luckily, we saw this development already in in May at the GM, we got two‑thirds vote against increasing the membership fee so we took the signal and pulled the brakes. While the 20% reduction in travel from the budget, it's roughly in line with what we have done this year so it's not a dramatic change so I should tell you I have done a dramatic change to cut the budget because you told me to, if I tell that to staff, dramatic change we don't like this. This is a very delicate balance where I have one communication externally to my members that funds me that we have done the cuts and I am telling internally don't worry this is not really that bad.
You can look at the budget visualisations, the blue part is the registry and the green part is the measurement services and IT, are and then you have the red part which is the external engagement and the purple part which is the overhead, but, you know, we really need HR and we need finance and we need security and so on. And interesting thing if you look at the right side here is, where does the money come from?
And looking at this RIPE meeting for instance it costs us around 700,000 to pull us off this meeting, we probably going over budget so it's going to be more, but we only get 120 to 150,000 in ticket income so there's a huge imbalance in that. We have some sponsorships and they are mainly for the measurement services but some for the meetings but should we increase these areas in order to reduce the membership fee or should we focus on the major part here and not get into that? That's one of the discussions that we have to have, not for '24 because this is more or less costings done but for '25 and going forward.
And I think since I am out of time I have more slides on the elements of the registry but I also have a speaking slot in the GM so I will let this just be the introduction there and I actually have exactly the same slides for the rest in the GM, to be mindful of time I will stop here and ask the chair if there is time for any questions?
KURTIS LINDQVIST: Sure. Any questions? For Hans Petter?
(Applause)
HANS PETTER HOLEN: I paid Daniel to make sure there would be at least question but I don't know which question it is.
DANIEL KARRENBERG: My name is Daniel Karrenberg, I am one of the co‑founders of RIPE and I am also RIPE NCC staff member but not speaking as such, I am speaking as member of the community. Let me ask one of your question, how many servers at the start of the RIPE NCC, one internal and external, security and this is written up in a RIPE Labs article for people who are interested in the details.
I have more a comment, two comments and a question.
One is the thing that sort of Randy raised on Monday saying do I need a training course to use the RIPE NCC Services? And I will reveal a dirty ‑‑ not a dirty, a secret. We started those training courses not only to tell people how to use our services but also to appear less of faceless bureaucracy, to talk to people and to get them in the room to build confidence and that makes me a little concerned when I see your slide that says we cut external engagement. I think the credibility of RIPE and the RIPE NCC rests with the bottom‑up trust that we generate, and it is very easy to cut stuff that is not greatly appreciated by the present members, even the majority of the members but that is crucial for our credibility. So, I would encourage people to actually discuss this and I have no voice in the membership meeting but if you have, you might want to send some signals to the Board in that regard.
The second thing is, is there any ‑‑ that's a real question ‑‑ is there any discussion between you and the Board about aligning the decision about the fee structure and the budget because what I personally observe right now is we decide in the beginning of the year we don't want to pay more and we decide at the end of the year what we want and the two team a little bit uncoupled, usually you might want to discuss what you want and then fund it.
HANS PETTER HOLEN: So, it's kind of a mission impossible, because you can say that since May we have not been working on the activity plan and budget, right. If we are going to do the activity plan and budget before we do membership vote in May we would have to start before Christmas planning the year after and we need to have some time to execute these plans as well.
Now, if we move the funding until this vote so I put in front of you here is a plan and then here is the price and you have to vote yes or no, what happens if you vote no, right? This means I have to strike things afterwards and now I have actually two weeks from today to the ‑‑ to the December Board meeting so since this meeting is so late in the year, it's kind of mission impossible to know even take comments from this meeting into account so it's really a planning squeeze here.
I see a couple of solutions. One would be that as all other RIRs, the members leave to the Board to set the Charging Scheme. Now that's a bit scary because that would require two‑thirds vote in the GM and there were two‑thirds voting against increasing the fees so that's a complicated one. Another one is to look at when we, and you will see in Simon's presentations in the GM that he has made forecast for 25 to 27 already, when we discuss the fee structure in May, we don't have a detailed plan for what we are going to do in 25 to 27 but we have an indication on what the status for the current plans is going to be and we need that funded so that's the immediate ‑‑ that's the easiest step that we have taken so far.
But if anybody has any great ideas in how to change this, you know, enterprise planning things for 200 staff and 40 million‑plus, minus, business into something that takes this into account, yeah well, I count those three‑year plans, three years ahead of time, they plan a lot in the future, I am all ears for ways to optimise that. We have talked about it but ‑‑ we are now providing forecast for the next three years and that will be part of the discussion in May.
KURTIS LINDQVIST: Last chance, questions?
Thank you, Hans Petter.
HANS PETTER HOLEN: Thank you.
(Applause)
KURTIS LINDQVIST: And with that, I am going to hand over to Bijal to do Chair selection which means I am done.
(Applause)
BIJAL SANGHANI: Thank you, Kurtis, for 20 years of chairing this Working Group, it's going to be weird continuing without you.
But okay, so we are ‑‑ we don't actually have a lot of time, I think we are already gone over, but I just wanted to recap on the co‑chair selection, so on 25th September Kurtis sent an e‑mail to the NCC services mailing list declaring that he was not going to be standing again for reselection, on 1st November Rob Evans my co‑chair who is unfortunately not with us today, is ‑‑ sent a mail to the mailing list opening ‑‑ asking for candidates to step forward if they are interested in the co‑chair position.
We received two nominations, Janos Zsako and Stefan Wahl.
On 16th 16th September asked to show support for the candidates. We receive three votes of support and as Kurtis mentioned earlier we are not entirely sure that that is any sort of consensus, so, I would like to ask the Working Group in the room here if they could show their support for the candidates. So, I will start in order of who is ‑‑ who came forward first, so anyone showing ‑‑ if you want to show your support for Janos, please can you please your hand now.
(Show of hands)
And next for Stefan, please.
(Show of hands)
Very close from what I can see anyway. Yes, so that was actually very close, and I'd like to thank you both for standing for the position. And going by the number of hands raised, I would like to confirm that Janos will be the co‑chair for the NCC Services Working Group. Thank you again, Stefan, for standing, and welcome Janos.
(Applause)
Okay. With that, we have a few minutes for AOB, does anybody have any other business they would like to discuss.
SHANE KERR: I do, I am Shane Kerr, IBM. I may have missed it but I didn't think there was any discussion about RIPE meeting locations and the way that meetings are announced and things like that, basically this is my attempt to lodge a complaint, I am not being super happy with the physical locations in Rotterdam or here, and regardless of the reasons for that, I don't really expect a defence of that, but I find the process has been very non‑transparent, I think it would be nice if we could have an open, bottom up discussion of how to arrange our meetings, I feel we have become quite lazy as a community and outsourced it to the RIPE NCC which has been very convenient but maybe if we are not happy we should do a little more work to help out with that.
HANS PETTER HOLEN: Thanks for that, part of that falls in the Community Plenary and discussion, what does the community want, do you want bigger or smaller meetings, do you want more central or do you want them in the outskirts so people don't run away but actually stay focused at the meeting, there are many dimensions to this. One thing and I mean this is clearly on the RIPE NCC part here, we are working closely with Mirjam on this but we have to execute, we are doing calls for venues, we are catching up after Covid, right? We used to be two years plus in advance and we now have call for locations, we have proposals from local hosts and we have then, going after those and doing site surveys but I am not quite sure when we can do a public consultation while negotiating with the venues because if we, you know, get too close to the dates we have no negotiation power yet and if we include too many people in the actual should we go there and there or support this and that venue, that gets very, very complicated. Every other organisation I am talking to being ICANN or IETF have issues with this after Covid. But it's really like you know, I would like to promise we will sign up the next six meetings shortly into next year but that will be hard but maybe we will get back to two years in advance and do so. We have criteria for selection of the meeting places, I think having the community review those and look at those and the more existential things, do you want us to grow beyond 800 into 1,000, 2000, that means conference centres and venues like Rotterdam, or gives a lot of other options and I don't have the answers to that and I shouldn't dictate that but I will pass that ball to Mirjam and I will be happy to work with her on the community ‑‑ and the community on that, I am sure Hisham and his team will be happy to work with Mirjam on that.
MIRJAM KUEHNE: Thank you. Hans Petter has already said everything, I don't have much to that, Hans Petter and I are talking about this extensively and talking to other community members and this is the right questions we should consider as a community and I am happy to hear any feedback on that and yeah, just so to mention this is not the first time we are thinking about this, we are continuously thinking about this and Hans Petter said we are still catching up from some of the fallout from losing staff from the Covid pandemic and also this is an industry‑wide issue that we are seeing at other events that it's hard to find good locations but we are definitely working on this closely together, the RIPE NCC and myself.
DANIEL KARRENBERG: Speaking as myself. I am slightly uncomfortable with the Chair selection thing being done by a vote. We don't vote in RIPE and we haven't, but that's just, I am old and inflexible.
More to the point, I think you are making a little mistake here, you have two qualified and willing volunteers, you might want to use both of them in some way, so consider that, maybe have someone as an under‑study, Stefan, if he wants to, for the next ‑‑ for the next time a selection has to be made. I think that would be the right way to do things ‑‑ RIPE way to do things.
(Applause)
JOB SNIJDERS: Job Snijders, talking as an individual contributor. I want to echo Daniel's comments and point out that the RIPE Services Working Group Chair selection process description allows for three Chairs, so ‑‑
BIJAL SANGHANI: We already have Rob Evans.
JOB SNIJDERS: I am confused because of the remote situation, apologies.
BIJAL SANGHANI: This might be a good opportunity to say that next year, it's my turn to stand down and I will also be standing down so you know, maybe somebody can restand or just to let everybody know there will be an opportunity to stand for this position next year as well. Yeah.
Okay. Any other comments? Anything? Any other business?
All right. In that case, I think we are done and I'd like to close the Working Group. Thank you.
(Applause)
