RIPE 84 Working Group Chair Meeting Summary

19 May 2022
InterContinental Berlin

Attendees:
Ignas Bagdonas, Erik Bais, Sandoche Balakrichenan, Nina Barginson, João Damas, Ondřej Filip, Antony Gollan, Julf Helsingius, Paul Hoogsteder, Hisham Ibrahim, Raymond Jetten, Achilleas Kemos, Shane Kerr, Florence Lavroff, Kurtis Lindqvist, Jen Linkova, Remco van Mook, Moritz Müller, Niall O'Reilly, Marita Phelan, Bijal Sanghani, Marcos Sanz, Benedikt Stockebrand, Massimiliano Stucchi, William Sylvester, Leo Vegoda, Alexandra Vos, Denis Walker, Martin Winter.

Chair: Mirjam Kühne
Scribe: Karla Liddle-White

1. Welcome/Intro

2. In/Outgoing WG Chairs

Mirjam welcomed new WG Chairs Massimo Candela and Stephen Strowes (MAT WG), Peter Steinhauser (IoT WG) and Markus de Brün (Anti Abuse WG). She also thanked outgoing IoT WG Chair Constanze Dietrich and Brain Trammell for their work.

3. Agendas and Presentation Submissions

Many WG agendas were published rather late this time. This made planning difficult, both for speakers and participants. Some agendas were also sent to the WG mailing lists without a prior call for submissions. This limited the ability to get involved in Working Groups, especially for newcomers.

At the PC meeting, it had been suggested that a volunteer contact in the community could answer questions and provide support for submitting a presentation, and that there could be one system for submissions which would allow Chairs to choose those that fit into their session. Another solution could be to send a mail to registered participants on how to submit a talk with links to the submissions page.

4. WG Chairs Selection Procedures and Terms

In addition to showing the start and end of terms for each WG chair, it was suggested to note how long someone had been a Chair (in total).

5. Feedback on RIPE 84

There was general agreement that the meeting was going very well and there had been very few complaints. The challenges of running a hybrid meeting were discussed. There had been some issues with the hybrid format in terms of handling the queue and questions on Meetecho. Online participation for socials hadn’t worked quite as well as it had at the previous online meetings.

Overall, however, there was agreement to continue with the hybrid meeting format and improve it further.

The length of the time slot given to each WG on Wednesday was discussed (some were 60, others 90 minutes). Mirjam said that this was caused by the General Meeting moving to an earlier time (which had been agreed for online meetings). She said she would review this with the Board, WG chairs and the PC.

Other topics discussed: not being able to see the room when participating via Meetecho, the breadth of the rooms causing audio issues on Meetecho and introducing a chat function to Meetecho. Some attendees enquired whether the Women in Tech session could be renamed to be even more inclusive, such as Diversity in Tech.