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Arbiter Appointments

The following individuals have been appointed by the RIPE NCC Executive Board to the Arbiters Panel:

Before they can take their place on the Arbiters Panel, these candidates must have their appointments approved by the RIPE NCC membership at the RIPE NCC General Meeting, 17 November 2010, at the Westin Excelsior Hotel in Rome.

More information on the Arbitration Process.

Biographies

Pierre Baume

I was born in France and studied there, eventually securing an engineer diploma from ISEP (a Paris-based engineer school focused on electronics and related technologies). Among others, I worked with IBM (which led to my move to the Netherlands in 1995), EUnet, Qwest, kpnQwest (these last three were the same employment, the company changed ownership and name), the RIPE NCC (as a hostmaster), AMS-IX and IMC bv (where I'm still employed at the moment). I've built experience with both beginning and experienced LIRs and with an RIR. I've attended RIPE Meetings on and off since 1998, but less, recently, as few have taken place in Amsterdam and my present company uses mostly (private) IP resources handed to us by our partners.

Conor Dufficy

Conor was born on March 3rd 1965 in Dublin. He is a founder and director of Serverspace Limited (www.serverspace.co.uk), a provider of IT Services to businesses in the area of colocation, managed servers, cloud computing and related services. He is a practising barrister, specialising in commercial law and personal injury. He is also a qualified and practising mediator, with very broad experience in commercial mediation. Before becoming a barrister he had a seventeen-year career in Capital Markets at the end of which he was European head of Foreign Exchange for Bank of America. He sits on a number of company boards.

Ronald Duncan

Ronald Duncan co-founded @UK PLC in 1999. Prior to @UK PLC, he spent ten years running his own computer software consultancy, servicing projects using a range of languages and platforms. Ronald studied Physics at Cambridge and is a Chartered Physicist and Member of the Institution of Analysts and Programmers. He is a former UK downhill ski champion who competed internationally for ten years, including at two Olympics. Currently, he is developing BASDA Green XML and working on interoperability for the Hub Alliance, and is still Technical Director of @UK PLC.

James Hickman

James Hickman (1972, UK) studied Computing and Informatics at the University of Plymouth before working in various I.T. roles within the Rail industry. These including running transformational projects to deliver multi-million pound HR and Finance systems, though he most fondly remembers trying to get hundreds of shiny new ticket machines and passenger information systems to work within a few feet of 25kV overhead power lines.

In 2000, he joined a mobile internet start-up called OmniSky running the infrastructure for the European offices and was part of the team designing and building PoPs to provide the service over GPRS.

In 2001, James joined PSINet as a Senior Pre-Sales Consultant. He took over running the team shortly afterwards and built it into a respected part of the business. Under his leadership, many technical functions were drawn into the team. This included responsibility for support and administration of RIPE resource applications as well as providing advice to customers and partners wishing to become LIRs in their own right. In 2004 Telstra acquired PSINet UK and James was asked to run the combined Pre-Sales team.

In 2008, he was invited to run a newly-formed complex customer design function and was given responsibility for the architecture of the entire UK network backbone during a challenging time of consolidation and integration of a new datacentre.

Nowadays as Head of Technical Consulting he concentrates on professional services consultancy around managed services for large Enterprise customers.

James is accredited by the British Computer Society (MBCS CITP) and the Engineering Council (CEng).

Ondřej Surý

Ondřej Surý (1977, Ostrava, CZ) studied Computer Science at the Charles University. While on studies he joined hosting company Globe Internet in 1998 (part of ACTIVE 24 group now). After working on several projects he became CTO of Globe Internet. In 2005 he joined CZ.NIC, the .CZ registry, as a Chief Technology Officer to build a new registry system, which was deployed in 2007. In 2008 he was involved in DNSSEC launch in .CZ. In 2009 he became a head of the CZ.NIC Labs, newly founded R&D department of CZ.NIC.

He is primarily involved in DNS and DNSSEC deployment, acting as an active participant of the DNS Working Group at RIPE, and dnsop and dnsext IETF groups. He founded a KIDNS working group at IETF pushing the idea of certificates in DNS forward. He is also one of the seven Recovery Key Share Holders who participated at the first ICANN KSK Ceremony. In 2004 he founded the Czech Ubuntu Local Community Team which turned from a volunteer organisation to a official NGO after some years.