RIPE 83 RIPE Community Plenary Minutes

1. Update from the RIPE Chair Team

The presentation is available at:
https://ripe83.ripe.net/archives/video/682

Mirjam ran through what the RIPE Chair Team had been busy with. There were two active task forces (RIPE Code of Conduct and RIPE Database Requirements). The RIPE Database Requirements Task Force could close now that it had published its final document. It is part of the RIPE Chair team’s goals to make RIPE more visible – one thing they’d done was to reach out to the WG Chairs to record a video to introduce their WG. They were also making the RIPE community more visible on ripe.net. She mentioned some values the RIPE community can subscribe to and referenced a presentation from the RIPE NCC in the Cooperation WG earlier in the week that might go in a similar direction.

2. Rob Blokzijl Award

Carsten Schiefner and Eileen Gallagher, Rob Blokzijl Foundation

The presentation is available at:
https://ripe83.ripe.net/archives/video/683

Carsten Schiefner and Eileen Gallagher, two members of the Rob Blokzijl Foundation Award Committee,  presented on the Rob Blokzijl award for 2022. Nominations were opening that day and would close on 18 March 2022 next year – they would announce the winner at (a hopefully physical) RIPE Meeting in Berlin next year.

3. RIPE NCC Chief Community Officer Report

Hisham Ibrahim, RIPE NCC

The presentation is available at:
https://ripe83.ripe.net/archives/video/684

Hisham Ibrahim gave an update in his new role as Chief Community Officer. His three priorities were to better understand the needs of local communities, restructure teams and engagement in the service region to make more meaningful impact and build ecosystems around the RIPE NCC’s data services. He noted that geopolitics were increasingly impacting how communities interacted and said they would use more direct/targeted engagement at the national level for this.

4. Report from the Number Resource Organization (NRO)

Hans Petter Holen, RIPE NCC

The presentation is available at:
https://ripe83.ripe.net/archives/video/685 and https://ripe83.ripe.net/archives/video/687

Hans Petter gave an update from the NRO.

Jordi Palet Martínez, Moremar - The IPv6 Company, said that he caught many mistakes when he tried to compare any specific policy aspect among different RIRs on the NRO website and that he preferred to go straight to each RIR "policy manual" (or set of docs). He added that the NRO should consider dropping it, and instead having links to each policy manual or at least clearly state that it is just a summary and that the original manuals should be looked at carefully.

Hans Petter thanked him for the feedback and said he would raise this within the NRO. He asked Jordi to alert them of any errors he saw. To his wider point, Hans Petter said that if Jordi had found any errors, he could let the NRO Secretariat know.

Kurt Kayser, representing himself, commented about ARIN's "VIP" services to supply ASNs and warned of competetitive RIR services when RIPE NCC staff is busy with lots of complex transfer tasks.

Hans Petter said that the RIPE NCC was quite unique in that they allowed members from outside their region. In their region, they treated members equally in terms of requests.

5. RIPE Draft Policy Development Process

Mirjam Kühne, RIPE Chair

The presentation is available at:
https://ripe83.ripe.net/archives/video/686

Mirjam presented the revised version of the PDP which was shared on the ripe-list in October. Some key changes: they had shortened the summary, updated the appeals process, re-introduced an informal discussion period before the PDP started, clarified the roles of WG chairs and added information about how the PDP was changed.

Jordi Palet Martinez, Moremar - The IPv6 Company, said he had sent an email that morning. He had two major disagreements, the main problem he had was that the PDP should not be authored by the RIPE Chair – it should be authored by the RIPE community. He thought this should be amended. He didn’t agree that this was a community governance document that should have a separate way to update. In fact, they had recently updated the PDP around 2018 using the PDP. This was how they did it in other registries, and he didn’t know why we were doing this differently or why we were having different processes for different documents. He didn’t think it was worth having different processes. He understood they wouldn’t have enough time today, but maybe they could have a bigger discussion elsewhere.

Mirjam said she believed that each document should have an author. She agreed it was a consensus document by the RIPE community but was authored by the RIPE Chair. She didn’t agree that everything was a policy and thought they should make a distinction – as a policy had a very rigid process which they needed for policies – while there were other documents that she didn’t think they needed to go through the PDP. She didn’t think the PDP document was a policy itself, but they would see what others thought on the list. She thanked him for his suggestion to have a separate discussion on this.

Rüdiger Volk, representing himself and responding to Jordi, noted that the policies all had natural person authors. That might sometimes be a problem but having the RIPE Chair as the author of the PDP is not really a problem. He thought it might be good to use the PDP for these sorts of documents – using an undefined process seemed murky.

Mirjam said she didn’t agree that the current consensus building process on the mailing list was murky but thanked him for his comment.

Shane Kerr, member of the RIPE Database Requirements Task Force, said for anyone who thought the revised version would create more bureaucracy for the RIPE community, this was indeed the opposite. He added that hopefully they would never have to use any kind of appeal process again.

Peter Koch, representing himself, said he had been a little concerned by the lack of discussion on the list and this just sliding through. He had sympathies for what Rüdiger said, in terms of applying the PDP to the PDP. The current suggestion addressed some of the objections they’d had with previous invocations with the PDP and that was important. Maybe the community shouldn’t try to boil the ocean – there are deeper issues (this referred back to what Chris Buckridge had suggested in the Cooperation WG on values). He suggested to create and publish a redline version to help people grasp what was really changed – while he trusted the summary provided by Mirjam earlier – he thought that would be helpful for people.

Jordi said that the document should not say that "it is owned by the Chair" because it is a community document.

Niall mentioned that this is something where it's difficult for the community to find what is the right thing to do. He added that he was happy to take input from all over the community about the best way to combine a clear attribution of responsibility for the current version of a document, on the one hand, and the open source of the document, on the other. He said that there are two conflicting kinds of attribution in this document that the community needs to resolve.

Jordi said that all documents that go through community consensus should have the same timings and the same process. He asked why RIPE wanted to have a different process than other RIRs.  

Mirjam said this was a question that went back to why there were other RIRs. Over time they built processes that fit their community. They were looking at other RIR communities and seeing what worked there, but people also appreciated the diversity and goal-driven process that they had. It wasn’t a goal in itself to unify all the processes across the region, though obviously they could learn from other communities and incorporate those lessons as needed.

Jordi said that having the PDP update as a policy proposal, as we have done before, will show the redline that Peter mentioned.

Niall said that there had been only one update to the PDP process (of the half-dozen or so over the years) that used the PDP process itself, so it was not clear that this was the way they should do this.

Mirjam agreed but said they would provide a redline version for this – the RIPE NCC staff could help with this – and invited further discussion on the RIPE mailing list.