[cooperation-wg] Co-chair attributes: some suggestions

A consensus seems to be emerging about who should join Meredith as co-chairs. I don’t want to derail that.

In parallel to those deliberations, I think it would be helpful to suggest a list of essential or highly desirable qualities that a co-chair of this WG should have. The list below is a first attempt at that. Feel free to suggest others or disagree with these suggestions.

It’s improbable that any one individual could hope to tick all of these boxes. That should be possible however when these qualities are spread across 2 or 3 people. The trick is finding the right balance of skills and experience. And I suppose deciding how to prioritise whatever set of requirements emerges: eg “foo is mandatory, bar is nice to have, foobar is highly desirable”.

Meredith’s initial three criteria are no-brainers. But they do set the bar rather low. IMO the WG leadership needs to have more than those baseline qualities of being willing, able to attend and available.

Here goes (in no particular order):

1) Roots in the RIPE Community
2) A good understanding of how things are done at RIPE (policy-making, consensus driven decision making, openness, lowest possible barriers to entry, inclusiveness, etc)
3) A good understanding of the NCC and its role in supporting RIPE and its WGs
4) Useful contacts with those in leadership and/or influential roles other Internet institutions (ICANN, ISOC, IETF, IGF, trade associations etc) along with an understanding how these institutions intersect with the RIPE community and how/when to best work with them
5) Useful contacts with those in leadership and/or influential positions in government/regulatory circles
6) An appreciation of current legislation and regulation which affects the RIPE community
7) An understanding of future trends in 6) - like new EU Directives, stuff that might pop up from ITU, WCIT, etc and who is driving that
8) Able to engage with legislators and regulators about relevant technology/standards developments like IoT, 5G, IPv6 migration and the IPv4 run-out, crypto, RPKI, next generation broadband (whatever that might be) and so on
9) (Mostly) based in the RIPE service region
10) Ability to engage with government/regulatory policy-makers as well as those in other Internet institutions and represent the RIPE community in those fora