[ripe-list] a proposal to change the PDP

Dear colleagues,

Listening to the discussion and without going into detail about the
proposal Jordi sent to the list, I would like to clarify a few things
about the process.

After Jordi sent his policy proposal to the RIPE NCC on 5 October 2020,
the Policy Officer and the RIPE Chair Team worked extensively with the
proposer on the content and language of the proposal. We specifically
discussed the part of the proposal that referred to RIPE NCC bodies and
suggested improvements to make the proposal more suitable for submission.

During this process, the proposal went through a number of iterations,
but we remained concerned about the lack of a clear problem statement.
At the same time we felt it was not wise to propose a change to the very
process we were reviewing. Therefore we suggested to defer the
publication of the policy proposal until the review of the appeal has
been finalised.

After having looked more thoroughly at the Policy Development Process
and the review of the appeal, the RIPE Chair communicated to the
proposer on 1 December: “Therefore Niall and I believe that the RIPE
Policy Development Process already adequately excludes participation in
its appeal process by the people responsible for the decision under
appeal. We may have missed something; if so, we would be glad to see a
problem statement which makes this clear.”

In the meantime we worked with all parties involved in the appeal on a
review of the appeals process. That review has now been published as a
draft document:
https://www.ripe.net/publications/draft-and-discussion-files/review-of-the-ripe-appeals-procedure
together with a thorough analysis of the evolution of the PDP:
https://www.ripe.net/publications/draft-and-discussion-files/evolution-of-the-ripe-policy-development-process

We are currently working with the RIPE NCC to have both documents
published as RIPE documents. As soon as that is done, we would like to
have a community-wide discussion about the recommendations made in these
documents.

I would like to stress that the RIPE NCC Policy Officer followed the
process very diligently. She provided excellent support to the proposer
and the RIPE Chair Team and cannot be blamed in any way for delaying the
publication of the proposal. Also, at no time was the RIPE NCC trying to
influence the RIPE policy process.

Kind Regards,
Mirjam Kühne
RIPE Chair