<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=us-ascii"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;" class="">Hi there,<br class=""><div><br class=""><div class="">On 4 Jun 2020, at 06:08, Hans Petter Holen <<a href="mailto:hph@oslo.net" class="">hph@oslo.net</a>> wrote:</div><div class=""><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"></div><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class=""><div dir="ltr" class=""><div class="">The proposal is modelled after the RIPE Fellowship program and can be found at:</div><div class=""><div class=""><br clear="all" class=""><div class=""><a href="https://www.ripe.net/participate/ripe/wg/cc/ripe-working-group-chair-financial-support" class="">https://www.ripe.net/participate/ripe/wg/cc/ripe-working-group-chair-financial-support</a><br class=""></div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">If there is consensus from the community on this I will do a formal request to the RIPE NCC for such support.</div></div></div></div></div></blockquote><div><br class=""></div></div><div class="">Peoples' circumstances do not allow them to travel to RIPE meetings and spend a week there volunteering for the community. It seems likely to me that there are excellent working group chair candidates who have not put themselves forward because they know they can't commit to attend. People whose employers won't support them with time and salary (or independent contractors who lose income when they can't work) are similarly disadvantaged. Eliminating those disadvantages might add useful additional perspectives to indviidual working groups and to the wg chair collective.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">I think providing this funding might well reduce those barriers to participation. To Michele's point I don't think there is a serious risk that anybody would take on the job of being a working group chair with simply to get a free week in a hotel. People are selected to be working group chairs based on their reputations and their ability to do a good job, not simply because they put their hand up. If some unforeseen negative consequence did arise, the NCC could simply rescind the policy (with appropriate notice) and call it an experiment, in which case at least we learned something.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">If the NCC is prepared to make budget available for this, I think it is a good idea.<div class=""><br class=""></div></div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Joe</div></body></html>