31 October 2014

RIPE Chair report October 2014



I would like to share with you what I have been doing as RIPE Chair since the last RIPE meeting in Warsaw in may now that the RIPE 69 meeting in London is just some days away.

The agenda for the RIPE meeting as been published at https://ripe69.ripe.net/programme/meeting-plan/
The Program committee has done a very good job in putting together a program for the week, all working-groups have published their agendas, and most working-groups have started working on wg-chair procedures as agreed at the last wg-chairs meeting.

The working-group chairs will meet as usual for lunch on Thursday. The agenda for this meeting can be found at
https://www.ripe.net/ripe/groups/wg/cc/agenda/ripe-69-working-group-chair-meeting-agenda


As RIPE Chair I am invited as an observer to the RIPE NCC exec board meetings in order to coordinate activities between RIPE and the RIPE NCC. There have been board meetings in June and September and minutes of the meetings are posted at http://www.ripe.net/lir-services/ncc/executive-board/minutes/2014

The theme of my first half-year as Chair, and before that as Deputy Chair, has been to get to know the community better, trough participating in regional meetings.
  • MENOG 14 in Dubai, UAE
  • SEE 3 in Sofia, Bulgaria 
  • ENOG 7, Moscow, Russia
  • ENOG 8, Baku, Azerbaijan
These meetings have given me a better view of the current issues in our region. While we in Western and Northern Europe have a multitude of Internet exchanges to improve regional and national connectivity, there are challenges in the Middle East and further east. International connectivity is also a challenge - limited by available international fiber, and with higher cost than in areas with more competition between fiber providers. Privacy issues were high on the agenda at ENOG. There was a lively discussion on how to deal with government request. It is great to see the participation of these meetings, both in numbers and in content. The technical discussions in the meeting and the corridors, to exchange ideas and solve problems.

The RIPE NCC also does outreach to governments in our region. I participated at the High-level meeting in Brussels the RIPE NCC arranged in close cooperation with CENTR, as well as a Law enforcement meeting earlier this year in London.

During the summer I went to Toronto Canada for IETF 90, my primary interest was the discussions on the IANA transition. In addition I attended most of the Operational track.

The NRO Number Council appointed me to the ICANN NomCom for 2014 and we completed our work and appointed ICANN board members as well as ALAC, GNSO and ccNSO council members.

The report from the 2014 NomCom can be found at https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/final-16oct14-en.pdf
the was also an urgent appointment of a board member to replace Olga Madruga-Forti who stepped down unexpectedly during the ICANN week. I was not able to participate in this appointment due to less than 24 hours notice for the meeting.

The NomCom also conducted a peer review of our contributions to the committee. The report from this has been published
https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/360-review-members-15oct14-en.pdf 


The Number Council was kind enough to reappoint me to the 2014 Non-com, which started its work with a two day meeting following the ICANN meeting in Los Angeles. The call for nominations will be out shortly. This year the NomCom will be appointing 3 board members. Looking at the board composition there is particular need for board members from the African region and the Latin American region, but good candidates from Europe are also welcome.

The NRO NC will in addition to the NomCom appointments, appoint one board member, see the announcement at https://www.nro.net/news/aso-ac-call-for-nominations-for-seat-9-on-the-icannboard 
 

In order to better understand the Internet Governance issues in a broader sense I have participated in 
  • Annual meeting with the Norwegian regulator, Lillesand, Norway
  • EuroDig, Berlin Germany
  • IGF2014, Istanbul, Turkey
My interest in Eurodig and IGF was the NTIA transition of the IANA function. ICANN had a strong presence at IGF and there were several good discussions on how ICANN accountability can be improved. 
  • ITU Plenipotentiary 2014 in Busan, Korea.
The Norwegian Ministry of Transportation and Communication invited me to participate on the Norwegian delegation at the ITU Plenipotentiary 2014 conference in Busan, with the trip funded by the RIPE NCC. The RIPE NCC is a sector member of the ITU-D and participating with its own delegation with Chris, Maxim and Chadic.

There are excellent reports from the meeting by Samantha Dickinson at http://linguasynaptica.com/ as well as live twitter updates, see  #Plenipot14

With this short report I hope I have given you some insight into what the RIPE Chair has been doing since the last meeting.

Sincerely,
Hans Petter Holen
RIPE Chair

24 October 2014

RIPE WG Chair procedures

One of the topics that had been discussed among the RIPE Working-group chairs for a while when I joined as Deputy Chair, was procedures for electing and replacing chairs. There was a draft text, but had not been an agreement before the RIPE 67. Some still thought more detail should be added, some think it was to descriptive. The wg-chairs decided to form a task force, with Brian Nisbet as coordinator and Ondrej Filip, Nick Hillard and me as members.

The minutes from Working Group Chairs Meeting at RIPE 67 specifies the objective of the group as:

"- The task force should look at the final document, give it some editing as needed, and have the RIPE Chair publish it on the ripe-list with an explanation and a deadline of one month."

The proposal by the task force was circulated to the RIPE Working Group Chairs Mailing List, but there was no consensus to suggest this as a common proposal for all the working groups.
The matter was further discussed at the Working Group Chairs meeting at RIPE 68, and while there was no consensus on the proposed text, there was consensus that we should have written procedures for this. Hence the following conclusion referred in the minutes:

"- The Collective agreed to work with their respective WGs to establish a procedure for replacing WG Chairs.
- The minimum requirements are that each WG should have its own procedures, that these should be written down, that this should be done by the next RIPE Meeting and executed at the end of that meeting."

This is also more in line with the "bottom-up" principle of RIPE, each working-group agrees on their own procedures. If the procedures turn out to be similar we can later reopen the discussion on

The proposal from the Task Force has since then been published.