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.

No comments: