RIPE community plenary
Thursday, 19 May 2022
At 4 p.m:
MIRJAM KUHNE: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Community Plenary of RIPE 84. Before we start, I wanted to make a couple of announcements. If you have not voted yet for the PC elections you can still do that for another hour until 5:00 if you go to RIPE 84.ripe.net, there is a button. There is a candidate to vote for two seats. It's great to see so much participation. The other thing I was asked to mention is that the last Kahoot quiz for this week will take place after this session on Thursday, so we are not going to have another Kahoot quiz tomorrow after the closing plenary, and so if you still want to participate and chance to win a prize, there is one more chance today.
Right. I guess everyone who is interested in this is here, everybody else is out in the sun, rightly so, I wish I could do that. But let's start the Community Plenary. We have a few agenda items I want to show you. I am going to give you a quick update about what the RIPE Chair team, so Niall O'Reilly ‑‑ I am Mirjam Kuehne and I am the RIPE Chair and Niall O'Reilly is the RIPE Vice Chair, we are chairing this session together, Niall `is going to help out with the queue and on‑line and questions and answers. I will give you a quick update on what we have been doing lately and we will have an update by Hisham Ibrahim from the RIPE NCC about what RIPE NCC is doing for the RIPE community or community at large. After that, Hans Petter Holen, the managing director of the RIPE NCC, in this case in his function of the member of the numbers resource organisation, the NRO, will give you an update what they are doing, together with the other RIRs, and then we will have a presentation by Göran Marby from ICANN who will join us remotely and we have some space after that where you can ask him some questions and maybe we can have a bit of a discussion and then at the end we will have an award ceremony in the name of Rob Blokzijl.
Right. You should start my clock now, I only have seven minutes left, that's not fair, I get ten minutes. I will get through this. There is not much. If you want ‑‑ if you want to follow it, it's a summary of what I have been updating you every month on RIPE labs, so publishing this RIPE Labs articles one a month to keep you more informed of what we have been doing and we also, one thing that is recurring theme is visibility, I want to promote RIPE and make it more visible and more accessible for newcomers and I am excited to see so many new people here and I have been talking to a number and they seem to be enjoying it, which is great. So in order to also make that more visible on the website, we have a few new features there. There is a community news section, you might have seen in RIPE NCC publishes news items and now we have community news items, like next RIPE meeting or look at this document or whatever and so in addition to that, we also have a page with ongoing activities, currently ongoing in the community, which I think is nice for us, for the community to keep track of where we are at with certain activities, but also for newcomers if they come to the page to see what the community is currently working with, kind of on a grand scale. It doesn't show all the Working Group activities, that's separately in the Working Group pages. This is more community at large activities. It looks like this. So you can see the activity, for instance the PDP is being revised currently and the mail and the action is currently asks for feedback from the community and there are other items on that list. And there is a link to that. And last but not least, the Labs articles I already mentioned that we are publishing once a month, roughly.
Again, our visibility, inclusion we have changed the website, with the RIPE NCC they are helping us to continuously improve it and make it more accessible, this is already from the last time if you go to the RIPE .net page and click on the RIPE logo you will end up on a page where you can see all these Working Groups and you can click on the Working Groups, it's a bit easier than navigating the site menu. If you drive into one of those Working Groups, the address policy Working Group, they have some of the Working Groups, not all yet, but some of them have a little introduction video that you can see here on top and then under that there's also a table where you can see who the Chairs are, underneath is also pictures and biographies of all the Chairs, but this is new information where you can also see where they started, what their start term and end term is and when the next selection will take place and then you can make go talk to them, think about if you would like to stand as a candidate and it adds more transparency I think to the Working Group Chair and Co‑Chairs.
And again, maybe in the scope of RIPE visibility and outreach, we have also been participating in some events, mostly online so far, even though Niall actually participated in a real world at the meeting NREN meeting in Ireland so he is starting to go to ICANN, the ICANN meeting, Niall is planning to go to the TNC conference, the NREN conference later next month, we have also started ‑‑ I mentioned this in one of the companies, we have started a project to reach out to students and I would like to continue that also and I think that has already shown a little effect, we have seen a few more students on the registration page so they managed to come to the meeting here. And we continue also to work with the RIPE NCC staff to make sure the new RIPE NCC staff gets to know the community a bit better as well.
And we have ‑‑ we are working on two new documents already for some time. This is one of them, the definition and guidelines for RIPE Task Forces, this was one recommendation by the accountability task force that published a report some years ago and that we tackled this one, and so Niall has been mostly running this and he sent out an e‑mail recently to the RIPE list with hopefully the final version, there's a deadline to 30th May, and then after that, a last call. So far, there was really good feedback on this final version, I think we are almost there. And that gives some guidance to people in the feature who want to run a task force, what it takes, how it is structured, who makes decisions and so forth.
The other document that's been going on for a while that I have been ‑‑ I send a mail to the RIPE list some time ago about the revised policy development process document and we have been discussing this last time and after the last meeting, we organised an online event, session; on Zoom, where we only focused on that particular document and I worked through some suggested changes and revisions and we gathered feedback and after that we published a new version and at the moment I just send out two weeks ago, or last week, these meetings ruin my time, my feeling for time, I don't know how long I'm here really, so the main changes there was that we realised that this notion of a difference between author and owner, that was confusing so we took that out, every document has an author, and the documents when they reach consensus they are owned by the community but I was a bit confusing to have that specified in that particular document. We received some feedback about the idea to share an idea for policy with the community before entering the formal process, and that has, most of it is very positive feedback and I have seen also it's been used this week in the address policy Working Group there was a presentation just to kind of test the waters and have this idea and what do you think, before actually entering the final ‑‑ the formal PDP process, so we kept that in there and strengthened the language and added some more motivation for that.
The appeals process, after we had this, we reviewed the appeals process and are adjusting the language in the PDP and to clarify a few words there but it hasn't changed much since the last version because the feedback that we received was, it was pretty solid. We kept the section at the end where it says how the PDP document has changed and that's why community consensus as all the other RIPE governance documents.
Right. If you want to have a look at it, there is also a red line version or I think it's blue or green line at the moment, and the deadline is 27th May, and we would also like to see, get some feedback if you agree with the new version, that would be really helpful because otherwise it's really hard for us to know if there is consensus and if you think this is a good version to publish and move ahead with.
The last meeting, the RIPE database requirements task force published their report of recommendations and closed, the task force is closed and there is a list of recommendations here on this URL, on this website and you can also see next, this is like a table and you can see which Working Group is looking at what of the recommendations and will continue to update that page so you see what the status is. It doesn't mean all recommendations will necessarily have to be implemented, it really depends on the discussions in this Working Groups where the recommendations will be discussed, but you can then at least see the status and there may be a link to the discussion on the mailing lists on that page.
And last but not least, here is again a link to our Labs articles. That's really all I have to say and I don't want to repeat everything that's in there, but yeah, with any questions, anything I left out, anything you were wondering about, we have, according to this clock, 20 seconds, but I don't think that's fair. Is there anything online, any questions, Niall? No. All right. Well, then, as next presenter ‑‑ going back to my agenda. There you go. So Hisham will give you community activities that the RIPE NCC has been doing and maybe an outlook into the future. So if you could share Hisham's presentation.
(Applause)
HISHAM IBRAHIM: Thank you, for that. Hello everyone. My name is Hisham Ibrahim, as Mirjam introduced me. For the past eight years I have been working for the RIPE NCC on various community‑related initiatives throughout the service region, and for the past ten months I've had the privilege of being appointed as the first official chief community officer for the RIPE NCC. This presentation is meant to talk a little bit about the logic that we have been implementing since. I gave a talk at the previous meeting that spoke a bit about what we were planning on doing so this will build on that a bit and also report on some of the activities we have been busy doing since the previous RIPE meeting until now.
So if you have heard me talk at all during these ten months then you have probably seen this slide before. I apologise if you saw it multiple times. I like this. It comes from the first time that I addressed the RIPE NCC staff trying to let them know my priorities for the next year and what I want ‑‑ what I think is supposed to be a priority, and ten months later, it's still something that we are actively working on and it is very true today as it was then.
Going through them very quickly because like I said there's a whole talk about it at the last meeting, it talks about us trying to understand better what the community needs rather than assuming we know what they need. So going out there, having the dialogues, understanding and then providing them that. Also making an effort in institutionalising that within the organisation so that we don't lose that as good people, leave the company and grow elsewhere, we don't end up losing that understanding and knowledge.
The second bit talks about how we are distributed and configured. How can we be more optimal in providing more meaningful impact which is what they want to see at the end of the day. And how we can create better workforces for that. And this very psychedelic pyramid next to it talks about the effort that we put at the beginning, so we used to report mainly on like the different activities and the departments and what they were doing, but we put time and effort into trying to understand better the purpose of what we were trying to do, so why we do what we rather than what it is we do and we ended up with this, the reason why it's that way they all bleed into each other. We found three very distinct whys for what we do, which is community member and building engagement, community learning and development and we consider those to be the base of everything we do, so the stronger that is, the easier it is for us to do more community coordination and collaboration and there will be slides that talk more about these. Last but not least, building ecosystems around our data services. And there is a whole logic to this because if we understand what people need, and we are able to provide them meaningful, insightful data then it will get people excited and engage with it and as they get more excited they provide us more data and information and knowledge and we use that so on and so forth, so rinse and repeat and hopefully that loop continues.
So that, in a nutshell, is a big part of the logic there.
Since the last RIPE meeting, the RIPE NCC published document that talked about where the next five years, the link to it is on the slides, if you haven't read it already I advise you to do so. In that document, it talks about five strategic objectives and while the community and engagement team within the RIPE NCC contributes towards all five of them in different capacities, some of that we lead and others we support, but the one that speaks the most to what we do is the first one which is basically support an open, inclusive and engaged RIPE community. It's from the community that we get our mandate and we work hard on trying to support the development of the entire community.
Now, the document goes and explains a little bit more detail after that, so breaking the objectives into different strategies and as you can see, the strategies correspond nicely to the different whys that we have identified before and that's obviously no coincidence. So the first three strategies talk mainly about creating and fostering environments for dialogues and feedback loops and talks about being inclusive and being diverse and it also talks about supporting the open community here and it's represented with this continuous feedback loop, right? Now, second one is maintaining excellent relationships with technical, governmental and standardising bodies, basically how we fit in the bigger picture symbolised by the puzzle piece that we represent. And last, increasing community knowledge through community learning and development activities, the light bulb and all the training and all the different activities that we do there. And again, corresponding to the pyramid that you saw before.
Now, moving from strategy to tactics a little bit, we also publish the activity plan and budgets and I wanted to highlight the thinking of how we plan on taking these high level strategies into what we do on regular basis. So the activity plan and budget talks about, we have 51 budgeted FTEs, we are not running at maximum capacity yet but quite close, we have a number of consultants that provide us with political, public relation and business intellectual. We are distributed and have presence, people on the ground in seven countries, you can see their country codes here, basically United Arab Emirates, Armenia, Austria, Netherlands, Serbia and Ukraine. You can see we have added more to our distribution in the region, understand the needs better with local understanding of the culture, language and other factors as well.
The graph here talks about how we actually configured internally so while we report externally in the activity plan and budget making it easier for us to compare over the years of how we are spending our money and you can hold us more accountable to are we getting closer to the goals we set or not, internally it makes us easier for us to configure across these different activities that we have listed here and I will go through them very quickly. So we have roughly €5 million for all the activities related to communications, web services; the platforms that we provide, the events like the RIPE meeting here, and the other meetings that we organise, community development, the people that are actually out there soliciting that information on what the community needs and trying to create the mechanisms and the vehicles for that, and membership engagement that focuses a little bit more on the needs of our membership from the RIPE NCC. The road maps that get produced and we gotten engagement on them, last year, I heard Felipe talking yesterday about member satisfaction. This is work we contribute towards that.
The second budget line corresponds to community learning and development, it's quite clear from the name we have around €2.6 million for that, it's the people that go and do the training and deliver the content but also more importantly, the people that are supporting them building the curriculums and building the content and top‑notch quality content for that. I say that's the pot of gold by investing in, by building that content it helps us do anything.
Last but not least, community coordination and collaboration, around 1.4, to all the efforts towards public policy and Internet governance and the reason why I have dotted lines there is we can add now in the background more functions as we need them but keeping those reporting lines to the community very clear on what we are trying to accomplish rather than how we are doing that.
Now, enough about the logic behind the madness. Some reporting, I promised that. So looking at some of the strategic goals and dissecting a little bit more, so creating and fostering environments for dialogues, the obvious one being RIPE 84, thank you very much. We have put a lot of effort in trying to organise it in a very difficult time and I must give the utmost respect to the events team that managed to do this while in the most insane circumstances that I think anybody has organised an event in this kind of scale. Other than this event we have also done before this, we have done another event so we had a little pilot, so our first hybrid meeting was actually SEE 10 which was done roughly a month ago in Slovenia, very well highly attended, everybody very happy and excited to see each other and it felt very surreal for everyone, it's like how Thanos snapped everybody out of existence for two years and we were brought back and everything felt normal. It's like we weren't away for two years, it's like we saw each other a month ago in another conference somewhere, it's weird and I think we are all still processing it but it was an amazing feeling.
I want to highlight a little bit more one of the sessions that were there, there was an excellent presentation that was done during the session, followed by a great panel. And I want to focus a bit on the story of this, not necessarily the work itself but how that work developed. He hired a consultant out of Serbia and she was expected also to understand a little bit more how the community, what the communities need and how to do so. For her to do her work she needed to have a lot of dialogues and understand the history. Started understanding the history of building that work in former Yugoslavia and we did a lot of great insights but we felt we were still missing some bits so we reached out to community members that had been doing research to looking into the history and they helped us build a better picture of this. We took to the PC saying we have an excellent presentation we wanted to present. They loved it and said this is brilliant but these people you are talking about, the networks, the people live right across the corner and let's invite them to have a panel. It's that type of energy when you put the time and ‑‑ that everybody likes to contribute to it and add more and in the end the totality is so much better than what you thought you were ever going to begin with. It was a great session, I see Jan smiling so he approves as well.
We have the call for hosts for SEE 10 is out and the deadline is done. Unfortunately I am told we cannot announce where we are going but I can promise you great weather, lovely food and great people, which is anywhere in the SEE region, it's ridiculously beautiful, come on, seriously.
Anyway, shifting tone a bit and shifting locations, ENOG 19, a lot of you would be aware and probably have seen the e‑mail from the ENOG Chair Toma, who may or may not be in the room, talking about disbanding ENOG, and the thing is, the obvious trigger for the e‑mail was the situation in service region, the war that's happening there but that was like the last straw for ENOG there. For years, we have known that ENOG was not necessarily performing or bringing together the community the way that we were hoping it was doing. While masked by the local success it would get when it was hosted in certain countries, so it was successful on a national level so you go into a country a lot of people show up and then another country, there was no following, there was no community sense, right? And we worked with the community on trying to figure out how that could be done better but unfortunately we ended up in the situation we are in here now. What the RIPE NCC has done is that we postponed the meeting for this year, we relocated the funds towards some other initiatives, and we are leaving the final decision on the fate of ENOG towards the community. We have had some discussions during this meeting, some discussions also on the mailing list, I personally felt that it was a bit premature to bring this into this meeting but hopefully for RIPE 85 we would have a much more in‑depth discussion on the future of ENOG and what can happen there, and I look to all of you participating there as well as myself.
So where we relocated some of these funds. We were still keen on doing a lot of engagement in that region as well so we have had great collaboration over the last year in the virtual realm in doing online series of meetings for Central Asia. These countries have similar conditions where they are all landlocked countries, they all have roughly the same development levels when it comes to peering and interconnection and we managed to build some following online of these people who are participating and sharing their stories and sharing whatever regulatory, technological or other concerns or thoughts that they have. Or plans. Now, we promised them when we can, we will do a meeting and hopefully we can do this later this year in Kazakhstan, do it for the peering forum and those of you interested or in that region please follow the news there and join us.
We also are doing RIPE NCC day in Uzbekistan, this is something we promised roughly three years ago to happen, we are keen on delivering on all our promises so we are still going back hopefully, if the stars line up. You did the support for the Ukrainian community, we have my colleague on the ground there but we did some remote online workshops for them as well and we continue to provide any support that we can.
Speaking about other engagements and good collaborations that we have, so I, with other organisations, so Internet measurements day is something the RIPE NCC partners with ICANN on, trying to provide meaningful, insightful data so we can encourage dialogues and more understanding. We have had a couple of successful ones since the last RIPE meeting, we have others planned as well. There is a MENOG meeting coming but I won't go into too much detail because we have a RIPE meeting before that as well.
You heard, I like the title, content creation for engagement and I think that's a really nice one as well, you heard Mirjam talk about RIPE Labs, it's a brilliant platform, a lot of different opinions, a lot of different good articles on there, always something interesting to read but if that wasn't enough for the people running it, they also wanted to do podcasts on top of it. There is at least two or three, but I know that they are going around recording with a lot of you here podcasts, so stay tuned, it's a lot of really good content there. Also producing is the RIPE NCC Internet country reports we do, we see the countries there listed and some of the efforts we are doing in this area there, to engage more and have more dialogues on this.
I need to speed up a bit. So, this goal basically to me reads bringing down the barriers of engagement. And for me, there are clear and obvious ones. Something like language, for example, so we are investing a lot more in translation efforts. We have a WIKI supporting these languages but we also making a point of doing translation efforts so like the country reports are produced in the languages of the countries we report on so people consuming relevant information on them in the language they speak locally. Open houses is brilliant, the initiative as well, triggered by Covid, we have the Goldilocks number, 90 minute session, amazing topics, great engagement, even after people started travelling again, we see a lot of engagement there. Plus the support that you use from the RIPE NCC with speakers and funds towards the different NOGs.
You heard Mirjam talk about academic engagement and how we have a lot more new young academics at these meetings. It contributes to a lot of the effort that was done by these lovely people and these initiatives it, you might be asking yourself where are the regular speakers, Greghana has an article on how we relocated for that towards funding some research and that will be presented at the next meeting as well.
Community knowledge and learning. So, this is going to be an interesting slide. We have successfully conducted an in person training and it sounds silly to say it this way but it was a pilot, we tested it in Amsterdam and it worked and because it worked we dared to be even more bold and do one abroad in Madrid, and it worked as well. So, yes, that's encouraging us to do more, we are not going to be jumping on planes travelling all over the service region any more for a lot of different reasons but what we are focusing on is, as I said at the beginning, the curriculum development and building content that makes, people can comb through stuff like academy and study by themselves and get more work there. We are producing BGP security course at the end of this year, adding to the portfolio that has IPv6 fundamentals and security and database, we are also working on Internet governance course and for those of you that attended anti‑abuse you would have heard Gerardo talking about the work they have been doing at that Working Group as well.
The team has also been responding very well to feedback so they are continuously trying to perfect the different delivery mechanisms that we have here, improve the user experiences, we have a lovely new website and we are exploring new ways to do the examinations based on the feedback we are getting. I understand we had 10 to 15 people getting their examinations at this meeting, live, we are looking into record and review option, all these efforts to try to make this easier for everyone to take the exams and get certifications and I think they had a class photo earlier today.
Then, yes, maintaining excellent relationships with technical and governmental and standards bodies. I need to say this in ten seconds, but the certification, the work we have been doing, the content that pot of gold I was talking about is getting us closer to governments, they want their people to be trained on IPv6 and get the certifications and get educated on the stuff they are talking about, the BGP, all that stuff, and it's enabled us to build great relationships with different governments through other service regions as you can see here in the slide here with content authorities and LEAs as well so this is really a trajectory we are happy with and seeing the developments are happening here, not just the techies interested but also beyond. And it is helping us build needed relationships during this time with all the political uncertainty and all the legislation and regulation that we are seeing in this area.
We have also done the regular round tables since we last met, and contributed to European Union open consultations, and we have met with, as you heard from Athina and Hans Petter yesterday, with the European Commission, we constantly meet them to discuss issues relating to sanctions and how to support the technical community in our service region.
Final slide I have here is inter‑governmental work that we do so ITU, during this time they have the biggest four meetings that they organise during this year, it's taking a lot of effort, we also participating in stuff like the study groups, 11, 13 and 20 which are protocols future Internet and IoT, there is the work that was this too, I can go on but I ran out of time so I thank you all, and if there are any questions, I am happy to take them.
(Applause)
NIALL O'REILLY: From remote participants there is a question and comment. They are both from the same person, but wearing different hats. The first one is a question from Alexander ‑ wearing his community member hat: Can we say that requests from some governments to revoke all names and number resources of other countries is a failure of community engagement especially with presence of NCC in those countries.
HISHAM IBRAHIM: I wouldn't say it's a failure of engagement. I mean, we heard yesterday from Dmitri who said he help write the request from governments asking to revoke the resources, he said he wrote so knowing very well that we will not be able to do so. So there is a little bit of apolitical stance on why these things get sent out this way but I must say there is a lot of deep understanding we are seeing from government and efforts to try to understand more what the difficulties and challenges are so something related to sanctions, we are having dialogues, as I said, with the European Commission for them wanting to understand more and my colleague Emile had done some great work in RIPE Labs on doing measurements about the effects on sanctions in Russia and the Internet in Ukraine and such, I must say these are being picked up by government and they are reading and interested in sitting down with us and understanding more the implications of whatever they are putting in place on how that affects the Internet so this is actually a good collaboration between us in government, I would say.
NIALL O'REILLY: Thanks for your answers. The second comment from Alexander, he is wearing his ENOG PC member hat and the comment is: The requested council ENOG from the ENOG PC Chair, he says ‑‑ he points out was done on his own capacity and that other e‑mails in support were sent by people outside the ENOG region.
HISHAM IBRAHIM: Sure. I understand. The meeting was planned to be hosted I think in July in Moscow. Even if Toma didn't send the e‑mail I guess he would have ended up in the same position, that's my answer.
NIALL O'REILLY: Thank you, that's all we have in the remote questions. What about the hall, anybody? No. Then...
(Applause)
MIRJAM KUHNE: You are faster than me, next up is NRO update by Hans Petter Holen, the vice Chairman of the NRO.
HANS PETTER HOLEN: Thank you, Mirjam, this is my third presentation here at this meeting, the first one was very local, it was practical information about this meeting. The second one was about the RIPE NCC regional, no, I am on the global level. So the RIPE NCC is a member of the number resource organisation, so what is that? We formed this in 2003 with an MoU between the five RIRs. And have added an addendum and we actually have a revised MoU now but we haven't completely finalised it.
And this is for the five RIRs to work together and act together. It's not a legal body, it's not incorporated at any place but it is the five of us acting together.
We have a mission to coordinate and support joint activities of the RIRs to provide and promote the joint Internet numbers registry, so we have five Internet regional Internet registries but together they are a joint registry because we do transfers between them so conceptually it's one that guarantees uniqueness and we want to be the flagship and global leader for collaborative Internet number resource management and central element of open and stable and secure Internet. That's our ambition.
The executive committee NRO EC consists of the managing directors, the CEOs of the five RIRs and we restate the positions. Last year I was Chair, this year... John Curran from ARIN is the treasurer and Eddie from AFRINIC are members this year. And next year we will rotate again. We have a permanent secretary hosted by APNIC and a consultant Laura based in LACNIC.
We have coordination groups. So, the communications, the engineering, the registration services and the public safety are permanent coordination groups, with plans and budget. In addition we have looser groups for public affairs, policy, financial officers, legal staff and human resources.
This year, the five of us met and this is the first time the current five managing directors actually met in person because of Covid. Eddie has been at AFRINIC approximately as long as I have, of course Oscar, Paul and John have met before but it's many years ago and we discussed where do we want to take the NRO in the future, and we figured out that we do actually want to be a bit more committed than just coordinating. We do want to launch some programmes and one of them we prioritised highest is to provide a robust, secure, RPKI service and what we mean by that, means that no matter which RIR you take service from you should have the same level of service. We didn't really settle on whether some RIRs might have even higher level but should at least be a minimum level, maybe even fully aligned across the regions.
Secondly, we all realised that cybersecurity of the RIRs is something we need to coordinate better. This is fully in line with the priorities in the RIPE NCC activity plan this year, we have been straightening the RPKI budget and we have added budget to cybersecurity and I have, as I said, in Services Working Group yesterday, hired chief security officer that would start from 1st July.
The last one is to proactively engage governments as critical stakeholders in the success of the Internet numbers registration system. In the past please stay away from the Internet. Now while we may emotionally think that is still a good plan as engineers, it doesn't quite work. The governments have a responsibility for their countries, their society, their infrastructure, so what we can do together is to educate them in how to do this in the best possible way, so we have a lot of information, we produce country reports, we have a lot of knowledge to share them, we invite them here and hold roundtables but do that in our service region. We need to be better coordinated with the other RIRs, create common position papers and have common terminology so we appear as one united system when we talk to governments, that's the idea behind that. We want to be a bit more committed here so we want to find a programme manager to lead each of these programmes and we will put budget behind them and report to a steering group which consists in the first phase of the NRO EC so it has commitment fully from the top.
Finances, of course the NRO needs some funds so almost 500,000 US dollars it goes into the ASO, the NRO, the IANA Review Committee, secretarial support, communications like teleconferences, the ASO, AC Chair travel to ICANN meetings, NRO group meetings and expenses. IETF contributions, we contribute together through the NRO, we contribute to ICANN, which is on top of the 500,000, there is another 800,000, which is the partly the IANA contract and a voluntary contribution to ICANN.
There is also a stability fund which is a joint pledge, it's not ‑‑ it's not money that's being transferred out of the RIR accounts so it needs a board resolution in order to release it. I was authorised to do that in case AFRINIC needed it so that's the first time this has happened. But we did not need to go to that step.
And we did, as part of the previous years' annual budget because we had saved a lot of travel, to approve a contribution of legal expenses to the AFRINIC in the difficult situation they have been in so we, together, protect RIR system.
How do we divide this. It's based on Revenue so each year the CFO sits down and looks at how ‑‑ what's the size difference and they create this formula so you can see the RIPE NCC pays 38.33% of the numbers that you have seen previously.
We do have some publications as well, global Internet number stats, number number resource status report updated quarterly, stats on v4, v6 and ASN, RPKI adoption report by the four, six and economy, it's updated daily and you can find that on NRO .net/statistics. We have a comparative policy overview so if you want to see what's the difference in policies for a certain topic in the different regions you can look at this document where you will find a table and you will see for transfers in the four different regions you have references and policy text in the same place. Of course for the exact detail you will then have to go to the regional policies but here you can easily find this in one place and this is updated quarterly as well.
There is an IANA Review Committee so IANA provides services to the five RIRs, it's very simple, they send us IP v4 addresses whenever we need them, while we need them there are no more left, they don't do that, whenever very need v6 which is very rarely and AS number numbers from time to time and there is a quarterly support and we have members from each region to review that report. Lot of overhead to make sure they provide that service.
Review Committee members, you can see them here. There is also an empowered community in ICANN so any sort of decisions that you would normally find on the GM level in an organisation like appointing new board members goes through the empowered community, it needs to be ratified by the empowered community before it comes active and you can see here some of those things that happen, that they do.
The seat number 10 on the ICANN board was up for re‑election this board and Christian Kaufmann, the current Chair of the RIPE NCC was selected to that board so I am really proud to see raised the prominent community member to that level, and I'm really sad to see him leave the RIPE NCC board as Chairman as he has indicated he will when his term leaves next year.
So, it's mixed feelings but I am really glad that he will continue to serve the community on the ICANN board.
And that was it. And I have 17 seconds left for questions. Any questions? That was a strong hint, right? Thank you.
(Applause)
MIRJAM KUHNE: Thank you, Hans Petter, I thought it was really interesting to get the global view on a registry system. Next up we will have a bit of an experiment, if all goes well, we will have ‑‑ it's not an experiment because we have been using this session all week, Goran Marby from ICANN remote. He doesn't have slides, so he will just join us remotely and give an update or introduction to what's brewing at ICANN. And followed by a discussion Q&A session with him. The vice‑chair and the technical support are working on getting him up on screen. He needs to be upgraded to speaker. I don't see him in the queue.
NIALL O'REILLY: Go ahead.
MIRJAM KUHNE: We will see if he pops up, he can join us later. We had actually planned to have some other discussion and open mic session here during this time, there he is. I can see him here on this screen and there is Goran Marby, welcome. It's your turn to speak, to give us a bit of insight from your end, and I understood that you have no slides and you would like to share just some ideas and ‑‑ I shouldn't look at you here on the screen because you are actually there, well, in that camera. But that you would then like to have some time for questions and answers afterwards. Go ahead.
GORAN MARBY: Thank you, first of all, can you hear me?
MIRJAM KUHNE: Yes, we can.
GORAN MARBY: I have never used this before. And I see for some reason they are using my full name. Don't tell anyone my name is Bo as well. Thank you very much for inviting me to be part of this. I celebrate six years as ICANN CO this week and the interesting thing is the day I day became formally I had ‑‑ in the Copenhagen meeting six years ago. So I feel welcome back.
What I want to talk a little bit, it's about the, what we do together and some of the challenges we do but I want to start on something. Do you know that Internet is actually in quite good shape? Many times today when I speak, having meetings with the governments and business interests, everybody talks about so big problems with the Internet, I say I don't see any real problems and the eco systems includes ICANN and you seems to be working fairly well. And I am starting to wonder a bit about why, I defined it in narrowest way as the identifiers, it's the protocols, for me that's the Internet, what happens on top of it and in applications and platforms, that's not the Internet for me, it's something else. You sort of leave the Internet when you go on platform to somebody else's computer. But it's been quite interesting to hear that, some of the things that's happening, that the Internet doesn't work. Well, the first thing I want to say to you you, thanks to you guys, it does, remarkably well. If I remember correctly now, in 2020, in November 2020, it was to my understanding the largest Internet day ever with 8 and a half trillion requests. I don't know how we calculated that or came up with number, that was biggest number ever. I don't know why, maybe you do. I don't. The system we created together collectively just swallowed it. Every day more than 5 million people connect to do a lot of good things and some bad things but it's been working flawlessly for 45 years. Where does this notion of the Internet doesn't work really come from, because it actually does.
I want to be very short in my introduction to this because I am really looking forward to interact with you but there's one thing important as the ICANN CEO, which is this: I am really happy to work together with you, we have really good relationships with RIPE and ‑‑ helps me being Swedish, I think over the years has been able to develop even better relationship. We are in this together, we have different roles and do different things but the respect from your organisation and mine is huge. I will end there and come to a conversation with you, remember one thing, the Internet is actually in good shape, thanks to you.
(Applause)
MIRJAM KUHNE: Thanks for that short intro, it's interesting you say the Internet for you is Internet numbers, identifiers and protocols. We had a BoF earlier this week where we looked at the what is the Internet and what kind of properties do we want and expect from the network and potential future network protocols so that would have fitted right in there. That's a nice hook back to that BoF. In terms of interactions I don't see people rushing to the mic but there must be some thoughts or maybe online. We don't see anybody online. Any comments, questions, that you would like to ask? I see Jim Reid moving to the mic.
JIM REID: Hi there, my name is Jim Reid, a DNS guy who is self‑employed, doesn't work for anybody else. I quite agree with your idea that the Internet is in good shape in terms of the plumbing, moving packets around the network, servicing DNS queries, all that stuff is working really well and it's scaled up and doing remarkable things especially during pandemic times and a lot of traffic migrated across. At another dimension I am not sure so healthy, I am thinking about the aggregation and the fact we have got a small number of key players able to dominate many certificate, standardisation efforts, deployment of new protocols, there are a number of actors in that and probably got an unnecessary or uncomfortable amount of power and influence over things and I'm not sure where the best place to have discussions about that kind of thing should be, it's maybe not appropriate for a RIPE meeting, it might be appropriate for ICANN meeting but I'm not sure. I wonder what your thoughts are on that?
GORAN MARBY: Thank you for asking such a simple question, as the first question. I mean, so bear with me because you asked a really good question. I mean first of all, is it proper to ask a question in RIPE or ICANN? I think it is. I mean if we can't discuss anything in this environment, who else ‑‑ who else can do it? You represent very well a lot of competence in this area and thoughts and you are engaged in, that is the difference from having to make decisions about it. So ‑‑ one of the reasons I am defining the Internet the way I do is to ‑‑ when I meet and legislators and for some interest ‑‑ there is a lot of interest from legislators and parliament in what ICANN and RIPE does, I think I have mentioned RIPE five times today, there is no central point of the Internet and many times they talk about the Internet, they talk about platforms and I have nothing against platforms and people choose to use them, if there is other alternative I don't have a problem with that. I think what you are saying is fair when it comes to that, yes, there are some large companies that provides a lot of services to many people, but I am old enough also to know, to remember search engines before Google or social media before Facebook that actually disappeared because something else came up because one of the fantastic things you know as well I do, Jim, and probably better than I, when they invented the Internet they had no business plan, they didn't know anything about VoIP, all the things this has done. And the interesting thing on the Internet it seems that good ideas survive and bad ideas eventually disappears because of the fantastic thing you as a user can choose. If you decide not to go on a platform you can do things on the Internet as well. There is a fair discussion, there seems to be a lot of misunderstanding about this. I know that you have discussed this and basically know more about it than I do, for instance the proposal from the European Commission about, and I can't remember, resolver for Europe or something.
JIM REID: DNS for EU.
GORAN MARBY: Facebook have changed name as well, they said that 92% or whatever of all resolutions made by Google and Cloudflare to our surprise because they are market sharing 2%, I think there is a lot of misunderstanding from legislators, business and otherwise how the Internet actually works and I like the fact you have raised question the way you did, we need to formulate together how we can explain how this system was, hangs together and how we, from an ICANN/IANA perspective work together with RIPE and how we do things with ITF and also make sure we are strong standing together for the Internet. Thank you for the question and I don't have an answer.
JIM REID: Thanks for your comments.
GORAN MARBY: If you drink beer.
JIM REID: I never drink beer, it's never been known to happen.
NIALL O'REILLY: A question from a remote participant, the same one again, Alexander from Free Moscow University asks: What kind of interaction with community do you consider to be more effective to respond to emerging challenges? RIPE's community NCC as secretariat or ICANN's empowered community? Maybe it's a false dichotomy?
GORAN MARBY: Can I plead the fifth? I mean, it's a really good question, and I have got to walk around it again because I am not going to answer it. Sometimes people talk about multi‑stakeholders as a thing, the way RIPE and ICANN does things it's actually a way to mean, we are supposed to do something with it. ICANN doesn't exist for the multi‑stakeholder model, to make policies within ICANN. RIPE have chosen another way of doing it which is close to their target, we do different things and different models. Both great.
NIALL O'REILLY: Both great is a great answer.
JULF HELSINGIUS: []To be on equal footing with you: This time with my ‑‑ this time with my Cooperation Working Group Chair hat on, where we have been listening to, well you said exactly the Internet is doing very well, unfortunately a lot of governments don't seem to think so. And so yes, good idea survive on the Internet and bad ideas disappear except that governments and other organisations generate bad ideas faster than we can kill them. So ‑‑ so ‑‑ I mean you already answered Jim's question pretty much on the same subject I would still like to hear a bit more how you see the roles of RIPE and ICANN separately and then working together to deal with this problem.
GORAN MARBY: I had the pleasure of having dinner with Hans Petter yesterday, sometimes history and luggage seems to be feeling that predicts ‑‑ prevents us to do things together. Sometimes like an argument between siblings to be honest, we are the same family, many of us are engaged in this not for the flights and T‑shirts and stuff, it's actually because we believe ‑‑ you don't have T‑shirts?
MIRJAM KUHNE: Yes, of course we do.
GORAN MARBY: Thank you. Otherwise my Internet connection would disappear. We do this because we have a passion and you my friend, come to ICANN, live in more than one world. For the very long time the way we developed policies was done with no government interaction because they didn't pay attention. One day they woke up and said oh Internet, it seems to be happening, and what do politicians do? I am not going to complain about it because they are going to look at the things that doesn't work. Because that's what politicians do, because they want to get re‑elected and fix that. The problem is that Internet is a very specific thing. And our roles in that is very, very specific. And of course ‑‑ so I think that we in RIPE and other organisations around the world have to work with governments to explain to them how this works. When we do that it works quite well. In Europe as, you know, it's like sitting on the other side of a machine because... some of them has nothing to do with RIPE or us and I would like to ‑‑ with ISOC, has a freer role when it comes to able to talk about things that is outside our technical merit and specific measure but we need ‑‑ you heard me say this, we need to work well together and for RIPE I am building a bigger team in Brussels, RIPE has a really good team and I think we have the same interest, we might not always agree and I think we all agree interconnect of the Internet and the possibility for people to connect on the Internet, that's what I'm doing. I can speak for ten minutes more about this subject but I won't bore you to death.
JULF HELSINGIUS: What you said about ISOC, ISOC Finland chapter chairperson hat on, I thank you for that.
GORAN MARBY: I might have known that.
CARSTEN SCHIEFNER: Carsten Scheifner, Internet citizen. This is pretty much going along to what ‑‑ or going along with what you have just already said and what you have been discussing. So my question really is: I don't have ‑‑ I'm not really sharing the feeling that it's getting better with the governments. I have the sort of feeling that it's slightly getting worse at times, at least as in like Julf said it, issuing more bad ideas than the Internet community as a whole can kill at a certain point in time, and I cannot really share your feeling as in governments only want to fix what's not working, at times I have a feeling that they also engage into issues that are not yet working so properly as they were meant to be, like for example I have just had a discussion yesterday when it came to the v6 adoption where there is in the cybersecurity strategy if I recall it correctly the notion there needs to be a sundown for IPv4 addresses now so v6 is in a better position to pick up and I just wonder how, and I am losing a bit of hope here, how we can, as a community, the ICANN community, the RIR communities and so forth, how we can actually fix this understanding in the various, for example, European Union countries as well as in Brussels when it comes to the European Commission?
GORAN MARBY: Can you ask the next ‑‑ an easy question, I don't know what it would be because you are asking really good questions. And I didn't say that I was agree with politician's problem definitions because ‑‑ some of the proposals ‑‑ look at this. Governments are participating in ICANN through the ‑ if they actually want to tell us why don't they go to the multi‑stakeholder model and propose it there? The benefit would be it would be a policy for all of the world and we have implemented things, security things that ICANN has to do which comes out of the governments and they write to us and through the ICANN community, process, it became policy with is 1500 contracts, that's even faster than any legislative process I know, to make sure civil society, technical people and everybody got a say in the same thing and what really makes me sad especially in Europe is that the Commission, the European Commission isn't a member of the GAC but they are still legislating proposals as we saw. Do you know ‑‑ I am going to give you a little bit of hope. Look at me. I can't see you. I am a nobody, believe me. I am from Sweden, who cares about Sweden? I work for ‑‑ I am happy for an organisation called ICANN, a small not for profit organisation with no commercial interests based in California, who cares about us? So might the European Commission comes up with legislative proposals to regulate all sorts and you and I, together, be no one actually made that change ‑‑ change that legislation and it was taken away. That is very unique thing that we do, and you call them sister or brother organisations, and the ‑‑ do the same thing. And the interesting thing is those countries duly do listen to us. Do they do mistakes? Yeah. Sometimes they forget that you can't do technical neutral legislations. Good thing, but it was sort of hard to do it. But so I actually am a little bit more positive because we see interest to talk to you, to talk to us and you can have your say and they will listen to you. So, I am a little bit more positive. Are you more positive now.
CARSTEN SCHIEFNER: A bit, thank you.
GORAN MARBY: Remember, I am negative by design.
CARSTEN SCHIEFNER: I am German, I share your feelings.
GORAN MARBY: You know what they say in Sweden, if the German ‑‑ if Germany gets a cough, Sweden gets lung cancer. My team says I should stop joking now, I think I am funny.
NIALL O'REILLY: There is Robert Carolina from Internet systems consortium: Using your definition of the Internet as names, numbers standards, what do you perceive as the greatest threat to the good functioning of the Internet and how can we reduce that threat?
MIRJAM KUHNE: We should probably cut the line after this.
NIALL O'REILLY: That seems good.
GORAN MARBY: We of course have reporting of that. There isn't many things ‑‑ if you are interested in what we do, we do ‑‑ we have our own research house, one of the things we do, we produce tools to track DNS abuse and bad domain names and stuff, that's kind of ‑‑ in our mission to secure stability of the ‑‑ we also ‑‑ I commissioned a study group last year where we brought in from numbers and countries ‑‑ we started to realise that there are more targeted attacks, not all on the DNS but the whole ecosystem and ‑‑ was taking over, not through the DNS, it's actually through the support systems, and one of the problems with that is we, because everybody is so delegated and RIPE is responsible for the top level domain level has responsibility we don't have that many connection points ‑‑ we have some but to actually share some information and how we can actually work ‑‑ how we can work together to mitigate ‑‑ and I think it's time for us to work together to see how we can stabilise and continue to evolve the how we identify ‑‑ another thing is that in ICANN right now, which RIPE is a really important member of, are we talking about the governance of the system itself to see how we can better together and ‑‑ equal terms to really talk about how we can ‑‑ this comes from the root server, how we can make that structure every more secure and better. Because I have one underlying thought, if you don't evolve then you eventually die and I think we ‑‑ we sort of, we sort of ‑‑ we have an obligation to continue to think about things that can go wrong and go wrong but again I also think it's so important that we with our different roles actually have conversations. I had the pleasure of ‑‑ you have abuse Working Group, and I immediately felt there are things in this should have talked about and share information. By that I think we can do much more. So I have a lot longer list of things I worry about, to be honest.
MIRJAM KUHNE: Thanks for that, and thanks for joining us here today. I think this was a really good interactive session and yeah, I hope you all here got some answers, I hope you got some ideas over there.
GORAN MARBY: It was really fun. And I am looking forward to the T‑shirt.
MIRJAM KUHNE: You will have to pick it up here.
(Applause)
MIRJAM KUHNE: Last on the agenda, we have more fun, I hope, at least it's the second edition of the Rob Blokzijl award that we are handing out, those of you who were here in ‑‑ at the RIPE meeting in Marseilles, might have experienced the first time we did this and it is the second time and I expect that Sander, you are the speaker, you will probably tell a bit more about the background. Great. I will leave it to you.
FALK VON BORNSTAEDT: Rob Blokzijl Foundation you see the picture here, some people asked me who he is. You can read it on our web page. He was 25 years founder and RIPE Chair for 25 years so the foundation wants to celebrate those who made substantial and sustained contribution to the development of the Internet in the RIPE NCC service region. So it was just said the first award was done in Marseilles, the second one is today. Before we celebrate the prizewinner, I want to celebrate the award committee. They did a diligent work to identify the winner. Special thanks to Eileen Gallagher and Carsten Schiefner, it was difficult to find dates in different time zones. May I ask the members of the Committee who are in this room to stand up so that we see you.
(Applause)
FALK VON BORNSTAEDT: I want to hand over to Sander, who was part of the committee.
SANDER STEFFANN: I prepared on bits of paper, I don't trust this technology. I am standing here today as a member of the Rob Blokzijl award committee for 2022. A committee was tasked with selecting the next recipient of the Rob Blokzijl award in the spirit of his legacy. Not just somebody who contributes to the community but also supports others in the community. So the committee consistented of... and myself.
We had some excellent nominations and we enjoyed deliberating all these individuals contributions to our industry and our community. If any of you nominated somebody who doesn't win, please, nominate them again for next year's award because they were definitely worthy.
But we could only select one winner, the winner of the 2022 Rob Blokzijl award is someone who has been part of the RIPE community since 1996 and I found out their first RIPE meeting was in this very city in the building of the technical University of Berlin. But their involvement started before joining the RIPE community. They were a writer of fax software, in 1993, and I actually I myself used that software, some of you might remember it's called M Getty Plus Send Fax. The last committee was in 2021, which shows the dedication to providing excellent support.
Another contribution they are well‑known for is adding IPv6 support to open VPN, first as developer and later as maintainer. They have been a strong force in the deployment of IPv6 over many years, giving many presentations on the topics surrounding it, always ready to help fellow community members with learning about IPv6 and deploying it in their own networks.
In 2003 they became a Working Group Chair of what was then called the RIPE LIR Working Group which was later split into the address policy Working Group and NCC Services Working Group. This was in 2007, and I actually shared the position as address policy Working Group Chair with them for eleven‑and‑a‑half years but they still stayed on until after I left. So as far as I know, they have been the longest serving Working Group Chair ever serving this community for 18 years. And serving is exactly the right word. They always put the community consensus above their own opinion. When we were chairing address policy the ‑‑ the Working Group deserved a neutral chair, focused on the job, getting the job done well within the minimum amount of bureaucracy and politics. Many have told us that this style of chairing has been the leading example to their own way of interacting with this community and in quite a number of cases around the world for chairing their own Working Groups. As I mentioned before, they are always ready to help others and contribute to this community and when I earlier was asking around for quotes and feedback, I got one quote from Rudiger saying, well, okay... I can't think of anything negative to say and I usually don't have that problem. So, with that, I want to invite to the stage the winner of the 2022 Rob Blokzijl award in recognition of a lifetime of achievement, Gert Doering.
(Applause)
GERT DOERING: Well, thanks. Thanks very much. I have noted ‑‑ well, I have not been taken by surprise, I was approached a couple of days ago and I knew that this was coming but I had no idea what Sander was going to say and the things I thought I might say, half of them have been said already now, so well, I'm not at a loss of words, but I am. Anyway, actually there was one bit that's not right. Kurtis is the longest serving Chair because we became Working Group Chairs at the same time and I ran away and he is still serving. But we only found out yesterday. Indeed I joined the RIPE community in 1996. This is 26 years ago. I am 50 so more than half my life I have been part of this community. And it's been a very good part. So, yes, as someone said before before the SEE meeting, you come to RIPE meetings and you feel at home because this is sort of my tribe, my family. And it's been a good time and I will not run away, so don't worry. Supposedly, the document that I am not sure ‑‑ I think it's there ‑‑ says lifetime award. Which is a bit, makes you think like, okay so it's over now, if that's the lifetime award. Then you spend thinking about age and 26 years of this and being 50 and so on and now it's time for a mid‑life crisis I think and I spoke to a good friend two days ago about this and he suggested I need to buy a motorcycle because yes, I have money now and I can get a motorcycle. But I don't have time, I am a geek, I need to be hacking and doing stuff and annoying the Working Group. So no time for motorcycle.
Then I discussed this a bit with another good friend, who should I say challenged me a bit and said, you have money, do something good with it. I said I intend to do so anyway but why are you asking? Well, he said, you could give some of it to the Ukraine thing going on, and I will ask the foundation to top it up. I said well, I intended to give something to Jan anyway, but what's the deal? So, Daniel actually ‑‑ well, I agreed with Daniel on buying a new slicer so I pay 2000 and the foundation pays the rest. Very big thanks to the foundation and enjoy your new slicer.
(Applause).
JAN ZORZ: Thank you very much, on behalf of the foundation, on behalf of the keep Ukraine connected team and on behalf of Ukraine operators that are running around trying to put together optics and keep their users connected, big, big, big thank you.
GERT DOERING: This is something that really rang something for me, when I saw the picture of somebody sitting on a heap of rubble and repairing our network, so that's it. Enjoy your coffee. Thank you.
(Applause)
FALK VON BORNSTAEDT: So, after the nice words we have some pieces of hardware. Three things I have to hand over to you. So the most heavy first, this is the award, so something you can put in your living room, so to make ‑‑
GERT DOERING: It's good I am here by train.
FALK VON BORNSTAEDT: Then we have the award paper. There is another thing I have not with with me here is the €10,000, you give me your IBAN and we will send it the right way.
(Applause)
GERT DOERING: Am I supposed to take questions now?
JULF HELSINGIUS: Thank you. I want to thank you for all your contributions to the community and to other communities as well, but I want to quote Rob now that you are holding that piece in your hand because he received one at one time and said oh, it's transparent, it must be good.
(Applause)
MIRJAM KUHNE: Congratulations, this is wonderful, I have learnt so much off Rob and I think of him now this week, especially this week, I am benefitting so much from his legacy and well deserved, Gert. I just wanted to wish you a nice evening and there is a RIPE dinner for those of you who registered.
NIALL O'REILLY: There's one extra item on the agenda, it turns out 19th May is Mirjam's birthday.
MIRJAM KUHNE: Oh, Jesus.
(Applause). Thank you so much, I said Gert was so brave to mention his age. I won't do that.
NIALL O'REILLY: There's even some cake.
MIRJAM KUHNE: I was going to talk about dinner, starts at 8:00 I believe, buses leaving here, you got an e‑mail, Alex sent out an e‑mail to those who have registered ‑‑ 7:45 to 8:00 buses are leaving the venue. Please bring a mask, if you are in the bus we require a mask and enjoy and hopefully see you tonight.
(Applause)
LIVE CAPTIONING BY AOIFE DOWNES, RPR
DUBLIN, IRELAND
