Side room. 6pm. BoF.
FERGAL CUNNINGHAM: Hello, is this working? I think so. Maybe I don't need a mic at all. Louder? Louder than this? Even louder! This is on steno you know Raymond, welcome everyone, this is the RIPE NCC strategy BoF. I'd like to thank some people, Tina is doing stenorgraph for us, thank you very much. The mic is off. Now it's back on, OK. Thank you, Tina, for doing the stenography. Karla is doing chat monitoring and Ulka is taking us through the deck today, we have interactive developments, we'll be doing it through Kahoot. You see the QR code, please sign up, we'll be asking a few questions, and Hans Petter Holen will be reacting to them and hopefully you guys as well, we are part of a strategy team who is drafting this strategy and trying to bring it through to the end. Ulka is here, is that Heena? Do you want to stand up so people can see who you are and Ulka as well. And obviously Hans Petter. Who is a key, you know Hans Petter.
So today the whole point of this Bof is we want to get input from the community on our strategy. Five years ago I helped co‑ordinate our strand and we got a low amount of input on the mailing list, this time we are putting in extra effort, we did an open house, Hans Petter presented it, he did two presentations yesterday, not one but two. Which the main purpose of which was to drive people to the BoF, which is nice.
And we have also we are carrying out a members survey running until the edged of October, it's a consultation survey, we are trying to shape it to so that people will give focused input on areas to help us develop the strategy and I am fairly sure some of you in the room have already already taken it.
Ulka? Have people signed up for Kahoot? Do you need some time? I see people coming in, nice.
OK. Yeah, I will very briefly you take you through the process because this is about actual input on the strategy so we won't spend too long on the process today.
The methodology we are following is diagnose, decide, deliver, we have done the diagnosis part, this was mostly an internet project, we scar read out these he will analysis, operational Pestle analysis with you will the teams in the NCC to look at all the factors they are saying impacting them in the coming years and using that, we created a draft strategy direction we have published for everybody to see and this is the phase we are in now.
The next phase after we have gotten the input and developed strategy further, we will work internally to develop service level strategies for our teams, four our activities and the goal there is to align all our activities with the overarching strategy.
We'll also develop a budget that will go along with our five year strategy so we can say, we are fairly confident we can pay for what we plan to do.
And the goal is to bring this strategy to the board meeting in March 2016 for final approval ‑‑ 2026 for final approval and we'll be able to create the activity plan for 2027 which will be in line with our overall strategy.
So yes we are gathering community feedback, especially at this BoF session, we will refine the strategy based on that and basically this is what I have just explained.
Two slides, better than one.
So the draft strategy and this is where I welcome our managing director, Hans Petter, to talk you through it.
(APPLAUSE.)
HANS PETTER HOLEN: Thank you, Fergal, I hope my voice will last through this presentation.
So first, what is the RIPE NCC? We are one of the five regional internet registries that manage and distribute internet number resources. Everybody knows that.
And we do that as a not‑for‑profit membership organisation serving 20,000‑plus members across Europe, the Middle East and central Asia.
That's, you know, a fundation of what we are doing.
We support scaleability of the internet through allocating registering and promoting the adoption of IPv6. IPv4 will not let us stale the internet much longer than what we do today, so IPv6 is important. We strengthen resilience by allocating autonomous system numbers because autonomous means you can decide your own rooting policy, you don't have to rely on anybody else's definitions of how you want your packets routed, so that's important for resilience and of the operation to have Kroot, to have diversity in the root system, we are one of many operators and we base that on our principles and it's funned by our 20,000 members so we are not depending on for instance the domain market for the stability of that root name server.
We enhance routing security but RPKI and there are coming even more fancy security mechanisms to put on that going forward and that's important because we need to trust the rooting system. We improve transparency and stability through measurement and data services.
One thing is to say that we are doing these things and doing these things really well, we need to measure that it has an effect and that the internet is working well, as well, right.
We implement policies developed by the community. It's not the RIPE NCC that decides to do this or that, there are community processes where anyone, not only members, but anyone interested can participate and define policies. That's pretty unique to this system.
Maintain an accurate registry, that's kind of the core of our registry, if you are going to have a registry, it has to be accurate, otherwise it won't have any value over time, so that's really important for registry.
And in order to stay relevant, we need to engage with our members and community through transparent collaborations an events like this, we can't just do everything online, sure we do, we did that during Covid but the value of human interaction directly also is important clearly.
And then last but not least, acts as secretariat to RIPE, the RIPE community, supporting the policy development process.
This is the opposite order of the ‑‑ my previous strategy slide where I started with the community, we can turn this core any way, maybe this is a circle, maybe there isn't an order here at all.
Now, there is a poll.
FERGAL CUNNINGHAM: Hello, Hans Petter I am going to leave you up here. This is our first interactive question. Hans Petter explained the RIPE NCC's role.
It's a simple question: Do you see the RIPE NCC's role changing between now and 2031?
I think we'll give you a minute to answer this one. It's a simple yes/no, probably you don't need a minute. But if you want to have a think about this. Think about what Hans Petter listed. Do you see us doing new things? Fewer things? Different things?
HANS PETTER HOLEN: May I vote?
FERGAL CUNNINGHAM: You can vote, just once though!
HANS PETTER HOLEN: As we learned yesterday, this is not ‑‑ oh no, here's the result. Wow.
FERGAL CUNNINGHAM: If you joined late, we are doing it on Kahoot, go to the URL and enter the pin and you will be able to join.
HANS PETTER HOLEN: This is an interesting answer because when I saw the first version of the strategy that came back from the team, well, the first version was many pages and a lot of material and then it's been distilled and discussed and back to what we have shared publically and presented. But one reaction to that was that, but this is just the same, right. So one take on board RIPE NCC is we are supposed to be doing what we are doing and doing it better and being stable. This is not the speedboat that is supposed to turn quickly, but it's going to, you know, be on a steady course. But it's worth noticing here that 40% actually thinks that the role will change. And I think there is ‑‑ it's not quite a 50/50, it's tending towards conservative but I don't think we can avoid seeing that we actually need to adapt a bit as well.
FERGAL CUNNINGHAM: I would be interested if someone said yes, they see the NCC's role changing, as Randy is doing, could you step to the mic please.
RANDY BUSH: I think we are naive to think there won't be seriously more engagement with governments.
FERGAL CUNNINGHAM: Thanks, Randy.
HANS PETTER HOLEN: Yes, thanks for that. If you wonder which button I pressed, it was yes, I think this is one of the areas that will change and also technology will change over the next five years and we need to keep ‑‑ stay on top of that and stay relevant with changes, right.
I said yesterday, I think that I am an AI sceptic, but I don't think we can't avoid that either, that's something that we need to adapt to and use sensibly
FERGAL CUNNINGHAM: You have got a question on Meetecho?
SIMON LIENEN: I also voted yes, I think five years, it's difficult to expect there was no change. I don't foresee big changes and the co‑roles of RIPE NCC will remain intact and work by the strategy draft as far as I see it, but there will be ‑‑ I do expect some changes in addition to what Randy says, and there's already quite a bit of engagement with governments compared to I guess five years ago so, even ten years ago and that will probably continue, this development. But I could also see or I think it makes sense to think about maybe limiting activities in areas that are considered less core by the wider community. I think, for example, of research. Say, making user data more transparent, it's all fine and good. But although I am a huge fan of research and also the good work that RIPE NCC has been doing that is something that might be contentious because it's in a way competing with research and academia and industry and so on. That's something I could imagine as an area where RIPE could, RIPE NCC could focus a bit more on the infrastructure part and do a bit less of the research for example. So when I say yes, it's these kind of fine adjustments, but I am not having any issues with the core missions of RIPE for sure.
HANS PETTER HOLEN: Thanks for that, I think that's interesting feedback. I don't think we are competing with academia in research. We have three or four full‑time researchers or some part‑time researchers and one of the things that we are trying to do more of is having interns, not only on the research side, but all over the place where where we would engage with graduates and students and we need to have somebody they can to talk to that understands what it means to do research. So going down to zero people that works in research, that kind of too few, is also very fragile, I don't see a 30 people research department, but I don't see how we can do something meaningful there with less than three, right. So that's kind of one thing here.
Another thing is that one of the things that we bring to the table to governments when we meet them is actually inside. We take data from or data that we have collected and we can't really present that in raw format, we need somebody that can actually turn that into something meaningful that can be used by governments or others in their decision‑making processes. So it's not, it's hard to find isolated areas in the RIPE NCC that we could kind of stop doing or move to a new home.
Interesting enough I found a slide deck from 2001 related to start up of internet in Norway and I had a slide there on outsourcing because the challenge, if you want to outsource something, if you do it really well, you need to find somebody that can do it better and cheaper than you, but you definitely know what it is you want, right. If you don't do it well, how can you find that somebody that can do it because you don't really know it that well so it's kind of like a delicate balance there, yes, we can kind of outsource research but we still need to interact with them in some ways and speak the language. So yeah. But thanks for the input, I am sure people will take note of it here
FERGAL CUNNINGHAM: Absolutely, thanks Simon. Carla, you have a question?
CARLA WHITE: Kind of a question. Daniel Karrenberg, Vice Chair emeritus says the question should have been changed fundamentally on the question.
HANS PETTER HOLEN: You want different questions!
FERGAL CUNNINGHAM: We'll have a Kahoot quiz on the quality of the questions, I presume Daniel would say no, things are not changing fundamentally.
HANS PETTER HOLEN: The way I understood him should the RIPE NCC's change fundamentally between now and 2021 and I would have said no, right:
FERGAL CUNNINGHAM: Any last comments in the room before we move on and we get to the real nitty gritty? Hans Petter will take us through the actual strategy.
HANS PETTER HOLEN: Yes, thanks. So what's come up in the proposed strategy, that's circulated now is four anchors. Guarantee uniqueness and build trust, so the value proposition from the RIR system is that we guarantee you a right to registration of your numbers so that they are unique, right.
There is a lot of people talking about property rights and so on but I think that's a different planet for me. This is a technical co‑ordination job where for the network to operate otherwise that's connected need unique numbers and that's what the RIR systems provides, we ensure the uniqueness of the number resources and maintain control of the data for that, right.
So we need to ensure that it's accurate and has integrity so it can't be changed and we need ‑‑ all that we do to demonstrate trust to neutrality, transparency, authoritative data and resilience under pressure, right. Resilience under pressure a couple of years back we got a letter from people saying please deregister these and these for that and that reason, we can't do that because it should be an accurate registry, we don't have any opinion on what people use addresses for, we keep a record of who they are, right. And that's what we should stick to there.
That's the first element.
Provide responsible stewardship. So contribute to the internet's, security resilience, scaleability and stability and we do that by supporting open standards, promoting best practices and capacity building efforts.
Focus on technical integrity. So IPv6 deployment, RPKI, routing security and interconnection.
So that's not things that we can do, that's things that our members can do, but we help our members to do that.
Be a source of authoritative data. Provide high‑quality neutral information and insights through our measurement platforms and tools.
We have all the registry data, but the measurement gives additional layers of how these are used and what effect they have or the way our members build and operate an internet and can be used there. Of course, there will be other players that do that, we are in a unique position to provide a neutral data set that anybody can analyse.
Engage members and renew our community. I think I have said this several times now this week, I came in here as one of the young ones and I have to realise that I am not any more and it's really important that we allow new people in, right, and that they are not only invited to the party but also are allowed to dance and select the music, right.
So foster inclusive participation. Invest in the next generation of leaders. Maintain open transparent bottom‑up governance, ensuring it reflects stakeholders needs and brings value to the members and community. We will not stay relevant if we go on with the same people. Eventually we all die out, so we need new people.
So that's number one, one, one and one.
FERGAL CUNNINGHAM: They are equally important.
HANS PETTER HOLEN: I wonder if it's a feature or a bug, right?
Strategic focus areas. So this leads to six focus areas that will help us achieve our vision, registry accuracy and we need to do that by automation. There is only so much we can do by adding more and more people and the more people that does the same tasks, the more repetitive the taxes become and you get chances of errors so automation, modernise technology, strengthen fraud detection and enhance self service. Ensure compliance with global best practices an standards. We are under increasing scrutiny from ‑‑ legally the Dutch government can impose regulations on us, those come from EU but we serve 72, 74 ‑‑ I can never remember ‑‑ countries an we need to be trusted by all of them. Hence global best practices an standards.
Internet resilience and scaleability through routing security, resource distribution, Kroot operations, promote IPv6, routing security and PQC, ensure the internet remains stable, resilient, secure and scalable. I see things moving on the screen, I don't know if I am touching anything but OK.
Data and insights: Maintain control of data and use automation responsibly to improve efficiency and support members while continuing to provide high quality neutral insights. Community partnership and trust, renew and diversity participation, uphold openness and inclusivity and build trust through responsible action, training and knowledge sharing.
And we heard a strong pitch yesterday in the Services Working Group for training and knowledge sharing because coming into this community and figuring out where to start is also the condensed version facilitating training source courses rather than wandering around in the corridors for five years and picking up bits and pieces. I don't think I ever attended a training course in my young days in the RIPE community, maybe I would have learned much quicker if I did, right.
But I have learned a lot from the RIPE community, that's what brought me back to the RIPE meetings, the corridors, talking to other people that kind of done things before me and learned from their mistakes or getting their tips.
Good governance, demonstrate transparent, representative neutral and resilient governance, maintain a fit for purpose membership model that brings value to members and the community. This governance thing we didn't think about at all 30 years ago, it was just a project and we didn't have to have a formal board or anything like that. But then over the years we are a properly governed organisation, we have developed our articles of association with better and better controls and I would say we are quite resilient in that area and that also applies to the community, this is the RIPE NCC strategy and we had a discussion in the community plenary on their processes, people that see us from outside don't necessarily see the difference so it's equally important for the RIPE NCC that the community processes are seen as robust and good governance, right, so I think there are collections there, although our focus now is the RIPE NCC.
And then agility and execution culture. And we have quite some discussion, agile execution or is it agility and execution and what does this even mean? We need to foster a culture of delivery and accountability with strong follow‑through by being focused and adaptive and goal oriented. The risk of being, you know, registry with policies and procedures is that we become a bureaucracy, right. So the other extreme is that we become too agile and, oh, this is easy, let's skip this part of the process and jump ahead here because it seems like the right thing. Let's do what's intuitively right. But we can't do that because we have to treat everybody equally, we need to have a common understanding of policies and processes.
But that doesn't mean that we cannot change, being able to do that in a responsible manner, it's a very delicate balance in an organisation like the RIPE NCC.
I see a lot of smiles and nods but nobody runs to the microphones so here comes Fergal to engage again.
FERGAL CUNNINGHAM: Yes, thanks Hans Petter, it's quite a brief concise strategy as Hans Petter said a few weeks ago, this was quite massive I would say and now it's two slides so it is quite high‑level.
We are going to ask ‑‑ we only have three Kahoot questions, we are going to the second one.
And what we want to know is: From the two slides Hans Petter just presented, do you see anything as being missing? Are we not covering anything that you consider important that we should be? And as Rudiger is demonstrating. If you don't want to do Kahoot, please come to the microphone and tell us, we want to hear from you guys. Please.
RUDIGER VOLK: I have not read the draft. I am quite sure the draft and the slide set is not exactly the same. And remembering Randy's comment at this mic, I note that interaction with governments or something like that did not show up in your lists so far. And if that is supposed to be important, I think it should show up somewhere. I don't have any real contribution for that or ask, but I am just seeing, well, OK, yeah, consistency in the deliberation calls for something.
FERGAL CUNNINGHAM: Thanks Rudiger, yes, we take note of that. Andre?
SPEAKER: One thing I also wanted to mention is that yes, this external sort of ‑‑ the RIPE NCC in this world, how they maintain a relationship and it seems like the importance of those relationships especially with governments would only increase. And another thing I wanted to bring up in the same area is that RIPE NCC operates only part of the global registry. So ‑‑ and I know there's some efforts on the way like RPKI programme which I applaud which tries to harmonise certain things that the global consumer can see one single registry instead of five sort of fragmented things. So where does this fit into the six areas? Thank you.
HANS PETTER HOLEN: I can respond to that with governments and other RIRs and so on a bit, because I tend to think about community in the biggest possible sense. I see all governments in our service region and all other governments as part of our community. Now, that doesn't mean that it shouldn't be called out and specified in more detail and we should do that, but in my thinking, you know, community is all the external players around us in various forces, and then on the high‑level then I don't distinguish between them. But then the moment I start to call out some, they become more important than others, so I think it's important to do that in the next level, in the next strategy document, let's make sure that we pick that up, it's a very good point and we don't do this alone, should we do more on ‑‑ why do we have five RIRs, why not just one with, you know, things around ‑‑ let's do some mergers and acquisitions here, right, that comes with a lot of challenges in itself, resilience is in one, if you have one that falls all over, there's nobody else to take over, it also is large differences in thinking on governance and policy and whatever around the world, so we may lose some of the diversity in the system by, you know, merging all of them into one.
But that doesn't mean that we can't have a stronger collaboration together, right. Like in the RPKI programme.
SPEAKER: Dan, I will come back to the governance, but first reading all these priorities obviously I see execution, stability and internal governance but in my opinion like financial stability should be also there explicitly more or less, obviously it's implied and I don't have any challenges there, I assume everything is fine, but we know that what we all went through in that sense.
On the governments, I don't think that European Commission sees itself clearly as a part of the larger community. I had some experience in talking directly with them and I think that the important role of RIPE is not seen well enough and I think it should be one of the strategy priorities. Obviously, the service region is large, I am personally coming from Serbia, not European Union country, but we know that EU Commission is... and regulation and speaking with them, they often say, oh, we have our own experts, we don't need advice from technical community, but then we see what is happening and I think it needs to be there in this next strategic plan.
HANS PETTER HOLEN: I think the internal focus and external focus is interesting here because, for me, it should be comforting to all the governments that I am saying and to the community and all the other players, that I recognise them equally, right, I think about them the same way. Of course, for the European Commission to see from the outside that I don't recognise them specifically, that's actually a strength to all the governments outside the EU but a weakness to the European Commission. So how do we balance that, because if I call out the European Commission, I have to call out everybody else there as well? So I think that's part of the balance there in how we describe that and I felt some comfort in saying that, I think about the community in the widest sense, it includes government, regulators, law enforcement agencies, copy write holders, you name it.
SPEAKER: One more thing, I know that European Commission worries very much about the root servers seeing them as a very American thing but we Kroot is here and it's very good and very important and this is part of the messages that's not really understood.
HANS PETTER HOLEN: Root name server is an interesting thing, that can be a discussion in its own and it's going to be next week at the ICANN meeting. The route server operators today are merely a distribution function, there is a content coming from IANA, it's digitally signed, and the only thing we can do is deposit or not. And if we don't posit on them, nobody wants to use them any more. So you are irrelevant, but it's important as, you know, a function that was ‑‑ that went away when we started to sign the root and I think what the European Union wants is to ensure the content of the root they can't do by regulating the root server operators in Europe but that's a very long discussion.
PETER KOCH: Peter Koch, everybody says they are speaking for themselves and so do I but as... not speaking for them. Anyway, a question to Fergal: Is the poll actually open?
FERGAL CUNNINGHAM: Yes, we can open it.
PETER KOCH: I was wondering whether it was me or not. But since I am here, the building blocks of the strategy are good, I think, well sufficient, my German background, that's actually a compliment. I am wondering ‑‑ and I didn't do that, maybe I should have ‑‑ what the dif is compared to the previous five‑year strategy? That's one thing.
And I think there's some things in the detail and the previous discussion between you and Danko surfaced a bit of because given the geopolitics shall the preparation for one future is maybe not enough and maybe the board has done that already but there's different tools like foresight where you think about the doomsday scenarios, the crazy scenarios and then you wake up at some point and something happened in the US and all these crazy scenarios appear reasonable. So doing that in a way.
It might be covered by the agility is more technical than strategic and shifting that a bit might actually help and again in the details, promoting IPv6 to pick just one good thing but maybe not at the same level as RPKI because in that, the NCC has an operational role. Where the other is good for the future of the internet so to speak but not ‑‑ the others need to do that as well. So that level. I am not missing anything at the building block level. Thank you.
HANS PETTER HOLEN: I think that balance between where we actually have an operational role ourself on RPKI versus IPv6 where we, we do have a role in distributing the resources and the thinking that has developed I would say over the five years is that this is important for the growth of the internet, so if we don't get you guys our members to implement V6, the growth of the internet will stop, something will happen with the network or change the nature, so that's why it's in here now but you know, I do see your point. It has been lower on the radar and not that high in your strategy and you can see it not being high in our activity plan for some years and, you know, we are getting now push that we should have it more visible and do more in that area. That's one of the things that we need to ‑‑ a priority we need to set for going forward because we can't really swap every year back and forth on whether we should do more or less in that area.
RUDIGER VOLK: Coming back a little bit to previous things. Actually, I question your extremely inclusive approach of saying, well, OK, everybody we have to do with is community. I think one has to recognise that well, OK, there is one entity and kind of it is living in an environment and has to respond to what the environment is doing. Kind of well OK where are you acting and where are you receiving stuff. So kind of just saying all the government relations and so on can be set, well OK, they are, Chancellor Mertz is amember of a community, I don't doubt, I don't believe that.
HANS PETTER HOLEN: I think it's an interesting thing because RIPE NCC has not taken the word multi‑stakeholder too much in our communication, that's the foundation of the rest of the ecosystem, ICANN preaches multi‑stakeholders, some of the other RIRs stronger than others. We do not give the governments a special role, they are one of the stakeholders. So I was kind of built on the community term here and maybe we need to change that, I am open for that. If we had been a ccTLD, to make it simple, it's very easy for Peter to treat the German government in a very special way because they have ultimate jurisdiction over a company in Germany, and Germany is your main market, right, so that's simple.
The Dutch government has been very good home for the RIPE NCC for the last 30 years. And I think the question for the next 30 years, which actually resonates with this, should we do some scenario planning and looking at the doomsday scenarios, are we guaranteed that that will last? If you read the activity for next year, I put a sentence there where I say we should be resilient beyond national borders so you could take the picture from a childrens novel when I grew up the, the flood is coming, the dikes are bursting, we can fix that by making sure one of our data centres are above sea level, we have done that now, right, it wasn't like that last year, interestingly enough.
But maybe we need to have it outside EU as well, Proton Mail, they have three data centres, one in Switzerland, one in Germany and one in Norway as far as I know. Three relatively stable countries with strong privacy thinking and so on. That's good. Maybe we need to think similarly. Is it to pick three countries within European Union or European Economic Area? But what about the trust from the Middle East and from central Asia and from Russia and Iran, right.
Do we need to completely rethink the registry and make it ‑‑ distribute a set of databases that are located in the jurisdiction of our members so that they are ‑‑ we can fulfil the digital sovereignty because when you say sovereign, that's the country, that's the government, so when you are saying digital sovereignty, does that mean that the Dutch should control everything that EU should control everything? I am trying to avoid that word. I fully subscribe to the idea that the RIPE NCC should control its own data and that's something that I also think needs to be reflected in the strategy going forward. But should it be controlled by one government?
RUDIGER VOLK: Well example for what I'm thinking is ‑‑ well, I didn't see anything that would lead to the usual NCC round tables in Brussels. And while OK, that happens where you are talking to the EU and others in a way where other members of a community are excluded, probably for good reasons. So claiming one community obviously is a little bit overgeneralising. But I stop here.
HANS PETTER HOLEN: Yesterday, I think that's a good point and I think that should be definitely should be added. I agree with that. And I think also we are not only doing and tables in Brussels, we are also doing it in central Asia, southeast Europe and the Middle East, they are all very different, both in maturity and in the way the dialogue is but I think they are all very useful in their own way.
And you know, to some extent, there is much more interest in north western European countries for these round tables than, yeah, I can kick out my own Norwegian government for not having shown up for years now.
SPEAKER: Speaking as a corporation working group co‑chair, I want to remind everybody that European Commission is part of our community because my co‑chair is from European Commission, Achilleas Kemos, sadly he is not here today, otherwise he would probably go to the mic but also to follow up on Rudiger's suggestion, yes, I think we had kind of a dream, it would be nice Co‑Operation Working Group would have have some kind of round table so it's more recognised and the maturity is very different so one would have to take that very carefully
HANS PETTER HOLEN: Yes, thanks for that.
FERGAL CUNNINGHAM: I think we should move on, we have to ‑‑ we have 15 minutes left. Moving on, we have carried out a members survey. We think it's important to not just get a full community view but also hear directly from members who will finance this strategy effectively, and we did have questions which were the sort of thing seen in activity plan discussions and general meeting discussions and mainly about focus. We asked this question, we got about 70 responses, firstly on the strategic direction, there was quite a high‑level of agreement, which was nice to see of course. We then asked about the registry function at the RIPE NCC and we asked if there needed to be much change, people don't see much change in this.
Moving on to our other activities, pretty similar really. A little bit more change maybe but also leaning towards little change in that area.
And then finally we did ask about individual services and activities. And you can see for the registry related functions, the database registry, also Information Services, largely no change, very few people saying they want less focus, quite a few saying more focus.
HANS PETTER HOLEN: Looking at this, the previous one, is that the safest way with those services is not change anything, right? It's a very, you know, the majority is a lot, this slide a bit different .
FERGAL CUNNINGHAM: Yes, we see a few more people asking for less focus in L & D and exams and certifications and a little bit in research but also largely no change I would say, at least the most common one, especially around community co‑ordination and quite a few people asking for internet governance to have more focus which is probably reflected in what we heard already today. I would say.
HANS PETTER HOLEN: It's probably within the error margin, there is a slight preference for more research and analysis, not less. There is a slight preference for less on exams and certifications while it's actually over the times with the responses the learning and development, the training webinars and so on, that's more balanced, a slight preference towards more but not really that much any more.
But internet governance activities, that's clearly something that there is a call for more focus.
FERGAL CUNNINGHAM: I think interesting that this is the membership we asked directly, it's encouraging to see that.
HANS PETTER HOLEN: That's one of the challenges, we have the community and the one person in the RIPE meeting saying we should do that and we go and do it and then 20,000 members have to pay for it, right, that's one of the decision‑making processes that is difficult.
And this is one of the things that we hope to do now that we get the strategy ahead published and that we now start to work on the five year plan and we get a new charging scheme in place, that funds that five year period so that we can have stability and work on doing that well for the next five years. We don't have to fight for funding every year so to speak.
FERGAL CUNNINGHAM: We also added some of the comments we got, we had some open text in these areas. You can see them here. Appreciation for all these things that we have talked about, Hans Petter has covered, stable operations, political engagement with political actors an continuity for the community. There's been comments that the strategy says where we are more than going in a whole new direction, request to preserve neutrality and our authoritative role and keep.costs low; cost comes up frequently in the member survey.
If we go on to comments on the registry function, most comments saying the registry function works very well and if there's improvements, it's around automation and self‑service, which I think if you were at services yesterday, you would have heard us talk about that.
Quite a few members do ask and we see it on mailing lists quite often to reduce all other services apart from the registry which is something we hear quite a lot. There's a comment that delegated trust is risky in the registry system, request to expand RPKI services to legacy holders.
HANS PETTER HOLEN: I think that one is actually interesting because we can offer RPKI services to legacy resource holders, it's just that we need to identify them and have them sign the piece of paper so we know who they are. Should we offer RPKI services to somebody we don't know who are or whether they actually can document that they hold these resources? Big question mark. Funded by all the other members, does that make sense? I am asking this in a provocative way and how can somebody who held gut resources back in the the 80's, how can they think that they can continue to operate services on those resources without ensuring in any contractual way today that they are part of the system? That's something that baffles me.
And I know that with the focus on RPKI, for instance in Norway, I know that quite a large proportion of the addresses used in the academic network and I know the people that got them and I know that they were working for a government agency when they got them, but the paper trail to the academic network has not been updated, they are listed or there was, they were listed as legacy resources back in June, I don't know if it's been fixed by now, I don't follow that closely but they couldn't enable RPKI and they actually then have to go and document that, they have actually been transferred to whatever history through the academic network today and hopefully nobody else in the government would dispute that and then of course they can be covered by RPKI and academic network won't have to pay more because they are already a member but we can't just let them enable that without doing the checks of that because then anybody could walk if from the street and say hey I got this email address that was registered in the database 30 years and ago and please accept my rights to the registration. So that's part of the challenge there I think so I am all for doing that but we need to have some checks an balances in place.
RUDIGER VOLK: I think true language is, well, OK, you are essentially forcing NCC membership direct or indirect, else there will be no LIR access account, yeah, no LIR account that, access account that actually enables the RPKI functions and just playing devil's advocate, kind of ‑‑ if a few parties don't pay the improved security of the overall internet, actually helps and yes, one might start to discuss whether unidentified ownership of resources should result in blocking them.
Kind of certainly not here, I do not want to start that discussion but devil's advocate, that's a potential argument.
HANS PETTER HOLEN: So all real life is that we have two parties that comes and claims this and they both come with convincing arguments, which one do I give this account to and how do I do that, right? It's not about the technical implementation, it's not about the multipath, that's the charging scheme, it's about how do we verify who is the rightful owner.
RUDIGER VOLK: I did not question the necessity of actually identifying stuff.
HANS PETTER HOLEN: Thank you.
RUDIGER VOLK: And what the modalities are for establishing a legacy case kind of is a can of worms.
FERGAL CUNNINGHAM: OK, thanks Rudiger.
Moving on to the comments on the next. Ulka has to click, she's in real control.
Some comments on non‑registry activities, there was a suggestion to increase inter RIR cooperation to save costs and improve processes, increase the focus on research and analysis to help maintain the stable internet and internet governance activities which comes up quite a lot. There was a note on the increasing importance of the IGF as a forum to be involved with. If you were at NCC services yesterday, you would have seen the panel discussion on AI we found very useful in the NCC in helping us to figure out where we are going to go with that, it's also reflected I think the vibe from yesterday kind of came through in the survey as well I would say.
Yeah, we mentioned where people wanted to increase focus and reduced focus and we did have more than one comment about spinning off non‑registry functions to save costs for members which I think Hans Petter covered.
HANS PETTER HOLEN: I have been spending some time on that. In my previous job I was working for a commercial company that was doing and is doing mergers and acquisitions, when I left there were 10,000 employees and today, five years later, there's 70,000 employees . They are spun off a lot of things that are not core any more, I think they are doing one acquisition a week, that's a completely different environment than we were in. Now RIPE NCC has some tradition into spinning off activity, centre started as a project, we were the home of getting that off the ground and then they moved out and grew up and kind of forgot about their parents, but that's OK, we cooperate, and we have ‑‑ we have the one of the DNS server implementations, that's now a host developed by LNnet lab, that was funneled and spun up and then it's living and thriving somewhere else, so it's not that we cannot do that, that we haven't done that.
The thing is that if we spin‑off something and find a new home for it, then if we need that service, we would have to buy it back on arm's length terms, that doesn't necessarily become cheaper at least short‑term. And then we lose the risk of not having that service there in two to five years because unless that entity finds other revenues streams and builds other funding for that service, there is no guarantee that the service will be there and that we will have that service in the future.
And I think we have an example from sister organisation or another organisation in our seek system, Internet Society, that spun that you have their management programme, gave them funding for five years, I am really curious to see and I sincerely hope it goes well that there is other funding coming in after those five years so that very important programme doesn't die out. If we are going to take something we are doing today that we want to spin‑off like this and it is important for the RIPE NCC to have that service, then we need to make sure that stands on its own two feet. It was a qual for more collaboration between the NCOs early on here, why do we develop five back‑end systems to run a registry, maybe one or two would be enough, right, maybe we could consolidate in that way to save money. We developed five different RPKI implement takeses, maybe two or three would be enough, there's a lot of things there but some things happen as well, we have spun off the validator project at RIPE NCC, that's now, we closed it down and OpenSourced but there is nobody actually maintaining it any more but luckily there are three or four validators that are living and growing so we are doing it in small scale, but it doesn't really have a big effect on what we are doing.
FERGAL CUNNINGHAM: Yeah and I think finally there was some final comments requesting to expand the membership to reduce costs, reducing costs is a reason for the lot of the comments, there was a comment there's no mention of avoiding vendor lock‑in and a comment not to delve too much into environmental issues and the comment that geopolitical developments make neutrality very difficult to maintain.
We just have a couple of minutes left, would anyone have any last thoughts or something you would like to say before we ‑‑
LEO VEGODA: I did mention it by email, but I will say it out loud, I am not entirely enamoured with the word "neutrality" that you have used throughout. I see neutral as being a mid point between two extremes. I think you mean impartial. And we are not taking sides. And because this is a document that is going to have people from governments looking at it, I think you want to be careful about the wording so maybe I am wrong but I would encourage you to think about the choice of word.
HANS PETTER HOLEN: Thanks for that, Leo, and while I buy your argument, before having an opinion on it, I want to go back and see what we have used in our communication over the last 20 years because if we changed from neutral to impartial, then that will be a change and what does that mean. So you know, if we have used that word for a long time, leaving it for something else, then it needs to be something better and but I don't know how strong we have subscribed to neutral but I have seen it in a lot of places .
FERGAL CUNNINGHAM: I have written it a lot of times for sure. But I think, as with all the comments today,, the strategy team will go through each one and see what we need to do with the document and we'll do that in close consultation with Hans Petter, so thank you very much everybody.
We do have one more question, because the RIPE dinner is happening soon and I know, oh, we did have a question and I just want to leave this up for an edged is, we probably don't have time to delve into all these but Hans Petter mentioned in the open house last week, there's some areas where and I think we got some today actually talking about the balance and how we engage with governments etc but these are areas where we feel it would be useful for the strategy development to get your opinion and you can do that on the list, you can do it on the survey, you can email the strategy team at strategy at ripe.net, that's a good way to get your input to us. And I think we are just about out of time. And to help you go on your way, we have one last question. And we are going to ask you to vote with your feet, we are going to ask you to get out of your chairs and come over here if you think it's a bad strategy, if the strategy makes you sad.
This is, come to Smahena ‑‑ she looks very happy, I don't know if she should be on the sad side ‑‑ and if you think it's generally good and makes you happy, please walk over here. And come over to Roman, he is our happy person today. So come stand where you think and in the middle is neutral or impartial. It's unfair you are blocking the exit, right!
We are all leaving anyway, you might as well take part. You can drop a pin here as well. So our remote participants can see where they land.
HANS PETTER HOLEN: Are you neutral.
RUDIGER VOLK: I am neutral, I am not impartial.
I am interested to see where our board stands.
OK guys, if we could wave at the photographer, we have a bit of a human data visualisation here, thank you very much. And thanks very much for attending the BoF. We'll make an announcement on this and publish, well, the stenography is there, we recorded it. Thank you all for your input and enjoy dinner.
(APPLAUSE.)
Thank you.