RIPE 91.
Main room. Monday, 20th October 2025. 11am. Newcomers introduction:
RIPE 91.
Hello everyone, this is the RIPE 91 newcomers tutorial. Welcome everybody, you are sitting at the end there, it's going to be difficult for me to address you all. It's a very awkward room, don't be shy, move to the middle. So... I think we have to start because we have kite a packed agenda, we have a number of speakers lined up. Hopefully give you a good impression of what to expect from a RIPE meeting and make it a bit less kind of, you know, secretive.
This is your first type meeting, this is RIPE 91, the first one was in Amsterdam, many many years ago, all the RIPE meetings are actually recorded or there's information about all of the meetings online, you can go back and find some interesting history there. And of course all the most recent RIPE meetings are also recorded and ought the presentations are archived and so forth so you can dive in there.
I am going to introduce myself in a second, I just want to set the stage here because I am the Chair of the RIPE community and for those of you who are not familiar with this concept, we actually have a formal RIPE chair team, there's a RIPE chair and a Vice Chair, they are selected by a nominating committee who select the RIPE chair and the Vice Chair based on community feedback. The main task of the RIPE chair is to ensure that the RIPE community functions well. It's pretty much all it says in that RIPE document that defines the role of the RIPE chair.
It then goes into some examples, it could mean this and that and the other but overall that's my task to be here to make sure you feel welcome and included and comfortable, this is useful for you and to make sure everyone works well, all the processes are documented and understandable and so forth.
And so yes, I am Mirjam Kuhne, I am the RIPE chair, I have just been reselected for another five year term by the NomCom earlier this year. I am originally from Berlin, from Germany. I studied computer science in Berlin many, many moons ago and I worked a little bit at the RIPE NCC and I worked also for the Internet Society, there's project at the RIPE NCC, until then I was also very much supporting the previous RIPE chair, I kind of got an idea how it all works and so then I was elected RIPE chair in 2020 for the first time and now I do a second term.
(APPLAUSE.)
Thank you!
Thank you all for putting your trust in me, I am really honoured to do this, I love this job but I love working with you all here ‑‑ this is going to be his last week so just a few words about Niall, he has been in RIPE as you can see evening longer than I have and he used to work at the university in Dublin, he also chaired a working group in RIPE which is closed or dormant or inactive I think it's called for a while. And I don't know if you want to say a few words about yourself, you wanted to promote some of the associations I think, I don't know, there's a microphone.
NIALL O'REILLY: I am supposed to say my name and this is something everyone is supposed to do during the week so do remember if you come to the mic I am Niall O'Reilly I am the RIPE Vice Chair for the time being until my successor takes over during the meeting, the one thing I always plug is any of the newcomers are interested in rock climbing, we try to make an excuse to go to a climbing gym usually on the Wednesday so talk to me about it. We have a mailing list to keep in touch between RIPE meetings, otherwise you know what the working groups are and what you are interested in, if you are confused, find me or Mirjam or the meet and greet people, there are lots of people to support you during the week. It's not just all over after the newcomers session and the newcomers lunch.
MIRJAM KUHNE: Thanks, Niall. And then we also have Anna Wilson here who is the next who has been selected by the recent NomCom chair, the next Vice Chair, she's taking things over from Niall during the week. (APPLAUSE.) I feel very supported and I am sure you will have a good RIPE chair team, a solid RIPE chair team hearing during the week. I have also been a long‑term RIPE participants and has been chairing a couple of working groups, I didn't remember the net news working group that we had back in the day. It doesn't exist any more. But you also had the IPv6 work and in her day job Anna is work, at HEANet, the national research and network in Ireland ‑‑
The official handover will be done during the week and it's great to have you both here. I don't know if you want to add anything? No. Right.
Let's get started, this is a blast from the past, I am not going to talk about box on the left, actually I never really had one of these, I was more like an atar re person. But you did, OK.
But more interesting I always find the map on the right, you don't have to read all the labels but this was basically the, the internet in Europe in, what does it say? 1980 something, I think 1990, this was actually produced by a RIPE working group at the time, there was a connectivity working group I think it was called and they would produce those maps and fine out what new network has been connected to the internet, to the infrastructure in Europe. If you drive into it, mostly academic networks and how it was started, it it was born out of academic networks, they all connected and they used using TCP IP and many of them were founders of the RIPE community, at some point the map grew a little bit too big, the working group, it was not scalable to continue to publishing those and the working group also closed.
But I believe they even published as RIPE document, if you want to go back, you can find the history of there.
I should have asked you at the beginning if you are connected to Meetecho and also of course those of you who are online, you are connected to Meetecho because you will have a question for you or a poll, you can use a poll, the poll function in your Meetecho app, you got a link to the Meetecho, this is a good exercise for you newcomers, to use the Meetecho application. You got a link this morning I believe or yesterday. You have an individual link to the Meetecho application, used here for remote participation, you can ask questions, we like to to questions, if you are in the room, if you are remote obviously you can also participate. I want to ask you and as a poll, somebody is going to run it for me, do I have to click the button are you are you going to do it? Click one more, OK. That's it. Do you know the difference between RIPE and the RIPE NCC. You can also raise your hand if you are in the room. Yes, some do, you are not exactly newcomers!
But yeah, there's a few more hands, not that many. I don't know how it is online. If you want to show the results, do I have to click one more? OK. So yeah OK, more people knew the difference than not. All right, anyway, I will see, you can test your knowledge, see if you actually know the difference between RIPE and the RIPE NCC. I want to make this point at the beginning of the meeting also, we are going to have a presenter from the RIPE NCC later on going into more detail of the RIPE NCC but just in a nutshell, the RIPE community as I said earlier was mostly founded by academic networks at the time in early '90, '89, the first RIPE participants came together and founded this community to co‑ordinate certain technical aspects of the network, how to find each other and how to communicate with each other, who is using what IP address, what needs to be registered in the database and things like that.
It's been always open, RIPE has never been a legal entity, it's always an open community, anybody can participate, who is interested in running an IP networks, and it's still pretty much the same, information exchange, best current practices, technical co‑ordination and and aspect is the policy development, basically developing policies on how to distribute IP addresses, what's registered in a database, what kind of contact information do we need to have, things like that, which then gets to, we hand over to the RIPE NCC to implement. On the other hand we have the RIPE NCC which actually started as the secretariat for the RIPE community so RIPE was first, as you see, in 1989 and then all the work was done by volunteers so they were all people going OK, I will run the instances of the database, I will main mailing lists, I will organise the meeting in the universities, after a while, it was getting too much work so they had set up the secretariat and the RIPE NCC, the network co‑ordination centre.
All RIPE stands for by the way RIPE NCC stands for Reseaux IP Europeans. So the RIPE was founded in 1992 and they took over the kind of co‑ordination (RIPE NCC (Administrative the logistics, it took on the role of the IP registry, the regional registry because the community and the membership of the NCC already trusted this organisation and they trusted them to also take on that important task.
So the RIPE NCC is a legal entity, is a membership association, the members elect the board and there's staff and a managing director and the RIPE NCC provides services to the members but also to the larger community. And yes, there's a link, there's a ‑‑ we hear more about this, there's an important link then between the policy development and policy implementation the RIPE NCC does.
Coming back to the RIPE community here, we have a bunch of working groups you will see later during the week.
This is the list of working groups right now, I am not going to go through them all, some are more obvious related to this technical co‑ordination that I mentioned earlier. Others are different, IoT or maybe co‑operation is an interesting case, where we have the technical community and the regulatory and government representatives come together and talk about their topics. So you will see more of those working groups later during the week.
And every working group has a mailing list and so you can subscribe to the mailing list, it's used mostly for announcements and discussions of certain topics and then the main work, the main list here actually is the RIPE list, we have also a list for the entire community, the RIPE list and then you see information there about generic kind of information relevant for the entire community, not specific to one working group.
And yeah, just as a starter here and then let's dive a little bit more into this specific meeting. You can see on the website or also in your Meetecho, I have to try to pronounce this properly in the properly Italian way, it's hard. The meeting plan here you can see that and it's interactive, you can click on the sessions and you will see the agendas of each of the sessions so there's a lot going on every day.
I am not going to go through everything. Just to maybe highlight a few things for you today. There is a Birds of a Feather meeting, it's basically more informal session, it's not attached to any of the working groups actually something the Programme Committee reviews and in this case we have three Birds of a Feather sessions, one of the kind of topical discussions, it's open to anybody, today it's one on discussion on the second draft of an RIR governance document, it's a bit Meta but it's important for this community also to make sure our regional internet registry and the entire RIR system is stable and future proof. That's happening today. And there are, I thought I had a slide for the other BoFs as well. Tomorrow is not BoF but it's a diversity in tech session or DEI session in the afternoon, I am really looking forward, we have interesting topics there, it's different every time and highlights various aspects of diversity and inclusion that's relevant for our community here.
Then on Thursday, Wednesday we also have sessions, they are kind of regular plenary and working group sessions. And on Thursday we have another two BoFs, they are also relevant, one very technical and one more strategic, organised by the RIPE NCC to talk about the next five year strategy and one is about encryption in a DNS so very different topics.
Here's some tips and how to participate during the week. As I said earlier, you can use the Meetecho app for that, there's also you can find it in this list, there's a chat, you can use the Q&A facility or you can come to the microphone and as Niall pointed out, we like to hear when you are when you come to the microphone so we get to know each other a bit better.
This is something we have promoted a few meetings ago, this time we have one but we have local hubs, it's basically people getting together in their local country or city or university and kind of participating in the RIPE meeting together rather than everybody individually at home, we like that and we promote that.
Already you figured out why you are here and why you want to participate but just to summarise this, it's a great way for you I think to engage this community and shape the future if you will of the infrastructure and the internet of this region, you will find peers and build your career and basically you know, yeah, be part of this community, it's quite a diverse, actually it's not only technical, there's also other topics that and we need all of you to participate there.
A quick overview, the Programme Committee, lots of faces there, you will see more faces during the week, just to give you an idea. These are the people who are responsible for the programme for the plenary slots. And there are some elections going on this week so we are still looking for candidates, two slots I believe. And you can also the Programme Committee and also the working group chairs would like you to rate the talks so they get feedback on what you like and what they can do better, you can see that also on the website an in the app, every talk you can rate.
And then it says network here it means actually social network more again how you participate and how you feel more included in this community, already mentioned the Meetecho app and the attendees list, just for completeness here, there's another link you can find it there.
And of course we have social events. So unfortunately here on site, not for you online, we experimented with online social events during the Covid period but it just wasn't the same so we kind of for those who are here, they have the advantage of also participating in the social events; a welcome reception today and another networking event tomorrow evening and then the traditional RIPE dinner on Thursday.
Yeah. Almost coming to the end of my part. We want to hear from you, share your experience with us, there are some ways you can do that and then I have a few tips for you if you need support and there's a tech team here, technical staff, some of them sitting there, we also have a desk where you can find them and there's, you can reach them on on this email address, but it's probably easier to just find people there at the registration desk, they can point you in the right direction. You can always send an email as well and of course in our best place to go for questions is to the meet and greet team, I don't know if you you have any red t‑shirts in the room. Yes, two hats on, she's also on the meet and greet team, she's working on the RIPE NCC team and she's there on the right hand said, they are hard to miss, they are the very prominent place there. And I think that's when I'm handing it over to Sebastian and hovering around there is basically the code of conduct team and Sebastian is going to introduce the code of conduct team from the code of conduct team so I don't have to do that, thank you.
SEBASTIAN BECKER: OK, there's a code of conduct you basically saw that maybe in the registration process, that's very important for us because you should have the really great experience here, a positive one. So it should and a respectful get to go, nobody should be harmed or in any way intimidated, it's about tolerance and respect. And be excellent with each other and also you as a newcomer, you can come to us if you have anything to report, that's very important not or because you are new, you are not allowed to come to us because that was one of the last time's feedback we got, people thought I am the first time here, can I complain. You can. If you experience, if you have a bad experience, you can come to us, we hopefully can solve it for you or at least mediate and make the experience you have here a great one.
This is a code of conduct team. Please the other guys in the team that are on site, please stand up for a short time. You see three others. Me. You will see some others on site, not everybody is here but also on the online part, you can come to us, you can either go to individual persons or you have that mailing address where you address all of us. Please use it if it's necessary.
Lastly, there's a survey also about the experience you have, also with the code of conduct if you have something, please do after the meeting. Obviously. You need to have the experience of the meeting to do the survey. And that's basically it from my side. So, please be excellent to each other, have a great time.
(APPLAUSE.)
MIRJAM KUHNE: Thank you very much and yes, next up I was going to introduce you but you are already on the slide, it's Angela Dall'Ara, the policy officer of the RIPE NCC who is going to tell you a bit more how to participate in this policy development process that I mentioned earlier.
ANGELA DALL'ARRA: Good morning everybody. Of course welcome to the newcomers and yeah, I am the policy officer to so you heard the community makes the policies, RIPE NCC implements them and in between there is a whole process to make a proposal, discuss it, eventually change it, accept it ‑‑ eventually change it, accept it, withdraw, what can be done, this is your task now if you are new to the community. During this meeting you will have the opportunity to hear the discussion about three new policy proposals that are Address Policy working group. For old comers this time is going to be on Thursday instead of Wednesday, traditionally it was always on Wednesday so old comers don't make mistakes and come on Thursday, my role is to let's say assist with the whole process, to keep the timeline, to communicate to the community what is being decided, when there is a new proposal, when a prop changes phases, a phase in policy development process but especially for now, for this week, I am here for you to answer your questions and if you want to know more about the policies, what are they regarding, what are they going to change, how is the current policy and which are the changes that are proposed, I am here for you. You will see also me with red jacket in the Meet and Greet Booth and I would like to really encourage you to make questions because through questions, also the proposals can understand if their proposal is not clear, if there is something that has to be explained in a different way or more deeply.
And don't be afraid, don't be shy because started in this community and everybody was a bit afraid to go into a club that was already formed by people with more experience but you can always bring something new, a new point of view. Because times are changing. The policies that were applicable years ago might be not applicable to the new technologies, to new implementations nowadays, that's why all new policies, or the modification of an existing one is proposed so my invitation for you is be part of this process because you decide what the RIPE NCC has to do.
Then how RIPE NCC is going to do it is going to be related to the means an possibilities that RIPE NCC has internally to apply systems, to use staff and so on. But the needs, the how can I say, the new policies are coming from network operators so I wish you to have a nice experience here and welcome to the policy development process and come to me if you want any information.
(APPLAUSE.)
MIRJAM KUHNE: Thank you, Angela. Next and I think last speaker here, you have plenty of time is Hans Petter Holen the managing director who will dive into the other side of that slide, the RIPE NCC and the secretariat for the community and what they are role is in in meeting.
HANS PETTER HOLEN: Thank you, Mirjam. So I realised that ten years ago there was a RIPE meeting here as well and then I was standing here as RIPE chair. So since then five years ago I became the managing director or CEO of the RIPE NCC. And yeah, we are here to help the community make this meeting and the interaction of the community the greatest experience ever.
So Mirjam already told you about the RIPE community, there were like 16, 17 people meeting in 89 to solve all issues of internet in Europe and we are still meeting. So after a while they figured out we need a secretariat, somebody to make lunch and make sure there is a room and so on. My first couple of RIPE meetings was in the Nick of a building and we never knew if there would be lunch in the campaign, it was quite a different level of what we are doing today.
As for taking part in the community, I was put immediately into action and volunteered as a scribe at my first meeting, we didn't have staff taking minutes and staff, just raising your hand in the wrong point in time you know, you may end up actually doing some really interesting works over the years.
RIPE NCC is a membership organisation, more than 20,000 members across Europe, Middle East and central Asia. So 72, 74 countries. But we also have members outside the service region. It's as any membership organisation, there is a board, elected by the members and they hire a managing director to run the organisation and I am in charge of like 190 staff who actually does the work.
We provide services, not only to the members but also to the community at large and we are the secretariat of the community. And since Angela already told you about the policies, we implement the policies that you guys are forming. So we have a strategy to that comes to end next year, a five year strategy, I am working on the next strategy, there's going to be a BoF on that on Thursday, if you are interested in looking at what should the RIPE NCC look like in 2031, please come there.
We are set up by the community for the community, as I said, and then a bit later, the community decided that it wouldn't it be great to have an IP address registry in Europe, we didn't have the concept of regional internet address registries as well, it as IANA and Interlink handling IP addresses in the US and for the world because the internet grew out of the US, great to have it in Europe, easier to deal with so the registry was set up.
But then when the organisation was formed, the founders figured out that in order to attract good people and have a centre of knowledge other than just keeping a book of numbers, they were other activities writing into the by laws, so from the very beginning, it's been clear the RIPE NCC should also do other activities, our dimension secretariat for the community and also research measurement projects and so on. In order to do all this, we do this so that you as our members, you as community engineers working in internet providers or other companies that rely on internet services, we give you tools to make sure you can operate the secure and stable internet. For us to do this, we need a stable organisation. We have a board overseeing me and my work. We need proper funding, so we have a charging scheme. That will be in depth discussed together with the strategy in May but we are looking at that now as a result of the charging scheme task force that has put some work into establishing principles for that.
And none of this is possible without engaged and competent staff and we have quite a diverse staff, it used to be 42 nationalities, 42 is one of my favourite numbers of course. But now we are up to 46, it's a very interesting organisation to work in and yeah, it should be easy to connect from all over the service region.
The registry: We maintain the RIPE database, all of our information is publicly available to network engineers, law enforcement agencies, corporate holders and end users that want to know who is using or who has the registered right to this IP address and you can register other information in the database like routing policies and there's even an object for poems so you may find Limericks or haikus in there as well. So not everybody is deadly serious here, there are also a humorous sides of what's happening. Investigations into hijack policy violations, is part of our mandate and we working on a system called RPKI and I will come back too to that later, that allows you to secure the routing system.
Other services, informs services, we have measurement services, RIPE state which is a Looking Glass in the data collected not only by Atlas, RIS, we have an IP map to look into that and you will hear in a couple of presentations that we now released a couple of new tools that visualise the data that's available here. We operate one of the root name servers, so‑called K‑root and for those who wonder why K, you can look up the founder of the RIPE NCC, Daniel Karrenberg and you can guess why it's a K. And then we also operate the reverse zones for the internet an that's something that's not many people know about, if you have a domain name and you want to connect to the server, you look it up in the DNS and you get the IP dress, you can also put in the IP address and there's a reverse look up where you as operators actually need to maintain that look up and we delegate that access to you.
So while we are saying we only do numbers and not names, that's not entirely true. We do some names stuff as well.
RIPE database provides accurate registration information of internet number resources, publishing routing policies by network operators, facilitates co‑ordination between network operators, provisions of reverse domain name systems and ENUM delegations, anyone here knows what ENUM is
Two, three? Yeah, oh, no, the people woke up, yeah. We were actually quite wondering is that still in use, so if somebody wants a research project, that could be an interesting one. For those who don't know, it's a way of registering where to go from a telephony number service to SIP gateway into that system. I guess nobody uses voice telephony any more, it's all different apps now, and we do research and you can see presentations along research either from my colleagues doing that or researchers from other places using the data that we make freely available.
We have an LIR portal that you can use as a member, as a local internet registry to manage your registry data and make inquiries to our registrations department and so on. You can make requests for numbers, you can have AS numbers which is the number that identifies your network or your autonomous system, picks numbers or get on a waiting list to maybe get a tiny bit of IPv4 space. Open tickets, your billing and membership information and secure your routing with RPKI, I mentioned that a couple of times, if you know your basic BGP, it's basically that your router announces to its neighbours please send traffic to these addresses to my AS number, to my router. There is very little security involved in that, therefore RPKI was put in place so that you can digitally sign a statement saying this AS number is authorised to receive traffic for this IP address so you have a possibility to make that statement with the digital signature to the rest of the world. No, that isn't enough because we have five regional internet reg stress, can we sign everything, because of transfers we have the ability to sign everything, we are working on a system where we can digitalically sign the transfers between ourselves and have an authoritative source, we can verify this signature comes from the right RIR. So that's another level of complication on top of this and there's also an AS security on AS numbers, that is work in progress now and that type N is about to implement together with other RIRs where you can sign that statement saying that yeah, but I am only inter connecting with these AS numbers, if anybody else announces my AS numbers through them, that's not the path you should listen to.
So there is more and more security added here and it's really, you know, if you are into cryptography and stuff like, that it's fun to listen so some of those presentations.
Community engagement, all of this is for you by you, we organise meets twice a year so you can meet and interact, we offer training courses, e‑learning and professional certifications so you not only take a course but you get a certificate that you passed an exam, you can take those exams here if you want to, we contribute to public policy and internet governance discussions in other places. We take part in ICANN meetings and various ITMU meetings and we engaged with internet governance forums, the governments are discussing how to govern internet in the future, we try to be present there in order to make sure that we tell all the governments that we have a very well functioning system, bottom up, fully open for anybody to participate and that's what we are doing here.
We publish articles on RIPE Labs, if you have some interesting stuff to share, you can publish that on RIPE Labs. And we run the RIPE fellowship programme and RACI programme and we have revamped the fellowship programme now, it's not just about the meet but trying to get you to stay in the community and be here in the future, I am really sewer I don't say to see how that works out.
Executive team, you see a picture of my team here, two of my managers are unfortunately not here, gab or is working from remote and Philipe is unfortunately sick this week, we have a lot of man years around here, if you want to talk to somebody from the registry, all of the other registry managers are here and a lot of the colleagues from technology also.
The executive board is also here, do we have any executive board members in the room? No, so yes, Randy is here and Sander, excellent, if you have questions or since that you want to discuss about how, what the RIPE NCC should look like in the future or concerns about how I run the organisation, you can go to these gentlemen and discuss that with them.
And in May there is also elections for board members because they have three years terms and you can with some experience put yourself forward to actually govern this organisation.
There is a support help desk, if all of this went over your head and you have questions, go and talk to my colleagues at the support help desk. There is a general meeting, if you are a member and wants to participate in that, you can make sure that you register properly for that because it requires a separate registration and it's on Wednesday afternoon. There is an open part of that in the beginning in the Services Working Group we will present activity plan and budget for next year and we will discuss the use of or potential use of AI in the future, which is something that we haven't really made plans about yet but we really want to hear from you guys what you think we should do that, it's not often that we sit down and very openly discuss hey, what do you think we should do. So this is a really interesting first trial that we do that.
There is a user research hub here, we have Pedro is UX designer mainly working on training courses Antonella is working on interesting things, assisted registry checks on the LIR portal and AS PA systems and so on and they are here with two people from the development department, Fallon and adone NIS and they have some user testing so you can sit down with them and look what should this self service interface look like in the future. Keep in up touch, you can follow the mailing list, we have an online forum and we are happy to answer any questions. There's a newcomers lunch today I believe, so you can join together there, there are tables there with my first RIPE meetings and then I made this extra long since you said I had a lot of time this time but then I am done.
(APPLAUSE.)
MIRJAM KUHNE: Thank you, before you go to lunch, actually it's not even time for lunch yet, we still have to entertain you for a little while, I want to ask you, are there any questions? This was a lot of information on your first RIPE meeting day. Please feel free to ask any questions now. Are there any online? No? I don't see any. Well in that case, we have questions for you.
We have a little quiz and it's usually fun, so it is a voice coming from the off right now, are you ready? . There you go, take it away!
(KAHOOT QUIZ)
MIRJAM KUHNE: Thanks, that was fun at always and thank you for participating, what is always interesting here is not kind of, the also of course for you to test your knowledge but also for us to remember what to explain better next time. Because some things I think maybe we didn't explain well enough so you got the wrong answers.
But that's it for now for the newcomers tutorial, thank you all for coming an for participating and we will see you around during the week. Next up is lunch. And as I think as Hans Petter said earlier in the presentation, there are some tables so you are not in separate room, there are some tables that have a sign for newcomers so you don't have to just sit with each other, hopefully others will join you, you will get to know others in the community and yeah, have a great week and then see you through lunch.
(APPLAUSE.)