RIPE NCC Services
Wednesday, 13 May 2020
4 p.m.
KURTIS LINDQVIST: I think we're at the time, and we should probably get started.
So welcome to the NCC Services Working Group, your favourite Working Group as always. This time we're your virtual favourites, but still your favourites I assume, and I hope everyone can hear me.
Anyway, so, welcome everyone. As I said, this is the NCC Services Working Group. I am Kurtis Lindqvist, I am one of the co‑chairs together with Rob Evans and Bijal. I will be doing the slide presentations and Rob will be monitoring the questions.
Before we start, a few housekeeping issues. So, this is recorded, which goes without saying, that's why there is a big red sign saying "this session is being recorded" at the top of your screen. Some webinar etiquette is, if you want to write any ‑‑ have any questions, please write them in the Q&A function that you have in Zoom, not in the chat function, so please use the Q&A function. And one of us will read them out loud to the presenter.
If you are watching the live stream on the website, then using the chat mode for questions, the RIPE NCC provide a chat monitor will place the questions from there into the chat as well and try and catch them as well.
Please state your name and affiliation in writing before you ask any questions. And please rate all the presentations afterwards.
A few other housekeeping items. If you want to say anything in the chat session to everybody, make sure you change the little setting from panel list to panel list and all attendees, so otherwise they won't see them.
And last, we will have a coffee break in 45 minutes, we'll do the Kahoot quiz then that we didn't get around to in this coffee break and after the next session of the NCC Services Working Group, it will sound a bit odd because normally I'm telling you get out of the room quickly so we can start the GM. As a matter of fact, I am going to have to ask you to do the same thing, because the NCC staff needs to have time to change Zoom rooms from this to the GM. The good thing is that this time we don't have to get you out of the room, we'll just turn you off and we'll keep that as an option for the next meeting.
With that, on to the agenda. We are going to do a few admins. Then I'll hand over to Christian Kaufman, the RIPE NCC Board Chair, to talk about the hiring of the new Managing Director and then the new Managing Director, Hans Petter, will give the NCC update, we'll have the coffee break and then Felipe will give us the operational update after the coffee break and then we should all get ready for the GM.
So, with that, the last thing I have to do is just mention to approve the minutes, they were shared on the 30th March, and we have had no comments on them, so, I assume we can approve them unless there is any questions /comments. I'll give that 30 seconds. No. And with that, then, that's all the admin matters taken care of and we are handing this over to the first agenda item, which is Christian.
CHRISTIAN KAUFMANN: Thank you. With a little bit of luck I am getting some slides, and the authority to skip them forward.
I like your background, is that randomly downloaded or have you been there?
KURTIS LINDQVIST: I have actually been there myself.
CHRISTIAN KAUFMANN: My impression that that was I would get them displayed, then I would get the right to skip them forward. That might have been a naive assumption.
KURTIS LINDQVIST: There is a message saying that was only meant for the GM, not this session.
CHRISTIAN KAUFMANN: They kind of forgot to mention that detail.
ROB EVANS: There is a link in the chat if you want to download them.
CHRISTIAN KAUFMANN: Here we go.
So, this is a little bit unusual that actually the NCC Board present at the Services Working Group, I guess that might be one of the first times. But we, as in me, promised that we actually would be as transparent as possible in the hiring process and we mentioned that upfront and sent out some information upfront and now I actually want to present as I promised and recap a little bit what we did, how the process went. You already know the outcome, so that takes a little bit of the thrilling part away. But nevertheless...
So, the presentation is about how we went through the transition phase. As you might remember at the last NCC Services Working Group, Axel stepped down after 20 years of service, and the board was confronted ‑‑ well, we knew upfront about it, but we were then having the duty (a) finding a new one and (b) managing the interim's period and, with that, ensure stability and operation in the meantime and the presentation is about how we did that.
Even if I'm presenting the whole thing, this was certainly not me, by any definition, alone, and a lot of people were working on that in the meantime, and I wanted to pick out some. First, I wanted to thank Axel for being the managing director for 20 years, which was a very long time, and we all owe you.
I wanted to say thanks to Gwen, Felipe and Kaveh, these were the people who made the interim managing directors, who had suddenly a lot of more work, not just being the MD but also sinking between them because we appointed them, all three.
Thanks a lot for your extra work and the extra time, much appreciated.
I have to single out Carolien, she is the HR director, because she didn't not just help us with the whole process, we'll see that in second, but also in the interim's period and with all the HR matters, we couldn't have done it without her either.
And, of course, all the staff who supported us in the selection by giving us feedback, but who went with us through this journey.
What one does is, when you have a suggestion like that, you, of course, create a couple of subcommittees. But to be honest, they were kind of needed. It was clear that if we would go through the two processes, one of the transition and ensuring the stability during the meantime, and appointing the three new ones, but also the hiring, that if you do that as a whole board it becomes actually quite cumbersome because you then suddenly have to organise seven people instead of some and it becomes very time‑consuming, so we agreed that we do actually two subcommittees. We had a smaller one, Remco, Andre and me, who went through the transition process, and we had a Selection Committee to hire the new MD. And then again Carolien which was an honorary board member, I guess. She wasn't voting, but she ensured that we actually do that in a proper way and not just randomly go through that.
We had a couple of guiding principles and that's also the reason we have the presentation today. Is one was be transparent as possible. So we did not just want to surprise you with a random MD, and nobody knows what we did and where it came from. It was also one of the parts which at least was very important also for me was that the board not just changes or chooses their own MD and then the rest of the world has to live with it, but that we actually find one which hopefully is half‑way loved and respected by staff, which fulfils legal requirements and you know, interacting with Works Council, they have an active role there recording to the Dutch labour law, but that it also, you know, has a good interaction with the management teams and that we actually understand not just from what the board wants from that particular person, but also what actually the staff wants and what needs they have.
So when we created the job description, we actually circled it with some staff with the Works Council and they gave input as well. This was not just the board, it was a collaborative effort.
One of the parts was that ideally we have the MD before the next RIPE meeting. So, this one, which I guess we managed.
And as I said, finding the best candidate complementary to all the various stakeholders in this process.
We did preparation. Created the committee. Wrote the job description. Defined a framework actually. We split it a little bit the cover letter and the various ‑‑ the job descriptions and the requirements. We had something like that prepared before but we went through it and see if it actually was up to date. For what we, these days would think we want to have as an MD.
It was also clear that we wanted to have an outside company helping us, someone professional, because someone has to do most of the day work and the screening of the candidates upfront, because again, the board, this is a voluntary job, has to ‑‑ can't do that completely alone.
We then wrote a little tender, sent that out, approached three companies, and then have chosen one.
The interesting part was actually that the feedback and what we got back was not so different from the three ones, and it seems like, partially commodity market so there wasn't too much of a surprise. One of them, the ones which we chosen, Hargood and partner, was actually the one which we felt we got understood most. The NCC is certainly a very special organisation, not for profit, international and, you know, if you don't know that or cannot grasp that, then it might be difficult to find an MD.
We also had a little bit of a job description in, if you have seen it, where the requirements and what we wished for was actually bigger than we thought would fit in one person. So, we then said well, what we want to do is making it as wide as necessary, but then you know, see which candidates we get and then put a focus on one of the other part and this was the company which understood that best.
The black slides which you have seen so far with mine. The white ones were actually the ones which were given to us by the research company, and they highlight the various parts and then I interact them with my black ones too so you can see what actually happened out of that and what the time lines were.
We stick pretty much with all the time lines to be honest. Certainly with the big one that we have an MD before the RIPE meeting. But also, with the other ones, there were just one or two milestones in the end we slipped for a week or two weeks. But we had enough buffer but for the rest it actually went ahead exactly as scheduled.
So, the white ones I go a bit quicker because there are many of them and a lot of data, about you if you are interested you can see the PDF step by step. This was basically explaining the search process and making up timelines, see if they are realistic and then come up with a search company.
Number 2 was the job description. It wasn't just something the board wrote. The management team looked into it. The department had the OP, that's the Works Council, and then after they gave input as well, what they would like to see in their future MD, it actually went to the exit search. We also put a lot of emphasis on making that gender neutral, inclusive, as we were capable of, so that was a big point. And then it was actually published.
I think it was LinkedIn and Twittered and we approached it from various parts. It was also on the website. We sent it to the members with the link and that was basically the outreach component, but also at the same time, the exit search companies were working their network and whatever, database, or pile of candidates they have, and know as well. So we used different input methods to actually go forward.
That was just an update to actually see in mid of December if the process worked and in the beginning it was a little bit slow the uptake. I think most people were rather doing it towards the end of the deadline. So that was just a quick meeting.
The exit search, as I said, approached all candidates and actually looked for them, and I come to that in a second.
They then talked to the candidate, and actually I believe staff and some people in the community suggested people as well. They then went out and gave the various candidates which applied actually homework, and Hans Petter referred to that yesterday quickly where he was allowed some questionnaires which came up and answered questions, and to be honest, at this stage, we didn't see it. That was actually mainly done by the exit research company and they filtered them and put them into context.
The exit search company then came back, talked a little bit about it in general, which kind of company, which kind of market sectors, they talk about profit, non‑profit, and started then to come up with a short list. The short list, we thought about that a lot and said, well, what are ‑‑ what is the maximum amount of people who actually can handle. It was clear we wanted to have two interview rounds face‑to‑face in Amsterdam, so how much can the board actually be taking away from their day job to be there and what is a reasonable number? We decided that we would like to shortlist five.
These were the ones which already filled out the questionnaire, had interviews and were screened in the exit search company and then we actually met these five in Amsterdam. This was the suggestion, it was in the weekend of February 5th. Out of these five which we liked a lot and which at least surprised me a bit because I was always under the impression that we might not have enough females in our industry, we actually had three women and two men in the last five. They had very different focuses and they were very different people so we had a little bit community, we had certainly management experience, we had certainly Internet sector, or people who had more ‑‑ went into a governance and political components. But all of them fulfilled the job description because the job description, as I said, was relatively wide.
And in the first round what we did is invited them, had the meetings with them, and did the usual question, went through their background, industry, motivation. But they also made a presentation about the first hundred days. This was our homework for them. And then they presented what they believed were the challenges for the RIPE NCC but also what they wanted to do in the first hundred days.
And the first day we were relatively nice with our questions, not too controversial, not too mean. Then we chose actually two candidates. The funny part was, we wanted to choose two but then there was a third one which we actually liked a lot and we couldn't decide, we said we make three out of them.
So the last round then had three: one woman, two men. And this was now the time where we also brought staff in and we had a group, I don't recall exactly, I believe probably 7, 8, 9‑ish ‑‑ no, 9, 10, I guess more, where basically Works Council was represented, senior management, middle monitors, people who would interact with the MD and/or their representative from staff. The idea was not so much that they have the luxuries of selecting their own candidate per se, but we certainly wanted to have feedback, and we also wanted to give the candidate an opportunity to actually meet the people with who the candidate would then interact if he is chosen, or she, and so we made that quite broad.
So second day was 90 minutes, two hours with us and I think roughly two hours with ‑‑ 90 minutes with the staff representative.
We then ‑‑ I think it took us like a week, probably ten days, like two or three meetings between the board to actually now make a decision. Pretty much all of them I think could have done the job and there was not one which was you know particularly bad, but they all had their benefits, right, and their disadvantages. And then we went back and said how do we evaluate that? And now how we actually coming back to who is the one who fits best to the wordings, especially also at the given time?
And then we do the usual part: reference check, make an offer to the candidate, then you start negotiation. And figure out what are the legal implications, work permit and this kind of stuff.
And with that, we then signed. It was a little bit later then, the 1st ‑‑ it was then clear, depending on where the candidate would actually come from, that the notice period, or whatever is regular in his company, or in the country, would have quite an influence on when the person can start. So we had a rough timeline between April 1st and June 1st, but it was very important for us that we actually can present a new one. Even in a worse case, the person wouldn't have started yet.
But as you have seen, we were in that case actually quite lucky and got the candidate signed before.
The last part of what we want to do with the exit search company ‑‑ sorry, this is the introduction for the people who haven't seen it yet or hasn't realised it yet. We have chosen Hans Petter Holen. And he presented himself already yesterday, and it was already mailing list and stuff like that, so this is all very public knowledge and known.
We will then have a quick review probably next week or in two weeks with the exit search company to talk about how it all went and have a little recap, but for most parts, the hiring process is actually over and done.
And with that, last slide:
Some reflections from the board perspective.
So we always say it is our prerogative and our tasks to actually appoint new MDs, hire, fire, these kind of things. But I think whoever from us ended up on board, you usually don't really do it, right. Your term is usually way shorter than what is actually the term of the MD, so most of us do not come into that situation. One thing for sure I can tell you, if you think about it, this is a lot of work. I started to count the hours, but I'm actually not sure because there was so many meetings, giving a job description, you talk to them, the recruiter calls you every second day and gives you an update, something like that, this becomes a half‑time job. So that was a lot of work which went into that.
What was funny in a way is the team‑building exercise, that wasn't so much the idea. But now, we, of course, interacted a lot with the management team as well more than before, because we appointed three of them as management, as the managing director. Also, on top of that, we interacted a lot with staff to figure out what kind of MD they want and where they want to go. So, if you ever want to do a team‑building exercise, that's certainly a very good one.
We are very grateful for the exit search company, which was really helpful and structured through the process and, you know, it was not just that they actually have taken all the passive role and whatever application was sent to them, they just passed on. They had an opinion about it. They brought their own candidate, which actually made it quite far into the interview process. So that we don't fall for the bias, that we just take the persons we already know. That was certainly not the case.
Involving staff was fair enough, actually quite time consuming, because we sent the job description, we talk to them back and forth so there was a lot of interaction, but I think it was so worth it and whenever you have a chance to go through a similar process, my advice would be have a look if you actually can do it in a similar way. I think the buy‑in from staff is very different than just the new MD magically appears and they have nothing to do. But you also understand much more, especially as a board, what the requirements internally are right, you just have an external view and of course the view of the board, you believe you have an idea what staff needs and wants, and I guess for 80, 90% this is true, but there was certainly a lot of things which we learned on the way.
And with that, I just can say we are very, very happy with our selection and especially that Hans Petter has accepted. But let's not do this any time soon.
And with that, I stop sharing and I am open for questions.
KURTIS LINDQVIST: Any questions for Christian? I don't see any questions so far. No. We're going to move on then and hand over to ‑‑ oh, there was one question:
"How much did the whole process of selecting a new MD cost?"
CHRISTIAN KAUFMANN: Not going into a specific number, but as a general thing, what was interesting was the financial offers which were coming back from the three exit search companies was pretty much the same. So if you actually go for an MD and you want to hire one, even if you think this is the biggest thing for yourself because that's the first time in 20 years you change one, this is a commodity action for these exit search companies. So there is not much difference there. So we did not choose on price, we didn't have to; it was really who understood us best.
KURTIS LINDQVIST: Also a question from James Blessing:
"Wouldn't it be better to have a succession plan in place for when the next MD leaves?"
CHRISTIAN KAUFMANN: Yes. That is certainly the idea. It depends a little bit. If you have enough pre‑warning time. If you know where the journey goes and especially I guess what we have planned out of that, this is a good advice if you have a second one.
I think, not giving some credits to Linx, if you plan that better and you actually have a longer horizon where you know what will happen and then you can structure it like our friends there did, that's certainly preferable. On the other side, I have got to say we also knew that we could rely on the management team because we knew them, we interacted with them before, it wasn't, oh, we felt the whole things breaks and we are all lost. So, if you have a strong management team under the CEO, then in a way this is a little bit part of the succession plan.
KURTIS LINDQVIST: Okay. With that, I'm going to hand over to Hans Petter. Thank you, Christian, and over to you, Hans Petter.
HANS PETTER HOLEN: Thank you, Kurtis. So I'm here now in front of you not as RIPE Chair, as I was when I opened the meeting on Monday, but as Managing Director of the RIPE NCC. And I really want to thank the board for giving me this opportunity to continue to contribute to the community and to the RIPE NCC, as such.
So I started on the 1st May. It already feels like a long time ago. I had the advantage of having been observer on the RIPE NCC Executive Board during the last five years, so, in some ways, I have been sort of starting a bit ahead here. As you know from, if you participated in the 'Meet the RIPE Chair and the NCC MD' session on Tuesday, I have been part of the community for a long time. I have been involved in setting up several LIRs through the years. So, yes, I know the community fairly well, and I know the RIPE NCC from the outside but not from the inside. And therefore, one of my first priorities for my first 100 days is to get to know the RIPE NCC from the inside and, to do this, I have invited all staff for a one‑to‑one meeting, which is going to take a large portion of my time, the first couple of months.
As I mentioned in the opening, I will also remain as interim Chair until the community finds a replacement, the intention is to do that in June, so I'd be eager to hand over the RIPE Chair duties to the next chair and vice‑chair as soon as possible.
Before moving ahead, I really want to extend a great thanks to Filippe, Kaveh and Gwen for keeping the wheels running and doing a marvellous job in managing the RIPE NCC. Between Axel leaving and me being able to step in, they still have to pull quite some weight the first month, or maybe even longer, to make sure that I get off on my feet running with them.
So, great. Thanks, guys. Really a pleasure to work with you so far.
So, I'm actually here to report on what the RIPE NCC has been doing last year. And I don't really have an intimate knowledge of that, but if you look at the annual report, you will see that we still have a fair growth of LIRs, four‑and‑a‑half thousand, just missing one. And 1,929 additional members. So as you can see, we still have more LIRs than members, so the one member, one LIR doesn't really fit. It's more like at least two for the new ones coming up.
More than 6,000 /22s for IPv4 allocations and 2,840 IPv6 allocations.
So there is still something, something to do to get the v6 allocations to be larger than the v4 allocations, but I guess after run‑out we will see that.
More than 100 training courses for 2,000 participants in 41 countries and a further 35 webinars for 870 participants.
It's really amazing what we have been able to do in training in our community.
3,258 ARCs completed and 65 of them during the RIPE meeting. They are assisted regulatory checks, if you don't know all.
77,979 e‑mail abuse addresses validated. If you follow the Abuse Working Group, you know this is high focus there, what we really want to do is to have all the LIRs handling abuse in their networks, but the best the RIPE NCC can do is to actually make sure that the contact e‑mail addresses work.
94% of this is using an automated process.
More than 10,000 active RIPE Atlas probes, which is really great that we have this extensive measurement network. So you can do measurements not only in your own network but from anywhere in the world to watch your services and 579 RIPE Atlas anchors.
So, highlights from the financial report, and I won't bore you with details here, Gwen will talk about this later so you can get all the details on the finances then.
But really, it's a strong financial position. It's focused on prudent cost management. Of course the members always want us to be even more prudent and make the services and membership even more affordable. But that's the balance between what services do, you as members want us to offer, versus how efficient we can be in managing them.
We have a sound capital and liquidity management. And last year, the GM voted to add 50% of the surplus to the reserve and this was because of the uncertainty in the continued growth of LIRs moving forward after the v4 run‑out. So, the reserve is now up to a year's operating cost.
Possible LIR consolidation is affecting incomes in the coming years but we haven't really seen that as a threat to the long‑term stability yet. So we have been really on the careful side here.
So, looking a bit backwards, and both backwards and forwards. The board, in a couple of years back, started to actually look at formulating the strategy in clearer words, because, before that, the strategy was really do a membership survey and deliver the services the member wants, and doing that to an activity plan that was presented and then accepted and then forming a budget on top of that, and then executing on that and then doing a new membership survey. So back then the board said that, well, we actually need some overall guidelines, so overall strategy here, on top of this and the wording they came up with for the mission of the RIPE NCC to deliver world‑class services while engaging to connect people to maintain the resilience and stability of the Internet.
I kind of like that one. It's a good, very high‑level mission. But if you want to break that down further, the board then focused on these four key pillars in this strategy.
The first one is very important to the members, the service delivery and the registry and RIPE database. And then the marching order from the board was to rethink the service delivery and incorporate the professional trust model and ensure the accuracy of the registry /RIPE database.
And I believe, and, I mean, I have only been 13 days in the job so I haven't looked at all the details yet, but we have come quite a good way on accuracy of the registry. But we do have a challenge with the RIPE database and here is where the RIPE NCC is eagerly waiting for the result of the database task force, which is going to present some of their work tomorrow in the Community Plenary.
Engagement: It's not all about delivering services. It's also about outreach to all stakeholders and to stay connected and fulfilled so that we can stay connected and fulfil our goals.
Third one being the RIR systems. We can't do this alone. We are part of a system of five RIRs and we need to cooperate closely with them to ensure both accountability, transparency and resilience, and, very importantly, we need to adapt to the changing environment around us.
And, of course, the fourth one is really to the core of the membership organisation, we really need to understand the members. Back in the nineties when I joined the community, we were kind of either academic institutions or commercial institutions, larger ISPs, but over the years we have seen smaller ISPs, we have seen content providers and now we see end users, and it's a much more diverse member space and we need to better understand that and we do that today through the membership surveys and we need to continue that and engage even closer to the members.
So, in 2020, which is kind of the end of this three‑year strategy, the focus has been on improving existing services and processes, maintain effective member outreach and external relations. It's also about modernising our technical infrastructure, because, as you all know, servers don't last forever and they need to be upgraded; that's not only true for hardware but also for software. So that's continuous work going on and we have had special focus on that.
Adapting internal structure of the organisation. And we are kind of in the last three years strategic periods of starting to plan for the next one.
Just to give you the highlights of the planning cycle here.
We made this graph that you have for your reference where you can see that, well, we did, last year in 2019, a survey, and that is then taken as input to the activity plan and here you can see the full cycle where the results of the activity plan presented in the October, together with the budget, kind of steers the rest of the year, and you have your chance of giving input to the activity plan which is going to be presented well before the autumn General Meeting, so that's a very important that you use that opportunity.
So, current issues: As you all know, the Covid‑19 situation has impacted our organisation and our membership as well.
RPKI, you probably heard that news,
Sanctions and membership growth slowing.
So, briefly, on the Covid‑19 challenges. The RIPE database had to transition to fully remote work in March. Doing so, aiming for zero impact on the service levels, and I believe that we have done fairly well on that. Unfortunately, all regional meetings had to be postponed, but we were determined to do the RIPE 80 meeting and we have also started to do the membership lunches as virtual events. So this has been a great effort by staff to make this meeting happen, and I really want to extend the thanks to everybody who contributed to this.
And this is also a lesson learned from moving forward, that how can we do even more interaction with members through virtual channels which may have a bigger effect even when we can start to travel again?
Training courses. Remote. Payment periods for membership fees were extended for three months. The board figured out it's not good to chase money in the middle of this crisis, so let's extend the deadline by three months. And we have been using the systems that we have to monitor the impact of the Covid‑19 on Internet stability. So there has been a RIPE Atlas virtual hackathon and there are a couple of articles on RIPE Labs on the ghost office and working together while apart.
Now, in the past, we have said that the RIPE NCC doesn't have any direct impact on the operations of the Internet. I mean, if we registered IP addresses and if we don't do that for a day or a week, the Internet will still work. With the introduction of RPKI, we are suddenly introduced into the chain of production. So, when the RPKI service had an unfortunate outage, that actually affected operations of the Internet. And the board has actually, through the budget last year, put extra focus on the resilience of the RPKI infrastructure and we are now working on utilising the knowledge that we have from operating other high availability services like the RIPE database, like the k.root, also into the RPKI structure.
We have the challenge with sanctions, this is not technical at all. As you may know, both Iran and Syria is in our service region and two members in Iran and one in Syria were recently found to be on the EU sanctions list. And if you think it's trivial to monitor who is on that list at a certain point in time, across all our economies, we have different character sets, we have different way of representing names. So it's not as easy as you could think to identify who is actually on the list at any point in time.
We do, however, believe that registration of Internet number resources should not be affected by political disputes, and that is also sanctions. So, the RIPE NCC are taking steps to make sure that we can deliver services to these companies, these members, within the limits of the law, because the sanctions law is strict, the Netherlands is strict on this, so we have to apply for exemptions on this, and there will be more details in the operational update on this, but the board and the RIPE NCC is really committed to do whatever we can to make sure that members are not affected by this.
I mentioned the membership growth, and you can see that it's still growing. It's not going down.
There has been a new release in the Atlas, you know all the hardware Atlas probes, and we now have a software version of this so you can deploy that as a virtual machine.
There's been some improvements on RIPE Stat. There is a new prototype UI available to everybody now. And we're also collaborating with other RIRs on this development.
You are familiar with the routing information service. And that provides you information for a safer and more stable Internet. And we are making to make sure that users know exactly what RIRs can do for them and if you have suggestions for that, please e‑mail us at this e‑mail address.
One of the really interesting new services from the RIPE NCC, and I say this because, looking forward into the future, we may see that the registry business will be very different with the associations, so moving into other areas like professional certifications in order to increase them, the sort of value of knowledge and make sure that people can sort of document their knowledge in the area that we are working, is really great. So, you can now be certified as a RIPE database associate and we will launch the six fundamentals analyst and IP security expert later this year.
And there has been vouchers assigned to each LIR, and you may also see that if you look at the goodie bag for this meeting, there are some vouchers in there, so if you have any questions about this, please contact the exams [at] ripe [dot] net.
And that was it for now. So, I'll hand back the floor to the chairs.
KURTIS LINDQVIST: Thank you, Hans Petter. In the interest of time, I think we are going to hold questions until after the session ‑‑ after the break, I mean. So, we will come back to Hans Petter's presentation at the start of the next session, but I will say go for the break now and start the Kahoot quiz and we'll all meet back here again at ‑‑ well, in 15 minutes‑ish. So. Thank you, Hans Petter.
HANS PETTER HOLEN: Thank you, Kurtis.
KURTIS LINDQVIST: And then over to the quiz.
(Coffee break)
