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Closing Plenary
Thursday, 14 May 2020
5 p.m. (CEST)

HANS PETTER HOLEN: There are so many buttons to press to get this rolling.

Sorry about that. Some people in this panel actually started to send me messages in the place so I lost any sense of time. So thank you for that, you know who you are.

So going back to the topics under the Working Group Chair topics.

Each Working Group today has its own procedure for selecting the Working Group Chairs, and the reason for that is, you can say, entirely my fault because I was not able to establish consensus among the Working Group Chairs back in 2013. There was a proposal on the table then, but following discussions, there was no movement between the people in favour and the people against this proposal, so, I threw my hat in the ring and said why don't you go and document how you do this today.

And I regret it ever since. The accountability task force has since then pointed at the same thing and they haven't said that we had to do something but they said consider aligning the process for selecting Working Group Chairs across the community. And this has been discussed a couple of times. Some people may or may not agree with this, but I think it's actually worth listening to this recommendation, especially since we now have a formal process for selecting the RIPE Chair and the Working Group collective have an important role in that process in actually selecting a Chair interim if needed.

JAN ZORZ: Hans Petter, sorry for interrupting, Carsten is suggesting that it might be good for the Chair of the upcoming session to make people aware that the first agenda item, the WG Chair Collective, got already kicked out in the last session.

HANS PETTER HOLEN: Yes, maybe I should do.

So I can recap that. So, under that topic, WG Chairs Collective ‑‑ there were three agenda items. One was the Working Group Chair Collective is responsible for, and we dealt with that at the end of the last session, and now I am into recommendation 7 and then we have the Working Group Chair support at the end of this. So, going back to this one.

We have as many procedures as we have Working Groups today and the recommendation is to look into this. There are also other things that has happened since last time. I am a bit worried since I don't seem to show up in the live stream, just let me check that ‑‑ it's is the live stream working? I only have a picture of Jan Zorz in there. Could some of the technicians confirm whether we have ‑‑

JAN ZORZ: Yeah, it's working, and Peter Koch says "I see you".

HANS PETTER HOLEN: Very good. I have a live stream on a different computer and I can't see that working, but that could be for some other reason.

Anyway, at the last meeting, we had the unfortunate event that none of the Routing Working Group chairs were able to plan the meetings, so we had to invent a process to appoint some interim volunteers to start that before the meeting and we selected them at the meeting. But since every Working Group had separate procedures nobody knew how to do this.

Many of the procedures also describe how to do this at physical meetings and now we have a situation where we have virtual meetings. Maybe it's possible, maybe it's easy to adapt, maybe it's not, that's also something that should be looked into.

I have also had feedback that it's really a bad idea to select people in open ballots as we do on the mailing list in some Working Groups today where there is the candidate being proposed and then some respond yes, that's a great idea, and so on. Some thinks that the process goes too fast. Once somebody is proposed there is a lot of support, and then that stops others from proposing themselves. Some say that the incumbent always wins. There is lack of understanding of the process. And some have asked me what is really the qualification to become a Working Group Chair and who checks that?

So, the potential solutions to this:
Yes, we could do as we do for the RIPE NCC Executive Board, publish the candidates on the web before soliciting inputs ‑‑ supporting statements. That could chill down the start of the process, make it more open for people to look into. Maybe we should document qualifications and have somebody sort of pick the chairs based on qualifications and merits. And then it's who decides and how does one decide should it be a NomCom, should it be a RIPE Chair vice‑chair, should it be the Working Group itself?

And I think these are questions that there are many opinions and, in order to move forward on this, what I'm actually doing, rather than devising some recipe here, is to call for a task force to start to work on this. And I think that that task force shouldn't only consist of Working Group Chairs. It should be with members from the community. And what I propose as the mandate is to evaluate the current processes and gather community input for the suitability for the existing procedures, and propose a way forward.

So it's a very open mandate but really a clear timeline, have an evaluation by the next meeting, gather input during the next meeting and proposal by RIPE 82.

So it should be rather easy to accept the proposal if somebody wants to volunteer to do this.

So, I don't really expect anybody to volunteer to do this here so I'll send out a call for volunteers on the mailing list after the meeting.

Should I pause here for questions? I don't see anyone in the ‑‑

JAN ZORZ: There are currently no questions. Oh, there is one from Raymond Jetten:

"The Working Group chairing is a volunteer work. I think it's enough for every Working Group to have a procedure in place. Since no two groups are the same."

HANS PETTER HOLEN: And that is one of the opinions. The other opinion is that, seriously, this is really the same and the community at large should have a clear procedure and it should be well understood and it should be the same. That seems that this task force needs to look into this and see if this it be ‑‑ these needs can be aligned.

JAN ZORZ: Carsten is saying: "RIPE‑list at question mark?

HANS PETTER HOLEN: So soliciting volunteers for the task force definitely at that list (sound gone)...

JAN ZORZ: No open questions.

HANS PETTER HOLEN: Then another one, since it was mentioned in the Q&A here is regarding Working Group Chair support. So, we have, through all the years, said that the RIPE meeting is a meeting not a conference, and we expect the Working Group Chairs to participate as any other members and fully fund themselves. From time to time, the question has come up and it's been addressed to the RIPE Chair for support. Currently, the mechanism that is in place is not well documented anywhere but the RIPE Chair has the possibility to waive the meeting fee or ask the Managing Director of the RIPE NCC to waive the meeting fee and, so far, when I have had such a question from Working Group Chairs, I have reluctantly passed that request on and it's always been approved by the managing director. But this is not ‑‑ this is not open and transparent.

So this was brought then to the Executive Board after being discussed on the Working Group Chairs several times and every time the conclusion among the Working Group Chairs was that strong voices have argued against this proposal.

And then it was raised to the Executive Board in December 2018, and they tasked the RIPE Chair to make a draft procedure.

So, you can find the action point in the board minutes, and this has taken quite a while because there has not been a sort of strong consensus that this is a good idea. But at the Working Group Chairs' lunch at this meeting, I presented this, and basically what I have done is copy and paste the mechanism for the RIPE fellowship and the mechanism is then that, upon request, the Working Group Chairs can receive a full‑week ticket for the RIPE meeting, economy travel to and from home country for the RIPE meeting, and five nights accommodation near the RIPE meeting venue. This is exactly the same as a RIPE fellow receives.

It should be open and transparent. It should be public who gets this support.

It's limited to only one Chair per working group per meeting and the decision is done by the RIPE Chair and vice‑chair or whoever they might delegate this to. And the selected Working Group Chair will be expected to attend the entire RIPE meeting, Chair the Working Group session, attend the Working Group Chairs lunch and other relevant Working Group Chair meetings. And register with the affiliation of their Working Group so that it's quite visible that this is not sponsored by their company.

And there was no ‑‑ actually no objections to this at the latest Working Group Chairs lunch; therefore, I decided to present it here as well, because before no formalising this and forwarded it to the RIPE NCC Executive Board, I really want to hear what the community thinks about that. And since I don't expect you to queue up at the mic now, I intend to send an e‑mail to the RIPE list after the meeting with a copy of this proposal, and solicit input before 14th June, that's a month from now, four weeks, because there is the RIPE NCC Executive Board meeting right after the 14th June, so that they can get this proposal on the table and they can decide what it do with it.

I also propose to put that we review this after two years so that we can see how this goes.

So, any questions to that proposal?

JAN ZORZ: Well, Mohamad Amer Alshishakly is asking: "What's your programme for Middle East countries?"

HANS PETTER HOLEN: There is no special programme for mid‑east countries regarding the Working Group Chairs. This will be open for anybody who is selected as a Working Group Chair.

JAN ZORZ: Benedikt Stockebrand. "As a Working Group co‑chair I would rather pay the expenses myself and avoid dealing with people becoming Chair just to cut expenses. Doing this on as needed basis appears a very good approach. As long as it stays an exception rather than the general norm. We shouldn't just watch out that it stays like this so this really seems a good approach to me."

HANS PETTER HOLEN: Thank you for that, Benedikt.

And then the list of questions was empty.

JAN ZORZ: Yes.

HANS PETTER HOLEN: This goes too smooth, but then you have the opportunity to comment on this on the mailing list.

DANIEL KARRENBERG: Mohamad has actually put a little bit more in the chat what the explanation was. If you check your chat, Jan, and maybe copy it, I don't seem to succeed.

HANS PETTER HOLEN: I can read out the question there:

"Can you be more specific who you address and what you mean by 'programme'? I mean, the RIPE" ‑‑

DANIEL KARRENBERG: That was me. The one underneath that.

"I mean, the RIPE, if there are any specific things to do in mid‑countries? Thanks."

So if you ask about the RIPE in general and the RIPE NCC, the RIPE NCC has been supporting MENOG for years, so that is one of the things that we are doing in the Middle East region and the RIPE NCC also has membership lunches in all countries and has visited quite a few of the Middle East regions.

As for participation on RIPE meetings, we have a general fellowship programme that anybody can apply for and the there is also a RACI programme that anybody can apply for. None of these are specific for the Middle East but they are certainly open for the Middle East and definitely also used by participants from the Middle East.

So I hope that answers some of that question.

JAN ZORZ: The question and answer queue is now empty and would I like to ask every participant to write the questions into the Q&A section. I cannot monitor multiple things at the same time.

HANS PETTER HOLEN: If I look at the time, then I think maybe I should move onto the last agenda item, because this community session ends at 17:30 and then we are going into the Closing Plenary. So, I will jump on to the RIPE Code of Conduct. Because I think that's a very important topic, and the first thing I really want to emphasise is, what I said in the opening as well.

RIPE have, and have had for quite some time, a meeting Code of Conduct. We also have a mailing list Code of Conduct, as you probably have seen, being discussed over the last couple of weeks.

I also believe that the RIPE NCC Executive Board at one point said this this Code of Conduct and mailing list conduct should also apply to all RIPE NCC events but that has not been put into operations yet. So there has been a Code of Conduct in place for a long time and there has been a mechanism for handling violations of the Code of Conduct with so‑called trusted contacts. And they have received special training in mitigation.

And if you look at the Code of Conduct on the website, you will also see that there are some specific language what can happen if you don't obey to the Code of Conduct such as being denied access to the meeting.

Now, we did have, or do have a diversity task force that has worked on those. That task force decided not to have a Chair, and the mandate of that task force is very broad and there is no clear timeline. So what I'm proposing to move forward here is, again, throwing out the question on the solution here is to set up a specific task force for developing the Code of Conduct? And my proposed mandate for that task force is to review the work done by the diversity, review and incorporate the community comments and RIPE NCC impact assessment, and then my proposal here is to split this into three documents and seek consensus for them individually.

The reason for proposing this is that this is the approach we took when we were defining the process to select the RIPE Chair. We started with the role description, then we had a document of the NomCom and then we had a document on the selection process.

So, what I think could be a potential way forward is to have one document describing the Code of Conduct because my reading of the new proposal is that it is not significantly different in the wording from the current Code of Conduct, and it should be easy to reach consensus on that document.

The second part here is who enforces the Code of Conduct? And that could be put into a separate document like selecting the trusted contacts, Code of Conduct committee, or whatever you want to call it, but it also contains some interesting discussion on how do we deal with this on mailing lists, a Code of Conduct mailing list has been the responsibility of Working Group Chairs, should it still be? And how do we want to do that? I think that document is slightly more complicated, but I still think it should be fairly easy to reach consensus on that.

I think from reading the comments and the community input and also some of the RIPE NCC impact assessment, is that the procedures for the trusted contacts, how they should work, how they will protect the sort of rights of both parties in a conflict and what means they can do either alone or in consultation with the RIPE Chair or the meeting organisers, is where the rough edges are and where we are rather far from consensus. I mean, this is my personal assessment of that.

And I think that document may take some longer time. But I think, getting the first two in place and while working with them, establishing a common understanding of where we want to go with the third one, that would be my proposal for moving forward.

Now, any time any task force should have a timeline. So, what I saw from the database task force that we put together, we wrote a rather extensive and well‑thought‑through mandate and timeline, but they still decided that they wanted to work a bit on that and improve that.

So I haven't put too much effort into this, but I'm saying that, well, let's get the draft for the Code of Conduct for the next RIPE meeting, let's get the trusted contacts in Code of Conducts Committee done by the one after there and aim for the procedures for the trusted contacts after RIPE 83.

And my challenge then to the room is, if you care about this and want to speed this up, please raise your hand and volunteer for the work.

So, thank you. Any questions? So this challenge I will also post on the RIPE list to call for volunteers for this committee and I will solicit some potential candidates for the chairs and co‑chairs here, but don't be shy to volunteer yourself if you are interested in this work.

JAN ZORZ: The Q&A section is actually empty. Peter Koch is coming in: "The plan assumes that the Phase 1 passes, otherwise no need for a committee."

HANS PETTER HOLEN: Well, as we do have a Code of Conduct today, I think that revising that and see if there is any significant changes in the proposal that needs to be in the Code of Conduct part should be fairly simple. I think the trusted Code of Conduct, they are today or has been in the past selected by the RIPE Chair. Whether the community wants to continue with that, well then it's very simple to write the second document. But then it's documented. And if they want to have another mechanism, there is already a draft in the Code of Conduct from the diversity task force.

JAN ZORZ: Sandra Bras says that you have one volunteer from the IFC, that is Brian Nisbet from HEAnet.

HANS PETTER HOLEN: Thank you Brian.

JAN ZORZ: Denesh Bhabuta is also raising his hand to be on this task force:

"As long as it's okay for me to be on both the diversity and COC task force, I am already on the other one."

HANS PETTER HOLEN: Yes, that is excellent. And of course it's okay to be on both task forces. I believe that the reason I'm doing this is really to solicit a bit more commitment from the participants and a timeline here.

JAN ZORZ: Leo Vegoda is also a volunteer.

HANS PETTER HOLEN: Excellent. Now we have three men volunteered for this committee, so let's have four women as well so we get some balance in life. You don't have to volunteer right now, I will post this on the list. And that leaves us almost four minutes for any other business.

So open mic. Any other business you want to discuss? I see people have started to discuss food here, dinner or breakfast, depending on where you are.

JAN ZORZ: Yeah, but not in the Q&A section. There is one coming from Randy Bush.
"Do we need a task force on task forces?"

HANS PETTER HOLEN: Randy, I am so glad that you asked that question, and thank you for volunteering to chair that task force, and of course the implementation and follow‑up on that, I am so happy to leave to the next RIPE Chair and vice‑chair.

JAN ZORZ: I think we are in the clear here.

HANS PETTER HOLEN: So that means that we are at the end of the Community Plenary ‑‑

JAN ZORZ: Anna Wilson just asked, maybe she was just typing all this time:

"This has been a remarkably ambitious meeting and I am really, really impressed with how well it's gone. Thanks so much to the whole team involved for all the work. Anna."

HANS PETTER HOLEN: And thank you for the kind words, Anna, and I really want to pass that onto the RIPE NCC staff, the PC and the Working Group Chairs for doing the work here.

JAN ZORZ: I would also like to give plus one to what Anna said. Great job.

HANS PETTER HOLEN: But then even if the Community Plenary is over, but then we immediately shift to the Closing Plenary.

JAN ZORZ: Absolutely.

HANS PETTER HOLEN: And I'm not really sharing that. I know I'm I am giving the last presentation, but I haven't seen it. Isn't there somebody to talk before me, isn't that correct?

BRIAN NISBET: There are a couple of people to talk before you. So, thanks, Hans Petter. This is Brian Nisbet. We have three things in this Closing Plenary.
The first bit, hopefully quite short, which is the results of the PC elections. Thank you again, it's really vital and I think this meeting has shown as much as anything else, it's vital that we have an active Programme Committee for the RIPE meetings. And it's been a really interesting challenge to work on this one along with the excellent NCC staff.

We had six candidates, which is great for the PC and we're always looking for more candidates like that. And the two people who were elected to the PC for another four‑meeting term were Peter Hessler and Wolfgang Tremmel. So, thank you to everyone who put themselves forward and congratulations to Peter and Wolfgang.

That is that on the PC elections. So I think we are now moving into the RIPE 80 technical report, which Menno will be presenting.

MENNO SCHEPERS: I was thinking maybe to put some music in the background, I hope you hear this because ‑‑ you have been hearing this stuff all week already, not all week, the last couple of days. So here is the technical report. Normally it's all about us setting up the network in the venue, but this week there was no venue to set up for us. But we have been all working from home. Here you see the group of people who were helping out the chairs with the sessions and the presenters during the meeting: Andrea, Marco, Menno, Razvan, Javier and Jord ‑‑ there were also a lot of other NCC staff helping out at the same time, so it's really a joint effort from everybody.

Also, we got a lot of help from Martina.

Then, let's look at some graphs. Actually, there are no graphs. The server, the server was up and running but no Wi‑Fi connections, unfortunately.

So, we had a virtual RIPE meeting. Back in March, we started looking into our options because it started looking like Berlin wasn't going to happen.

BRIAN NISBET: If I could just interrupt for one second. I think if you could just maybe turn the background music off, I think that might aid some people enjoying the presentation. Thanks.

MENNO SCHEPERS: Then we looked at several webinar forums. Actually, none of them turned out to be perfect. Zoom, however, we were already using that in the office by NCC staff, and we were looking at something that had to perform very well with a lot of attendees. So, we chose Zoom, and we first got a Zoom webinar 1,000 licence, so that's for 1,000 attendees, but we ended up having to upgrade it when we saw that we went over 1,000 registrations.

Then the meeting set‑up. Well, I did go to the office to set up a couple of MAC‑minis that we normally use for the RIPE meeting, I set it up in the office in a storage room, and we had one MAC‑mini as a production server, or remotely accessible by us. And we all VNCed into that and also SSHed into it to make sure that the latest movies and intermission slides and everything was there, and ‑‑ to what we did during every session, we VNCed in and upgraded RSLs to become co‑hosts and from our own laptops at our own homes we upgraded the panelists so they could present and we did some work to keep everything going.

We tried to keep it as simple as possible, but still, VNCing into an 06 with seven of us is quite, you know, can be quite messy, especially when you see the mouse cursor moving while you want to do something, but it moved out very as well in the end.

So, here is is a picture of my setup. And so we had two co‑hosts in the Zoom session, and we were all chatting to each other and to the presenters and chairs. It went through e‑mail, Zoom, IRC, but also WhatsApp and other things, but it sometimes was a bit messy, but that was all in the background and you hopefully didn't notice much of that, but in the end we didn't run into any big problems fortunately.

Then, we also had stenography, we tried to use it together with the Zoom, but the transcript in Zoom. Here is a screenshot of when we gave it a go and you see it's a bit like ‑‑ it didn't look very good. So we decided to put the stenography on the website instead of showing it here in Zoom, and yeah, that worked out very well. But that's also it for me and my slides, but I'm happy to answer any questions if there are any.

BRIAN NISBET: Do we have any questions? I wonder how the tech team is going to replicate the exercise you normally get for rigging an entire hotel for Wi‑Fi and everything else?

So we do have a couple of actual questions. Do we have any information on the peak number of users on Zoom at ‑‑ the peak Zoom users?

MENNO SCHEPERS: I don't know exactly, but what I saw for the first day there was 1,000 unique visitors and the second day it was a bit less, I think 700‑and‑something, and for today I don't know exactly. But I think in the end for Zoom, like the Zoom registration numbers were around 1,200‑and‑something, so, I think most of them did have, you know, have a look at the sessions, but some of them didn't log in, but yeah, those numbers, I hope that we can publish some of that later.

BRIAN NISBET: I think that there is interest in the Zoom numbers and the stream numbers, so I'm going to look at all the ones that are here, and say that they will be published later by yourselves.

There is also some interest in the, if we have any kind of knowledge on the bandwidth usage of both streams, but again, if that's something that you can publish later or otherwise.

MENNO SCHEPERS: That's not something I can answer because for Zoom I wouldn't know actually, but for the web stream that we have on the website, there might be some numbers for that, we can look into that.

BRIAN NISBET: Just looking at these. Alexander: "I don't know what you mean by graph participation". Again, I think that's the same number of streams and things.

MENNO SCHEPERS: And we have numbers, but graphs I think is a bit difficult. I didn't see graphs in the Zoom web interface.

BRIAN NISBET: After no questions and hardly any questions in the other things they have all just come flooding out now.

Erik Bais is wondering "Did you have any people who didn't like working with Zoom?"

MENNO SCHEPERS: Yes, plenty. But also, a lot of people who like working with Zoom. We anticipated this, of course, already and especially with the whole security issues around Zoom, but what we did notice is that, in the end, I think most of the participants were very happy with how it turned out. Some people with, you know, Linux desktops sometimes had issues with, but still, most of those were also fixed quite easily and because Zoom has also a Linux client, I think that many people were also satisfied with that and some people also had to use it in the web browser, which for most of them was all worked. It wasn't perfect, so some people complained, but it worked out in the end.

BRIAN NISBET: Okay. Just working through the rest of these. Will Hargrave asked: "Is it possible to get the transcript live by other method other than the streaming web page?"

MENNO SCHEPERS: We tried to get the transcript live as a ‑‑ like as a small window, an extra shared window in Zoom, which didn't turn out to be possible within the webinar, because with a normal Zoom meeting you can have two, I think you can have two persons presenting, sharing slides at the same time, so one window could have been the transcript. And we also tried to share the transcript as a fake webcam so that one of the panelists would show up as the transcript. But this also didn't work out in the end. So, it really ‑‑ we chose then to have a web browser, a web page with the transcript in it.

BRIAN NISBET: We may not to get through all of these. I am conscious of time. Kurt Kaiser is asking: "Will you post the recordings?" We have all already published on the meeting website and have been with the usual amazing speed of the technical team.

Markus Zeilinger from the University of Applied Sciences of Austria:

"If there will be another virtual RIPE meeting, are there any plans for using something other than Zoom?"

MENNO SCHEPERS: At the moment, we haven't looked at that yet.

BRIAN NISBET: Again, Markus and others are again reiterating the great work. There is a request from a couple of people to maybe publish the Spotify play list of the music that was done during the week along with your other stats, there seems to be a lot of people out there who like elevator music and light jazz.

MENNO SCHEPERS: I'll ask the meeting team if they can publish that.

BRIAN NISBET: I think ‑‑ I am just going to look through ‑‑ there is ‑‑ there are: "Any plans to also provide an Open Source webcast stream upload option for in the future?"

MENNO SCHEPERS: I don't know. But sounds interesting to look at. So, yeah...

BRIAN NISBET: And I think a suggestion as much as a question from Andreas Wittkemper, this is for the PC as well, is:

"If there are more virtual rooms, could there be side rooms created where people could talk during coffee breaks etc. "

MENNO SCHEPERS: I think this is interesting feedback, but we'll look at improving, of course, for the next time.

BRIAN NISBET: And I am just ‑‑ there is a couple of other things very briefly.

So, from Nurani Nimpuno:

"The online presentations have worked remarkably well, a suggestion for next meeting to explore ways for more interaction between them and from participants."

That's something we're all going to be discussing.

I think that's, Peter, I am assuming your mysterious Wi‑Fi ‑‑ Peter Hessler asks about the fixing of the mysterious Wi‑Fi traffic spike on Wednesday evening.

MENNO SCHEPERS: I can't say anything about that.

BRIAN NISBET: Okay. Listen, lots of remarks of thanks and great work and the feedback there as well throughout all of those questions. So thank you.

I will pass back to Hans Petter for his closing remarks.

HANS PETTER HOLEN: Thank you Brian. I have to press seven buttons to get the presentation in the right spot. So...

Closing Plenary:

HANS PETTER HOLEN: Thank you everybody for a very interesting RIPE meeting. It has been the first meeting of its kind as a virtual meeting. When we started to discuss this, there were voices saying that let's skip it altogether. I'm really glad we didn't do that.

If you look at the regular RIPE meeting, there'd be in between 700 and 800 and maybe a bit above 800 registered for the last couple of meetings. This time we were 2002 registered and 1,300 viewers per day on average.

I mean, this is more than twice as many as we would normally have, which I think is really impressive. So I'm to glad that we did go ahead with this.

Zoom webinar. Popular live stream actually increasing during the week. So, I guess a lot of people were happy with watching it. I hear a lot of these comments with interaction and I think some further research into that, I propose that to the tech team, if possible, because my observation, and this is entirely subjective is that we have had a lot of questions asked by different people and we have had more questions and less of long monologues disguised as questions but it's a different dynamic, so maybe a bit of both and maybe what we need to do is basically come up with a requirements list for the big vendors of meetings, we definitely won't marry it too soon, but I don't think there are that many platforms that could be done this; there may be some, but anyway.

So where are the people from? Well, Germany, since Berlin is in Germany. We're virtual, but anyway, Germany is big, Britain is big, the Netherlands is big, Italy is big and the US is number 3, they are usually much higher up on the list. So this is great. And we have had participants from 111 countries.

I would really like to extend thanks to all the Working Group Chairs for making this happen. Some of the Working Groups decided not to meet during this meeting. One of them, the DNS Working Group, used the opportunity to do something radically different, so they are doing monthly sessions to discuss DNS things, so if you are interested in DNS, please join them and see how that works. And that's a challenge that I will pass on to other Working Groups as well. Have a look at this technology that we have used now and request support from the RIPE NCC. We can support you in doing smaller sessions in between the meetings definitely.

So, I would like to extend thanks to Jim for starting the IoT Working Group and chairing it through the start‑up phases. So, I should have had an applause button here now to push, so thank you very much, Jim. He has stepped down as a Working Group Chair. And then, the IoT Working Group were not able to select a Chair according to its own process. So, that brings back to my previous slide on why this may need a review, and I was pretty surprised as RIPE Chair that that actually left the task on me to pick the next Chair from the two candidates.

And after considering the candidates, reviewing their resumes and the substance of the discussion on the mailing list and the contributions, I decided to select Constanze as the new co‑chair of the IoT Working Group. So, congratulations. And really extend my thanks to Peter Steinhaeuser for volunteering to chair.

That brings me to the next slide, which is on the RIPE Programme Committee. Without the Programme Committee we wouldn't have had any content on the Tuesday, so, I'm extremely grateful for that and for the work you did in contacting all the speakers and asked them can you really present virtually and then with the changed format, the changed timing and everything, you have done a great job in adapting to this and I am really eager to hear the evaluations afterwards and how, if we should do this, if we have to do this once again.

So, great work, thank you.

The PC has two outgoing members, Ondrej and Peter, so thank you to you guys. And there were elections and Wolfgang and Peter were elected.

So if you missed out the RIPE Community Plenary, we went through the NomCom update, the IANA numbering services community review committee report, the RIPE database task force requirement update, and some topics around the Working Group Chairs collective and you will see more about that on the RIPE list if you missed it. Also on the RIPE Code of Conduct and the next steps there. We will publish the minutes of these sessions on ripe.net.

And then there is a slide here with a question mark on and no speaker notes. So what is this? Oh, maybe it's about the prices.

So, the prices this time is a bit different. So, the first comment at RIPE 80, the winner is Aleksi Suhonen for the question "What's the name of the dog"?

So the dog's name was Imeeda...
If you missed that one, she seems to be jumping into my slide. Anyway, first virtual registration, Mohammed and congratulations to the three first podium Kahoot winners, Dimitris, Tuda and Felippe.

And then, of course, we want feedback.

Even more now than otherwise, so, please fill in the feedback form after this, and if I seem a bit distracted now it's that I'm seeing the chat on the side here and there is a lot of questions here is that is there anything that I have forgotten? And of course that is to thank our sponsors, Twitch, NTT, Brenac and Carrier Colo and then welcoming you to the next RIPE meeting in ‑‑ and that is actually the big question that we haven't decided yet ‑‑ whether that will be a virtual meeting as well or whether we will be able to feed physically. I think if you asked me today, I would think it is hardly likely that we'll be able to meet physically but the decision will be made as soon as the NomCom has appointed a new RIPE Chair and vice‑chair because they should be involved in that decision.

And as a closing remark, I also want to thank the community for trusting me with the job as RIPE Chair for more than five years now, and I also want to repeat my commitment that I will step down as RIPE Chair as soon as the NomCom has appointed a new RIPE Chair and the NomCom has ensured me that they will do so as quick as they can so that I won't have any real or perceived conflicts between being the Managing Director of the RIPE NCC and the RIPE Chair.

So by that ‑‑

REMCO VAN MOOK: Somebody froze, I guess. You know, some things never change. What can I say?

(Secret Working Group)
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MARY McKEON, RMR, CRR, CBC
DUBLIN, IRELAND.