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RIPE NCC Services
10 May 2017
4 p.m.

KURTIS LINDQVIST: All right. Welcome everyone. So, this is your favourite Working Group, otherwise known as the NCC Services Working Group. So, welcome everyone, I am Kurtis, I am one of the co‑chairs. And we have first some housekeeping items. As those of you who have been here before, there'll be presentations in this slot who are part of the General Meeting and the General Meeting follows straight after this in the same room. If you haven't registered for the General Meeting, rather if you are you have then you are sorry. If you haven't picked up your registration badge and information from outside, now is a good time to do so.

We had a record number of attendees for the GM. That has a little bit logistical challenge and that when we do end here, please, please, please make your way out as quick as possible because the NCC staff need that time to turn this around for the GM and they can't have you in here when that's happening. So the moment we finish, please leave.

You will be assisted otherwise.

With that, we'll move onto the agenda. We have got a rather packed agenda. So, we'll start with the admin matters which I'm doing right now, NCC update, NCC Services future direction, and I think I now realise that I uploaded Dmitry's slide to Paul's slot. But maybe our friendly helpers ‑‑ sort it out afterwards. And the rest of the agenda.

So with that I'm going to get going onto the administrative matters. We have a scribe provided by the NCC, which is Amanda, thank you very much. We have the agenda now which I think we can approve. The minutes was sent out after the meeting and there was linked included in this with the e‑mail for this agenda and we got no comments. Can we approve the minutes? Minutes approved.

Then we are going to come to a little bit more of a touchy topic, which is the NCC Services Chair election. We should have had a Chair election this time, but the very short simple version is that me and Bijal screwed up and we missed to send out the announcement the two weeks before we should have had and we had a discussion, when we realised, we had a discussion what to do and we thought that rather than rushing an election process, we'll postpone it to the next meeting, I don't think there is any ‑‑ either way would have been, well, a violation of what we actually said. But we think having more time is a better way. We will move the Chair elections rotation for next time and I'm the one who is going to stand down and we'll do the election at the next RIPE meeting.

With that, I am done unless anyone has any questions about that? Comments? Views? If not I'm going to hand over to Axel.

AXEL PAWLIK: Good afternoon. Hello. Everybody welcome. I'm Axel, RIPE NCC, a quick update from our side.

You might have noticed, or you might not have noticed, RIPE NCC turned 25 very recently. It's a little bit scary, it's also nice to see, we see lots of new members, we see a growing community, the numbers go up and to the right mostly, that's exciting, a little bit scary. The Internet has become a thing more than we thought in the mid‑eighties, so hello, that's good. I stand to my promise to say that if you don't want us any more we go away, but more to the point, we adjust and we would like to continue to do what you want us to do and to be helpful in your lives and your businesses and your dreams as well of course.

Thank you all for being with us, for supporting us over the last 25 years. It's been quite a ride. I have only joined in '99 so I haven't seen the early days really, only from far away. I would like to say thank you to our members, to our community, thank you to our various board various who have kicked my behind when needed, but who have been nice. Also last but not least, a big thank you to all the RIPE NCC staff over the last 25 years, it's amazing to see that they turn up at unexpected places like a couple of years later when we have lost track of them for a little while, also it's nice ‑‑ it's sad to see, of course, always to see people going away. But it's great to see, great to see them coming back up, staying in the community, finding other ways to, you know, be helpful and stay within the RIPE community. It's great. So thank you very much, guys, you are good folk and I am proud to work with you.

Right. So, thank you to my Mum too.

A couple of numbers from the annual report of last year. So the numbers are all outdated by now, of course. 2,178 members over the course of last year. More than 3,000 IPv4 allocations. Nearly 2,000 IPv6 allocations. That's good. More than 3,000 attendees at RIPE NCC organised events, that does not include the training, more than 100 training courses with 2,000 participants, so loads of people that we get to see, which is lovely. More than 2 and a half thousand assisted registry checks done last year, and that sort of is a good number because it's sort of roughly in the order of magnitude we wanted to do them. Every member should be touched every three years ‑‑ we have more members now than we thought we would have, so we need to up the number there as well.

More than 9,200 active probes and we just heard the today's numbers, SLAs anchors lots of them, very helpful out there and terrifying number of 1.3 million RIPE Stat requests per hour. I don't want to know how much per year.

The report, you probably have seen it already, probably have printed it out and it's under your pillow at home and if you don't do that, then it's on the web.

Financial report, similarly on the web, of course. Surplus, relatively normal number there, €325,000 over the last year. But of course, that is after we distributed more than 4 million euros back to our members. Researches are still at 25 million, which is lovely. More than 100% of the total expenses of the year, that's where we within the to be roughly. 2% lower than budgeted that's good. Staff numbers, nearly 140 FTEs, cost per member decreased, that's always nice, my board really likes that and members like that. 8% lower than the year before. The full report on the web.

Up and to the right. I was saying two days ago that we are sort of over the 15,000. We are nearly at the 16,000. Not within a couple of days, but good numbers.

Focus in 2017. No surprise, should be no surprise, strong, secure, accurate registry, that's sort of the main focus point, enhancing RIR stability of our own RIR and together with the others. Good governance, accountability. Efficiency, cost per members needs to go down the that's lovely. So, I have a couple of slides about efficiency there. And lovely graphs that go down and to the right. That's strange. And of course engaging with members, with the community, with governments, regulators, sort of the outliers a little bit outside of the traditional tech community. Do that again.

Further focus. There was a survey last year, thank you again for feeding it in, we studied very carefully, we have the key findings out there in the survey report. Again, there is a page on the website. They can track what we are doing, what we have identified, where we have. There is good progress in most of those actions. So, we, again, listen to what you are say and we promise lots of things and then we do most of them as well.

Right. External engagement update.
There was a presentation at the last RIPE Meeting by Maria, we want to engage with more members in all parts of our service region and Paul will talk more about this this afternoon as well.

More information gathering. More analysis, more strategic positions for the benefit of our members and our community at large.

You have seen here and there talk about MoUs, so building stronger and slightly more formal more transparent, more relationship with other stakeholder groups. With some them we have worked together for many many years, but again, accountability. Transparency, it's good to document those things and we want to do that also more over the course of this year.

Good for the Internet initiatives. You remember probably Salam talking about this last time around, we have set up the Rob Blokzijl foundation. The foundation itself has established a board, and now they need to kick it off and get it to look at candidates for support.

We have, as a community, committed to the long‑term sustainability of the IETF and you remember a couple of people from the IETF and from ISOC being here and talking to you and the membership was generally positive about this, so we said we would give out a couple of 100 kilo euros contributions over the course of the next ten years, the first of those payments has been made, so that's lovely.

The next big thing that we are in the last moments of setting up is the RIPE NCC community projects fund. Again, there is a budget line in the budget for this year. The thing has been basically, the procedures and all that have been set up as far as we could. Now we are about to launch the thing and get the first call for applicants out for dispersement there before the end of this year certainly.

We talked about the Seed Alliance initiative. So developmentally focused initiative by the southern hemisphere RIRs, LACNIC, AFRINIC and APNIC and we thought we wanted to join that as well, we are looking at that still but for now we have decided to get all the other things running smoothly first and then look at the Seed Alliance again later on.

Registration customer services. Remember when we said IPv6 allocations are so terribly big we will never see members come back for more. Hey, no, we were not right. This has happened now. First subsequent IPv6 allocation, so that's a good thing. Assisted registry checks, I mentioned them. Earlier on we are targeting the less active members to be more efficient there. We are targeting the less active members we haven't seen in a long time. If we look at the statistics there those things are not only welcome but also quite useful. More than 80% result in some changes in our registry in the database, updated information. That is quite good.

Resource transfers. So many of them. High demand on resources, lots of things going on, you have seen the statistics. We also see the complexity of tickets rising, also here and there there is some shady things going on so we are very, very careful, you put your trust in us, so we need to live up to the expectations there. So increased levels of scrutiny we are looking at things very, very carefully because we do not want hijacks to happen. We have lots of in‑depth due diligence checks, just to prevent also some really high volume hijacks that sort of we stopped in their tracks, that's good.

The Executive Board has reconfirmed their marching orders to report any fraud that we see to the Dutch police force there and we do that of course.

Efficiency, I mentioned. We want to do this, we are doing this, we see good results, but maybe nearly more important or just as important is that we get the human contact still ongoing so that we talk to you and our members and we see that as very important as well.

While we work on automation and improving the interfaces and stuff.

So, accuracy of the registry is the focus.

Talking about efficiency. Reverse DNS was a pain to set up. Was a little bit complicated and resulted in quite a lot of questions and errors and tickets to the help desk. We have Wizard out there now and we look at the number of support codes we get and down and mostly to the right and mostly down. We have lots of new members coming of course so it's a little bit much up there in the end between January and February, but generally significantly less calls, which is good.

Secure single sign‑on. We have migrated more than 35,000 contacts, LIR contacts, to the new secure SSO, which is lovely too. Lots of nice new interfaces there.

We talked to you and you wanted us to reimplement the RPKI validator, we said we would do this. We haven't done that yet but we are starting in the third quarter of this year.

Again, nicer interface for you to manage your resource, look at your resources, my resources, interface in the database. All your allocations, all your holdings, nice overview of that, seeing the holes in there. Again, fix lame DNS and reverse routes and things like that.

So accountability. We have seen a presentation early on this week. We have talked about this for the last, feels like many years, primarily around ICANN, about the RIRs, we have done all that work and we are continuing to improve of course. But now the shift is happening also through the ICANN process, towards the communities and clearly communities are not incorporated, it's a little bit more subtle how the accountability would work there, so, we have the Task Force to examine the procedures to see is everything clearly documented and we would expect it to be, where are the holes and then we'll hear back from them where the holes are and what they recommend we do with those holes.

So, Chairs, Bill and Filiz, thank you very much for that.

ICANN, IANA update. The Numbering Services Review Committee has been established and Nurani reported about that on the Monday, I think. They are starting their work. That consists mostly at this point in getting themselves organised. We would expect not too much ongoing work over the year, but it's there, it's good.

We have ongoing the review of the ASO within the ICANN framework. That's supposed to be ‑‑ happen every five years and we have done our first five years ago, five and a half years ago, I think, so we are in the midst of that process and you have seen Jim and Tom, they have been talking to a couple of you already about, you know, your views and please be friendly and give them your mind.

Good things will come out of that, I believe, improvement is always a good thing, so we'll try to improve the ASO there and the setup within ICANN as much as is appropriate.

Then, accountability again within ICANN. The Work Stream 2 of the cross‑committee Working Group there. The main focus there, or the main intention that I support is to keep this thing out of the RIRs themselves because, hey, we have done our own thing. This should plainly look at accountability of the ASO and the works of the ASO within the ICANN field and the activities there.

Lots of new procedures around community powers that are new after the IANA stewardship transition, those things are new so we have to do something with it, we have to identify them, we have to see who does what in the division of tasks between the NRO Executive Council and the Address Council, so different people doing different things, different intentions.

And we look at that and again together with the ASO review, we'll arrive at improvement and things to do.

This one. Identify technology health indicators. The goal here is to have metrics to measure the health of the Internet's unique identifier systems. The health is a bit controversial and I hear maybe we'll drop that word and get something else. In any case, that's just a label. The RIRs are working closely together to look at the number resources and to, you know, set the initial strategy here and to draft metrics for our numbers and our registry. That work is mostly done and we'll have, soon, community consultation about that so we'll publish what we have. We'll do this in the second quarter of this year, there is a couple of weeks left so really soon. You'll see this being published and then we rely on your enthusiasm in commenting and telling us to improve those things or maybe you come up with better ideas than we had.

The plan is to have the final, the initial, final metrics document released by the end of the third quarter of this year.

And there is a General Meeting, you probably know about this, it will be in this room, so get out soon after this and come back in because we need you in there if you are a member.

If you are not a member and have an interest, well talk to me.

It's a closed meeting for members only.

We have an Executive Board of seven very enthusiastic individuals that guids our work at the RIPE NCC. They are elected by the members. Three seats are open, need to be refilled. We have five candidates, so it will be fun. There is real elections, that's always good. Whoever you elect, I hope you elect good people, the right people. I am happy to work with them. And I hope they give us the right directions to serve you even better than we did before in the last 25 years.

So, your participation, your direction, your engagement is essential, it's your association, and so, be there, come.

I think I am well within my time. If you have any questions, I am happy to entertain them, or we can wait until later. I don't know.

CHAIR: Any questions for Axel? No. Thank you, Axel.

(Applause)

So, in my eagerness to start on time and finish on time I actually forgot two announcements I was supposed to make for the PC. First of all, the PC elections are open until Thursday at 5:30, so please go and vote. And the second thing is for Friday morning, there is a Plenary Session on efforts to increase diversity in the community and at the meetings. And that will start at 9:30 on Friday, not 9:00, 9:30. Thank you.

Okay, that was the two announcements. With that, next on the agenda is Dmitry.

DIMITRY KOHMANYUK: Hi. Hello everybody. I'll try to be quick, because we have more speakers after me. I am here to, I guess, present ‑‑ show you a bit about ENOG, one of the regional meetings that RIPE NCC holds.

This is a bit of the story. In the beginning with the Moscow meeting and then a few people from the community proposed to convert it to the east European firmware Soviet Union countries meeting. It was great. It lasted for six years.

This is the entire lineup, where it has been. You can see it was seven of these in Russia, three in Ukraine, one in Azerbaijan and one in Yerevan. These are numbers which is hard to read. The numbers means participants from the local country and entire participants. These all exclude RIPE NCC staff.

You can see the biggest one is probably as big as some RIPE meetings, if not bigger, and there was one small meeting although it attracted less participants from Azerbaijan, hard to see whether it's good or bad but these are facts.

So these are numbers. Totally, we managed to handle about 3,600 people and about 80% of these were local. I would say that's not the happiest number I can see, but it's better than 90%.

So, I gathered some statistics based on excellent data. I was actually surprised. As you may know, there are two more events like that. There is a MENOG which covers Middle East countries which is about 15 countries, give or take. And if Palestine is a country, it's one more. These are total LIR counts. In these regions, this means that I include the definition of UN like I would include Greece in the EC, although I think Greece was not part of the EC meetings. Likewise, is Palestine in Israel? But I included them.

What it means, that, basically, roughly one in every six or seventh person in RIPE territory is coming from the region. And it's about 200 million people in total.

So, there was some announcement that was only sent to RIPE PC list and I am trying to be humorous here because I'm sure it was coming through other discussions I haven't been privy too and the discussion ‑‑ well, I mean the announcement resulted in discussion, and we didn't quite all agree there was a good idea. The idea was to change from two annual meetings, which are usually two days to one a year and to substitute this with something else. So, we forward this had to the mailing list. There were a bit of a comment but frankly not enough interest. I thought maybe nobody cares. I decide it had ask for a slot here. So these are as I summarised but of course we have RIPE staff to explain these alternative approaches. So either meetings in the country or events like member lunches, which, to me, don't really substitute, and maybe training courses and other events like it was mentioned today the government engagement and others. Okay. These are all not community driven. And these are reasons why I think there is no substitute. They are usually, at least of those I have been two one day events, they are done by RIPE NCC staff and not the PC members that are coming from the community. In the case of ENOG we have multiple PC members from various countries not just in the region but people say from Netherlands, United States. Likewise, I know about MENOG and the CPCs, they had multi‑country community which helps to attract other speakers. And yes in one country versus several countries although as I said the numbers is 80%, still it's better than 99%.

So, I view them all like RIPE marketing events in a good way. Like, somebody doesn't know what RIPE is about, they have this event. RIPE staff comes, RIPE staff talks and explains, gives Atlas probes out, stuff like that. Sure, it may help you to go further in your quest to become a better member of a community, but for people who are there already, well to me that's a bit of a shortcoming.

We had Moscow regional meetings before the ENOG meeting converged and even though most of the MENOG meetings had been in Russia, three in Ukraine, I do believe those present a valuable part of community resources. People in these countries often have less money. It may be harder for them to travel to main RIPE meeting, which is five days away from work and likewise. I am just saying that it may be reasonable to expect people to go to these.

I also heard, which is not confirmed, that the rough budget for these two meetings this year is about, in six digits which means it's a lot of money. I don't know exact external relations budget and maybe we should have a better transparency and have at least a single line on our report which says MENOG meetings X, RIPE general meetings Z and likewise, training courses I think those would be good numbers to show because I actually have no idea how much it cost the RIPE NCC to support the show.

Yet, if that estimate is true, the entire ENOG meeting budget represents about €7 per LIR. Well, guess what, it's not about the money but it always is so I'd like to mention that fact.

I have several ideas how we can make these events more affordable. The easy way is to choose cheaper locations, and charge people for dinner. These events have been completely free, so maybe that's another reason why they are so popular. One of my colleagues suggested require an ASN number for registration, I think that's too technical, but I have seen some random people at some of these events which haven't been part of that community at all and just came there for drinks, I mean social. And more money coming from sponsors versus RIPE NCC. Well, sure. The two last options to me sound a bit of too hard to do. Meaning like as much as I know about MENOG used to be somewhat independent of RIPE NCC, I don't know what its current status S so this would require somebody to step up and say we are going to underwrite this meeting and then it would transform all of the RIPE NCC as well. So these are more difficult options creating some organisation or external committees.

Anyway, these are two next events. So, that's coming up soon. We are still accepting lightening presentations, lightning talk presentations and the bell Russ is still in the planning. Unlike Russia bell Russ is easier to go to because they just abolished visa requirements for you citizens as long as you don't come for more than five years ‑‑ well, I think five years in Belarus you can only spend in some other way which I'm not going into. That maybe actually just exact time that you need to attend that meeting.

So, please come and participate, remote participation is sometimes available but not always.

I think these are our contacts. We have the discuss mailing list and we have official and unofficial Facebook groups. One is for announcement from RIPE NCC and other is just run by some members. And we have the page on feedback, I'm not sure if that actually works quite well.

So, I think I'm done so far I'll ask people to ask me if you have any time for that.

CHAIR: Sure.

AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Hello, my name is Jan Zorz and I am a random guy from the Internet community coming from the SE region. I like your presentation and as far as I understand, you need to solicit some feedback from ENOG community, what they think about this change proposal. So my question is, will you have this presentation at next ENOG meeting and try to get the feel of the room if they care or not.

DIMITRY KOHMANYUK: Of course, it may be a lightning talk because I may remove some of the data that is obvious to them, but yes.

AUDIENCE SPEAKER: I do not have questions to Dmitry, but I have answer for you. First of all, if you find Randy Bush and open [B&B] too boring, you are likely read the BoF which is to me on Thursday. This BoF was proposed before RIPE NCC privately started announcing its changes, but okay, you are also as a representative of one region, welcome to discuss it, how community could be developed more.

The second of all, actually the more local BoF proposed for ENOG also by me, not exactly same presentation, but a full scale BoF for exactly local community to resolve this problem to answer these questions, to become what ‑‑ trying to discuss what we could do on the way forward to such develop a community like RIPE community in western Europe. So, everyone welcome to BoF tomorrow and everyone welcome to ENOG meetings.

DIMITRY KOHMANYUK: Thanks. I like when people answer things. And, Jan you are welcome too, although I'm not sure if again the Russian visa is okay for you and I know your schedule is packed. I already have my tickets to ‑‑

RANDY BUSH: We used to hold INET, which was the leading for the whole world in various places, and then for instance in Africa we pushed it down to AFNOG and that got too centralised, so now I mean Sarah Alamain is running her fifth Sudan NOG, right, so, nets not talk about difficulty in poor countries. This is a beautiful slide. Look how many people are local to Kazakhstan. Start doing the Kazak NOG.

DIMITRY KOHMANYUK: Kazakhstan we didn't have, they applied. We had competition from them but they did not want this meeting.

RANDY BUSH: I have been in Yerevan, it is not in Russia, most definitely, so, do local NOGs, start fostering that instead of the centralisation, and just it's a further flow from RIPE holding the regional meetings, it's the next down. Somebody said in the previous session I was in that computer science is iteration. I disagree. It's recursion.

DIMITRY KOHMANYUK: By the way, the Backu meeting had less locals than non‑locals, as you can see in this, which is kind of an anomaly. Any other...

CHAIR: Okay. Thank you.

(Applause)

So can, next on the agenda is Paul to talk about the NCC outreach, actually.

PAUL RENDEK: Good afternoon everyone. My name is Paul Rendek and I am the Director of External Relations for RIPE NCC.

I am actually going to give you an idea of what our outreach looks like these days across the 76 countries of our service region.

So, but before I do that I'm going to give you some a little bit of background so we can put all this into context.

What is external relations?
External relations means a lot of things to a lot of different groups, a lot of different people, they would define this differently. At the RIPE NCC, this is pretty much our definition of external relations. Sorry about all the text on this slide.

Our external relations efforts at the RIPE NCC cover everything from public relations activity, capacity building style activities, coordination with other industry bodies or members, communities, governments and the like. And staying ahead of the curve. Being out there, checking out what's going on, checking out the trends that we see happening. Changes in regulation, anything that we would see affecting our operations at the RIPE NCC, or actually posing some kind of a threat to our, or the way we like to operate in this bottom‑up industry of self‑regulatory process.

And any changing environments that we see. So, external relations and what we do there is probably a little different than maybe some would define it.

So what do we do? We are the eyes and we are the ears of the RIPE NCC, or a big portion of that. Our members and our community come first. And I think that I need to stress this because I think a lot of people take a look at the group that does these efforts and they think that, oh, you just go out there and speak to governments and that's it. No. Actually the bulk of our work is done with our membership and our community first. Right. And they take up the bulk of our work.

And we can't really do anything without understanding your needs. Hence all the outreach efforts that come along with external relations.

And the RIPE NCC wants to position itself as a key player on the topics that matter to our members in the community because without this, we have difficulty in defending what it is that we do.

So who are our stakeholders? That word keeps flying around, it's not new to us, we hear it you will a the time around in the circles. What do the stakeholders mean to us? They are our RIPE NCC members of course, our community, governments, regulators, law enforcement, the academic community, the other ISTAR organisations, industry partners such as GSMA, triple E, these are the folks that we look at when we take a look at stakeholders. They have something to say or contribute, certainly to the community here, and of course into how the RIPE NCC might operate.

So, challenges, hot topics and our approach to these.
If we take a look at our membership I think you have seen various presentations, our membership is definitely changing. I think earlier on, you probably saw the core of our community would have been the core of our membership base. These days we have had this massive growth that's come up, I think it's fair to say a lot of these people have come for that last /22 and we don't niecely see how they would fit into the RIPE community or how they would participate in this process and actually coming up with things that drive the RIPE NCC to give the kind of service that is need to be done to its membership or even to the community.

So, when you get the likes of Prada and Porsche as your membership base, I am wondering whether Amanda is going to be running around with a Porsche in the middle of there and the next which is would be us giving away one of those, are we going to get a pair of Prada shoes over the break? I'm not sure if we are going to get those members here to meetings like this. What is it that they are wanting from the RIPE NCC? Or what would they want from something like the RIPE community? This is a challenge for us. We're actually working on this, on identifying what it is that we will give to those folks such as enterprise or even government bodies that are coming on board as members and maybe something different than the non‑traditional member that we see coming in.

And when you look at this evolution, we probably had LIRs at one stage, then we moved on to members, and then now what's going on here? I would never even want to utter the word 'customer', it's something we wouldn't say inside the RIPE NCC but how would Prada view itself? Would it view itself as a full‑on member contributing to all the pieces that you traditionally see happening? Our kind of workings? Or do they see themselves as something else?

And in this, when you take a look at these identifying all these changes that are happening, we need to see what these needs are throughout the entire service region, right. So, in doing this you need to strike a balance.

So, an over arching strategy that we have inside is we can only be effective if we position ourselves as a key player for the values that we hold strong and that are part of your expertise to our stakeholders. How do we achieve this? First we need to find out what everybody wants from us. And we are busy doing that. We have a handle on a bunch of areas, but we're finding out some of the other ones, again a challenge for us. Then figuring out what we can offer them. And how we can have the most effective impact in any of the efforts that we do, for instance in outreach or training or any of the kinds of things they're looking for from us.

The RIPE NCC service region. I just wanted to remind everyone, it's 76 countries across, it looks something like this when you map it out. Extremely diverse cultures, languages, ways of operating, thoughts, needs, so all of these things come up when you see ‑‑ when we go out there and engage with the different members that we have across the service region.

So what do we see as some of the hot topics and the challenge that we're seeing that across all of the service region. I have identified them up here. Regional diversity, it's big. People are at different stages of Internet development. There is diversity in the cultures, languages, they play in different ways of business operations. Getting our heads around this is really quite something, it takes a bit of energy. Providing data, everybody is looking for some kind of data coming out of the RIPE NCC. Whether it be what their country looks like in all the address space, whether they are comparing themselves to somebody else. Data, Atlas, everybody wants something from us in the form of data across the whole service region. Accountability. And again this thing means different things to different players out there.

Privacy, security, national regulations. In the past, this was a little bit easier, this is becoming more complex as we're going along and I will identify that throughout this presentation.

And engaging with the executive level. With the v6 efforts we probably have a kind of a tech will community covered from the technical side of operations covered quite well. We need to be engaging with this executive level, certainly on the area of IPv6 and we can see across the whole service region. And new technologies, IOT, it's a buzz word everywhere, that we see. Smart cities, they are all wanting something from the RIPE NCC. And then 5G, what do these new technologies mean for us coming in.

Across the region, our approach. We have tailored events and we are more focused on local events that we're having. We are reviewing and we're enhancing both RIPE NCC and RIPE accountability. We have the Task Force which you all know, they presented here, it was brilliant, we have spent a number of years working on RIPE's accountability, taking a look at our corporate governance structures, mapping them out. Making sure the different stakeholders were happy with the covet governance the RIPE NCC has, does it match their expectations? And managing relations and developing strategies with industry partners. We work with ICANN, ITU, ISOC, IETF, I mean this list goes on, EC3, GSMA, CENTR, sometimes we work with any one of these, sometimes a group, a sub‑net of these. Depending on the topic and what we're doing out there we will engage with them. Managing these relation is quite an effort in itself.

Formalising our existing relationships and forging new ones with key players, we constantly see new people coming into this space and we are looking at the RIPE NCC and actually looking at what their relationship would be with our organisation or even with our community.

And developing positions and messaging, we're seeing that a lot from different stakeholders. We have different governments approach us who want factual technical information from the RIPE NCC, and we are able, so far, to give this to any one of them that have come to us and we give them to everyone equally. So this is something that is our approach across all the regions.

So western Europe focus. What are they? Privacy, security, national regulations. This is big. This is really big across this part. Government's and LEA engagement, we are probably a bit more mature in this part of your service region than we are in the other one. Certainly a bit more advanced in our relations there. New technologies, IOT, this is ‑‑ we're seeing the time to market and the pressure, market pressure here. This is much higher than we're seeing in the other service regions when we're speaking to our membership out there. And networks and IXPs, the development part here is much further than maybe the other service regions we participate in a lot of NOGs, they are a lot more established here, IXPs, it is an export from Europe to the other parts of our service region, we can see that, right.

So what's the approach here? We're participating in a lot of these NOGs and IXPs. We have put aside the funding for that. We either send resources there in terms of money supporting them in sponsorship but, more importantly, they want to have someone from the RIPE NCC there engaging, so...

And we work with, when I mention the regulations part, you know, earlier on in the earlier days, we saw that the regulations were formed in the ITU, they talked about them in this space. The States was probably the one leading all this stuff with the regulatory areas of what was happening in telecommunications and Internet space and it was a copy and paste into another country and they modified it a little bit. That's changing. That's not really the landscape any more. A lot of these governments ‑‑ we're going to move faster ‑‑ so we're working actually with an external body that's giving us a lot of intelligence that we can keep up with the regulatory changes that are going on. We couldn't do that even with the staff that we have.

Managing our engagements in the global governance arena and working with stakeholders to understand their market pressures. We have become a member of AIOTI.

European Europe, central Asia focus. We have a demand for capacity building this this part. There is a lot of diversity the development in this region is very different and we're looking at targeted stakeholder events. We are looking at local event in this part. We had calls from folks in Armenia and in Georgia, Azerbaijan, they want us to come to their country, they want to do something local at home. They see what's going on in RIPE, they see the regional stuff. That's all fine but they always tell us, come here, we want to be here at home with you. And they see us as this neutral body that can pull together them in their local space. And we have got some geopolitical challenges there with trying to get people from one spot to the other if we're doing something on a regional basis.

So big focus on capacity building, new initiatives with stakeholders, we had our first government round table meeting in bell Russ, we had pretty much everyone from that, from eastern Europe and central Asia come. We had a seminar for law enforcement in the Ukraine, first time we have had that in that part of the world and we are going to the central Asian IGF.

More local engagement. More national local meetings as I mentioned and we're focusing on translations. The language, it's something that's particularly, something that they want to see in Russian mainly in this service region.

And we have got a project for this, for some community led translations of some of the documentation.

Middle East. Again, demand for capacity building. Way high up there. Targeted stakeholder events. Banking sector, they are a bit of a smaller part of our service region. So we were able to kind of isolate the banks in Lebanon, the banks in Bahrain, we see the big banking sectors there. We have managed to actually engage with these folks. Local community building, they are calling on us to help them with low can go NOGs. Geopolitical challenges, quite big in the Middle East. We want to reach out to our Syrian members, we pulled them to Lebanon, we wanted to reach out to our folks in Yemen, we pulled them to Jordan. When you want to deal with the Iraqis, Jordan not a bad place. It's different on how we engage but we have managed to engage with them all. Academic initiative, RACI, very popular with regulators and governments wanting to work with us in this space. IXP development, the biggest buzz word in the Middle East. It's a European export and he can see all the Europeans with their eyes on the Middle East, how are we going to develop this IXP market. It's come.

So the approach, the tailored training, banking sector, academia, regulators, IPv6 roadshows. They were actually fostered or they actually came out of the Middle East region and now it's moving into central Asia and Russia. We have an export coming out of the Middle East there. National IPv6 strategies for governments. We worked very closely with Saudi Arabia, now we have got Kuwait, Oman, Bahrain, Qatar, on our tails wanting to work with us for their national v6 strategies. We are helping to kick off some of the local NOGs: Iran, Palestine and Yemen. They have actually had some discussions with us on how they can get their local NOG off the ground.

Academic initiatives and we are seeing seen there as a centre of technical expertise. We are very careful in our approach on how we dealt with kind of governments. The governments are the ones that are pushing the development for Internet in this region. That's just the way it is. Very different from maybe the other regions in our service region.

So now actually we're seen as a centre of technical expertise and it's great because we are invited to the table for our discussions.

How do we do this? Well, we have organised 77 events in 44 countries in our service region in the past 12 months alone. That's quite a big figure.

What do these events look like. RIPE meetings, ENOG, MENOG, SCE meetings, regional meetings, member lunches, training, IPv6 roadshows, train‑the‑trainer programmes, round table meetings for government. It's quite a shopping list, isn't it, and we use some of these and we get demands for these in the different parts of the service regions. And of course we contribute to a wide range of other events and we actually have to turn down some of the place that is we're invited to. It would just probably be too much for us the

So, comparing the regional engagement. This is what this looks like. Our membership percentages from the different, three different regions I'm talking about. As you can see, western Europe looks pretty much the same there, our membership and the percentage of events organised there. Then we move to eastern Europe and central Asia. Membership size and the percentage of events that we organise in that part of the region. Then you look at the membership size in the Middle East and the amount of events percentage‑wise that we're giving there. So I think our representation in those parts of the world has been actually quite good if you look at it from the percentage of the membership base that we have there. And we're quite proud of that. I think those regions have probably classically not had as much attention from the RIPE NCC and I think that it's good. We have got some good energy going there and I think it's efforts well spent.

So who is doing all of this? Well, we have a team of 11 working in external relations. And we have got regional staff. And this let's us focus on the individual and regional and local needs. And we're in the process of adding two more positions to cover these needs. And I will show this to you quite quickly. These were approved by the Executive Board if you remember at the last GM meeting. So, we have those in mace and we're very close to announcing those individuals that have come on board and we're looking forward to bringing them into the mix here. And, of course, our external relations activities are not done just by the external relations group alone. I mean, the training services department is just Godsend for us as well and we have wonderful relations and we do a lot of it with that group. The legal department we weigh heavily in on that many because we are treading into different angles like regulation and privacy issues. Coms, the registration services department, really all of them.

So across the region, what does the mix look like of staff. Myself, Chris, Richard and Sandra. We are flushing around working in all parts here encompassing the whole service region.

Then we move on to western Europe. We have Suzanne, Gergana and Marco based in Amsterdam. Central Asia and eastern Europe, we have Alex and Maxim, they have managed to hit everyone of the countries in that service region in the last year except for one, and that's Turkmenistan, and I think that we have got some issues there so that's probably the reason why we haven't made a presence there. But it's been fantastic and they were well received, a lot of hard work from two guys they are ping‑ponging around this very, very large service region. And we're go to add one more. I can't wait to flip this over and show you who that individual will be coming into the ER team.

In the Middle East, it's Shafik and Hisham and we have another one that we'd like to spin, there will be another Arab, we are close to announcing who that will be and we'll have a lovely team of three there on that side.

So, as a parting message for you, we are here to work on your behalf. And as I said, our membership and our community come first for the RIPE NCC. We're always listening. We're interested. And we're available for you. But we must find the balance in our outreach efforts and that's something that we're working on all the time. It is a challenge for us. I have been doing this for quite a number of years and I think that I can say that, you know, on behalf of the whole team that does this external relations, we do this with our hearts. And I hope that as the alerted of this team, I have the trust from the membership and from the community in actually moving us forward with our outreach efforts. So. Thank you very much.

(Applause)

CHAIR: So, we have some questions. Jabber first.

AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Laura Publey from the RIPE NCC. I have a few comments from Juri Gargopolos from the Ukraine. He is a member of the ENOG PC. He says, thanks, Deema and Paul, for interesting reports. Allow me as a member of the PC to make a few comments that relate to these last two reports.

One: The goals of ENOG should be in the area of finding working contacts with telcos. And two, as I understand, we do not have a constructive programme for joint work with telcos. ENOG does not work with the concept of convergence and ENOG does not have engaged theme.

PAUL RENDEK: Thank you very much. I do now Juri personally, he has been somebody that has been quite a driver in our presentation in the Ukraine but thank you very much for your comments.

AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Piotr. I have a question we heard from you that one of the focuses for the eastern Europe is local events and we have had on the previous that the RIPE NCC cut funding for one of the events throughout the year, so from two to one. So is it kind of contradicted that you heard from the members that they are interested in local enters and then you are cutting the funding for those events. That sounds strange.

PAUL RENDEK: That's a very good question and I'll attempt to answer that for you. We are not cutting the funding. The budget has actually grown if anything. What we have decided to do is I talked about the mix of what I think we need and what our members are telling us. We have engaged, as I said in everyone of the countries in the last 12 months in the eastern Europe and central Asia region and we did the same, we have hit every single country in the Middle East region. Now, we haven't gone to Iraq, Syria or Yemen, but I have said that we have brought the members that we have there to other countries to engage with them and of all that feedback we had from them, they did say to us, yeah, great, regional meeting, that's wonderful. We have problems at home and we have travelling problems to go to ENOG. Do you know how big the service region is of central Asia and eastern Europe? It's huge. Some of them are saying we can't afford to go to an ENOG, we want RIPE here and you are the neutral party that can come to our country and bring together our government our regulator and all of our members and would he have seen it and we want to have it here. So it's not that we don't want to support an ENOG. We are, in fact, supporting one ENOG which we think a good regional meeting, one strong regional meeting a year is fantastic to bring all of those folks together. But we actually want to have more effective use of the funds that we do have and spread them around so we can do some things locally and do some of the things with the local communities that we haven't had a chance to address and that is what we're doing with the money. So it's not representing a cut in our budget. It's actually using these funds more effectively. Thank you.

AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Dmitry. I don't want to quote from my own presentation. Can you please show me slide 23, it's about six back. I just see the numbers, and I just want to point out. I just learned two things, I learned that Israel is part of western Europe. And I just learnt also that Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia are part of eastern Europe, it's actually not true by your own definition. Are these also part of ENOG region, these three countries. Because we were under the impression that they shouldn't engage with these people because they are part of western Europe?

PAUL RENDEK: I'm just giving you this by regions. I'm not specifically putting any country in a region. Saying this is where they belong or saying Latvia must go to an ENOG. Anybody that thinks that they belong in an ENOG should go to an ENOG, in my opinion. As far as Israel is concerned, it would probably be very clear that the Arab staff that we have in the Dubai office would not be servicing Israel and yes they do, they do actually get their services and we do have our our outreach from the European office to that country. So I don't think that's a strange thing.

AUDIENCE SPEAKER: I see, but there is no ‑‑ basically, we had 12 countries in the ENOG and we had 12 meetings and 7 of 12 have been in Russia. It was always a RIPE NCC decision to have a meeting. So it looks like the RIPE NCC decides to have half the meetings for 12 countries. If they would evenly distribute like they do in the region each year in your country in the last six years, it would be more diverse and I fail to see how having one meeting less a year, even if you add two more regional meetings a year, it would help a bit, but there is a way to expand it. The thing I want to say about this, the percentages don't agree. If I see that's almost 80% on the west on that and that, I feel like the ‑‑ western Europe is 70 something, then the eastern is 10 something and then the last one ‑‑

CHRIS BUCKRIDGE: This is my fault with this slide. The scale on the left‑hand side there actually refers only to the membership numbers. So the membership numbers for members are 77% in western Europe. 14% in eastern Europe and central Asia. 9% in the mid‑will he will east. The events organised is actually a different scale which is not shown on there. So we have 51% of our events are actually held in western Europe. 26% of those are in eastern Europe and central Asia and 23% are held in the Middle East. We'll fix the slide and upload that.

AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Actually, it's nearly my question about, well, scale on this and that's ‑‑ I have two points. First of all, I support Dmitry's suggestion to have more transparency on evens budget and something like because if you are using such slides with the failures for decision making, it's actually not very good. But another point I want to state. You see that membership in the eastern Europe actually nothing not eastern Europe, it's about 15%. That means for example that such even like RIPE meeting should return to this region each four years. But RIPE meetings never was in this region. So, comparing just number of events, okay you have two RIPE meetings in western Europe and a number of small, tiny membership lunches all along ENOG regions. There was a bigger community in western Europe and the smaller corporate RIPE NCC events in ENOG. So like Americans will say about this slide it's fake news.

NURANI NIMPUNO: I'll be very brief. I'd actually say that I found this slide the least interesting of all the slides. Just two very quick comments. I totally agree with, basically, with what Randy was saying. Build local NOGs. The RIPE NCC has a role in doing capacity‑building but not to be the local NOG of the world, right. And my second point is, I really, really enjoyed this slide‑set. I am one of the ones who have asked for more topic based, talk about the issues that are relevant in the various regions, and so I just wanted to acknowledge that you responded to that. I'm not necessarily that interested in how many events or, you know, how you have gone to, but the fact that you are mapping out what issues are important in what regions and how you respond to that, that's what I care about and I don't need to micromanage how you spend your budget. So I just want to thank you for that.

PAUL RENDEK: Thank you.

AUDIENCE SPEAKER: First, I'm really impressed by your team and what they have achieved so far. It's really impressive. And also very happy with you, Paul, the way you value this and you put it very clearly to the community to understand the complexity and the result out of it. So, usually we say that music and sports transcend geopolitics. I am tempted to say that the RIPE community spirit is yet another factor of transcend ance.

(Applause)

CHAIR: I think Laura was the second...

AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Filiz Yilmaz, Akamai Technologies. I have been involved in the emergence of MENOGs and ENOGs and even if I wasn't there in every meeting I was follwing the developments and I think these formations within the support coming from RIPE NCC worked very successfully in those regions created this buzz bringing people together, talking about issues that they care about, and knowing that this is very successful, I wholeheartedly congratulate you to bringing the resources to be spread a bit more diversely now. It is time, it is not only ENOG gets to support its regional meetings, it's not only MENOG which does not ask for resources much anyway for sometime they have been on their own. This NOG concept is not easy to be established in some of the local areas. We still have an issue here. I'm originally from Turkey and Turkey is supposed to be part of the MENOG community but we know it is not. There are language barriers, there is transportation, there is visa issues, so go local please, and spread the resources more diversely and hopefully the entire region can benefit from this support from NCC. Thank you.

AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Laura again from RIPE NCC. I have a further comment from Juri. And he says for me it's absolutely clear that we should find the ways for changing ENOG format as a more efficient platform for a more stakeholders from any regions and countries. I think that in current circumstances, when we have lack of knowing, understanding of our aims, targeted stakeholder event as well as the new format and the new paradigm of ENOG, we should hit the brake pedal on any separation thoughts and we should concentrate on one ENOG per year.

PAUL RENDEK: Thank you very much, Juri.

CHAIR: Thank you. I'm really sorry, I cut the microphone, but we don't really have a coffee break to run into and we are already minus 15 minutes left. We have to move on. Thank you Paul.

(Applause)

Next is is the technical update.

KAVEH RANJBAR: Good afternoon. I am chief information officers at the RIPE NCC and I am going to give you an update about our global technical services. You might ask what is global technical services in these are the services provided for the larger Internet community. So not only limited to our membership. For example, K‑root, RIPE Atlas, RIPE Stat and a few others. Normally you get up states about our membership services and RIPE database from Andrew in the other RIPE meeting, so in Dubai you will hear from Andrew on ticketing system, RIPE database and many or membership orientated services.

Before I move forward, I want to mention that there is a bit of change in the format of the presentation. I thought it was better to focus this presentation more on the most valuable asset the RIPE NCC has, which is my colleagues, lovely RIPE NCC staff. But this approach comes with two notes. First, I have added a bit, because I am focusing more on the services and the staff. There is a bit less numbers as my usual reports, but to compensate for that I publish the three part article on RIPE Labs, so please check that, it's from last week, so if you go to lab.ripe.net there is a lot of detail about what we did in the last two years and what we are going to do in the coming months. And I'm more than happy to provide the answers relating to those numbers as well.

Second one, as there is no one on one relationship between the staff and the services, almost everyone in the RIPE NCC works on multiple projects and services. I tried to find and group them by the closest service or the one they spent most of their time with but it doesn't mean that any of these people only work on only one of these services.

Hosted services are the ones which are, which have equipment hosted with some of our members, or someone who is hosting equipment for us. Colin, which I guess, he is sitting here, he is also part of the RIPE meeting technical team. Inego, Michaela and Anand are the ones mainly involved with the services. One of the services is routing information system, or RIS, many of you might know the service. Since 1999, we are collecting BGP updates every eight hours, full dumps and every five minutes partial dumps and these are available for everyone. It's a very valuable resource if you want to look in the history of routing or the current state of BGP.

Data is used also extensively internally by the RIPE NCC. For example, our registration services when we want to look at the history of announcement of resources and things like that. Also in many of our tools including RIPE Stat and BGPlay and other stuff. We have 21 collectors located around the globe to manage the peerings and get this data in. One part of the news which might be interesting for you is we are migrating these collectors to a new model. Because previously they were collecting data locally and we had a central server coming in and pulling the data out. We are changing the model to streaming, so basically the whole BGP updates are being streamed out of the box and it's a push model. It has the added benefit that you basically anyone who uses the stream can actually look for provide near realtime services over BGP, for example alerts and monitoring over BGP. We will try to provide those services soon.

We are migrating the collectors but you don't have to worry if you are relying on the older format of the data because we have a script already working in place, four of these 21 are already the new type with the messaging and the streaming but all the streams are converted also to the old MRT style, via the dumps.

DNS services. As you might know RIPE NCC has a large footprint of DNS services, including K‑root. I am not going to go in that much detail, because of time constraints. Tomorrow, there is in the DNS Working Group, there is a detailed presentation about what we do. But just in short we are adding capacity for the K‑root in the five core nodes that we operate. Plus right now we have 46 K‑root hosted locations. Two years ago we started this project to expand K‑root. And if you are interested to host K‑root, please talk to us, we'd be more than happy to work with you.

We also reverse zone nor RIPE region. Plus, we have discussing for all other LIRs, basically we have the whole IPv4 and IPv6 Internet served.

There was an issue early on in that system, because that system is very complex because the way reverse works. In IPv4 for example, it's a /8 and the /16 its on top of the delegations and since these resources are scattered over different RIRs we have to have complex scripts and systems to go over like when there is a transfer, part of a resource which is for example managed by ARIN comes to us. We have started the discussion on the mailing list, DNS Working Group mailing list on possible improvements for this service. Also, published the detail analysis of what went wrong early April which affected some of ARIN and APNIC customers.

We also provide secondary services for ccTLDs. We have 55 of them right now. Last year, DNS Working Group came up with policies we work with them on criteria on who is eligible to get these services and that's also published and we are working with the ccTLDs operators who are not eligible to work with this any more.

But, no big news there, actually all of them are happy.

Ripe.net domain is the last one. Because there are some highly available services running, including RPKI and WHOIS, we thought it was important to make sure the domain is immune from now more than ever popular DNS, DDoS attacks against DNS. Although we have a good platform to host the domain, we also thought it was good to have another external authority as a secondary provider and we did that, we had an open RFP and we found a partner and now we are working with that.

RIPE Atlas anchors. So, we also work with deployment and maintenance of anchors, today I checked and we have 264 live anchors. I am personally very happy with the distribution of anchors as well. We have them in all of the regions. And we are working very closely, especially with APNIC and LACNIC and we are trying to work more with AFRINIC as well to put anchors in their region. If you look at the map we cover some very interesting locations.

One thing which again you might have heard in the MAT session a few hours ago as presented by Robert, Soekris, who is a provider of hardware for RIPE Atlas anchors, suddenly decided to stop production of the current device. It's not a big issue for us because the supplier we use to work and we still work with, bought all of the remaining stock so I think they have about 60 which should give us a few more months without any issue. And we are investigating further and we will consult with you on a replacement. We already have some additional criteria for choosing one, one we heard from Randy and we heard also from our committee members, to go for something which is cheaper.

So, then we have Oleg ‑‑

RANDY BUSH: I said the opposite.

KAVEH RANJBAR: I have a list. We will talk. We have Oleg, Elena and Paul working on our big data back end. The big data back end is there for our storage and data processing for all RIPE Atlas, RIS and RIPE Stat. This is cutting edge tools. And it's a Dev ops operation, mainly all these, with a lot of automation. And one thing which you might be interested to know is recently we moved to single main cluster because we had full redundancy in that which is really nice operationally, but it won't scale ‑‑ it wasn't going to be sustainable because it was going to cost us a lot just with the growing amount of data, grow two clusters, but don't worry, data is safe. We have one cluster which is internal redundancy and second a smaller cluster which can always come online and provide data for about a month or two, and we have full dump of our data backed up, encrypted and backed up in a Cloud. In case of major catastrophe, we will have the services up and runing with limited amount of data. But we can recover the full data. This gives us a lot more flexibility and efficiency using our resources.

Then we have Florian and Hanieh. They are mainly busy with our global peering, monitoring and alerting. We have all of these things all around the globe. So there is a lot of work managing these peers, RIS has about 700 peers, K‑root has a couple of hundred peers and it needs remote hands. We have a very complex monitoring and alerting. So we published one or €.O2 articles about our monitoring and alerting systems and scenarios. And if we would be ‑‑ we would really like to share knowledge on that as well because there is a lot happening there. We would like to learn from you and if there is things you want, we want to see how we are running the operations we are more than happy to talk about these services.

And then we go to RIPE Atlas infrastructure. Andreas, Christopher, Yohan and Viktor, and Andreas and Christopher are here. They are mainly involved with middleware, the main thing that runs the RIPE Atlas. This is the general system architecture handling measurement, the management and accounting and all of the logging, debugging, so the main Atlas workload.

And then we have Philip and Leigh working on two very different parts of the probes.

Philip is mostly involved with the firmware for the probes and anchors. I'm not going to get into that much detail because again Robert did the detailed presentation on some of the things there. But we had USB stick issues, we published a lot of articles with the new firmware the situation has improved hugely, so basically there is no visible issue any more. And v1 probes, we are going to stop providing updates, new features to them except for the security updates because they have hit their hardware limits.

And new probe hardware is being investigated, version 4, and virtual probes is something that some people in our committee really want and some really don't want but we think we have a solution, we are going to publish our proposal in a few months time and we will take it from there.

RIPE Atlas logistics is something that Leigh is mostly busy with. It's, as you can imagine, shipping and we really try to be as efficient as possible with that. Last time today I checked we had 9,000,744 online probes. We also tried to manage the distribution strategy that we have for example, quotas for regions or ASNs relationship management, with ambassadors, sponsors. As you might know, all of the probe hardware since three years ago, is being funded just by the money we get from the sponsorship. So this has been a strategy we set also. So, all of that is handled in that part of the team.

One other issue, I won't go into the power adapters and imports issues, but if you are interested in that, I have a detailed section in the labs articles I mentioned.

And then RIPE Stat and country reports. Christian is the main contact and person driving RIPE Stat and the country reports. RIPE Stat is I was very pleased at the last MENOG when I went to the meeting and I saw men the operators there had integrated RIPE Stat in their day‑to‑day work so they had a script for alerting or checking their network integrated to RIPE Stat. Now we have more than 30 million data calls a day and you see a graph there which shows from start of 2015 till now how the usage has grown.

And basically that's a tool designed for network engineers with information about Internet resources. I have a very limited time so I will try to be super fast.

Country reports. New tool based on RIPE Stat services but we are aggregating country original information and the aim is basically to move a bit to target different set of customers. Or users. Not the network operators but mostly people who make high level policy decisions and decisions like that.

Upcoming tools. Jasper and Massimo, you saw ‑‑ so Open IP Map was an idea from Emile. This is not end user geolocation. This doesn't do end user geolocation but it's geolocation for network equipment, routers and IXPs and things like that. Very popular service, we already had the prototype we are now making a production service. It will be released in a week or two so you will see the first release very soon. And TraceMON, you just saw a presentation in the MAT Working Group, I'm not going to repeat but very nice and as put by a few of the audience, sexy tool, so try it out. It's already available in Atlas, if you have traceroutes, now you see a button and you can visualise your traceroutes. DNSMON and DomainMON, if you don't know them try them out.

And then our research statistics and data analysis team. Emile, most of you know him and met him. Stephen is the newest member of the team, he is also super sharp researcher and engineer, and we have Rhenia who was been with us since 1996 and he is basically a guru in registrations services and the history of how the system works.

Other than that we also do prototyping. A lot of collaboration with other researchers including last year we had a few papers published with very prominent researchers, Randy Bush, Geoff and we had Christian and a few others, we tried to focus on more operational data and we tried to support academics.

I won't because of the time ‑‑ and this is my last slide. So, all of this, these are these two, Robert and Romeo are the glue who make this work, all of that, so without them none of this would work. And they are also both here so if you have any questions they are the managers who manage the people who you just saw.

And basically that's the presentation.

(Applause)

Thank you. Any questions? Hopefully not.

No, all right. Thank you.

Next, we have ‑‑ we are not doing applauses at the end any more. Next is Rumy with the training services.

RUMY KANIS: Hi, I'm going to rush through these slides, so forgive me if you don't understand anything or if goes too fast you can look back or come talk to me.

RUMY KANIS: My name is Rumy, working for the RIPE NCC, I am going to tell you a little bit about training activities that we have done over the past year and especially the future.

So, first, the training department. This is my team. I think most of you have met most of them. And here is my awesome Photoshop skills. We have a new staff member starting next month, Jad, he is washing around here, he is going to be our first training representative working in the Dubai office to help us with the regional training courses in the MENOG region but also in the rest of our service region.

So, our passion or our philosophy is obviously sharing information and training with our community. And I would like to go back a little bit 15 years ago when I started at the RIPE NCC. When the RIPE NCC started with training there used to be just one course, it was the LIR course, and this course was heavily focused on teaching people how to interact with us, how to fill in our forms, how to follow the procedures. And the only target group was members. And we have seen over the years and I think Paul actually mentioned that in his presentation as well, the community has changed, the needs have changed and we also realise that just telling people how to fill in our form was not enough. If we wanted our community to engage with us and to be part of the community and to be active part of the community, we need to empower them so imparting knowledge is not enough, but empowering and focusing on capacity building and growing groups of knowledge in our various areas that became much more our focus.

Another area obviously we have shifted away from only targeting members. Our community is very diverse and there is a huge areas that we need to tap into. The stakeholders have changed we have the LEAs, the academics, so the training department has changed its scope right significantly over the last 15 years.

Why do we do what we do? This is a definition of capacity building. We want to empower individuals and groups of people, by providing them with the skills they need to effect change within their communities. So, we want you guys and our members to be active part of the community, to be empowered, to feel that they are part of the community.

And that helps developing our service region.

So how do we achieve this? We reach out and share knowledge and data. The RIPE NCC has developed and become kind of a sent centre of expertise. We want to increase the diversity and strength of the RIPE community, promote digital inclusion, reach out to areas that are maybe less developed or need a little bit more attention. We want to create a platform for participants to share their wisdom and experiences. I'm saying participants and I'm saying that on purpose. We refuse to call the people who come to our training courses attendees. We call them participants because we see them as being very important in participating in the course. Usually it's the people in the countries that know best what challenges there are, for example, in IPv6 uptake, they may know that more than us, so bringing these people together and learning from them and sharing their expertise is very much one of our focuses. It goes the other way around as well, by going out there we see very much what the needs are of our community and can bring that back into the organisation and make sure that the services we offer to our members are in line with the needs of our members and the community.

So, what activities do we do? I think most of you just think we do training courses. We do quite a lot more. I'm going to briefly go into all the activities. So, in 2017 we have participated in 120 member courses and we have currently six courses in our portfolio. That's a big leap from the one course we did in 2001. At the end of the year we're going to launch a new course, the IPv6 security course. When we develop our material and we decide on what content is important, we always look very closely at the membership survey and also surveys that we conduct after training courses to see what the needs of our community are, and also which areas in our service region have what need and we try to tap into that.

Just to give you an impression of how much my team travels. This is 2016 and all the countries we have been been to. It's a huge spread. To help us decide where we go we look at how many new LIRs came into a country. We look at registration services statistics, the questions that come from different regions, we get lots of input from external relations department as to which countries are in need. And we try to spread our presence as much as possible over the whole service region. It's a lot of travelling and a lot of flying around, which is why we have the registration services department help us with resources as well and deliver training with us.

Apart from this we do roadshows, Paul mentioned this already, we have participated in 13 roadshows this year, basically the roadshows are IPv6 courses, three‑day courses, that we provide to those regions.

Then we have the train‑the‑trainer programme. Paul also mentioned that this programme, we are training people in the ENOG and MENOG regions to help us out delivering more courses because people keep asking for more and more and more, that's one of the things we get huge feedback on in the membership surveys, is they want more, and we can't, obviously, provide all of that. So we are training our people in the different regions to help us out with these courses, not just to be able to do more but also to be able to help us with language barriers that we face in these countries. And help us ask questions or answer questions during the breaks in the local languages.

Apart from this, we also do presentations at conferences and tailor‑made workshops and tutorials. You can think of IX meetings, NOGs, I would also encourage if more NOGs are to be set up in the ENOG region, please let us know, we are happy to help out with content or presentations and tutorials. This is all on top of the 120 training courses I already mentioned.

So, this is a question that actually was asked to one of my trainers during a training course. Do we only give training courses or do we also work? I think you saw in the previous slide how much we do. But also I would like to mention that our material is updated on a monthly basis. We find it very important that we keep up to date with technical developments in the industry. We analyse trends in the different service regions. We keep up with the technical developments. We develop new material and we identify areas of developing new material and reaching out to other stakeholders. So we are very, very busy with all of that.

Now, part of the face‑to‑face activities, we also do quite some stuff online. As Paul mentioned before, there are certain parts of our region that face some political issues, maybe we can't go everywhere or they can't come to us because of visa issues, but there is also time constraints, people may not be able to leave their desk for three days, so we have started to develop online material already a few years ago. And we have various solutions for this.

The first one I'd like to mention is the RIPE NCC academy. This is a platform that hosts various training courses. Currently, we have an LIR course, a database course and an introduction to IPv6 course. These are courses that you can follow in your own time. You can take your time to do it. You can obtain certificates to prove that you are an expert in your area. And we are working on more content for the academy. Hopefully later this year we will launch an advanced IPv6 course. We are having some challenges in that area. Because to be able to provide an advanced online course, you need to provide labs and this is not the easiest thing. Like, in training courses we have 20 attendees and it's easy to provide access to 20 attendees, but if we were to provide these online we'd need to have many more simultaneous connections, as you can imagine, so we are working hard to phase this.

When we have launched the academy, we were in contact with APNIC who was very interested in the work we did, so one of our staff members spent sometime at the APNIC offices and helped them with the development of their academy, which was actually launched a few months ago and is picking up nicely.

Then apart from the academy we also do webinars. These are weekly webinars, they usually are about an hour long. They are on a variety of topics, they are interactive, so people are only missing kind of an hour of their work, they don't have to leave the office, they can follow these topics online. So these are weekly, and every week we have a different topic and rotate that and we are also constantly developing new content in this area.

Another thing we're doing with the webinars is we have developed a series of webinars for Europol and CEPOL, because we realised we were spending a lot of resources helping and training them, we decided to develop online content so we can scale this a bit more and reach out more. Next week we are launching our first webinar for Europol and CEPOL. It's a series of six webinars. Today we had more than 340 Europol and CEPOL agents registered for this course, so it's quite big and, if this is successful, we will obviously follow up with it and do it more often.

Then we also launched a new webinar on Internet governance. I don't know, you may have seen the announcements. We didn't expect it to go that fast. The course was full within a day. We had more than 60 registrations, so we announced the second date yesterday, or this morning, I think. The plan is to do the Internet governance webinars twice a year in conjunction with the IETF and the EuroDIG.

Then, we also want to develop webinars on developments or events in the industry or invite guest speakers to help us with these webinars. We are not the only content experts. It's nice to have people present topics together with us. So we're working on that.

And later this year, in October, we're going to do a pilot. We want to have a full day online event which will basically be a series of webinars focused around one specific topic, so the pilot is going to be Atlas and we will be inviting people from the community and internal staff members who will do a series of webinars throughout the day and it will be modular so people can decide to only follow one or follow the whole day of webinars, this is a pilot. If it's successful then we want to do it on all kinds of topics you can imagine we can do a day on IPv6 security, or a day on BGP, if you have any ideas in this area, please come talk to me or even if you would like to suggest a topic for a webinar or a participate in a webinar, present on a webinar, let me know. But this will be announced later this year but it will take place in October.

Then, so this is all the training courses we're doing. We're also launching a new initiative, which is the RIPE NCC Academic Partnership Programme. Paul already mentioned it that we have started in the Middle East on that but we want to expand it and take it wider across the service region.

So, what we have noticed is, and you may have actually read it in newspapers as well, a lot of companies experience there is a knowledge‑gap at the university level so people who leave university don't necessarily have a lot of practical or relevant knowledge. We have also noticed in our training courses and when we speak at universities, even technical universities or technical students never heard of RIPE NCC, don't even know who ICANN is, don't know the Internet ecosystem, and we think this is a gap that we need to tap into.

And also, we have noticed at the same time that we're getting an increased demand to come and present at universities. I have no idea how many universities we have in Europe or our service region, so, obviously it doesn't scale. We can't go to all these universities. It's kind of right now we do it on best‑effort basis. When we get a request and we happen to be in the country, we'll go, but we can't go to all the universities.

Now, some universities have shown interest in our online courses, and, as you may have heard, we have signed MoUs with the American universities of Beruit and Dubai, that we're going to be working together with them. And the idea is that we will provide online learning programmes, and, ideally, this is an ambitious plan, these online learning programmes would become part of a curriculum of technical students. And these students would be able to obtain credits by following these online courses either as a full module as part of their curriculum or as an extracurricular activity. So the universities of Beruit and Dubai have already taken steps in this direction and we have started to develop the content with them.

So that's this one. But we also want to reach out to other universities. But if I take a step back. We think the goals, there is lots of benefits to this. Obviously we're bridging the knowledge gap. We make sure that people who leave the universities are more aware of what the Internet echo system looks like. But also get more support or understanding for the RIR system, establish the RIPE NCC as a centre of expertise, make sure that people now what the role is of ICANN, what the role is of IANA and of the RIPE NCC and the different RIRs. But also, we want to rejuvenate and diversify the RIPE community. I'm not saying you're old. I am, because I have been here for 16 years, but it's always good to get new blood into the community and to get new members. So, we think this is very important. At the same time, we want to reach out more but we don't want to spend too much doing it online obviously reduces the costs for the academic outreach and we'll be able to target a lot more universities.

And then my own little passion, obviously, is the accreditation and we have also seen in membership surveys that this is an area that our members would like us to to go into a little bit more, is to have a possibility for people to follow a set of courses and become a RIPE NCC certified professional, for example. If universities subscribe to our courses and include this in their curriculum, it will obviously give more importance to certificates that people can obtain following our courses.

So, as I said, the next step to do the pilots with these universities and reach out to other universities. This is a map of the universities in 1650. So that's about three centuries ago. You can imagine how many more universities we have now and it's just so you have an idea of why the face‑to‑face outreach with the academic world just doesn't scale and offering online courses to them is much more big reach for them.

So, what can you do for us? Get involved. Learn, spread. If you have contacts also in the academic world or you are interested in working together with us, please come talk to me. Share your needs. Let us know which topics you find interesting or important. Suggest topics for webinars or videos. As I mentioned before, webinars are relatively easy for us to develop so it's quite a quick fix for areas that people would like to have more training on. We can also do videos, and actually something I didn't mention because I thought I was going to be short of time. Is we also do videos that people can watch and one of the things we would like to do is have translations of videos, or have them subtitled. So, if you would like to be involved in helping us translating subtitles or translating these videos, I'd be more than grateful to hear about that because we can't cover 76 languages. I have quite a few languages in my department but not that many.

And finally, if you would like to host a training course, either alongside a NOG or a meeting you are doing or a conference or even inside your company, that saves money and effort for us, please let me know and I'll be happy to discuss it with you.

That was it.
So if you have any questions, there you go.

AUDIENCE SPEAKER: So. First I'd like to thank you, it's amazing efforts that the NCC staff have been doing in the capacity‑building and efforts and training efforts. I want to talk about ‑‑ I want to ask about a request that we have made a while back, and if there is any objection to it, I'd like to hear it, which is to make the material that is being used for the training, to be released under a common, creative comments licence, so we made this request a while back, I don't know if there is an objection to it, it would be great. If not then let's do it. I think it would improve the localisation efforts. It would help the self sustaining efforts of local efforts of developing, but you know I'd like to hear some feedback maybe from Paul or from whoever is against it or...

RUMY KANIS: Point taken. I am all in favour of that and actually I think some of our material is available on creative common licence. I am looking at Athina. Because ‑‑

AUDIENCE SPEAKER: The material that is available, are the PDFs of the sources and they are not really identified as copy lift material.

RUMY: I am very happy to look into that definitely. The only kind of ‑‑ or objection I would like to make, or not objection ‑‑ is as long as our material is not used for commercial purposes, I don't see a strong problem with that because we are all about education.

AUDIENCE SPEAKER: That's part of the licence, so...

AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Rob Evans. Just a quick comment. For the NCC academic partnership programme, there are several networks here and I think we have contacts with the universities, we'd like to help be involved I think.

RUMY KANIS: Great. Thank you. That would be great.

CHAIR: Thank you.

(Applause)

KURTIS LINDQVIST: So, that leaves any other business. Go, go, and thank you all. Done. With that, we are done for this week ‑‑ for this time. So, thank you all for coming. We'll see you at the next RIPE meeting and we'll see you at the General Meeting in 15 minutes. 14 minutes in here and please be quick and leave the room to help the NCC staff.



LIVE CAPTIONING BY
MARY McKEON, RMR, CRR, CBC
DUBLIN, IRELAND.