These are unedited transcripts and may contain errors.
NCC Services Working Group
15 May 2013
4 p.m.
CHAIR: All right... I'm still Kurtis Lindqvist and this is yet again your favourite Working Group, the NCC Services Working Group. It's Christian's absolute favourite Working Group.
So, before we start, a small reminder that for those of you who have done this before in this part of NCC Services Working Group, will have all the updates and presentations for the RIPE NCC AGM that will follow directly after this, I am assuming it's going to be in the room next door, I heard someone say yes, so it's guess that's right.
Before we start, if you haven't registered for it and got your voting sheets and name tag, you should go do that instantly and you also get a very lovely copy of the RIPE NCC annual report, which you should have read by now by the way...
If you haven't read it, you have got some work to do during this session. So we'll have around 15 minutes after this into the meeting next door but you have to register.
So, we have a scribe Laura, and we did most of this in the morning, so, we'll just have a report from Axel and then we have a report on the RIPE NCC survey by Serge and then we have an Internet governance update by Paul, and then last registrations services update by Andrew. And last we have the open microphone session and then any other BIS and then as I said we'll be heading over to the AGM, with that, Axel
AXEL PAWLIK: Thank you. I brought it myself, so that I have something to hold in my hand while Randy isn't here.
My name is Axel, I am the managing director of the RIPE NCC and I am waiting for my presentation to come up.
All right, speaking of slides, that's modern technology. I can read from a book.
This has been last year has been a momentous year, 20 years of the RIPE NCC. That's something special. If you need proof that we are becoming old and stuffy and old?fashioned, here it is hard bound. Annual report 2012, please do read it and I promise we didn't do it because we want to become stuffy and dusty and all that. We have got a good deal on the hard copy, but it looks nice too.
Basically, some big things happened last year, the 20 years, we ran out of IPv4 addresses more or less, you know that. We went out many times again to defend your interests and try to represent you as good as we can and all those Internet governance fora, played well together with the other RIRs. And of course we were very busy cooperating with the other RIRs on preparing some things that we do regularly, one of which is the membership and stakeholder survey thatau you havera probably seen before and that you are probably also looking forward to be filling in again, and Serge is going to talk about that.
SERGE RADOVCIC: So, sorry to jump ahead in the agenda. I am assuming Desiree Miloshevic is also in the room, I am hoping. She is going to be co?presenting this presentation. She probably thought ?? we are not doing well today guys. Anyway, I'm going to start off with the first few slides, I am sure when she shows up she will grab her couple of slides that she'll be doing.
All right, I'm Serge Radovcic of the RIPE NCC, Chief Communications Officer. This is the first time that I have taken over from the survey. We used to do this member and stakeholder surveys every two to three years, and we have decided now to do it a little bit more systematically and keep it to every two years. We feel that two years is about the right amount of time to be doing the surveys, I think a lot of things change in two years, especially in our industry. I think since we did the last survey, we have got almost 2,000 new members, so we also want to reach out to those people.
We have got a range of mechanisms that we use to gather feedback. These meetings are one of them but not everybody can make it to these meetings, not everybody dares to get onto the mailing list and voice their opinion. The surveys are designed that you can answer them anonymously, you can do them at your own rate, you can grab a dictionary and see what the terms mean in your own language, and you can have the opportunity to have longer comments rather than just saying yes/no type thing. So it's one of the feedback mechanisms we have in place, we feel it's one of the most far?reaching feedback mechanisms we have in place so we do use it to help form our strategy.
The surveys have always been conducted themselves by independent consultants and we are going to continue to do this and one of the independent consultants is Desiree who is going to join me in a minute.
Here she is, great.
The most recent survey that we conducted was in 2011, two years ago, the Oxford Institute report that they wrote for us detailed 52 key findings across all of the services that we provided and other aspects of RIPE NCC and RIPE itself. Now, what we did is we researched, investigated and acted on all 52 of these findings in some way or another. Some of them were quite small. Some of them were things like, hey, why do you guys waste so much paper, perhaps cannot send everybody single person the annual report. If they want an annual report, let us know and we'll post it to you. Things like that, we acted on it, and we'll continue to do it. That was great feedback. Others a lot more ongoing and we will continue to keep updating you guys on how we're doing with some of the longer action points.
So, we created a report that, there is an URL down at the bottom if you go to ripe.net/survey/2011, you'll see the survey results themselves, the report, the findings and you'll also see an action plan of what we have done so far with those 52 key findings, so you can see that's not just that we just listen, get the information and don't do anything with, it we do really act upon this information.
In preparation for the surveys, we hold what we call, what we have been doing that for the last couple of surveys, focus group meetings. Now these focus group meetings give us input for the survey, it allows us to start getting a feel of what some of the issues are that we'd like to expand on during the survey. Now, the focus groups have a range of about five to six people in them and they there have an opportunity to talk again a little bit longer and really discuss the issues face?to?face, not with us, they may not feel so comfortable really talking about the issues with us, so what we do again is we have used a couple of independent consultants to talk to these people, major being John Earls and Desiree Miloshevic.
Not only do we use this input to help us with the questions for the survey and already start forming part of our strategy when we hear major concerns, but in some cases on some of the smaller or easier suggestions we think wow, what a great idea we have already acted on them. We started the focus group meetings in November, and it went through to about February. And a few of the things that you may have already seen us doing is the RIPE academic cooperation initiative where we had the students yesterday, that was something that came out of the grow can you say group, we thought what a great idea, why didn't we think of that and we got it implemented very quickly. A few of the countries we went to said, hey, why aren't you inviting our Government officials to some of your Government roundtables and LEA meetings, we said we do but we don't have the right contacts so they gave us the right contacts and we invited them to those round table meetings, so that was fantastic. People told us that we weren't allowing enough time for the GM voting and getting the agenda issues out far enough in advance. So we increased that. Again these are are are small things but we thought these things we can just do right now, other larger ones we'd rather get a lot more people's feedback before we start incorporating those.
We held this time around 13 different focus group meetings and individual interviews right across our service region. In total there are about 70 participants. I have listed the cities, you can read them yourselves up there on the screen. You will see that in 2011, there is a slight overlap with some of the countries, or with some of the cities that I have listed there. The next time around, again we are going to try and go to different corners of our service region when we conduct such focus group meetings.
The participants that we invite, we have had a couple of questions about how do you choose these people? Who do you use for these focus group meetings? It's a bit of a mix, there is people that are quite opinionated, outspoken, we think they'd be great candidates to get in there and give them time to express their concerns. We invite some those people, once we have chosen a city, it's around Frankfurt, let's invites this guy.
We also then start looking at database for a range of LIRs that we have there from small to large, medium to newer ones to older ones and we send out about 20 invitations and we get about five or six that reply back saying great initiative we'd love to get involved. That's basically how we choose them and again we sort of rotate the next time around of choosing different people from different areas and also perhaps focusing on some other people that are quite active in our community.
One thing we did to also help reduce costs and to get the members a little bit more involved in some of the cities and the countries that we went to, we actually asked people to host a venue where we could bring these people together. More often than not, they tended to be IXPs but we used a range of people across our region. So, a big thank you to those hosts that helped us out.
I should note that these surveys ?? and I know that Des will get into, it you are going to be talking about the next slide so you might want to make your way up here ?? is primarily for our members of course, because it is the members' money that we are spending, especially when it comes to services; and naturally we want to reach out to all of our members. There are 550 people already checked in for this meeting. If we can get all 550 of you to fill in the survey we are off to a great start. There are a lot of people who can't get to these meetings and we are trying to reach out to them as well. You don't have to be a member to fill in this survey. If you have any interest, any interest whatsoever, feel free to fill in this survey.
So what I'd like to do now is hand over to Des, who did about half of the focus group meetings, and let her talk a little bit about her role in the survey, what she did in the focus groups and what sort of feedbacks she got from those focus groups.
DESIREE MILOSHEVIC: Thank you Serge. And good afternoon everyone. It seems it was just almost like yesterday that I was here with Paul Rendek announcing the 2011 survey, so either it was yesterday or I should change my T?shirt more often.
But, certainly, it's really good to have the pleasure to actually say what happens at these focus groups and what are some of the initial findings that John Earls and myself carried out during a few weeks this year. And some of the initial findings actually are different from different regions that we visited and different hosts and different LIRs and individuals that we spoke to. And let me see if I can share this slide.
And one thing that comes up all the time, over and over and over again, wherever we go or ask questions about the primary purpose and core business of RIPE NCC, as it came out this morning as well in the proposals Working Group on PI, PA and legacy space, is they want RIPE NCC to have and run an accurate registry, and that is the core thing they worry about and want the RIPE NCC to do.
Other corners of the world that spoke to us, they have actually mentioned that they would really like and appreciate if they could get involved and if they could also be communicated about the early stages of service development. They don't want to hear about it afterwards. So keep them informed.
I think this came from western Europe. But there was a cry out for more transparency within RIPE NCC. And our findings this time are going to be included together with the survey results, so you can then go and see that as well. There is additional transparency to the focus group work that we were doing.
Something that did come out strongly and quite unexpectedly from ?? that is different from the 2011 survey ?? is the need and cry for the RIPE NCC to defend the community and the RIR system. They felt that RIPE NCC is doing a good job, but they need to be less neutral and defend the open governance model.
If we were to zoom in now into the more regional feedback and what came out of this Middle East, the focus groups' members were saying that they would appreciate more regional presence and more support. Whilst in western Europe, which I already mentioned, they were asking for more transparency and more engagement with LIRs and resource holders.
The findings from Ukraine and Russia were, one had to feel, really sympathetic too, they really were asking for more engagement with the governments and saying can we get more of you people to come over here and talk to our governments and explain how the model works. As I said earlier, we will include this material from the focus groups in the final survey so you can find more details there.
And maybe just lastly so mention that the survey again would have a members and non?members part of the survey, so if you are a non?member you can skip and go straight to answer those questions. And it's open to everyone, there is another, again, the same effort to get as much input as possible from anyone even who is a non?member from the community, from other interested parties, and not to mention the word multi?stakeholder.
The Oxford Internet Institute will be heading these analyses with a couple of colleagues there and we will ensure anonymity. I know we asked last year to leave your e?mail just in case you were going to win something, a prize, and so ?? but anyhow, the anonymity is ensured, so we look forward to getting as much input from you as possible to make the best use of your member fees. I'll pass you back to Serge.
SERGE RADOVCIC: If you want to know more about the survey about the focus groups, about our preparations and what we get up to, these are ?? there were a few people that were helping out with the survey, these are the six key people that were involved, as you already heard from Desiree.
John Earls, could I ask you to stand up. John has also been helping us out with a few of the focus groups. Nick whom I am sure most of you know. Fergal, Paul, because of his experience has also been helping us out quite a lot and will continue to help us out until the report is finished. And myself of course. So, if you do have more questions, please go and talk to these six people. I am sure Axel would also be happy to answer some questions on our behalf.
So, what I want to finish with is please get involved. As I said, I expect no less than 550 individuals to fill in the survey, those of who that registered and taken the time. It's going to be open for five weeks, so you don't have to rush off and do it as soon as you see it open. I'm sure some you might have some other things to get up to. It takes around 15 to 25 minutes, again depending on if you are a member, or if you are an other interested party and depending on how much text you want to add to those comments. But we did it a few times, it's about 15 to 25 minutes.
I know, looking at the attendee list, that there is quite a few of you that are from one organisation. Please feel free to fill it in multiple times, that is allowed.
As Desiree said, we will be offering prizes, so, there will be a question at the end that asks you if you'd like to be entered into the draw for an iPad, we thought that would be a suitable prize on this occasion, then please put in your e?mail address. The e?mail addresses will only be seen by the Oxford Internet Institute. They won't be passed on to us in any way and they will choose the prize randomly. We are going to be doing that once a week to try and entice a few of those people that need enticing.
So, again, your feedback is crucial for us to understand what those issues are and for us to start putting that into our strategy. Here is a link to the survey at the bottom and I'm happy to take questions.
If there is no questions now, I am sure you'll have a lot of opportunity to give comment during the survey, and by the look of it all of you cannot wait for it to open on Friday. There is also a question right at the end that asks you a bit of a comment about the survey and if you think there was some things that we didn't include or you might want to change. Please feel free to fill that in or come and talk to me.
Okay, then if no one is going to ask me a question I think now we're going to hand back over to Axel.
Thank you.
(Applause)
AXEL PAWLIK: A bit of an update from the RIPE NCC, slightly more reflective mode this time.
Well, I started out with last year, it was a great year. The one thing that I didn't mention so far is that more than 50% of our members now hold IPv6 space, which is great but please if you hold it, do something with it.
Now, more than 50% of the members, that's in absolute numbers, it's a rather high number. We hit the 9,000,200 from 76 countries, we see steady growth still after v4 runout. That doesn't come quite unexpected because we have seen similar effects in the APNIC region as well.
Now that poses a bit of a challenge to us as well; first of all, it's so many of you, which is great, but, also, increase diversity in regions, also in what type of business you are running, and certainly I would think overall, on average, a decrease in your mind share for the RIPE NCC, which is normal. As Paul Rendek used to say, they are thinking we are just the pluming and as long as everything works, well, it's great, but now with the v4 runout, the water doesn't flow so as well any more and people take note, it starts to stink a bit... no... I'll come back to that as well.
What we have to do out and what we are doing and have done, I think, rather well with the other RIRs together is preserving standing up for the bottom up self?regulation, the PDP, we get more and more, by more and more understanding from other parties there as well.
Keeping engaged with the PDP, that goes back to what I said earlier, mind shares is decreasing a bit and we want to stand back and counteract that and try to engage all of our members or as many as we can get.
Evolving industry landscape. Engaging the membership and membership engagement, you can read it both ways. So we understand from our point of view that we need to be more active and do more to reach out to not only the community at large but our members in general but also of course we would like to see more engagement from our members in the PDP and our community in general.
Now, trying to do this, you see we do it, we do Facebook and things like that. We are still based on good old?fashioned, mail lists which is the core for the policy development process. Apart from being at the meetings, that is something that of course we keep. But there are more things that we are trying out to reach out and create awareness of what is going on and what we should be doing.
Now, a few statistics and you see it online as well. We see a change in leadership there, new membership by countries. Back to the UK and Germany and France and Russia has taken a step back there. But still Russia is biggest overall in terms of our membership.
Regional outreach: Basically what both Desiree and Serge have said before, we do see a loud, or hear a loud cry from the regions that we should be present more, that we should be sending more people, that we should engage their governments, which is great, we try to do this, but you know, we have to spend some resources there and we have done, we have started to do this, discuss this with the board and to go into that area.
That's basically what it says.
Internet governance, I mentioned earlier, it is going quite well, there are more players than ever. It seems to be fairly established circus on the road ?? event, the Internet Governance Forum and then similar things that the region and the national fora there. I have the feeling that more and more people, more and more governments also understand what we are doing, which is great, that's why we are doing this. On the other hand, they understand quite well what we are doing in part and they also see some of the perceived shortcomings on their side, like the absence of a transfer policy in our region, we hear about that. And I think that's something important that we all need to be aware of, there are eyes looking at us whatever we are doing and we need to be able to strongly defend what we're doing and our reasons for those things.
Our technical community, you have influence on the future of Internet governance. Again, engagement is all ?? we need to engage you and the other stakeholders and you, please, also be aware of this and support us and do your own things within your countries, within your regions and talking to your governments.
Now, I started into this a little bit earlier this morning. Over the last couple of years, I feel we didn't do as well as we could have done, as we should have done, we came quite frequently. All enthusiastic with changes and improfits we thought and ways of doing things that were not met with uniform cheers. So, we hear you. We understand that and like I said, you should engage with us but also we need to step up our efforts to engage with you in a coordinated way, a transparent way as we have heard earlier, that's something that we need to do. And I always say yes, everything that we are doing is open and transparent but maybe not as open and transparent to you as it should be, it's not maybe as obvious as we think it should be or would be. So we have already started to make some changes to focus our minds within the RIPE NCC organisation on to this, and we try very hard to do this.
Now, like I said, many of those, or basically all of those activities, we embarked on with enthusiasm and goodwill. And good faith. And we believe that the majority of you sees that and believes that. On the other hand, we are certain that we lost some trust in this, although we meant well, we hope that you believe us that we want to do the best for all of you and the community at large. If that is not the case, please do speak out and engage us immediately and talk to me and my colleagues and the board if you feel that they can't be quite trusted.
We understand that your trust is the basis of the organisation, of the community and without you and your support, the RIPE NCC is no worth anything.
So, please do engage us, talk to us and give us feedback and point out early on when things don't quite seem to be the right way, as Randy said earlier, e?mail is a great tool for misunderstandings too, so do talk to us, call me, I have a telephone even, do I answer that. But of course, do send me e?mail too.
Now, many ways to give input. As you know the community, the general meeting later on, we have had a breakfast this morning, so many things, the coffee breaks and parties in the evening, don't be shy, talk to us, whoever you are, whether you are a member of the wider community, governmental employee or just a member.
I think we have lots of things to do. We can improve quite a bit there. We want to do this and we need your help in doing this, basically.
Year to come. Yes, there are some highlights here. You have heard about the survey already. It is an incredibly important tool for us, we have done a couple can have them and we always come out with them out of them with more information and more insight and more activities geared towards what you need.
Registry accuracy, Andrew is going to talk about this a bit. Measurements. Internet governance, again more of those events to travel to and to support and to mend workshops and again represent you as much as we can. Of course you are welcome to point us to events in your region and require us to come there and support you.
Some things that you might not see from the outside as clearly as we from the inside is, some of our systems are still rather ?? we have done great efforts in replacing them, the database software is all new now, but there is still some old things hanging there and we are replacing them and working very hard to get this up to date, make things even more efficient as they currently are, so those are things that we currently using resources for that you might not see immediately on the outside.
But speaking about transparency, we need to tell you about those things and I promise we will.
And I think that's it for my presentation. If you have any questions right now, I'm open to that. Otherwise of course, there are a couple of presentations more around this field and we won't leave the room until you are happy enough with that.
CHAIR: You have 15 minutes to ask Axel questions. No? Any questions? No. Okay. Thank you Axel.
So, next then is Paul Rendek with an update on policy, Internet governance, sorry.
PAUL RENDEK: Thanks very much Kurtis. Good afternoon everyone, my name is Paul Rendek and I am the director of external relations at the RIPE NCC. I am going to give you an update on external relations and what we're doing. Those of you that are interested in Internet governance or what we're doing in cooperating with other stakeholders, there is a Cooperation Working Group that takes place tomorrow, and we'll go into a lot more detail about maybe some of the things, the issues that we're dealing with, but for this particular audience, I thought that I'd just kind of give you an idea of what external relations is actually dealing with these days and what we're doing with either of our members and reaching out in the different regions and what we're doing with the other stakeholder groups.
So here we are. The external relations team, we are a slowly growing team, there are four of us now. Myself, Chris Buckridge, who is not here because he is in Geneva at the WTPF defending our interests. I am so happy I got to stay behind with you here with the community. I decided not to go to Geneva. We have Sandra who I'm sure all of you have seen when you were checking in here. And our latest edition is Marco, I am happy to have Marco on our team because what we're seeing when we are reaching out, a lot of the things we do have to defend is a lot of the technical issues that we deal with here and it's great to have Marco on there to give us that insight for us to be able to use when we're speaking to all the various audiences.
So what are the kind of areas that we are focusing on. The increased interest about the Internet from the public sector and stakeholders as well as other groups, a lot of even civil society groups; we're seeing interests coming from all kinds of areas. As you all know the Internet is exploding into all of those sectors, there is no stopping that. We are addressing the differing regional needs of our members and our stakeholders, these are the main areas that you would probably see us focusing on from the external relations area. And okay, you see us here, we are a pretty small group so you can well manage that we rely very heavily on all the different areas of our company to make sure that they feed what we need to be able to do that work outside.
So, defending the RIPE model. As you all know, we are a bottom up industry, self governance, and it has proved a very successful model for us for sometime and it has shown quite a lot of stability. And there is a role for governments inside of this Internet governance area as well. And they are one of many stakeholder groups here, we do see a lot of increased participation from the likes of law enforcement, from governments and different Ministries and regulators, we welcome this and we want them to see what we're doing here, we want them to participate and see how we develop the policies that govern the work that we do.
The top down regulation poses a threat to the Internet. I think all of news this room would probably agree to that. And I think there are a lot of unintended consequence that is result from governance processes that have a lack of input from various communities and one of them being the technical community.
So that's definitely one of the things that we do. I do spend a lot of time speaking to or colleagues inside of the RIPE NCC and also my other RIR colleagues saying that influence is something that we as a technical community need to have, an increased influence because we will find our space and we should have our say at the table there. So defending this, the RIPE model or our RIR system is something that's obviously quite important for us in external relations.
But neutral organisation? Yes, we are very neutral towards our membership and our community. That is the foundation that has made us I think the success we are today. I think it will continue to be a foundation for us. But in ER terms, are we a neutral organisation? No, we are not. And the funny thing is that the more we are moving along and the more ?? we are getting a lot better at playing in these governance fields, we are seeing that regulators, law enforcement and governments are telling us, mmm, don't play the neutral game here, you are not neutral, you have a position. We want to see much more of that position and we want you to show it much stronger so that those people that actually are also wanting to defend this system have the right kind of information and are getting the right kinds of positions from the RIPE NCC and the RIPE community to be able to actually defend us forward in their public policy forums. This is actually quite important for us.
So of course we will continue to defend this bottom up multi?stakeholder model and we argue against the expansion of a top down Internet governance approach. We realise that, you know, and I think when you look at this, a lot of people hear the word "regulation" and they run. I was very recently put on to panel that was all about regulation. Not really an area that I am familiar with in the public policy space. But I certainly am from the open bottom?up space. And I think that when we looked at those that were on the panel, regulation is not a bad word. We have regulation inside of our community too. We do policy development process, that is a form of regulation that we have in forming what we need to do to do our work, right. So I don't think regulation is a bad word and I spent a lot of time explaining, I didn't think it was a bad word. I think it's just very important how you reach your regulation. How you go from that process, that's the important part. It's not that the word "Regulating" or "Regulation."
So, Internet governance. The RIPE NCC of course, together with our other RIR colleagues contribute a lot to the Internet governance discussions, we are quite involved in what goes on in the ITU groups and in these events. In IGF, the Internet Governance Forum. And other regional IGFs, there are small regional IGFs popping up everywhere, there are even country specific IGFs, in fact these things are Grange so much momentum with the resources we have to get around all the demand where they want us to be present. And there are governmental initiatives, of course we work with the European Commission, we do a lot of public consultation with other national governments and again we are seeing that we are invited to so many national initiatives that it's hard for us to have a presence. I mean, we need to find our balance here between the work and where we are actually making a presence.
And interesting enough, when we look at the word Internet governance, I know this is a word that probably doesn't digest very well with a lot in this room, the word is very strange. But unfortunately it is the word that's being used out there. When we look at what's happening and we look at the different fora that we're involved in, what we're seeing is that, of course, I mean, we have to play in the first point that I put up here in the ITU.
If you look at the RIPE NCC service region, we're a huge region, 76 countries. Countries have very different relations with the ITU, and if we are representing ourselves correctly in the region, what are we doing, it's ?? sometimes I find myself quite lost. I mean, I am running from one side where you see western European countries have one idea of their relationship with the ITU or our working and relationships. Then I go to Moldova or the Ukraine, they have a different look on this or they are a little bit more involved in the ITU process or rely on the ITU process a little bit more for their information. Then we look at the Arab world and there is a whole other look on it there. And it's quite difficult to even get yourself around understanding what those relationships are, what they should be and what is expected of you as somebody coming from the technical community and how you feed into this. So, the nice thing I have to say about this here though, is that recently we have actually been invited by a lot of governments that, in my opinion, are probably a lot closer to the ITU process, these rely on these ITU processes and they have asked us to come in and work with them, with the ministry and the regulator, to actually hold a nice neutral event and get all their operators together, either to discuss IPv6, which is probably a very obvious point for us, and this is great. I mean, they see us as this netural body that they want to work with to get all their operators and stakeholders involved, and we have done some of these in some great places, in Moldova as I have said, in the Ukraine, areas such as this. So we certainly want to do a lot more of this, but again, it's a resource issue.
So, ITU's role in Internet governance, we are concentrating on them a little bit in parallel with this meeting and not surprising with many ITU events that seem to overlap with our technical community events, we have the world telecommunications policy forum, it's taking place in Geneva, there are quite a few of us RIRs representatives there. Like I said, Chris Buckridge is there and I have heard back and I have been sitting on various different social media and different kind of chat lines getting all the news of what's happening in Geneva. And I think we have been defended as the RIPE community there quite nicely by Chris, and I am quite happy to see that.
So they have convened to discuss basically the role of ITU in Internet governance. Oddly enough this World Telecommunications Policy Forum was wholly concentrated on the Internet, right. So, I mean, if you looked at the opinions that were brought forward, there were a number of opinions that came through where these governments were discussing and they are all about Internet, IPv6, I mean, you see ?? IXP development, these are the things that they are talking about, like I said, we have a lot more detailed information that we will be putting into the Cooperation Working Group. But I'm just giving you a taste of maybe what's happening here.
So, you know, there is the potential to bring the technical Government issues into the public policy forum. They are doing that. In fact, I was actually quite surprised when I read some of the opinions and even some of the further submissions that are going to the ITU Council Working Group, which is the big Working Group that decides a lot of things that are going to become public policy, the material they were using, the text that they were using to form their public policy issues were taken from us. In fact, I looked at them I thought, I think I have written some of this text, together with my crew. So, that was quite surprising to us but actually quite alarming on the same side because if you look at this, they are getting very smart in choosing the text that they are choosing to put inside of these public forums.
Now, you could say that that's a good thing, and at first glance it probably does look like a very good thing. But on the other side, those that may not be wanting to support a multi?stakeholder region or bottom?up process could be using this text and saying this text has been championed inside of a public policy arena and this has been brought forward by us the Government, and here we go. Wow.
So there are two sides to these things as always. This is one of the things I warranted to look at. As I mentioned the IPv4 markets concern has come up. IXP, IPv6 deployment, hello, these are things that firmly belong inside the Internet administration circles that we all hold very dear. There they go.
So, the RIR response to the WTPF, of course we did. We did do a response on behalf of the RIRs, I was very pleased to see our crew at the RIPE NCC put pen to paper and we championed the draft that was submitted to the WTPF on behalf of the RIRs and I am very pleased at the work that came in from our other RIR colleagues as well, but not only that, the great thing is that when we published our first draft before we actually submitted the real thing, it was great to see a lot of people from the community, many of you here in this room because you bombarded my e?mail account, saying, oh, Paul, we want you to put more in on this or focus a little bit on this and why aren't you defending the ISPs more. So I had Jaab banging on my door because she had her membership saying do something, RIPE is submitting something, let's have a bigger presence there, you know.
So, naturally we gave our suggestions and our response to the actual six opinions to all six of them, some of them we were very mild on because they were areas that we felt probably weren't really in the purview of RIPE NCC's business. But we did do some redrafts and we took all the comments in from the community and so that was some really nice proactive engagement there with our community.
But if we're looking at that, the opinions that we put in, they pretty much highlight what had I have put in on the slides which is the existing governance structures are being looked at, the success of the bottom up policy development of Internet growth, that was one of the other things that we highlighted in because that was one of the subjects they were touching on. Proactive engagement with the public sector by the RIR communities of the I think we have spent a lot of resources engaging and making ourselves available. Of course there is always more that we could be doing or areas where we might have gone wrong. But we will continue to do this kind of engagement and we have made that very clear. The RIR submission is also kind of vital in informing national delegations. The great thing is that after even the number of years that we have had so far in engaging with regulators, Government, law enforcement, when these opinions were published by the ITU, I was surprised to see that my mobile and my e?mail account was hit by about seven governments that said, Paul, what are you going to do? We want you to reply. We want to see the response and we want you to publish the responses much earlier than the submission is actually due. Because we would like to see what you have got there and hopefully it will help us with our deliberations when we show up in Geneva for the WTPF. How cool is that? This is what we wanted to have. We wanted to be consulted, the RIR system, the RIRs, we wanted the community and our organisations to be consulted to be able to put the appropriate input and the facts in when these governments are actually going to their public policy forums.
One of the things I have to say again, and I probably say this every time I jump onto the stage, is that we RIRs are not interested in forming public policy. Are you kidding? Our communities and our members they are way too busy running the Internet. But I think what we can do is we can actually provide input so that governments can make better public policy and there is a place for that. So I have actually put the URL here so you can take a look at the submission that we have put in.
So our external relations strategy. We are engaging with the relevant stakeholders and groups, governments, international organisations, we formed some really nice ties with some intergovernmental organisations and it's proven to be quite good for us in getting some messages out there to the larger world.
And we're providing data and analysis to support our positions, and particularly in regard to, of course, defending our industry bottom?up structures and the model that we're using here, the open multi?stakeholder model, and we're working to inform you of the issues and provide you with materials so that you can engage locally with your Government. And I'm going to talk about this more, because I think it's something that we haven't done as well as we probably could do. And I am hoping to vamp that up. But I think you need to look also at the resources we have inside the RIPE NCC. If you look at what's hitting us from outside and where we need to be, sometimes you make the mistake of not engaging with your own family, if you know what I mean. So this is something that we are certainly going to be looking at and I'm counting on ?? I know that there is some of you in the room that are very much wanting to participate and help there, so that's great.
Engaging internationally, if we can take this all back to the international level. The OECD, the Organisation For Economic Cooperation and Development. They have become a wonderful strategic partner for the RIPE NCC as far as we can see. I really enjoy the engagement that we have with them. They are an intergovernmental organisation but they are increasingly multi?stakeholder in how their approach is working, which we think is great, and we found a nice niche in there. They aren't a policy setting body, for those of you that know them. But it's the chance for ?? but they do provide a lot of input into governments and governments do take these ?? the materials that are published by the OECD very seriously when they take a look at what they do inside their countries for best common practices and the like. And this is something that actually ?? isn't really only taken by the developed countries. You'd be quite surprised to see how many developing countries get their hands on papers and things that are published by the OECD and want to sit and watch as even observers in seeing what's coming out of the OECD. So we seem them as a great vehicle for us to get these things out.
The RIPE NCC was one of the co?founders of something called the Internet Technical Advisory Committee, ITAC, which we call it, which is formally recognised, it's a formal group inside of the OECD. How cool is that? We have a technical community voice in there. They actually contact the RIPE NCC on the steering committee there so they contact us looking for the appropriate technical people to actually input into papers that have quite a lot of influence, and we have seen ?? we have had a lot of people, I know some you in this room have co?published papers that have been published by the OECD and that's great. That's us putting our technical expertise to work. So I think that's really great. And one of the things that they have ?? I took the OECD logo off their site, and it says: Better policies for better lives. Okay, that's wonderful. And as I said to you just a moment ago, we are not concerned with developing public policy, but we certainly can help them make better public policy. So this, in my opinion, is a great stakeholder for, you know a great ally for the RIPE NCC and the registry system.
The Council of of Europe. We also seem them as quite a great group to work with. They are probably a little bit more limited in their scope of what they do. But they are quite mean and they have got quite a bit of teeth and presence and they are quite an important international body. We seem them all over the place inside all the different governance areas, they like to work with the RIRs. I know that the RIPE NCC very much enjoys a relationship with them. We take the lead because they are here in Europe and we are committed to working with non?governmental stakeholders. And they are very much a leader, they were a great leader at the early start in the whole multi?stakeholder process, so that's really great.
So we have contributed to a lot of Council of Europe's work, we have teamed up in different workshops together with the Council of Europe at different Internet governance forums and other kind of Government meetings that they have. And they are also one of the founding organisations and a big supporter of EuroDIG. For those of you who don't know who EuroDig is, they're the European version of the Internet Governance Forum. So that's the regional kind of Internet Governance Forum presence, so they are a big push behind that, they are really quite nice to work with, so I thought I'd point them out.
And the last one I have here in engaging internationally is the law enforcement agencies. It wasn't very long ago when the word law enforcement came into this community, everybody pretty much vacated the room. And it was quite hard because I found myself, whoa, from the community, engaging with this beast that everybody didn't really even want to talk about. We've come a long way in our relations with the LEAs and I have put them down here as somebody we consider a strategic partner in some ways. The LEAs are a real valuable partner in sustaining our open and transparency registry system. And I'll tell you why: They are keen on keeping our RIPE database open and as accurate as it can be. That's something we very much share with them. I see them as actually somebody who we can use to help us lobby out there in the greater scheme of things, saying, oh wow, we have looked at this, this is important to us, we like how this is being run, we like what they are doing for the accuracy of it, we like the fact that they keep it open and there is a big community around it. And the LEAs want to be part of this. This is something when I meet these LEAs, of course there is something they want from us ?? I make it very clear what I want from them as well. This is one of the things.
Europol, EC 3, which is kind of a new establishment inside of Europol. We have somebody from Europol, Dick Leaning, he is here. He is there over in the corner of the room. It's great to have him here. I think they take what we do quite seriously. They want to actually see how things are going and contribute. So that's really fine. We have had a really nice relationship with them; done some joint training, things on what they can do with public data that's available, so that's really great.
And they are open to capacity building efforts, like the trainings, but it's a limited part of our service region. It's really kind of the western European side of things, and we definitely need to have some relations with other law enforcement. I know that I have got some great relations with the law enforcement out in the Arab world now. And they are actually just starting to see a lot of crime coming in on them and they are not really quite sure what to do because they don't have the same way of working as the western Europeans do in sharing. And even the western Europeans have problems in getting themselves together. This is all resource things that we probably would see. We see the same things happen in the Middle East, they say we know we have to work with the community.
Outside of Europe, we are building these relationships. We use EC3, we use FBI, we use SOKA, they are important partners in getting us in touch with the LEAs, make we are very clear on what we can and cannot do for them. The challenge here is I'm here in Europe, we have got the platform of RIPE and there are some other platforms that the law enforcements have. Outside in the rest of the world, there really aren't these kind of existing forums, so it's kind of hard to see where you would engage with them, so that is a challenge for us.
So regional engagement. Is the RIPE NCC region really one region? Oh my gosh, I don't think so. And I have learned this actually by having left Amsterdam. I'm now sitting in Dubai for about two years and I'm looking in and from where I'm sitting and from where I spend most of my time, Amsterdam is a lovely place and we have our offices there and the RIPE NCC does a great job in doing its service provision to all these 76 countries, but Amsterdam is a very irrelevant place. You look at things from the Russia corridor down to Yemen. Amsterdam is just another city; there's a whole other world going on and Amsterdam doesn't factor in as this great hub. Right so, we have got differences in the state of Internet infrastructure, different economic differences going on, cultural differences, holy wow, and the lack of like an industry organisation in some of these pockets of our region. Like RIPE is very big here in western Europe, we all know it, we all come together here. What are the equivalents in some of the other parts of the regions? It's just not maybe really at the same level. But we, actually, as RIPE NCC, we need to actually provide services to all these 76 countries. We need to cater also, and to understand that we have differences inside in this region. People ?? LIRs in a different parts of our region need different things from the RIPE NCC, and we need to make sure we keep tapping in on this, this is really important.
An Arab RIR, I wanted to bring this up because this is something that is really a big wet fish on my deck. Recently, we had an Arab IGF open consultation meeting in Dubai, which I am a part of the Arab IGF process and part of their multi?stakeholder advisory group. In fact, I am the only non?Arab that's on their multi?stakeholder advisory group. And out of that meeting came something that I probably was suspecting and has kind of of come up before. And that was the initiative for the interest in forming an Arab RIR. Now, by Arab RIR I don't mean the Middle East part of RIPE NCC service region, I am talking about all of the Arab countries that span from Pakistan to Morocco. Mainly, it is Middle East and north Africa, so if you look at this you are cutting across three registries, APNIC for Pakistan and Afghanistan; Middle East, which you can probably appreciate those countries; and then the north Africa ones, Egypt all the way to Morocco. Now, it's unclear what problem having an Arab RIR would actually solve, because I have been trying to get to the bottom of those since this was announced. Incidentally, this was not announced by any one of our members or LIRs working there because I have quite a lot of interaction with those people as well. I probably have as much interaction with regulators and local governments in the Middle East area. This came from Government. Top down. Oh O, that doesn't really side very well with the RIR system but I think if you understand how things work in the Middle East region, it wouldn't be a surprise that this has come from the top down area, governments are amongst the largest employers inside the Middle East region. They have a very big presence in guiding their economies there so of course they have this natural propensity to get involved in things even like we consider to be the open multi?stakeholder process. So to date there is minimal support from the network operators, I have run around a little bit, visited folks in the Qatar and in Saudi Arabia and UAE, of course, and some other parts, I don't really see the support coming from the LIRs necessarily.
So, the RIPE NCC or the RIPE and AfriNIC communities we must work together actually, because a new RIR probably does not really have to be a reality. But, I do want to say, and I want to make it very clear, if our Arab members and the Arab LIRs are saying to us that they prefer to have an Arab RIR, I would be one that would help them establish this, if this is what they want. But coming from a top?down approach, I don't think that's something that's supported by the RIPE NCC or by the RIPE community as far as I can see.
So, recognition. I think the RIPE NCC efforts in like Internet governance these days is very broadly appreciated. I think we can see this by the fact that we have governments literally calling us and asking us for our position and opinions and inviting us into these forums that really we didn't have before. So, okay, we're appreciated and we're recognised there and that's really great. They are very proactive and having for instance they have a lot of initiatives like IPv6 national days that probably have the regulator or Government involved and we get invited to these things. They want us to work together with them as partners in this and that's great that's ever expanding. But again, resource issues probably would keep us from going to every single one of these countries as you can well manage.
The regional presence seems to be working quite well. We are seeing that our engagement strategies and capacity building strategies are being copied in different regions. We have an IPv6 road show in the Middle East area and now there is things being copied all around. It's a great sign of public and private cooperation, where we team together with the governments and we train their Government network operators on dealing with IPv6, so they can champion this inside their countries. Wow, this was done in the Middle East and kind of sprung out of the Middle East and is start to go POP up all over the place. Everybody wants to copy these successes, which is lovely.
But this will not go away. In fact, I just see this thing exacerbating. So there is much work to be done. And the RIPE NCC is committed to being a leader in this arena. But naturally, there has to be a balance between this kind of work and the work that we do for our members and our community. Because at the end of the day we also make it very clear to these governments that our first responsibility is that to our membership and our community.
Engagement with local stakeholders, this is bringing us to the end of the presentation ?? I am sorry I have probably taken so much time here ?? engagement with the local stakeholders. I want to save this for last because I think this is the part that we have probably got the most work to do.
The RIPE NCC members in the community are often in a better position to engage locally than we are. I think we can play quite a nice role in these international, maybe global scene and we have certainly got our contacts and our presence there. But locally, I think it's just too difficult. 76 countries, I just told you how diverse our region is, it's very difficult to get around.
So the RIPE NCC, what I feel can do, can assist in providing materials, information, contacts, to our local LIRs and to RIPE community members, so that you can engage locally with your Government, you should be engaging locally with your Government.
Now, as I said here, this is probably one of the big things that needs to be improved from the RIPE NCC side, because, like I say, we are so busy engaging maybe on the global front that we forget to maybe engage with our community and our members and give you these positions so that you can go and speak with your governments locally. And the funny thing is in the surveys that we have had in the past and in these focus group meetings, I watch these very diligently, everybody is saying, oh my gosh, protect us from the ITU, engage internationally on the governance scene, but, maybe not locally, we can do the local stuff. Wow, okay, cool. So, that's giving me an idea of what we can do to work together with our community so you can do the work locally. I think that's much more effective to be honest with you.
So, and we are working with our members to include a lot of public sector representatives in kind of all the events that we do and regional events that we do. RIPE NCC regional meetings, the different nogs, we do see governments coming and participating. In round table meetings, we throw two Government round table meetings a year and they are popular. The great thing is we finally have the relations where we can be very frank with the governments and they very frank to us telling us, this is what you need to do now, go figure out your position and publish it. Great. So, this is quite coming along quite nicely.
I think that some of this needs to happen a little bit more on the local level. That kind of brings me to the end. I am sorry, Kurtis...
CHAIR: Any questions for Paul? No. Thank you, Paul. So, lastly we have Andrew with the operational update from the NCC.
ANDREW DE LA HAYE: Thank you Kurtis, well, last presentation of this session, so, bear with me. I do have some slides to go through. We got quite some questions over the last couple of months on some detailed statistics on how we are doing in different areas, so that's what I'm going to provide. Lots of pictures.
What I usually do is I go through different departments or areas where we do new stuff, but actually most changes happened in registration services, that's the area I want to focus on today. Nevertheless I do want to touch upon the continuation and extension of the webinars we have been doing in training services which we have been highly valued and we are looking at expanding more those than we did today.
We did do a lot of improvement in the database area but that has been discussed in the Database Working Group already this morning. So I'll skip those.
We implemented the IP analyser, as many of you know and requested IPv6 functionality as well. Well, we are currently planning on these next steps and hopefully this year we'll be able to launch that as well.
Certification enhancement. We did move on, making it much more easy to retrieve a certificate working on the U I to make it as easy as possible for to you understand and use the system, and currently we have about 1,500 certificates registered.
And the last bit is we did get lots of questions on, can we enhance the way we communicate with you guys? And we implemented life chat for our customer service department and I'll touch upon it a bit later on today as well. We'll also look at the pilot for RS to make it easier for you to get in touch with us.
RS activities. Just to give you a bit of an idea what we are doing in RS. Of course the main focus is maintaining a strong registry, it has been one of the biggest topics today recollect keeping the registry quality up to date and maintaining it. We do consolidate the services within RS in three main areas, one is strong registry, or the registry as such with the quality, resource life cycle management, handing out the resources and managing those, and stakeholder services, I won't go into all of these but I will highlight a few of those which have been very important over the last couple of months.
Registration services ticket volume. This is one of the many asked questions, what did happen in RS? Did you see a tremendous drop in tickets? And honestly, if you look at this slide, we haven't. It has been quite stable amount of tickets we have been seeing coming in, and now I'll go through a couple of those points later non this presentation, why we are still in a similar fashion as we were before.
The last /8. Now, everybody now has run out by now. It was the 14th September last year and every LIR can receive one last /22. So how are we doing there? So far, as of today, we have 1553 /22s which we issued and of course you do have to have your v6 allocation as well.
How does that look like in a graph on a monthly basis? Well we get about 150 to 200 requests a month. And it has been quite stable. So we haven't seen a big raise or decrease over the last couple of months. What we also do focus on is whether it's ISPs getting those resources or whether it's non?ISPs. So when people sign up, they can mark where they are, there are a lot of different options they have, but this gives us a bit of an idea whether it's End Users getting these last resources or ISPs, so to speak.
Then a trend line on the IPv4 allocations since 2009, we have seen a growth of course, and everybody noticed that. And in 2013 we see a bit of a trend bridge where where he see more IPv4 first allocations than additional allocations. That's not really weird, looking back at the former slide. And also noting that quite a few of the LIRs already have their 22 nowadays.
Transfers, one of the major topics of today as well. So how many transfers are there in our region? And this one makes is transparent, we hope. On a monthly basis we see between 5 and 7 transfers happening in our region. This is without mergers and acquisitions. So you might say well, there might be lots more mergers and acquisitions going on. And that's this slide. And in quarter 1, we don't see a trend bridge with what we have seen over the last couple can of years, so there is no big change in mergers and acquisitions either. You do see the bumping in the quarter 4, but that has to do with the normal business goings within our LIRs.
So that is a bit what we have been seeing in IPv4 land. So now I move over to IPv6, I have two slides. Just to give you a bit of an idea of where we are. We see about 200 allocations per month. It dropped a bit and it's now around 150 applications which we make. And that is also in line with the last /8 policy which does expect people getting a 22 to also have a v6 allocation.
Then lastly, we also implemented the extension for v6 allocations, the policy, and this is a graph that shows the impact of that specific policy. We see that we are getting about 20 to 25 requests per month, to extend the 32 our LIRs already have, and there is three options basically, either a 31, a 30 or a 29. In general people just ask for the 29, which was to be expected.
2007?01 came up today. So, one of the questions we saw today was area there still lots of no contract PI addresses in the database? Or in the registry? And threats because it's a major, major project and it has taken a lot of effort to get where we are today. We cut the project into three phases. Phase 1 was making sure that we had contracts for those PI addresses we handed out. Then in Phase 2, we started to contact LIRs with existing assignments and getting those contracts in. Currently, we are in Phase Three, where we have to try to find those that are not belonging to a specific LIR, and that's actually quite an effort. It's hard, there is lack of familiarity with the RIPE policy, and the RIPE NCC, so some just say who are you? So that's what we have to explain. It's sometimes very difficult to identify the legitimate holder of the resource, so it's really detective work in some cases. And we also have to ensure that for our continuity of active networks, you don't want to take something away from people that are using it.
All in all, we had to go through three ?? 35,000 PI resources. And we are currently at the mark of being around 25,000 resolved ones, which means we still have to go through about 10,000, we are slightly below, so it's going quite well. We already contacted 30 percent of those 10,000, and hopefully, Q1 next year we'll be able to finalise this project.
2007?01, will it come to an end then? The project itself will, but there is a lot maintenance coming out it have as well and that's new to us as well. Because all those people that have contracts, also have needs to change those once in a while. You can imagine that people change sponsoring LIR, RegID changes, status changes, contract status I mean, which means that every quarter we see about currently 2,000 requests for change, which is quite an impact on the team.
I got some questions in the hallway about abuse reporting, and handling, so this one gives a bit of an idea on what we're doing. There is two kind of abuse which we pick up. Incorrect data and policy violations. About 50% of all the reports we get in are spam or hacking, and there is not much we can do in those cases. The other half are cases we go into detail more. As you can see on the right?hand side, incorrect data, what do we do there? We investigate. And in about 75 percent of the cases it's 76 I think, if I can see it correctly ?? there is not much going on and we move on. In the other cases, the other 24 percent of the cases, we have been able to resolve those inconsistencies in correct data with the users.
Then the other one, the policy violations, more than half of them are not policy violations, at the end of the day. About 17 percent of those reports give us insufficient information to really dig into those and do something with it. But still, quite a number, which is 26 percent, we do further inquire row and we see to it that the policy violations are taken care of and being helped. Next question will probably be do you deregister? In the whole time that we have been handling this we only registered a few, it's really like a handful, but it does happen.
So that's all the operational numbers we have been focusing on and trying to answer some of your questions. Now two more slides or three more slides on some of the feedback we received from you and areas where we try to improve and enhance our services.
So the first one is the member stakeholder survey 2011, showed us that you want to have a better way of communicating with us and what I already told you, in customer services we implemented live chat and that's something we are going to also implement for RS specific for policy and resource led questions of course. We'll start off with the pilot this year.
Additionally, what we also do every new LIR, we give a phone call to explain in policy how everything fits together so that they are acquainted with the way we work. And that's very well received.
Final point, that's the membership and community feedback on high quality registry. Also it's very clearly in the survey in 2011, but also a big topic of today is one of their main aims and we have done a lot in that area offer the couple ?? over the last couple of years, we have done a project which was called resource data quality to enhance the data, quality within the registry, we do inter?RIR consistency projects and checks, we have been working in 2007?01 with great results, and for example, in database, we had the abuse senior policy proposal that went through, also to increase the data accuracy.
One of the issues we see at the moment, and that has to do with the exhaustion of the regular v4 pool, because usually people would come in and they would request new resources and we would take them through an audit to see whether all the data, stats were correct, contact data, everything like that. However, currently, we have less contact moments with our members. And that's something we have to tackle. Because it's a potential for the registry data quality to deteriorate.
The existing audit procedure, as has been raised at the last RIPE Meeting and for many of our members is very cumbersome and very time consuming and also something we have to take into account. And in order to maintain a strong registry and in line with the members feedback, we are trying to evolve this service and as auditing has a very negative connotation, we have also been thinking about renaming it, so to speak, and it should also fit the story and that's what we call "assisted registry check." And the aim of the assisted registry check is to maintain a periodic contact moment between the LIR and us, so that we are able to verify whether the register and data are still correct. We also aim to reduce the work load for the LIRs, as the current process is seen as a nuisance.
So what will the RIPE NCC try to provide? We will provide something annexed to our observations and recommendations for change and stuff you can think of is an overview of registry information, contact details, street address, that kind of stuff, we'll provide and overview of Internet resource consistency, overlapping assignments and such and we'll provide and overview of RDNS and route objects consistency, you can think about check Lame, reverse delegations and routing registry for BGP announcements. That's all kind of announcements we will provide to you proactively.
The intent with that is to assist you in improving your data accuracy, so there is lots of stuff we can do for you as well. And that's one of the main focuses for us to take a part of the burden away from you and to help you get your data up to date and as good as possible.
Now, as it is an enhancement of something we have been doing for a long time, we do like to have feedback from our membership. So, the idea is to have a pilot over the next quarter with about 50 members to see how they perceive the value of our assisted registry check and to see how it feels, how the process flow is and all of that. We would really like to get your input, so those of you that want to participate in this, please contact the info hub and leave your name and number, it would be very useful to us to get your input on this. After that period, we will make a writeup and we'll share our experiences, and from that moment on, we'll see how we can move forward with keeping this data accurate and up?to?date.
And that brings me to the last slide...
Any questions?
CHAIR: Anyone?
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Hi, I am Miriam from the RIPE NCC, it's actually not a question but just an addition to an operational update. I just wanted to make you all aware of another way to update you on our plans and road maps. We actually have implemented the RIPE NCC road map page on RIPE Labs that's currently in prototype and we are going to make it more pretty and also implement more feedback mechanisms on that page. And I sent a mail about that to the NCC Services Working Group a couple of weeks ago. We didn't hear much feedback on that yet. I would really like to hear from you if there is something you find useful, if this provides more transparency about some of the activities and services that the RIPE NCC is working on and what our current plans are on these services. I just wanted to make you aware. It's on the home page of RIPE Labs.ripe.net.
All right. Thank you Andrew.
(Applause)
So, we just have two agenda items left. One is the open microphone session, which encourages you to bring up any topic you want, not quite any, but we're quite liberal, I'll be the judge. So if anyone has anything you want to talk about, preferably relating to NCC and their services. No? Any other business?
Then, for the second time today, we have finished ahead of schedule, this is a new record.
(Applause)
So, the AGM will start at six o'clock sharp in the room next door, the Board is nodding, so I guess that's true then. So you have time to get coffee and whatever else and see you there.
