Dear colleagues, The RIPE NCC and the European Internet Exchange Association (Euro-IX) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) at the Euro-IX Forum in Krakow, Poland on 7 November. The MoU documents the existing relationship between the RIPE NCC and Euro-IX, and focuses specifically on the promotion of IPv6 and IXPs, the importance of security, and a common approach to Internet governance: https://www.ripe.net/publications/news/about-ripe-ncc-and-ripe/ripe-ncc-and-... This MoU is the latest formalised agreement for greater cooperation between the RIPE NCC and one of the many external organisations we work with, and we wanted to give you some background on why we believe these types of agreements are valuable to the RIPE NCC membership and the greater RIPE community. We also want to be completely transparent about the agreements we’re entering into, which is why we’ve created a new page on the RIPE NCC website where you can get all of the details for yourselves: https://www.ripe.net/about-us/what-we-do/engagement-external-organisations Beyond the RIPE NCC membership, there is a diverse range of organisations we work with in various ways, including governments, regulators, technical bodies, industry groups, law enforcement agencies, academic institutions and others. By engaging with these organisations, we can offer decision makers technical expertise that will ultimately benefit the Internet community, gain support for open, bottom-up policy-making, and strengthen the legitimacy, authority and accountability of the RIPE NCC, the RIPE community and the global registry system. In fact, this kind of engagement is included as one of the four main focus areas in the Draft RIPE NCC Activity Plan & Budget 2017, and was the subject of a presentation by RIPE NCC Executive Board member Maria Häll at RIPE 73. You can find both of these online for more details if you’re interested: https://www.ripe.net/participate/meetings/gm/meetings/october-2016/draft-rip... https://ripe73.ripe.net/archives/video/1480/ You can also learn more about our engagement with external organisations and the mutual benefits of these agreements in this RIPE Labs article: https://labs.ripe.net/Members/chrisb/building-and-documenting-stronger-relat... We encourage you to include any comments you might have in the comment section under the article, or on this mailing list. Kind regards, Paul Rendek Director of External Relations RIPE NCC