All,
During the charter discussion, some of you suggested to appoint a
co-chair.
Most RIPE working groups have more than one chair person. In the past,
I have never felt the necessity to do this job with more than one
person. However, in the spirit that it is always good to try something
new or different, we can certainly add a co-chair if the working group
believes this to be beneficial for achieving our goals.
Considering that we don't have any formal process for appointing a
working group chair, there is no standard on how this is achieved in a
transparent and fair way. This might have been acceptable in the
early days of RIPE when there were far fewer people involved and
governments weren't watching us.
Given that there is an interest in appointing an additional cochair,
this seems an excellent opportunity to achieve something more than
just appointing a co-chair: if we define an open process and are happy
with the results, we can propose the process as a RIPE policy proposal
to the wider community for the appointment of chair people within
RIPE.
At the same time, I don't believe we should overregulate and loose one
of the key benefits of our loosely organized community. Therefore, my
personal preference would be to formulate a set of principles that we
need to follow to appoint chair people while the actual implementation
can vary depending on the position that needs to be filled.
I would first like to hear what people think about this. If there is
support, I would like to form a small task force to write a first
version of the principles and how we plan to implement them in the
ipv6 working group.
David Kessens
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