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 ---