Dear colleagues, Today we welcome our 15,000th Local Internet Registry (LIR) to join the RIPE NCC. This comes after several years of intense growth across our service region — it was less than three years ago that we reached 10,000 LIRs. Coincidentally, this latest milestone comes as we are completing the move to our new office location in Amsterdam. Our membership is changing as it grows. LIRs are increasingly being created by “non-traditional” industrial, financial and manufacturing entities that are showing greater interest in managing their own technical infrastructure. We are pleased to welcome these new LIRs on board and recognise that additional outreach efforts may be needed to explain the bottom-up process and encourage their participation within the RIPE community. This is reflected in our recently-published Activity Plan and Budget 2017, where we have placed an emphasis on member outreach in the coming year. Another focus will be ensuring that these new LIRs are aware of the range of tools and services we provide to support them in their work, something that was identified as an area for improvement in the RIPE NCC Survey 2016 results. For more on our membership, this article on RIPE Labs takes a look at its growth over time and examines the effect this will have on our remaining IPv4 pool: https://labs.ripe.net/Members/wilhelm/15-000-local-internet-registries Kind regards Axel Pawlik Managing Director RIPE NCC