Many thanks to Willem for his fine thoughts on the aims and structure of RIPE. His mail demonstrates yet another of the good features of RIPE - the quality of the discussion on its various mailing lists. These lists enable the functions of collaboration and information exchange between meetings and have been of great assistance to many of us. The areas of activity that Willem lists deserve consideration as it is about time that we tried to align activities with reality. These are some minor comments: 1. Where does "routing registries" belong, under routing or under registries? 2. Is there room for an area related specifically to broadband technologies? 3. While security merits its own area of activity, I would hope that this does not give the impression that it is of no concern to other areas. Security is a serious issue and it pervades almost all other areas. I agree with Willem about the size of meetings - the bigger the better, as far as the attenders go, as this offers us more opportunities for information interchange. Of course, growing numbers pose problems for the organisers and we must listen to their problems and suggestions. Personally, I find the schedule of three 3-day meetings a year just right, but there have been large imbalances in the attendances at parallel WG meetings. A re-alignment of the areas along the lines Willem suggests would help to rectify this. Cheers. Mike