I would like to congratulate Mirjam Kühne and Niall O’Reilly on their selection as our new RIPE Chair and Vice-Chair. Both Mirjam and Niall have a long history within RIPE; they are experienced chairs, they understand consensus, and they share the community's expectations in terms of transparency and openness. I am sure they will continue to serve the community well in their new roles.
After Rob Blokzijl passed the torch to me in 2014, this is the first time we have selected our RIPE Chair (and now Vice-Chair) as a community. I want to thank everyone who participated in this process - by standing as nominees, volunteering to serve on the NomCom, providing feedback, or by helping to establish the process itself.
I do want to acknowledge that concerns were raised quite late in the process about the potential for capture or influence by the RIPE NCC. However, I hope you will agree that the NomCom has chosen some good people here. It is worth remembering that we operate on “rough consensus”, which means that not everyone will fully agree with everything. That being the case, we have plenty of time to consider further improvements to the process before it starts again ahead of RIPE 91. There is also an opportunity to work on improving the process for selecting working group chairs and the community’s code of conduct, so I would like to encourage you to volunteer for these efforts under the guidance of our new leadership.
So what happens next? I am eager to hand over my RIPE Chair responsibilities. Mirjam and Niall will need time to fit their new RIPE responsibilities alongside their existing ones. I don't expect this will take too long, and I intend to exit the role pass onhand overam committed to hand over the torch as soon as possible.
I am happy that I no longer have to occupy both the RIPE Chair and RIPE NCC Managing Director roles. As the Managing Director, I am fully committed to giving the new leadership and the RIPE Community the support needed, just as my predecessors have supported me and my predecessor Rob Blokzijl.
In the meantime, I hope you will join me in wishing our new RIPE Chair and Vice-Chair the very best... and with my RIPE NCC Managing Director's hat on, I would also like to thank the outgoing RIPE Chair for his contribution over the past six years.
Kind regards
Hans Petter Holen
(Outgoing) RIPE Chair / RIPE NCC Managing Director
Dear colleagues,
The RIPE 2020 NomCom has selected Mirjam Kühne as RIPE Chair and Niall
O'Reilly as RIPE Vice Chair. After interviewing all nominees, hearing
substantial input from the community and a thorough discussion during
three selection meetings all voting members voted to select Mirjam as
Chair and eight out of ten voting members voted to select Niall as Vice
Chair. The selection was subsequently supported unanimously by all
members of the committee. We closely followed the process spelled out in
ripe-727 and ripe-728. We regularly paused to confirm that the whole
committee was comfortable with the process and its progress.
We were able to choose from a set of nominees who are all very capable
and well respected in the community. We expect that the community would
support any of them as their Chair. Our selection is in no way a
negative statement about the nominees we did not select.
We selected Mirjam because the input from the community clearly favoured
her. She is very widely regarded as someone who listens carefully to
everyone and who helps the community to find consensus and move forward.
We selected Niall because of the positive input we received about his
track record with the community. Mirjam and Niall convinced us that they
would work well as a team and complement each other.
The RIPE NCC board has confirmed the candidates in accordance with the
process set out in ripe-727. The original time line called for a
transition from Hans Petter to Mirjam and Niall during RIPE 81 in
October. Hans Petter has since resigned as RIPE Chair because he
accepted to be the new managing director of the RIPE NCC; he is
currently also serving as RIPE Chair ad-interim. In this situation it
makes little sense to stick to the original time line. Therefore we
suggest that the outgoing and incoming Chairs arrange the transition
among themselves as soon as practicable.
We plan to publish the NomCom report about this first run of the
selection process in September before our term ends at RIPE 81. We
expect to make suggestions for improving the process and look forward to
the community discussing and deciding the process for the next
iteration.
We thank everyone who supported the NomCom, especially all nominees and
the many members of the community who made time to give us their input.
Finally we call on the whole community to welcome and support Mirjam and
Niall in their new roles!
Daniel Karrenberg - Chair - RIPE 2020 Nomcom