These are unedited transcripts and may contain errors.
16:00:
RIPE NCC Services Working Group:
CHAIR: Right. Hello. So I know you're been waiting for the first Working Group, the NCC Services, and wait no more. Here we are. Before we go to the agenda, those of you who have been here for a while know that, directly after this, we have the RIPE NCC AGM, and if you, just like me, haven't registered yet, now might be a good time to do that. I'll try and wait until I'm off the stage. But please go and register because the AGM will start five, ten ish minutes after we finish here. So we don't have so much delay in starting the AGM because then we have the votings and we want to be out before midnight.
So the agenda for the meeting, we have the welcome, which I'm doing now. We have some scribe and Jabber scribe from RIPE NCC. If I would have checked my email, I would know who it was. Thank you very much for being volunteered by the NCC. Microphone etiquette, please be polite, nice, don't throw things at each other. And state your name and affiliation if you ask any questions. Then the agenda. First the RIPE NCC update by the NCC management team. We have an update on the 2007 1 project by Arne. Resource certification by Alex. Update on RIPE NCC governance by Athina and last the NCC arbitration panel by Keith. And any other business. And with that we're going to move over to the general meeting. With that, to Alex.
AXEL PAWLIK: Good afternoon. Just waiting for the people in the back to come in and sit. Okay. My name is Axel Pawlik. I'm the Managing Director of RIPE NCC and as is customary from the RIPE NCC we consider this to be part of the general meeting already so we you can direct any questions at the end of this and also during the part of the general meeting. So a very high level update from me and then go through the divisions and departments and my colleagues will talk about what they were busy with. I know we have talked about this already; I presented it in Rome. We are here to do your bidding. You tell us what you want us to do, what is helpful, and we'll strive to make that possible. You can also tell us what is not necessary anymore and we'll see that we stop doing those things.
Activities, there are many many things that we're doing. I'm not going through the details. Again, the three little dots at the bottom for those that didn't fit on the slide. Please do tell us what you haven't. It's important that we understand what you want from us.
This I call the Andrei slide and I call it that because Andrei is not with us anymore. He left us. He was our CTO, and after, I think three days less at the NCC man me, he left. And we all are very sad because he has contributed quite a lot of those more than ten years and we're very glad that he's not too far away. I don't see him right in the room but I can't see anything anyway. He left and went to work with the Internet society so we see him here. He was presenting earlier this week already. So that's a good thing. And apart from that, we have distributed the task that he was looking after among the other members of the senior team and we're not senior because we need [Canes] to come up on to the stage. Well, maybe one day.
Future and strategy, you've seen that slide probably before. It's happening. We're running out of IPv4 space, speaking for the RIRs and IANA. When journalists talk to me on the telephone, I say, yeah, I don't know when it's going to happen, maybe later this year but I know this guy from the Asia Pacific and it might be earlier. You can expect us to turn around and say sorry, you're too late. So we are developing strategies for the future around what services do we do, charging schemes and the like. Basically we're focussing on much like I started with, what is the use of the RIPE NCC for its members and the wider community. We want your feedback, we need your support and feel we have it so far. Back to the roots, goes back to the network coordination of the RIPE NCC where we started our life as an organization before we allocated so we're doing things we consider useful for the operation of the Internet in our surface region.
Strong registry, we perform the task so the registry should be of high quality. Someone needs to do it. But that's part. The other part is you as the strong community carrying this all along.
Not talking about this much, we talked about with our board or the last three or four years. Those are the things we consider most important for the future of RIPE NCC and the community and so far we have met with some this has been met with quite some understanding by you.
Current developments, service to members. Again, more feedback. Tell us. We are trying to do all sorts of things to give you more to talk to us and communicate.
Regional meetings and it was mentioned earlier that the first big survey in 2002 is something we look back to with some warm feelings because that spawned the first regional meetings. That has now progressed. Then we did regional meetings in Moscow. We're going off to Dubrovnik for the first time into this region. That's what we think is quite useful. Our members from those regions are happy with us for going there. Yeah, that's what we do.
Also, we have invitations or requests to come with this, with the big RIPE meeting to more or less everywhere and that, of course, doing two meetings a year is not quite possible. So we are thinking of attaching what we will call RIPE days to a couple of where we bring a little bit of the RIPE meeting, what's currently hot in terms of a Working Group and some share and some regular participants possibly to other meetings than ours.
Andy has presented on Monday what the Working Group share group is thinking of and has been thinking of and we're much in sync with that and like the outcome of that. We'll do everything we can to make those things possible. Membership survey, we'll talk about it some more. It's another big one and important for us to understand what you want from us.
The future as we see it currently says that we will be less busy with allocations, more busy with registrations and registering changes. Generally, services for the community at large, or the Internet at large and for the operators, you folks mostly. We also, of course for a long time have looked at legacy space and legacy space holders and it will be important that those guys find a home. Welcome back to the RIPE NCC. Find a home in the NCC registry and we have closer exchange with them as well.
Another principle that we're looking at, apart from services for the Internet at large, we're doing services for our members, for you, and that has been a little less some services where people pay for them. Everybody who gets such a service should be a member. So to get a say, to have a vote in what is going on in the RIPE NCC. And looking at the charging scheme, it's quite focused on allocations, we're thinking about ways to get to the next stage, get to the next level. So the main principles for the charging scheme, it should be fair and actually could increase in being more predictable than it currently is. And the whole thing has to ensure stability for RIPE NCC to continue doing work for you.
Now, how are we going to go about this? And you probably have an idea. We've done similar things before. We've had discussions with the executive board. We will talk a little more about this in the general meeting. What we will do is go to the drawing table or the writing table and write the whole ideas that we have up properly in the form of a couple of scenarios. We want to publish that then on the mailing list for our members to read, understand and discuss and have questions and proposals. We'll collect the feedback, bundle them up and review the proposal again with our executive board and then finalize the documents of a new charging scheme for the general meeting at the next RIPE meeting. And that is the high level overview from me. I have a question slide here but that's just to look pretty. I would ask you to ask the questions to all of us at the end of this slide set.
Next up is Andrew. Thank you.
ANDREW [de la HAYE]: Thank you. This year I won't bore you with tons and tons of slides with statistics on it, nor will I talk about what we did over the last year. What I do want to focus on is what we will do this year. It is all based on feedback we got from you, from the community and the membership, on what they expect from us in the member services area. The main three areas are transparency and procedures and transparency in procedures, the evolution of the services and improved member interaction. Number one, enhance transparency. We have a lot of questions in Rome on what we exactly do. We were a bit of dark grey box and we want to make it lighter. We'll clearly identify processes we have within the NCC and communicate those via the website and other media. A couple of examples, external impact analysis, on policy proposals. We'll try to inform you how we look at it. Seeking community guidance on clarity and interpretations. You'll see that tomorrow as well where we have a couple of questions on how we execute policy. Publish evaluation procedure of 54 on line. Making it clear to you how the process looks like, what we ask you to submit.
Second one is the registration services ticket mechanism. It is a bit of a change on how it used to work. We started, of course, with requests coming in, went to[ ROBOT], then into a queue and IPRA would pick it up. Then if there were questions, the requests would go in a queue and somebody else would pick up the next new request. What we'll do now, over the next month or so is to reroute, if there's any questions, to the top of the list. It goes to the top of the queue which means it will get a new time stamp or new IPRA, we'll have a look at it. You might be confronted with more IPRAs on your request than you usually see. It's basically to be very clear and make it very fair on who comes in, first come first serve kind of basis.
Transparency, again I don't want to go into all the details on how much address space. You can see it on our website. It's presented and updated bi weekly so you can keep track of it yourself and decide on what the end date will be.
Evolution of services. We've been looking at our registration services and as we understand the main topic for us is maintaining an accurate and complete registry. That is the most important thing at the moment and always has been. But the main focus will be on this for now. We surveyed 300 members with questions on how would you see that, how can we keep the data accurate and better and improve it. They all said, well, ask us to proper actively ask us to look at our data where it's still valid. One is we'd like to ask you to confirm your data in the database. You get a nice confirmation visible in the database object: And what we'll also do is that we will confirm LIR specific date, organization information, allocation details, probably on a yearly basis. Our target is to get 50% of our membership audited, so to speak, or asking them whether their data is still valid, which means every second year we'll try to reach you. Also that will be visible so that you can rely on the data we provide.
An additional service, we have been asked to look at this resource transfer listing. Again, the main driver is the maintaining of accurate registry. What we will try to do is facilitate resource transfers for the members. How will this look like? It's a concept, still. It's not there yet. If you have any feedback on it, please contact us. But the idea is to provide a platform where listers and needers, people who want to get rid of resources and people who want to get them can meet. It will be a member only service, that's for sure. RIPE NCC will confirm whether it's a member, that's one. We will look at the registry and we'll apply the policies that need to be looked at.
Evolution of services. Geolocation, seems wrong. We had lots and lots of questions on that. The problem is that the mechanism to link IP addresses is difficult, finding out postal addresses is hard, translating addresses is difficult. Many of your customers get either wrong language delivered or can even be blocked, of course. So what we will do is, in the RIPE database, create a mechanism where you, as a holder, of IP address blocks can basically as an authority prefer where you want your resources seen from. What are the benefits? Now, the end user will benefit, receive content in desired language, the LIR, you will have benefits. Full control of the location based services and this, hopefully, less complaints. And the content providers as well, easier to address their target audience. What we will be doing in this area, we'll present it in the database Working Group, if you have any comments there, it will be valuable. We'll add additional location data but always operational to you. Your privacy is guaranteed. It will not link to individual IPs. And we also incorporate with Google, [Maxmind], to see what their requirement specific locations are and try to work something out. If you have any ideas for additional partners or any requirements, please speak up.
Certification well, Alex will give you an update later on. Just a few remarks. Enhancement of registration information. It has been launched the 1st of January and currently we have 430 and around 450 certified members. Member interaction, that's the last bit for me. Network coordination services. We got a lot of request registration services for people who had issues being filtered and all that kind of stuff. And usually we'd say well you have to go to your stream and discuss that. It's still difficult for some of you to reach the right person. What we'll do is try to help you get in contact with these people and support you in finding the right person.
We have a little booth, it develops internal software. There's a voting mechanism. We would love to hear how you perceive our portal, not only giving it a number but also some pointers in what you expect from us. We're here to help you and facilitate as much as we can. That's basically all the red line through the whole story. Give us feedback. What we'll also do, based on request from you, is piloting web chat functionality. It's difficult, sometimes, we don't who to speak to. It's nice if we know there's some kind of warm body behind the RIPE NCC, so we will introduce this in the next couple of months, probably focus on customer services as an area, specifically to billing related questions, and, if it's a success, we'll try and roll it our in different areas as well.
The last one from me is RIPE NCC mobile pilot. It can be up and done once in a while. It's a trial to see whether you like it. We also like to get feedback. What you can do is Whois queries, gives you idea of location information, also contains itself, but it feeds from our RIPE Labs website, and there's a feedback button which we would value a lot if you would take the time to give us feedback.
This is a slide, a little movie, 50 second. Select a phone of preference because they'll start moving all together.
Does it work? No. Folks, not necessary. It will give you a bit of an idea on what the functionality is. You can see it yourself. We'll change the URL next week or the week after. This one should work. For anybody interested in looking at the database and querying it, it should work for you. Again, questions later on, please. And I'd like now to pass it on.
SPEAKER: Good afternoon. My name is [] Jochan. I'm the CFO. I have a bit more responsibilities, as you can see, mainly the supporting departments. I only have a couple slides and bear with me with the IT slides, it's quite new for me. First of all, Andrew showed all his lovely services, but I want to start with your favorite service, the billing service. We're quite busy and one thing we're positive about is the payment days which has dropped. People are paying quite a bit quicker, which is nice. An additional feature we're we've implemented is PayPal. You can pay via PayPal. And we're looking to do this for the regular billing activities. We just finished our audit for 2010 and the board has asked me this year, we had our auditors for six years, but they asked me out of good governance principles to look for new auditors, so we've sent out an RFP, whether they want to pick it up. And we'll look at a new auditor firm. We have some office improvements, the facilities and housing stuff. I just want to show it to you. One big thing we're working, as well, in IT and finance, is to look at efficiency and improvements. In finance some automation improvements, on line banking system and looking at automating our business expenses and make it easier to make the bookings. Also looking at travel requests in the hope purchase procedure flow so the authorizations can be made on line.
Legal, well only one legal FT, Athina. She is quite busy with legal issues coming up. Some of the governance documents. She'll present on it later on. We're slowly plugging away. There's a long list of documents to publish. We'll make sure the interaction with you and the community is there. We'll publish these documents and invite feedback. We really solicit feedback. If you have input on these documents or comments, please send that. She's also been busy with the legal framework on RPKI. And quite a bit of outreach with law enforcement and regulators. Reasonable we had a big event with 70 law enforcers from around the world in London, which was very nice for us to present ourselves and bring forward some issues. One of the big topics for them this time was v6 and the transition from v4 to v6. So they really are quite concerned about that and we hope to bring these issues forward to them and discuss this with them.
And furthermore, we have ongoing legal support internally when there's information requests, issues with contracts, when we need new terms for services, et cetera.
Then IT, information security. Well, because I'm quite a bit new to it, I want to take a fresh look at what we have currently. It has grown. Together with the IT team, I want to take a good look, see what we have now, see what we can make more efficient and move it forward. Of course, their big task is to provide internal support for the services we provide and also they run the RIPE meeting. On information security there's two things, one is the security review of our infrastructure and we just installed a network intrusion detection system and we're trying to set it up really well to monitor what's going on. Another big project is looking at the different information security of the different internal processes and how we run that. One of the first things we want to take a look at what members become a member, how do we do it, what due diligence, et cetera. That's it from my side.
SPEAKER: I'm Daniel Karrenberg, the chief scientist. I'll talk about two and a half things here. I will not bore you with stuff we have done. I'm not boring you with other stuff we will be doing. So just the highlights. But at the end, any questions about these things, I welcome. I also have inherited some of Andrei's responsibilities in the information services in the DNS area, so you know that we do a lot of stuff there, like K root and all these things. I'm not going to talk about that. I'm going to talk about RIPE Atlas. Those of you here at the last meeting heard about it, active Internet measurements from a lot of small probes. What you see here is all the working probes as of this morning, 350 of them sending in data for a picture like this. This is simplified realtime picture of the RTT for K root. What I want to show you is we launched this in Rome and we've really rolled out these things right now. You can see the results at atlas.ripe.net. Some of the hosts have decided to make them public. You can see how my two connections at home work. We are seeking sponsors for this. We're running this as a pilot service, better service, so we're not providing it as a service with service contracts but we're looking for people who actually like this, see potential in it and provide funds for us to continue this work. Obviously, partly it's paid for by all the membership but we want to see some extra support and people putting their money where their mouth is. All the details I told you in Rome you can find on RIPE Labs. We're deploying more in the summer. We've moved this from engineers sending all those probes to a more professional or department, our customer services department who will be doing this. That will be slowly ramping up. If you would like to host such a probe, go to the website and put your details in, the more details you put in the we'll make a decision where we allocate the next batch of probes. It's not first come first served. So again, if you're interested, please go to the website and give us as much details as you can in terms of AS numbers and IP addresses. We have ordered another 1 K probes that will be delivered in October. We hope that we can push those out a little bit more quickly, because the process will be oiled and at the end of the year we'll have certainly more than 2 K probes in operations. If you're interested in the details, come to the Working Group tomorrow in the last slot. If you have suggestions and want to speak to the developers and the engineers who do this, there's the measurement BoF right after the last slot and we'll make sure that it finishes before the dinner. Maybe not. Maybe the discussion will be more interesting and people will skip dinner.
The other thing I want to talk about is new. This is something we're launching this meeting, it's called RIPE Stat. It doesn't stand for statistics only; it also stands for status. Basically, look at what's the state of the Internet right now in terms of up to layer 3. This comes from the fact that we heard from very many people and that it's difficult to find our measurement information, other information and put it into context. We have a lot of data out there. We have the number registry, obviously, which is in the RIPE database. We have the routing registry, which is in the route objects and so on, also in the RIPE database. We have BGP information, we have active measurements from ATLAS and the older TTM measurements. There's a whole lot of more little data sets that we have about IP numbers and AS numbers and also have some external data sets like the geolocation that Maxmind makes available. There's a whole lot of data that we have here. We have this in near realtime actually. And we have for many of these data sets, we have a decade worth of historical data. But it's what you told us quite clearly is that it's so difficult to find and even more difficult to actually put them in relation to each other. The interesting analysis, if you do put them in relation to each other. Alex Band has already come up with this in the previous, in the routing Working Group, wouldn't it be great when we configure RPKI things to look at the routing table statement and see where the governances to what people are specifying. What we're trying to do is get all these data sets and any potential future data stats together, put it into one interface and give you that interface to work with. That's basically the idea. This is just a snap shot of how it looks like. It's basically a query box where you can put an AS number or IP number and we'll tell you in different boxes here what we know about it, from either one data set or combination of data sets. That's, in a nutshell, what it is. You can look at it. It's stat.ripe.net. It is don't judge it by the performance and by the bugs that are still in there. We do it in through development. We don't want to develop for six months then come back to a RIPE meeting and say here's what we did. We want to have a more close loop of interaction with those of you who are interested. What we're doing is having public demos every four weeks, on Tuesdays. It's a fixed slot there. They're scheduled until the end of the year. It's a half hour. You can go to a web teleconference for half an hour and hear what's happened and discuss it with each other and give us suggestions and so on. We actually minute those demos, so little summaries of what was said and announced and released and things like that, and actually if you want to hear the whole show, if you cannot make it, you can go to stat.ripe.net website and that let's you access the recordings. We've had four so far. After this announcement, we hope for a bigger turnout and more suggestions coming in. Tell us what you need because if you don't you'll get the tools that you deserve. An interesting other thing to note is, at least in my mind, this is when it's actually out of better and has all the boxes and can access all the data that we have, that it eventually will replace most other measurement tools that we have, and probably also the TTM pages, and so on. We want to put it all there. And again, the details, you can find in the networking group and the measurement BoF tomorrow at the end of the day. Here's the half thing. Some of you may or many of you may still remember the TTM service, the, it's also an active measurement service but not from as many points as Atlas, but fewer points, and what Atlas is targeted at putting the probes at service locations, one is in the network itself. It's an old service, designed for an environment that's much different from today because it was designed to help with capacity planning in times of scarcity. What we're going to do over the next half year, nine months maybe, is to evaluate the current usefulness of it to the subscribers, there's people who subscribe and pay money to host these boxes. And after evaluating it, we'll make a plan to evolve it to see what we want to do with it. My personal current straw man is to integrate it into RIPE Atlas and say we have these small probe, Atlas probes and then TTM probes, bigger, more powerful. That's my personal vision. We're going to talk to all the subscribers to see what they're doing with it, what they want to get with it and if we can evolve it in a way that preserves the functionality that they want and makes it more accessible with RIPE Stat. So if you're a test subscriber, expect a call from us. That's it. At the end, all questions about all my other responsibilities are fair game.
PAUL RENDEK: Good afternoon everyone. My name is Paul Rendek and I'm head of communications and external relations. They told me last time I wouldn't be going last, but I've been put into the back of the bus so I'm the last one to talk. I think it's to keep me from not talking too much. I'm actually going to be talking today a little bit and concentrating on external relations and communications that we do do. My colleagues explained all these wonderful projects and activities but these things need to be documented and coordinated and disseminated out there to the community, to our membership and to other stakeholders and I think this is where you see the communications and external relations come into play.
So I wanted to actually I took snippets from our activity plan 2010, what we kind of do as goals for outreach, that's one of the areas I wanted to touch on. Outreach is a big word and external relations, anybody that walks out the door of RIPE NCC and represents us somewhere is part of the external relations team that you see happening in our company. And if we look, some of the things that we've mentioned here, we work with a range of stakeholders both from the public and private sector. We're busy with that. We want to continue to promote the dialogue that takes place between the technical community and governments, this is something that we saw would be important for year as we see this moving more and Internet governance coming into our arena every day. Another thing: Anything we do in outreach goals is to guarantee the stability of the Internet, this is what we're looking for.
If we look at why are we doing this, why working so hard to have these public private partnerships and why is the RIPE NCC involved in this? The Internet is a multi stakeholder arena and we're not the only ones making the decisions. We have to go out of our comfort zones sometimes and this involves us getting in with organisations and sectors that we're not comfortable with. I think a lot of that is changing. I'm seeing a change. This is something we started to do three years ago, so we're at a little bit of an across roads and I'm explain why. We work with governments, international organisations, law enforcements. They're all growing, their influence in Internet governance and I use the word influence because this is what we're starting to see. We as a technical community have to carve out our influence in Internet governance as well and this is why we spend the time that we do with this public private sector dialogue. What we've seen and over the years that we've been doing this now, we see that if we can keep governments informed we're hoping that we can help them make better public policy. We know we're not in the public policy games. That's not our jobs, our jobs is to the Internet. We can help them make that, the better public policy choices. If you take a look at our model, I think we've managed to put this on to the map with a lot of stakeholders out there. I don't think we're quite finished, but I think we've put a good dent so far. If we take a look at this, we can see that the RIR models, I think the stakeholders have seen the benefits of this open and inclusive model. I think it's being hailed in a lot of circles and also governments I can see them going in and defending systems like this so we have to keep on track and make sure we stick to this model of how we want to work together.
So taking a look at outreach activities. I'll just concentrate on the public sector. Naturally the biggest part of external activities and is around the technical communities, naturally the RIPE, the NOGs, NREN is and also ETNO and other organisations like that. This is important to us. We spend the bulk of our time in our activities with these groups. We're also seeing that we're getting very involved in local IPv6 events, things not necessarily organized by the RIPE NCC. We have local governments inviting the RIPE NCC's experts to talk at 56 days that they hold. We have a whole bunch of other meetings speaking on IPv6. We spend a lot of time on the Internet governance circus. We're seeing it pop up on global stages as well. We spend a lot of time in that area. We see, of course, government regulators, law enforcement, the meeting in London was mentioned, this is the second time. Next year they want to give us a whole day on their agenda so we can give them workshops and teach them something that they're actually very much wanting to learn. So that's pretty good.
The intergovernmental organisations, EOCD, council of Europe, we find them approaching us as experts and wanting to work together with them. We do various outreach in those arenas as well. And a lot of this is done with our industry partners, the other RIRs, ISOC, ICANN, a lot of times we find ourselves working together when we have to go on to the global platform it's neat to see how these different organisations can work together and we make sure we represent the technical community as best we can.
Recent activities, I didn't want to go into too much detail on all the different activities that we are doing. I just wanted to given you some of the topical ones floating around. I think we mentioned the Internet governance forum a few times and what our role has been there or the role we've taking inside the IGF. Discussions are still continuing on what it's going to look like. They've agreed to have the next five meetings, I think I reported there were five originally scheduled and the last one was the fifth one, so they have renewed that, but the UNCS TD has a Working Group that's deciding what this is going to look like. Of course, we've given our opinion on his, what we want this to look like, and we still keep iterating this. The next thing, some of you might be aware that the IANA contract is coming up in September. So there was a notice of inquiry put out by the USNTIA. The NRO has already delivered its response. You can find it at the URL I put here. It's something that you probably want to read to see what the position was of all the RIRs in what they want things to look like for the IANA function moving murder. And the last is the ITU IPv6 group. It was going to take place in April. It did, and we were certainly there, and actually, it was quite nice to see that they took a look at some of the things that the RIRs were doing and also in specific some of the things that the NOG groups are doing. MENOG organises some roadshow groups inside its area for government and enterprise and this was hailed as such a success in the ITU IPv6 group that there are other groups wanting to joint the technical community and provide this capacity building in other regions as well. So that's really great to see. I think we've had quite a nice impact as a technical community there. That's good.
How is this all done? If you look there's quite a lot of meetings. Currently teams inside our company organise around ten meetings a year, wow. They range from RIPE meetings round table meetings targeted at government. We work in collaboration with MENOG and ENOG. In September of this year we're welcomed by the folks in southeast Europe, in Dubrovnik. I can see the program shaping up and everybody is excited. We're also excited to get down there. We will, of course, send out invitations to the community so anybody who would like to participate there, we'd like to welcome you there as well.
We also made a decision we want to have a presence at the local operator forums inside RIPE NCC service region. So we'll be having some sort of RIPE or RIPE NCC presence there, that we feel is important to us. We have many speaking opportunities that we need to organise at numerous events. It's such a shame we have to turn down a lot of speaking opportunities because we don't have the resources inside to speak at them. What we started to do is actually approach folks in the RIPE community that we know are well versed on these subjects to get out there and make a presentation on IPv6 or something. I need to stop. Wow. RIPE Labs, I think that's also been mentioned. The RIPE NCC web set. We take care of that. And the annual report where you can find all these activities explained. That will be published soon. It needs to be approved by the GM today and then that will be published. The last thing I wanted to do is remind you that it's survey time again. We have the RIPE NCC member and stakeholder survey that we plan on turning on on the 6th of May on Friday, and we hope that all of you will participate and give us your feedback. It's something that we need to make our strategies.
With that, I think we'll take the questions.
CHAIR: Any questions for the NCC management team? Good, because we're behind schedule. Thank you.
(Applause)
CHAIR: Next up then is Arne with an update.
ARNE KIESSLING: Good afternoon, IP resource analyst at the RIPE NCC. I'm here for a quick update on the policy implementation 2007 01, contract requirements for users with independent resources. The policy should be or known to almost everyone by now. So the RIPE NCC basically requires end users to sign a contract with the sponsoring RIR or RIPE NCC. If they need provider independent number resources, we started with the implementation of the policy in March 2009. Since then, over 10,000 Internet resources under this policy and our members have definitely adopted to the policy or to the requirements and most of them or all of them are aware they need to prove the end user exists and they need to sign a certain contract with these end users. If we look at what has been assigned during that time, it's mainly AS numbers and IPv4 address space. We have been busy for quite a while with the second face, looking at the resources. The RIPE NCC has been assigning in the past before this policy became reality. LIRs had the choice to declare resources being used by the end user or by an organization that's no longer their customer. Total amount of resources was almost 27,000 and we finished this phase in March, mid March 2011. Final results of this we can see here. We have about 11,000 of these or 11,500 being assigned to end users organisations, about 6,000 organisations assigned to LIRs and another 6, 500 where the LIR denied having any relationship. These are end users we'll be contacting in the next phase. We'll also look at end users who already indicated we will signed a contract but haven't been able to submit an agreement nor the documents proving the end users existence in about two years' time. And the total amount of resources we assigned in the past and approved for end users is almost 7,000. These numbers are based on results from mid last week.
Currently, we are in phase 3 where we look at what we call the orphaned assignments, meaning no contractual relationship of the resource holder with a sponsoring LIR or RIPE NCC directly. So we need to contact, or are in the process of contacting, these end users directly. We started with this mid March and when a couple of small batches to see what the result is, how good contact data, how much responses, how much feedback we get. We ask end users to go to the website where they can fill in and give feedback about the resource usage, then we need to look at the answers and provide support to these end users, point them in the right direction where they can find sponsoring LIR to sign the contract with.
And at this stage, this is the first moment where we can also include resources that are listed in registries that were closed before this policy was implemented, before 2009, March 2009, when the registry decided to close the independent resources were left in the registry because there was no requirement to have a contract, nor was a fee involved for the resource registration and maintenance. So, on top of the results of the resources that we filtered out during phase 2, we need to add approximately another 6,800 from these closed registries. So this is the results from phase 2 of the resources that were marked LIRs, not by end user, resources that were marked by end users but we never received the documentation to support this, and also the resources where the LIR never gave us feedback during phase 2 of the policy implementation, plus an additional 6,800 from closed registries. Those LIRs will not be able to give any feedback.
We will look at the registration data in the RIPE database to find contact detail for the end users. We'll try different level of contact so not just the maintainer of the resource, we will try to find different contact details, e mail addresses and then look at which or where we get a response from. This all will be done by email. We won't be able to phone people.
The process, we need to do this in batches. The total amount of resources is still about 19,000 so we don't want to spend the whole world with e mails to guide users to a feedback form. It will allow us to process the feedback we receive in a timely manner. We decided to prioritize this looking at the visibility of resources in the routing table due to the fact that, if a network is visible on line, it's more likely to first of all, that the email is read, gets received, from this the resource is so critical that they will sign a contract with a sponsoring LIR or the RIPE NCC.
We need to also monitor the activity, so we need to be able to see whether the email was received, whether somebody used the link, looked at the form, due to the fact that in the end during the manual follow up or after several attempts to contact the end users without getting any feedback, it might also be become the option that the resource gets deregistered, meaning the end users get three months' time to respond to the email we send them, plus another three months from the time the form was completed until we would need to receive and be able to approve the agreement they sign with a sponsoring LIR. And basically, if that doesn't happen, we will start the deregistration procedure, and, in the end, we return the resource to the free pool.
Last thing, some of you might have noticed that since this policy was implemented, we have been using another maintainer that we put on PI assignments. It used to be the RIPE NCC HP maintainer. It's also AS numbers that we have assigned that were not maintained until March 2009. Putting a PI restainer on AS number will be confusing; we use a new maintainer and we retroactively put it on AS numbers due to the fact that they're coming from pools that were allocated to the RIPE NCC to for the assigned two networks in our region. In order to make sure we do not lose contact with the end user, should they change company name, that we stay in the loop, and, for the sake of good registry, to be able to confirm at any time that the registration data and the RIPE database is correct and matches the records that we approved the resources for. That's for my side for now. Any questions?
NIALL O'REILLY: I think this will be quick. Niall O'Reilly. I work for an EIX holder. You mentioned three phases, and I wonder if people like us are in phase four or if we can get some parallelism, at least the low hanging fruit.
SPEAKER: The EIX space is excluded by policy, but if an EIX holder wants to sign a contract or become a member of the RIPE NCC for this, that would be fine as well. So it's the users.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: I understand the hint.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Hello. I'm[] from university of technology. I have a question about the stats which were on the other slides. Do you have any idea how many
SPEAKER: This one?
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: The next one. Oh, yeah. 6,093. How many of them are the IS numbers is the first question?
SPEAKER: I wouldn't know off the top of my head, but we can find this out for you. If you want to drop by in the Service Centre tomorrow, I would be able to give you the correct numbers. We were, basically, trying to look at the resource.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: The real question is, what is the personal attach of the IS numbers which are described as my infrastructure per LIR? Because I have strong feeling that a lot of IS numbers a lot of LIRs have been assigned as numbers just to publish their own PA space. And I think it's quite insane right now that LIR is charged in different way for the peer space and for that single IS number, extra 50 euro per year just to announce that space. That's insane. And if the personal dot which are holding a number for themselves, which are quite high, I think it's time to change the charging scheme to include that one IS number in their price for LIR, one or two.
SPEAKER: The idea here is to look at who's holding the number and not what address space it is announcing. It might be that you see LIRs allocation being deaggregated from several AS numbers. Some of them night not be assigned to LIR but to actual end users and used to announce address space from the LIR. In BGP, you wouldn't be able to tell this is an LIR with ten AS numbers; it might be one AS number LIR plus nine of the customers.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: I'm pretty much sure that LIRs describe my infrastructure for their infrastructure and customers with the peer space, that's my customer. We have three types, yes, that's my end user, that's my PI space and my infrastructure, and I think it's quite strange to pay extra 50 euro just for announcing the PI space.
CHAIR: Is it a case that you can reclassify the AS to be discounted as the normal resources? The LIR could actually contact the host master and tell them which AS number is actually theirs.
SPEAKER: That was basically the idea on the first step of phase 2, they mark the resources they use for the infrastructure.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Yes, mark my AS infrastructure and I was charged 50 euro more because of that. I know it's okay with the team which has been approved by the general meeting. Maybe it's right time to change the charging scheme.
CHAIR: The charging scheme is not decided by this Working Group, by the AGM, but I think I see your point. But I actually I think you can do what you're asking for.
Thank you. Last question. Thank you.
(Applause)
CHAIR: Next is Alex, with the certification update.
ALEX BAND: I'm back. Talking about certification again. A bit of old scheduling that I did a talk about certification in Working Group before and here's another one. Different slides, different story. So resource certification, at the last RIPE meeting I showed you this, mock ups of who the service was going to look like based on all your suggestions. And then we did a whole lot of work. We've been working on this for years, actually, trying to get the infrastructure ready, trying to make sure that it has all the features that it needs to have. So we worked together with a lot of departments. Business applications, of course, wrote all of the code, but, also, customer services was involved, registration services was involved, training services was involved, our communications was involved. So many different departments collaborated into getting this project out the door. And I'm really, really proud that we actually made the deadline, actually I think it was in Prague, he said 1st of January, 2011, we'll have something available for you, and we did. We delivered. We wanted a solid infrastructure and solid legal framework. Athina did a whole lot of work there to make sure we have the legal bases covered. We wanted to offer limited functionality. As I said in the Working Group, we wanted to start with a host platform and give you a good concept of the system so you can make an informed decision what you want it to be, how you would like to use it, what you what your plans are with such a service. So also the validation tools, so the other side of certification. One side is publishing your rooting policy; the other is validating it. Those two sides, we have a basic validator, just put outputs, separate file, and that's it. It's a start. The basis is there. We wanted to have a really, really low entry barrier, that has resulted in setting up a certificate is just one click, that's it. And the only thing you have to do is create root origin authorisations where you say, "I authorise this autonomous system to enhance these prefixes. Made sure we have all the documentation, tutorials, all the training materials. A lot of effort. Also a help desk. You can send an email to certification.ripe.net and people will be reading that and answering you as soon as possible. All of that was in place and then we went live and then I sat there on the 3rd of January well, you've shown a lot of interest in the concept but are you actually going to do something? And then this happened. And I was like wow, that's unexpected. I was actually really, really happy to see this. Because not only have you expressed your interest in such a system, but so, so many people actually went in, generated a certificate on the system and not only just clicked the button but actually went in and specified all of your routing policy and started playing with the system and my in box got flooded with feedback, suggestions, that kind of thing. It's 456. I just checked it. 456. And you go, 456 LIRs? Who are these people? Well, it's these well, and then some 430 others. So this is varying degrees of implementation. Some just enabled it, some specified everything, downloaded a validation tool and started playing with this. So these and lots and lots, hundreds and hundreds of others. What did they do? They created 168,000 /24s. Like I said, in four months, and 8,400 /32 IPv6 prefixes. So that's a really, really solid basis you can start working from. You can gather feedback and expand the system based on your input. But because this is a hosted system, because this is a hosted system, you actually entrust us with kind of a lot because we have the private key to the certificate on our system and we need to make sure that it doesn't get lost, the system doesn't fall over. It needs to be a very high quality system. We went out to the people from TUV information technique and we said, can you do on a test and they did a rigorous test and we were awarded five stars and that's five out of five. And the RIPE NCC is the first organization in the world to actually achieve that, which is really, really my hat goes off to the business application department because that's amazing, the fact that it did that. Five stars. We also had some support questions. This is the one: Where's my PI space? You put it everywhere in the documentation. You put and people still call. That was the number one question. Also where is my ERX space? In all of this, in everything we're doing, like I said, my in box gets flooded daily with people contacting me about it. I get lots of questions, suggestions. Because we're gathering as much feedback as possible. So I'm going out to network operator groups, even talked to individual LIRs, visit them, sit down, "how would you like to implement this? If you were to use this system, how would you integrate it within your work flow, how would you set up your decision making process?" We do that all the time, gather community feedback. And based on that, based on all of that feedback, we've made a road map. And first of all, and that is a technical as well as political, it enables air into go live, so you have a choice. Then you really have a choice if you're going to use the hosted system. If you'd rather do it yourself, manage everything yourself, you can. It will be done in two or three weeks and, at the same time, I'm very sorry, I called that client software again. I'll change the wording. It's actually the code, we lifted that out of the hosted system. You'll be able to download it and install it on your own system and it will operate securely with the RIPE NCC platform. For Q2, we're going to focus on data quality and integrity. As I said, yes, something like 9% all IPv4 that the RIPE NCC handed out now has a ROA attached to it. You want to make sure the quality is the best available. We want you to be sure that you can trust the data. So using RIS route collectors to support certification. For Q2 and Q3, we'll work on the validation side, so actually getting your ROA out there, publishing the information, that's the easy part. Basing decisions you need a validation ToolSet. And in Q4, we'll start working on supporting other kinds of address space. It also depends on how the certification policy unfolds. But also we need to be able to support transfers between RIRs, for example. So that is something that our aim is to get done by Q4. And, in fact, that's it. If you want information, anything, to RIPE.net/certification. Any questions? No. Thanks.
CHAIR: No? All right.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Comment. Ruediger Volk, Deutsche Telecom. Okay, so you are a product manager and you turn out to be more of a product manager than I like. I'm an engineer and, okay, the usual conflict between engineering and product managers is that someone is doing glossies and over exaggerating accomplishments and the other one is actually trying to achieve something and I'm seeing a little bit more glossiness around here than I like. If you could, please, when you list the well, okay, when you just for a simple example, where you list the coverage, could you please say how many ROA prefixes are in there? If I'm right
SPEAKER: It's 293.
RUEDIGER VOLK: So I guess that kind of about a third or maybe even half, half of the IPv4 that you listed is going to a [similar] AS in the year. I know my stuff.
SPEAKER: Yes.
RUEDIGER VOLK: And I think it was an error to put it in last Friday.
SPEAKER: Well, actually, let me put it this way: Even without the resources from Deutsche Telecom, even without that, I think there are a lot of prefixes in there.
RUEDIGER VOLK: Well, okay. I would be the last who would be unhappy about having many ROAs and certificates there, well, okay, I would like I would like to have a down to earth real, real number that kind of gives a real reality picture. And while, okay, for the other thing we're a little bit too much glossiness shows up. Well, today we get a road map and nobody ever asked for road maps any year before, any years before.
SPEAKER: Can I can I say something? Because this is very important. I had my slide set done last week and they did not include any address space from Deutsche Telecom and I was happy with the numbers that it showed. If you go to the certification stats.ripe.net or just ripe.net/certification, you'll see last Friday there was a bit of a spike. The spike is huge and it's one AS, yes, but even without that there's a lot of space in there. The other thing, I presented to you with a road map. You may not have asked for certain things at the RIPE meeting, but I've been in contact with the community and many LIRs over, well the course of the last year, not only at the RIPE meeting but at many different venues, also in training courses, this information is covered and the feedback that we get through training courses is included in building a road map because it's community feedback. It's members telling us what they want. And it's maybe not done at the RIPE meeting but it's still valid. It still counts.
RUEDIGER VOLK: Why are we having RIPE meetings and why did we have a task force working for years supposed to provide community input if when asked at the RIPE meetings about road maps it didn't happen? You weren't there and you weren't in charge then.
SPEAKER: That's true.
RUEDIGER VOLK: Well, okay. You are working for that company and, well, okay, progress, progress at last has arrived. I'm quite sure I'm not happy about everything, well, okay, it's really late in many respects. And the road map should have been presented a years ago, even earlier.
SPEAKER: Everything that was discussed in the certification task force sort of led up to what we launched on the 1st of January. Everything that we've learned in the couple of months before that and everything we're learning now because people can use it that is what the current road map is based on.
CHAIR: I think we're going to have this though I would like to participate but we're running really, really late and we have 20 more minutes of presentations and then we have the AGM so I think we're going to have to move on.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Next, then, is Athina with the longest title of the day, but the updates on the governance documents and the transfer documents.
ATHINA FRAGKOULI: Good afternoon. My name is Athina Fragkouli. I'm the legal counsel of the RIPE NCC. Today, my presentation has two parts. In the first part, I'm going to show you the RIPE NCC governance documents and in the second part the transfer document in particular.
As you already know, the RIPE NCC has certain procedures on how to evaluate new membership applications, how to evaluate request for resources, et cetera, and how to handle certain situationses. But where are these procedures documented? That's a very good question. Some of these procedures are very well documented in a very well established way. Some other procedures are in various documents, pieces of one procedure in policies, pieces of the same procedure in contracts, in procedural documents, et cetera. I'm not are not documented in a systematic way and some of these procedures are not documented at all. People were asking us what do you do when this and that happens. We had a reply. But they wanted a point of reference. They wanted a document that states this is what we do. So we realised how important it is to document all of our procedures and to be transparent and clear on the existing documents as well. So what we did, we gathered all these procedures and documented activities and we divided them in three categories. In the first corporate governance, in the second documents that show how to maintain a good registry and in the third category, documents that show how secure information is maintained.
Let's see the documents in the first category, governance. Here we have a very well established structure, we have the articles of association. We have standard service agreement with our members and standard terms and conditions for services we provide our members with. And we have agreements for services we provide non members with, and, for disputes that arise out of these services, we have the arbitration procedure. Reasonable for this arbitration procedure, we amended the articles of association to say more correctly and within the next year we might have to update the standard service agreement in terms and conditions. Now, these documents exist already, but we do now, we highlight their existence, so people know where to look into when they have questions regarding the activities of the RIPE NCC or the services of the RIPE NCC.
Now, the second group maintain a good registry. The first document in this group is the closure and the registration procedure document which I presented to you in Rome. In this document, we show all possible reasons and relevant procedure on how to close an LIR and how to deregister numbers. Then we have the transfer of resources and name changes procedural documents which I'm going to explain in the second part of this presentation. Independent resources contractual relationship changes. This is the document where we make sure there is always a contractual relationship in place in compliance with 2007 01. This document will be shortly updated. The audit activity, in this document we show how we control the quality of our registration data and this document also will be updated shortly. This is a document that does not exist, this is a work in progress. The procedures, though, do exist. And in this document we're going to show how we evaluate a new membership application or how we evaluate a new request for resources, how we evaluate the changes that might be requested with regards to registration data. Finally the abuse complaints handling document. Again, this is a work in progress about a procedure that we do have. In this document we're going to explain how we handle complaints we receive regarding abuse of our registration services, abuse of registered resources and so on.
The third category, secure maintenance of information. The RIPE NCC maintains a lot of personal data and we have a privacy statement of how we process them and what services, we also have confidential date about members' business and we're planning on drafting a document that shows how we handle this data as well. And finally, we're planning on drafting a more technical document about our information security.
Now, these documents are very dynamic. If policies change, if the circumstances change, these documents will be updated as well. So, please, please, send us your feedback on these documents. We would really appreciate it.
That was the first part of my presentation. Now, in the second part I'm going to give you some more background information and details on the transfer of resources and name changes document.
Just to make something clear: this document does not set new rules on transfer of resources. It's based on existing policies and existing procedures that are either written or not written anywhere. So, in this document we tried to gather all the elements that are relevant to transfer of resources from various documents into one single document. Now, where the documents we base this document on, the IPv4 address policy, section 5.5 of this policy talks about transfer of allocations and sets up the circumstances under which a transfer of allocations is allowed within the RIPE NCC service region. This is not the only document that talks about transfer of resources. We have this RIPE NCC procedural document with a title 'Mergers, Acquisitions, Takeovers and Closures of Organisations Operating an LIR'. This used to be the famous 3.01, but we changed the number because we had to update it and remove all the closure relevant provisions, now we moved them all to the closure procedural document. Now, the initial idea was to update the rest of this document. However, we realised that the title of this document and indeed its set up, does not reflect what is relevant for registration purposes, because even if an organization operating an LIR is being merged or taken over, this does not mean that the information that are relevant for registration purposes are changed. So what is relevant for information changed? We had to define that. Relevant for registration purposes is who is responsible for certain resources? So the name of a person we're talking to. And for what resources this person is responsible. Now, if a LIR A, for example, that operates the LIR account changes ownership without changing their name or without changing anything in the LIR account, the fact that they change ownership does not have any impact for registration purposes. So if the organization that operates the LIR A changes, for whatever reason, their name from LIR A to LIR B, this change has to be communicated with the RIPE NCC so we know who is who we're talking to, who is responsible for these resources. Then if the LIR A transfers some of the resources to the LIR B, according to the policy, this is subject of approval by the RIPE NCC. So the new document we outline all the procedures for this transfer to be evaluated and to happen.
Another example, if the LIR A transfers all of the resources to the LIR B, this is, again, something that has to be communicated to RIPE NCC. Whether this happens because of a transfer because of a merger, sorry, because of an acquisition, of a takeover, this is irrelevant for registration purposes. Having said that, the RIPE NCC will ask for documentation that supports this transfer so that we are sure of the legitimacy of this transfer. The last example that I have here, the LIR A transfers some or all of the resources to an organization that is not an LIR, does not operate an LIR. So, according to our procedures, this organization has to become an LIR. Now, in conclusion, this new document will set up the procedures that should be followed for changes that are important for registration purposes. If the name of the organization of the LIR changes or if the resources in an LIR account are transferred to another LIR account, how this change will be communicated with the RIPE NCC. The reasons for transfer is only important to support the legitimacy of the transfer, of this change. The draft version of this document will be shared with the community through the mailing list as we did with the closure document. We would appreciate your valuable feedback on that. And thank you very much for your attention. If you have any questions, please let me know.
CHAIR: Is Rudiger ready for a question?
RUEDIGER VOLK: Yes, I am. I'm not going to shout that badly. You are sitting just too close. Well, okay, I appreciate a lot of the cleaning up and clarifying and classifying that you're reporting. It seems to me that, well, okay, the transparency of how the documents are handled, defined, and how the control of the documents is handled, could need a little bit more information or, well, okay, a little bit more feedback to the community. So for the document that you were talking about right now, you are asking for feedback. And I think you asked for feedback, as well, for the closure document last time. I did not figure out what happened to the draft that was presented in Rome and how that got maybe changed or not changed, and who looked at it and said, well, okay, this is the final thing and we approve it and now it's final and effective. Okay, that would be interesting. And of course, it also will be interesting for the new document and all the others. Can you tell us something?
SPEAKER: Well, of course the same procedure that's followed for policies can be be followed here because it's not a policy. We do appreciate the feedback. We did take into account your feedback. The version that we finally published is based on your feedback. We did the changes you asked for. Well, and I wanted to say something else, but I forgot what. But, of course, if you want a more detailed track of the changes, we can work on it.
RUEDIGER VOLK: Okay. Well, I'm actually looking okay, my memory of a few contributions from the Rome discussion and what seems to emerge as the final document I think I'm seeing some differences and, well, okay, right now I'm just simply asking, what is the process where this document is finalised and who has reviewed and decided this is the final version? Has this been the executive board or has it been on the on some mailing list or has this been Axel having a look and a nice coffee with you, or whatever? Or is there something missing in the overall process where we might need a little bit of improvement and more transparency?
SPEAKER: For the record, if anyone has comments still on the published version, please feel free to speak up, because, as I said, these documents are very dynamic.
RUEDIGER VOLK: If those documents are really dynamic, I think we need some very explicit change control over this.
CHAIR: Axel?
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Yes I'm aware that you wanted improvement of those things quite sometime ago. And basically this is what we did. We went through all of our internal notes and documents and procedures and improved that and documented what we have, put it into some more or less readable, better readable version and present it here. So, please, have a look at this. And if there are missing things, if there are unclarities, let us know and we can further improve. That's what we want to do with improving it this year.
CHAIR: I'm, again, going to cut the discussion, but maybe that when you do these changes, one point Ruediger raised is a valid point, you should send the final version out and say this is the final version of the document as it stands right now. If any other comments are being left out, state why and then say the comment period is X days, weeks, whatever is reasonable. I think that's part of what Ruediger is saying, because they're RIPE NCC documents. It's not something the Working Group can do; it's a legally binding contract that the board has to approve and I assume that's what happened. Axel is nodding. Any other questions? Or we're going to move to the last speaker.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Next is Keith, who's going to give the arbiter's report.
KEITH MITCHELL: I'll try and do this sufficiently quickly so you have a break before the AGM. My name is Keith Mitchell. I'm speaking to you in this presentation as a long standing member of the RIPE panel. This is something that was set up about seven years ago. There are currently 13 arbiters on the panel. We roughly doubled the size of the panel November last year. There's been quite a lot of done by the RIPE NCC in the secretariat role in updating the procedure. When I first signed up, I thought IPv4 address space is running out, people are going to start fighting over it, we need some referees. In the past seven years, there's been seven cases, but three of these are the last 16 months. The screws are starting to be turned on people starting to feel the feel pain. We've had five meetings. These have been sparse. Stockholm was six years ago, I think, and gradually getting more frequent. You can see this in the history of the cases. But there's you also see a thing there which is quite often billing dispute between the RIR and the RIPE NCC. So this is the current arbiter panel. Not everyone is here but if they could stand up and identify themselves to the community. Okay. Thank you. So if you have a potential dispute, we're the people you can approach. It's good to have more people on the panel. You can find details there.
How does it work? You become an arbiter by being appointed by the RIPE NCC board. That, in turn, requires approval by the general meeting, which has happened on a couple of occasions now. This is a list of arbiters. Can you click on the link. People start on that list in alphabetical order. Then, they're basically assigned cases from the top of the list. If somebody has just done a case, they go back to the bottom or various arbiters have periods of time they're not available so we can move them around. That was one reason for increasing the arbiter panel. How do they get dismissed? Really only in the case of bad practice, concerns about their impartiality or performance, the executive board can propose to have them removed. Ultimately, the general meeting posts them off. Compensation, their cost recovered for the expenses, travel expenses, research, miscellaneous fees but not for the time and effort. That's contracted by the individual or their employer. So, as I mentioned, there's been some work done on the procedure itself. Mostly in the light of experience of previous arbitration cases. There was quite a lot of need for clearing the scope of the arbitration, making it clearer. Making it clear when the process actually starts as opposed to being this twilight zone where nobody is quite clear when it started and making the time frame more rigorous. There were some time frames, but not for all the possible things that could come up, all the possible steps. The role and responsibility of the arbiter's and a transparency, NCC is undertaking publication of the ruling. You can't see the parties involved in. We're making this up as we go along. None of the other RIRs have an arbitration procedure. So we felt it was important to build up a body of cases that we could use to set precedence and understanding of how to go forward. Scope of the arbitration. There's actually two things here. It was conceived for settlement of disputes. Personally, I thought it would be resource between resource holders. Majority has been contributors and direct assignment users, and actually not so much disputes between contributors or direct assignment users, but that's the main purpose, is to decide these disputes.
We also perform something more like a self regulatory function and that is for that's a recent introduction. A year or two ago there was a document that said if the NCC is looking for addresses, they have to be approved by the arbiters to stop the NCC of being in any conflict of interest there.
So how does the process work? The initiation is there's a dispute. The parties are asked to attempt to resolve that themselves. I'm sure that happens a lot but we only see the ones where it doesn't happen. If they don't manage to resolve it themselves, basically the request to have conflict arbitration is documented. And then there's a point at which arbitration is formally requested. So there will be an NCC support ticket which says I want arbitration yes, we're going to appoint you with the arbiter panel. And then, at that point, the parties that have the dispute fill in the form to have the arbitration. So the arbiter then basically, when it's being decided which arbiter is working on that case, they'll send an email back to the parties, here is who I am. Here's my background. I've been designated arbiter. Something that may go with that is potential conflict of. If it's important to be transparent about that. It's up to the complainant whether they want to decide having had these interests declared they're not or they want to declare a conflict. And an indemnification agreement. We don't want the arbiters to be sued if something goes horribly wrong. The two parties have to sign the agreement themselves. If the dispute is about fees and this seems to happen quite often one of the things we found there's a number of cases where it looks like it's been spurious complaint and all they're trying to do is delay payment of fees so the new procedure says if it's a dispute about fees they're placed in escrow until it's resolved and the decision about who gets the fee is his made. Then the arbitration commences. There's a requirement in the process that within 12 weeks the arbiter generates a ruling and that's based on RIPE NCC policies and procedures. One thing that's very important is the ruling is binding. I must admit that until we actually got a real legal professional we'd all been under the impression this is a stop gap and if people don't like the ruling then they go can go to court. Actually the understanding we've been given is most European country the law recognises the arbitration is binding. I'm not a lawyer but this is my interpretation of what was said. It has a lot of formal weight once the parties enter into it. Ongoing improvements. As I said the NCC secretariat has been doing a lot of work on the procedure, publishing the ruling on older cases, we have this form for requesting the arbitration, tools for tracking the time line, various templates for documents and parts of the process to be consistent and make it easier to publish the rulings once they've been made. Like I said we're kind of making this stuff up as we go along. It's very important the information is shared between the arbiters. So, for example, we've been having lunches at RIPE meetings to get to know each other and share where we're at. There was a first formal arbiter's meeting held here in Amsterdam back in February. There was bits of training material. We've been discussing cases. So that's pretty much it. I hope we're not going to get bombarded with cases but we want to be prepared in case it increases. As I say any of the arbiter's we have to talk to you to advise you, answer any questions, deal with things that might lead to cases, I'll be happy to take any questions.
CHAIR: Questions?
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: You're looking at the RIPE 2011 results. There was some discussion about the arbiter services so I'm glad to hear it hasn't been used in the past that much but it was also a novelty to some of the RIPE NCC members that arbitration services do exist. But my question is who is the contributor? You said most cases were between contractor and RIPE NCC? I don't understand that context
SPEAKER: That means the PLIR
SPEAKER: It's another word for member.
CHAIR: I've been told we have to stop now. We have to go to the AGM for electronic voting. Thank you, Keith.
SPEAKER: Okay. Thank you.
(Applause)
We're all off to the AGM, really, really quickly.