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RIPE NCC Services

26 October 2016

At 5 p.m.:

KURTIS LINDQVIST: So, I hope everybody is here. I can't see anything standing up here so you can all be out in the bar as far as I know. This is, of course, the reason you have all come to the RIPE meetings, the RIPE NCC Services Working Group, the favourite of all the people here.
(Applause)

And so, I want to start, because this is the favourite Working Group, you might have noticed how we have these small stickers that we hand out here at the RIPE meetings so people can show that they support certain causes or topics they are interested in or dear to their heart. NCC Services Working Group is the topic of everybody's support and your heart lies here and would you think there is a certain subsection of RIPE meeting participants that care a little bit extra about the RIPE NCC Services Working Group, and, you know, random example, it could be NCC staff, for example, so I made a little survey of how much NCC staff really cares about NCC services. Some of them clearly care more about peering than they do about NCC services. Interesting. Some of them don't care at all. Some of them, though, seem to get it.
(Applause)

On that note, on to something slightly more serious. You probably figured out by now, but in this room, if you want to talk you have to put up your hand and I will hand the ‑‑ you press the microphone button in front of you and speak, if you press before you will interrupt the person speaking. If you also haven't been to NCC services meeting before, this is the meeting before the GM. You should all have registered and gotten your little sticker for participating in the GM, and if you ‑‑ while we are down here, we ‑‑ we don't want you to clear the room as quickly as possible. The GM will be in the side room next door and I had otherwise agreed with Nigel that the person who is last out here is going to be scribing the fee charging discussion afterwards, you don't have to do that.

Moving on to the ‑‑ it moves on my screen but not on the ‑‑ so the agenda for today, we have the administrative matters, the NCC survey results, and operational updates by Andrew and outlook by Axel, which is part of the GM presentations, and then we have two presentations from RIPE NCC board members, first Sal mutt about and then Maria on external engagement and we have open mic row phones and any other business.

It's really interesting because the two screens are out of sync, and first we have NCC, the RIPE NCC has provided us with a scribe which we are thankful for, thank you. The agenda is, as is announced, and then we are supposed to approve the minutes from RIPE 72. We have a small admission to make by the Chairs, is that we have both agreed that the other one would send the minutes out and apparently no one sent them out so we will send them out right now and we will get back to them at the next meeting. And with that, I hand over to Serge.

SERGE RADOVCIC: Thanks, and thanks for having me here. I want to talk about the RIPE NCC survey, I think I was here, well, not here but up on the podium in Copenhagen about six months ago, asking everyone to fill in the survey. You did, I will tell you about how many did fill it in. Perhaps I can get a show of hands for those that did fill in the survey for us. I can't see anyone so I am assuming everyone has raised their hands. One person ‑‑ no, I see quite a few people did, so thanks for doing that.

So we have a lot of feedback mechanisms in place, these meetings serve as a fantastic mechanism for us during the discussions that we have here in the hallways, you talk to the Board, on the mailing list and so on but one of the most far‑reaching moth odds that we have got is the survey itself (methods). It will get out to every corner of our region, all sorts of people can fill it in and you can do it in anonymous fashion and take your time and have a think about it. It's really proved to be a fantastic tool. We do these about every three years, this is now the sixth survey that we have done, and we find them incredible valuable to be able to set our strategy for the coming year.

As I said, you fill in the survey and it is anonymous, you do add your e‑mail address at the end so you can go in the prize draw but we never see those e‑mail addresses, the ex Ford Internet institute removes all those e‑mail addresses, they do the prize drawing and let us know who won and they never sent those addresses to us, they just rent us the rest of the data in aggregated format. The survey is open both to members and other interested parties, we have done that for the last few surveys and that has proved quite valuable. We have able to split the data to look at what the members have been saying and what others have been saying about us as well.

In the lead‑up to the surveys, there is something else we do and that is consultation interviews. This time, we asked Dr. Rob Allen to help us out, some of you probably met with him two RIPE meetings ago, wherever that was, RIPE 71. And others were invited to physical meetings at a few different locations around Europe and quite a few of you had interviews with him via Skype. The information we got from these group interviews, we ‑‑ it helped us develop the survey itself, we saw some issues that were coming up and we used that. We asked Rob to put a report together from all those ‑‑ the results of all those interviews and that is in the final report of the survey which we published a few weeks ago. I'll give you the URL in a minute.

The survey itself, the respondents that we received, 4344, it's the most we have ever received, not only was it the high number of respondents, but more than 70% of those respondents filled in every question of the survey, which is fantastic to see, went right to the end that was brilliant. As I said, it was open both to members and other interested parties. You see the breakdown, quite a few members, almost 4,000, which is fantastic considering we had about 14,000 when the survey was run. We got responses from nearly every country, I think again for the second survey in a row the only country that didn't have a respondent was Monday co‑but we did pretty well in getting 75 of the 76 in our service region and fill it in and quite a few others outside of our service region also offered their opinion so we are very grateful for that. There you see the breakdown, rugs I can't, Italy and Germany were the largest, you can see the full break down in the survey. The full report is on line, there is the URL, go and have a look at it, there is executive summary and detailed analysis of it that Oxford institute provided for us, and there is also the raw data obviously without the e‑mail addresses that you can have a look at if you are interested in the comments that we got.

The raw data is around 165 pages, once you take away the 60 pages of e‑mail addresses and some of the comments are interesting and I found it a fascinating read. I would like to ask Desiree Miloshevic of the ex Ford institute to present her summary of the findings.

DESIREE MILOSHEVIC: Good afternoon everyone. It's a pleasure to give a survey results after another survey result, to start this session.

So, as Serge was saying, the Oxford Internet institute has done a third analysis of the RIPE 2016 membership survey, and this time, and out of six and this time I would like to share with you the high level overview of the results and our findings.

You can find a complete survey website, and I think the details have already been shared with you.

So, what is really impressive and what stands out here is that 95% of membership said that a fee for the services that they are getting from the RIPE NCC is good value for money. I think that is quite impressive for any organisation that runs on runs on membership services fee and something to be noted.

However, apart from that, high level of the section, and 95%, there were some concerns that popped up throughout the survey and you can find the details, but those are mainly, we can categorise them mainly in terms of ‑‑ that included lack of awareness of the services that RIPE NCC provided, and also some of the members said they do not have enough time to use those services that could be available to them.

Moving on with regard to the corporate governance, we have highlighted four items here, the survey respondents have found out that apart from what I already mentioned, that there is a good use of membership funds, that they found that they liked the Executive Board leadership and, as well as the they valued very highly engagement with the membership. Equally, they have found very high levels of satisfaction with the way how activity plan works and budget planning process. It is true, say, that some of the respondents, they really do not have time to follow the corporate matters as closely as some of you did ‑‑ do follow.

Now, back to the registration services. I think this slide really shows that the ‑‑ there is a high satisfaction with the level of services that they get and 80% of the survey respondents have said that they have ranked the levels higher than 5, 5, 6 and 7, and it's in the figure 17 you can see that 81% actually thought that the services level were extremely high. Some believe 11 or 19 said that it could be improved. Of course, there were some requests for improvements on the process side, especially to simplify some of the processes that the members currently use, and there is also an overall, I think, suggestion that it could be to have some tools in place and as well, it was noted that, in terms of registration services, they could really be helped with support from staff when it comes to the quality checks of data.

Moving on to the LIR Portal and RIPE database findings. We have seen here that majority, 92% of the survey respondents, are happy with the LIR Portal as it is today. We have also received in the survey some information on how often people use the RIPE database and what changes that have already been implemented in the database, were seen as favourable, and you can find the details of what kind of additional data fields you have favoured over the other.

When it comes to the IPv6 deployment, I think it's important to state that 19% of the survey respondents indicated they have no plans to deploy IPv6. Whilst others have and there is overall lack of customer demand and technical knowledge as well to ‑‑ which are seen as some of the main barriers for the IPv6 deployment. But also, we had to single out that training is seen as something as important that RIPE NCC could help with.

If you were to look further down this slide, you can see that apart from the training, some other categories were listed, but it's not really sure who can do that. There is a lot of convincing to be done. For example, one should conveyance customers of members to request IPv6 addresses, and then convincing vendors of the equipment as well as convincing management and the decision‑makers for the need of the IPv6. And there is some other specific comments but you can find those and all the other comments in the appendices, they are all included.

Now, looking at the RIPE Atlas and the RIPE Stat, I have mentioned in the opening slide that there were ‑‑ there was some concerns that popped out throughout the survey which meant ‑‑ which are really all about some lack of awareness that these services exist. So although 41% of the respondents of the survey said they use Atlas and 45 use the RIPE Stat, many of them are still unaware that those services do exist. But those who do use them are very satisfied with those services. So, generally speaking, lack of awareness and benefits that are cited for the usage of this service is something that I think one or this group should be working on. Fully. So you can see some of the comments, it says I don't have time to use RIPE Atlas and some of the respondents say it's not useful for their operations, they are not really using it. And only 2% of respondents said they had a difficulty using either RIPE Atlas or RIPE Atlas in this case.

So, let's go to the summary of the findings. I think over all there has been ‑‑ there are high levels of satisfaction and throughout the service and there is more positive reactions than in the previous surveys that we have noticed in 2011 and '13. And what is really standing out because there has been a lot of country that sent in their responses, they seem to have similarity in the opinion among the regions. We are saying not this is not on a country base but within regions there is a coherence of views of the RIPE NCC Services and the benefits that ‑‑ of the services that they get.

Again, they call for some of the simplifying of the processes. Members ask for better documentation and easy‑to‑use interface. There is really a lot of detail in the survey itself, especially the questions about the LIR Portal, interface, the register database interface and I would ask you to go and look for these details.

So, over all, increasing awareness I think and further engagement is something that the RIPE NCC should continue to do to either maintain or even raise the levels of satisfaction.

So, with that, I thank you all for the attention and I will stay here to answer any questions and pass you back on to Serge. Thank you.

SERGE RADOVCIC: Great. So what are we going to do with this information? Well, we are having a look at it at the moment. We are going to do as we did a few years ago and create key findings. I have already had a bit of a look and there is more than 40 that we have already recognised that we want to take some sort of action on or at least investigate. We will publish these in our planned actions, and we hope to get moving on all these actions as soon as possible, but we will be reporting back to you sometime next year on the results of those actions that we have taken. Again, there is a link to the survey. Something else we are going to do with the results is we have developed a tool internally for our staff so they can access the aggregated data and then draw down and look at countries and see where some of them scored low with v6 and do trainings or member lunches or regional meetings, we can use some of these data so we have been encouraging our staff to make use of the data. With that, we'd be more than happy to take some questions?

KURTIS LINDQVIST: Thank you, Serge. Any questions on the survey? No. Well, thank you, Serge, thank you, Desiree.
(Applause)

KURTIS LINDQVIST: Next is operational update from RIPE NCC.

ANDREW DE LA HAYE: Hello, I am the COO of the RIPE NCC and spent presenting you some slides on the operations. I would like to thank you all for filling out the survey, we were very happy and pleased with the very positive results, the operational team scored 6.1 out of 7 and thanks to the team for that. Nevertheless, there were also really, really interesting comments from you, and we will do whatever we can to make sure that we align as much as we can with your needs and questions.

Right. The first slide operational teams ticket volume, this is a very interesting slide, a lot of information on it. As it shows, first of all, the ticket trend. Those are the bars and as you can see we see sort of a stable ticket trend. We do see a change in sort of tickets where we see less requests for resources, but more trend ‑‑ for example, all in all we see that it's quite stable, and that, if you look at the red line which is the growth of the membership, shows also that we are improving in the efficiency within the operational teams. As the membership has more questions but we can still make sure that the ticket load is not exploding. So that looks very good.

And then the blue line shows you the FTE count in the two operational teams which is also stable compared to an increase in membership growth.

Allocations from the last /8, this is a number many people always want to see during this presentation, so this is the amount. We do about 200 allocations from the last /8 per month which is sort of in line with the membership growth, of course. And in total, up to today, we had about 11,000 /22s which we ended out of the last /8 pool. ASN assignments, also very operational but the interesting thing of the ASN assignments is that we see an increase in the usage of 32‑bit ASes compared to 16‑bit. The amount of ASes request is sort of similar to last year, but we do see an increase in the use of 32‑bit and we are also getting less 16‑bit ‑‑ less requests for specifically 16‑bit AS numbers.

IPv6 allocation trend, just one slide on this one. What was very interesting to note that was at the end of 2014 we stopped with the requirement to have IPv6 when we were requesting the last /22 IPv4 address space, and we saw tremendous dip at first so we thought oh, this is not looking good, maybe people did only ask for v6 because they wanted the /22s. Well, fortunately, you see that it's sort of stabilised, it goes up and down a bit, but still I think we are doing pretty well and over the last couple of months we again see an increase in IPv6 allocation requests, which is an interesting and good trend.

Then, legacy IPv4 resource registration, this graph shows the amount of legacy space that has been registered with the RIPE NCC. It's about 47% of all legacy space in our region, which is under contractual relationship with the RIPE NCC. And it's a very important contribution to the quality of the registry by having these resources properly registered. In total, it's more than a /6 of address space and what I would also like to note this is not something that was mandatory or pushed under legacy orders but something that policy allows legacy holders to do freely and we see nowadays that lots of legacy holders that buy resources come to the RIPE NCC and then want to register it to have it properly in their database.

IPv4 transfer within the RIPE region, the blue bar shows the number of transfers whereas the red bar shows the size of the transfers and we see a stable growth in transfers. Usually, it consumes quite a lot of effort for the teams because there is two parties involved and we have to do our due diligence of course. It's a fine line between doing due diligence and not asking too much towards our members, but it's very important to keep your resources secure, and that is what we are trying to achieve. On average we see about 80 transfers per month, in my expectation it will go up to 250 over the next year.

For the resource transfer process, based on your feedback which we have and a couple of community members and regular RIPE NCC members, gave us some pointers in how to improve the processes. We created a wizard, a transfer wizard which guides the party that wants to transfer resources through the process. It's simpler, it is aimed to maintaining the accuracy of the registry and the process is basically in translation of the need of you. What we are now going to focus on is also to see whether we can improve the process around mergers and acquisitions as it's a very cumbersome process, we understand, but there is a lot of information needed from your side and for us to verify but we will try to do our utmost to make that process as smooth as well.

Then IPv4 transfers, Inter‑RIR. The next time I will try to change this graph a bit because it's a bit hard to read, I guess. I think bottom line is we have seen 3.5 million IPs coming into the region and 170,000 IPs going out of the region, and that is important to note, and another aspect of this slide is that most of the resources coming into the region are coming from the ARIN region so the American registry.

Now, we see a very strong need for accurate registry, Internet number resources are becoming more valuable, that we all know, and we have seen a couple of presentations on transfers, mergers and some of the brokers have been around as well explaining the value of the resources so there is lots of focus from an LIR perspective on those. There is also focus on the quality of the registry by the LEAs, we have seen an interesting presentation on Tuesday with certain needs from the LEA community, and I think we as a membership should embrace those kind of presentations and needs as well.

Also, NREN and legacy holders see the registry as very important and for example, in ICANN there is the PS WG interest in the IP Whois accuracy.

We also see similar actions and questions coming out of the members' survey, the registration accuracy of the data is highly valued by you and what we notice is that there is still not enough effort although we do quite a lot, ah and I will come to that a bit later but there is, for example, support for regular data quality reviews and that is something we will be looking into over the course of 2017, also creating tools for to you make it easier to properly register your addresses and your RDNS root and INUM creastions, and to make it easier in one place and allow for additional customer information to be stored as well.

Now, all in all, for 2017 one of the main aims is security and data quality for the operation of the departments. And we are continuously reviewing this data. We got in contact with a third party, for example, which can help to us verify company name, legal address and national IDs, for example VAT numbers and such and we compare with our internal records. Now the interesting thing is that this third party also provides us push notifications, if anything changes, and if anything changes on the outside, which we are not aware of, then at least we can start either an investigation or do an assisted registry check towards this party to make sure that the data they have in the database and in our registry is up to date and up to scratch.

It's also August meanted with industry type and company size and I will come back to that (augmented)

Assisted registry check, this one I present every meeting since three years now, the main aim is the quality of your data. And so far, we did 4,000 ARCs, 95% resulted in LIR data update. And more shocking, 50% of all the ARCs we computed resulted in a change in contact details, which basically means in many, many cases in, one out of two cases, contact data is out of date and people that are in contact within our registry have often quite a big power within the LIR context to do what they want to do with the resources of the LIR. So, we'd like to really push to you make sure that contact data is always correct indeed. And the ARCs are contributing to that fact as well. That is 750 LIR that participated in an ARC survey, we send a very short survey with three or four questions and I don't have to show you all the scales and what we received back them from them but they highly value our service.

ARCs as well as our report form also result in investigations, and we have seen 200% increase in investigations in 2016, meaning that we have opened 75 new cases where we have to do more investigation in the resource holder and sometimes fraudulent information. We always get lots of questions on so what do you do if you conclude one of those investigations? And there is a small graph showing what we have done. So we have deregistered PI space in about ten cases, due diligence reminders, which is basically reminding people on due diligence. In 14 cases we gave some final warnings and we also had to close, unfortunately, five LIRs who did showed real fraudulent and we rejected new LIR applications and those were 24, based on the information we received within that process.

It's really important for us to understand you and what your needs are, and we do see a change in the membership, so we are trying to do our utmost to see what you want from us. We do that through the members' survey, who you are and what your needs are and what kind of services you are using. We do realtime event tracking since this year which basically shows us, for example, that the creation of domain objects was very high and that is something some of the areas we will want to improve in. Also, we have some demographicical information so we can basically pinpoint which type of member has which need, which is really good to make improvement in certain areas, and of course we have realtime contact with people through ARCs, through our trainings we provide to you, and other means.

LIR contact migration, I saw the five‑minute sign I think. So I will skip through this quickly. This is one of the projects which we went through over the course of the year, there were two lists, a list of LIR contact, which is a person identified by their e‑mail address, who can contact the RIPE NCC on the LIR's behalf, and the other list was LIR Portal user which is a person with a RIPE NCC access account who can also contact us and do all kinds of stuff on behalf of the LIR. That was not very secure and cumbersome as well to maintain. So we created a wizard for you that guides you through the process and allows you to make one list out of those.

Then some upcoming operational improvements, basically based on the survey results we have seen and based on the additional information we received through training and other means, we will work on contact LIRs. We have RIPE registry databaseed on the third parties. LIR Portal, review reminders, one of the projects we will be looking into to have a yearly ping automated that allows you to do a check and verify the data. Provide support to LIRs that do not know how to update their data, we see mainly in the region of the ARCs and we are going to create a one‑stop‑shop for rDNS IRR and INUM objects. We work on the domain object creation which will allow you to go through a wizard.

Finally, two or three slides on training services; also very valued by you, we got lots of questions on more courses in more locations, more on‑line resources. The RIPE academy tries to achieve to reach out to a larger audience by having on‑line courses and we have the aim to have new courses every year, which allows a larger audience to see and to learn what we are doing.

There is quite a focus on IPv6, BGP and security training. We have an IPv6 programme manager in the team which is Nathalie, most of you know her. We do IPv6 training courses and we did 66 in 2016 so far, we have two‑day BGP operating and routing security courses. And the nice thing, we are moving towards more and more hands‑on courses which really allows to you dig into the details and use that in your daily operations.

The numbers for 2016, now we did 112 training courses in 37 countries, which is really a large amount, reached out to over 2200 participants in those. We also had 42 webinars with over 600 participants so, all in all, we are doing a lot to help you and support you.

Long‑term outlook, what is training services bringing to you in 2017? Well, the main aim is to bring people together. We had some really interesting sessions and I went to a couple as well where we bring peers together and peers telling peers and teaching peers is way more interactive and you learn way more than just listening to us. So that is one of our aims. We are creating extra webinars also with content experts, so it's not only NCC staff we would like to have during those webcasts and webinars, but also experts out of the field, and on‑line events. Furthermore, what I already mentioned, we will have an on‑line advanced IPv6 course and on‑line BGP security course over the course of next year.

And that was a lot, but I think I made it within the 15 minutes I had.

KURTIS LINDQVIST: Next time he will be speaking as quick as me, almost. Thank you. Any questions? One question up there.

SPEAKER: Thank you. I'm from AfriNIC Address Policy Working Group. I had a question about the assisted registry checks. What triggers the ARCs in a case where the member LIR is not coming for a new resource, like you talked about some ARCs leading to investigations, what typically would trigger that?

ANDREW DE LA HAYE: Yeah, so how we deal with ARCs is basically random, and the intent is to touch every member, once every three years. What we do is, we send them a report on how we look at them, what we know about them. And ask them to verify that. And then we schedule a call, which on average, takes 11 to 15 minutes, at the end of the ARC and we help them and guide them through any changes which they can't change themselves or have difficulties with. So first of all, it's random. Secondly, in certain projects we noticed that certain pockets within our membership need a bit more attention. And then we ARC them as well. You can imagine that we see that through the third party we get notice of somebody moving, so having a new address, which is not communicated to us, that would be one of the pointers for registration services to start an ARC as well. So there is multiple paths towards an ARC. Yes.

KURTIS LINDQVIST: Any other questions? Going, going, done. Thank you, Andrew.
(Applause)

Next up is then Axel with the outlook for RIPE NCC. And again as I said, this is part of the team presentations.

AXEL PAWLIK: I can't see anything, some lights, good. Good afternoon, I am Axel. I am the Managing Director of the RIPE NCC. I was a little bit troubled there to see that Andrew must have said that he was the CEO, that is a little bit complicated there, so that was corrected so all is good. Andrew has given you lots of numbers, I give you lots of words, that is because I have the best words, really. I hear, that is what people are saying, I don't know. Also I have big hands.

About what we have been doing, what we are currently doing, I would be focusing on next year. This is also considered part of the general meeting so pay attention.

Yes, I have some numbers because they are very pretty numbers too. Membership growth goes up quite considerably for the last couple of years,we know that already. It's good. Done.

Others one done as well, IANA stewardship transition, we talked about this a a whole lot. We said it doesn't really mean that much to us, operationly, so politically in outreach that is great that it happened. Operationally, we will conduct periodic reviews of IANA services, the slide says we will do that. Our interactions with IANA really, really, really small, because not that much IPv4 any more and v6 we have quite a bit. So, it's good that it happened, it will help us, but in general, good, we won't see any big changes in operations.

Data quality improvements, Andrew has just talked about that. We are doing those ARCs, we are ARCing them, that is a new word, so it's a great tool. I am very, very glad that this is so popular in ‑‑ in the beginning when we start thinking about it, oh, they won't like to, but apparently they do and it's great.

Legacy policy, we are working on that as well.

Academy, trainings are very, very popular, we want to do more, but also we want to be sustainable there and ramp up the face‑to‑face carefully but do lots and lots of on‑line stuff there as well.

Our local communities, we have seen a bit of discussion about that earlier. Our service reach is very large and very diverse. Also Hans Petter has shown a map, also Iceland is included in our service region, it wasn't on the map, really. But we go out to all sorts of places it and to touch ourselves to industry events that are not necessarily ours, we do member lunches wherever possible, meet people face‑to‑face and there is a lot list of places where we went this year. We had regional meetings in Istanbul, Moscow and we do also participate ‑‑ participate in and support and go to local ‑‑ national operators' groups and try to instigate them that there are not yet, basically get the local communities running as well, as far as we can do that, really.

We have great participation in the RACI programme, reaching out to research academia again, we have extended to regional meetings, resource certification is quite popular, we are happy to see it's being picked up and there is a drive behind it and that many members are asking for this. And also the slides says RPKI validator, now version of this we will be introducing and implementing so there is support for that as well. We see that as a great achievement. RIPE Atlas, not quite 10,000 probes yet but getting there. It's very heartening to see and satisfying that it is picked up and people are making use of it as we have heard earlier.

As well, where people know about it and understand it, they typically like it.


Survey I won't talk much about it. Thank you very much for participating in the survey where you have done that. If you haven't done that, next time there will be another survey and do it then.

Generally, as we have said earlier, it looked really good for us, but the most important thing of course is not to hear you are so great and you are doing so well, it's much more in the details what could we do better, what do you want from us we are not focused on already. That is what we are really looking for in there, but thank you for the flowers there as well.

We did a strategy workshop with the Board earlier this year, basically it's ‑‑ was fed into by a strategy workshop that I did with senior management, looking at the environment, looking at who influences what we are doing, what is changing, what might be changing, where should we be prepared. And that is basically the main, the very high level outcome. Oh, there are changes in the landscape, we do see them, and naturally the RIPE NCC must be prepared in what we are doing and how we are looking at things to serve the needs of our members optimally or as close to optimal as we can.

So, from the Board meeting, a couple of outcomes were that we, of course, should further improve the registry accuracy, and it's also very good to hear in earlier discussions today in the policy Working Group that the idea of address registry correctness, accuracy is well planted in our community's minds so that is ‑‑ let's share that importance.

The RIR system should be stable, we are not in it ourselves alone, there are other RIRs we cooperate and coordinate with them quite a bit and we all agree that this is very important for all of our communities worldwide, that this remains stable and goes well.

Governments, well, we are increasing the scene as the source for trusted information, trusted source for good information in what we are doing and we have been fighting for that over the last, oh, 15 years or so certainly. And it's really getting there, we see that lots of requests are coming in from governments and from regulators, from law enforcement as well on we are doing and how we are doing this and the understanding is improving, is increasing there, that is great. But of course, people in governments change and we have a really big service region, as I said, so we need to engage further there. So that is what the Board told us to do, engage with those people.

Security becomes more and more important, so that's something that we also should do and the Board agrees with that.

Focus points for next year and certainly you all have read the activity plan for next year, the draft. Again, maintaining a strong secure accurate registry is paramount. Then, looking at playing active role in enhancing the RIR stability through good cooperation and good governance and accountability, and we earlier touched upon that on the Monday, already.

And it's also good to see it is basically shared by most of you, the idea that we all need to be accountable.

Increasing efficiency, cost saving, you have seen the graphs that Andrew has shown us. Lots and lots of new members and fairly stable FTE development then those departments. More automation and better and more efficiency, we seem to be fairly well on track there but we need to continue that as well.

And speaking to governments is nice, speaking to the police force is nice but our membership association so increased engagement with members of continuing to do outreach, and continuing to meet you people face‑to‑face, not only the members, also the RIPE community, governments and regulators and the police force and what else is out there, engagement is important for us.

Registry, yeah, once more accuracy, robustness of the registry, the ARCs, the assisted registry checks we'll continue them. It's quite a bit of work and Andrew alluded to that. There is a lot of things that are new, so Inter‑RIR transfers are relatively new, the whole fraud issue, hijacking cases, really some of them are really, really complex and interesting to look at. But of course, yeah, needs people, staff hours thrown at, days sometimes. Loopholes policies and procedures, we are discussing them and you are adjusting the policy, but what is important is that we as registry see what is going on and report on that, neutrally of course, and you make decisions on what you want to do with that.

So, further engagement, like I said, governments, other parties have us on their ‑‑ not on the Horizon but really close and they look at us and want to play with us, want to deal with us as well, the other RIRs, of course, and the thing that we really want to focus on, the next year is to have a better ‑‑ get a better understanding of, again, the wide scope of regulation, legislation that our members have to deal with and have to work under in the various very different countries in our service region.

Good of the Internet activities, I won't talk much about. Basically, we have somebody else doing that, thank you, ten minutes. What we have done over the last couple of years, you will have noticed we have contributed here and there to good causes that you thought is something that we should be doing, and they were scattered all over the budget a little bit so we have decided to make it more transparent and obvious what we are doing there and to sort of group them into several clear types, and Salem will talk about that. So the Board has asked me to look at country based statistics. We have lots of countries and yes, there are no countries in the ‑‑ there are, but the governments of countries are interested in how they are doing economically with this Internet thing, so we see it as important to have a look at what we can provide them with, based on facts and from a neutral organisation here. So we will work on this for this year and for next year we will work on more.

Ideally covering the whole service region at some point.

RIPE meetings coming up, regional meetings coming up, that is all business as we are used to it. It's great to see so many of you. And yeah, we try to cover the service region as much as possible, of course.

Good. A couple of numbers, happy numbers, I also have very good numbers. So, the service fee per ‑‑ the membership fee per LIR will remain as you know, at €1400 per year, which is lovely. We will decide later, you, our members, will decide whether they want to redistribute money as surplus to themselves, about €300 per member. We expect, though, looking at the developments over the last two years or so, we will see about a 13% increase in membership over the course of 2017. We have added some additional FTEs to work with that and to deliver good services. So that in the end results in about 9% increase in operational expenses and during the GM we will see many more very nice numbers.

Right. General meeting happening soon after this session. The things that we will discuss, obviously, are the activity plan in the budget for next year, the standard topic, also the general charging scheme model, or the way we charge will be on the discussion plate again. As we have heard ‑‑ as we see, there are lots and lots of new members and we have had various discussions about the charging schemes, the various possible charging schemes earlier, many years ago, quite some years ago, and not everybody has that in mind and maybe the situation has changed and so the Board has asked us to put this until the ‑‑ on to the agenda as well as a discussion point, to listen to the sort of temperature of the room, basically, so the Board can take that home and discuss it further and plot a way forward.

Some things will be formally voted on, charges for legacy, Internet resource holders, distribution of the surplus and amendments to the RIPE NCC conflict arbitration procedure and of course we have seen the agenda and you are well prepared.

Please do participate. The vote counts and we have a lot of votes registered this time around. Maybe we can get the 900, we hope for the best. It's getting up, it's getting there, it's really, really nice to see that. Please do not only register but vote as well. And that is me.

Thank you very much. If you have any questions, I am happy to see the lights on you. That is a queue for you to close your eyes.

KURTIS LINDQVIST: Thank you, Axel.
(Applause)

Any questions? No.

AXEL PAWLIK: They were very good words.

KURTIS LINDQVIST: There is one.

SPEAKER: Sorry, maybe you are too ‑‑ Alexander. You mentioned survey, we also see survey report previously, but how are you selecting survey operator, because if you are going to use these results on your work, survey operator must be not just well‑known, as everyone knows Desiree but must be trusted and independent.

AXEL PAWLIK: Thank you for that question, how do we pick the operator of the survey.

SERGE RADOVCIC: As Desiree said, we have used them now three times and proved to be great in providing us with the data. They are very trusted organisation and we are happy with the result. And I was talking to Des yesterday, we may consider for the next time and three years' time, perhaps we put out a call or consider others but we will see how that works.

KURTIS LINDQVIST: Okay. Thank you, Serge. No more questions? I think Axel is done, thank you Axel.

AXEL PAWLIK: See you in the GM.
(Applause)

KURTIS LINDQVIST: Then next up is Salam from the NCC Board on the good of the Internet initiative.

SALAM YAMOUT: So good afternoon, and I am going to talk to you today about the good of the Internet initiative. So, we have been having a good tradition, a proud tradition for working for the good of the Internet and to do and to give back to our community examples either K‑root, RIPE Labs, right Atlas, RACI, etc. In previous meeting we asked you if you should be doing more of this, and we received support for the basic initial ideas during the RIPE 69 presentation and discussions at the May 2016 general meeting and other meetings.

So, we ready to present to you a package, a initiative. We have a mission for it: It's going to be support project to improve services and tools for the RIPE NCC members, the RIPE community, network operators and the Internet users everywhere.

So, as Axel has said, some of the stuff you are going to see today is new and some is old, it's basically what is new is the packaging, so we are clearly going now to identify an activity called the good for the Internet Internet, it will have components and structure and a process, it will be clear and transparent so the package is really what is new here. I mean, also some initiative but the package is what is really new.

So the idea is to have the Board, every year, in the September meeting, decide on a budget for the good of the Internet, depending on you know how the RIPE NCC is doing and and as we decide on the budget for the next year.

So we are going to propose to you four ‑‑ the initiative contains four projects. So the first one is called RIPE NCC community projects fund. The Rob Blokzijl foundation, Seed Alliance and the IETF support. I will walk you through each one of them.

The RIPE NCC community projects fund is, we have done that before ad hoc or sometimes on a per need basis but now we put a process, a structure in place, here we are going to be funding projects that are of value to the operation and resilience of the Internet, these are rather large projects, maybe resulting in tools and/or services for Ben pit pour the technical community in the service region. So there is going to be an open application process, a form, everybody has to submit a business plan and the evaluation will be done by the RIPE community, assisted by one member of the Executive Board as an observer and one Working Group Chair. And probably one RIPE NCC observer. So, basically, it's a community who will decides of who gets, instead they all apply between January and May and we do all the selection and the review process in May and we announce in the second RIPE meeting, and so on.

The second project is the Rob Blokzijl foundation, Hans Petter talked to but this on the Opening Plenary. We have talked about it last meeting. We are all very saddened by his death but we think we left a legacy and it is our responsibility to award once every two years people that have also belonged to his vision, if you will. So, to reward people who have contributed to technological or operational contributions to the development of the Internet in our region.

So basically, here, the initial Board will be three people, one from the Executive Board, and one from the community and one from the RIPE NCC, and then these people will start the foundation and the RIPE NCC is going to be seed funding them so we are going to provide the first seed fund and see how they develop and if they need something else later we will see. But for now we will just seed funding them.

The Seed Alliance, this is a programme that is already been run by the three other RIRs, AfriNIC, LACNIC and APNIC, and basically it's some money that RIRs put, but the bulk of the money goes from donor organisation such as Seeda and others. So the idea is to give small grants and we are talking 5 to 10,000 dollars, not more, probably five, for development, usually in remote areas areas, in regions that are developed so it's somebody in a village that needs access or website or community development or for the invalids, stuff of that kind, development stuff. Around openness, right collusion, networks and access. So the Seed Alliance has already funded 116 projects in 57 countries since its inception in 2012, and we hope that RIPE will also join its sisters and brothers into this initiative for developing countries.

The IETF support, again you have heard about it, and last meeting they came and they pitched and we had a discussion about it so, the idea is that the IETF is looking for a long‑term sustainable funding, and is looking up to people to commit for ten‑year funding, so we did that, we have committed an annual contribution for ten years consecutively, and we, at the time, received positive feedback from you, and AfriNIC, ARIN and ISOC are also contributing to this, to the long‑term sustainability of the IETF.

So here is a matrix that different shades them, so the first RIPE NCC community projects, the first programme is really for large grants but they will be now given in a clear process and transparent process, selected by the community. The second one is to reward people.

The third one, Seed Alliance, is to really help rural area urban development for development.

And the fourth one is to ensure the sustainability of the IETF.

So, we believe or the Executive Board believes that this programme will benefit the technical community in the RIPE NCC region and around the world. We have a tradition of giving back and I think it's in part of our DNA and we should continue that and we should never forget that we have been entrusted to manage a public resource, so it becomes very much important for us to show that our organisation has a public interest component and activities to it. This is especially important after the IANA transition, it's kind of similar to the work that Athina is doing on accountability. We have to tie up our votes in post IANA era to ensure we appear as a good public interest organisation, able to serve its members but also serve the Internet and the community at large.

So, we think, we are in a unique position to make a difference, and we are asking, of course, this is all, you know, in the making, so we are asking for your support and for feedback. Please write me an e‑mail or grab me in the hall or any one of the other Executive Board members, tell us what you think and if you like, if you don't like. We need to hear about you ‑‑ from you before we proceed any further. Thank you.
(Applause)

KURTIS LINDQVIST: Thank you, any questions? Any questions on this? No. No.

Next is Maria, also from the NCC Executive Board, to talk about external ‑‑ I forgot what the topic was now.

MARIA HALL: It's interesting, I don't see anything. It feels like being on TV, I guess it feels like this, you don't see anyone else. Anyway, in ought all 2004, a pretty long time ago, one of my friends came to me and said, hey, you are the advisor for the Swedish Government in Internet related things, you need to come to the RIPE meeting, you need to meet the RIPE community and the persons running the stuff. And by then I was working with the Swedish, new telecommunication package, so I thought that is really, really good idea. So in Autumn 2004, the RIPE 49 in Manchester was my first, but certainly not my least RIPE meeting.

Anyway, as a newbie coming from the government I was actually ‑‑ I was happily surprised, but there were many issues and topics that were of interest, also for me as a person working for the government. Maybe the level, the technical level was a little bit beyond my reach, but nevertheless there were topics that I was very interested in. And around that time, I think it was around 2005, RIPE NCC created this governmental round table meetings, it is a special ‑‑ how can I say ‑‑ separate meeting when governments and regulators can meet RIPE community and talk about these issues but on a more policy level. And these meetings are going on still twice a year, and it has been very successful. And but besides that actually I and many of us lacked some kind of platform, some kind of space that also the governments can meet the community and discuss this technical issues, with the community and also see, wait a minute here, there are technical decisions and developments going on, how will that affect governments? And wait a minute here, how will governmental decisions also affect the technical community?

So the Cooperation Working Group was initiated sometime around 2007, there was some kind of enhanced cooperation task force in the beginning and the Cooperation Working Group was initiated. And I was co‑chairing that for quite some time until two years ago. But anyway, a lot has happened since then. And we heard some stuff also coming from Andrew and some stuff coming from Axel as well, a lot has happened. We have a lot of more members, we have new types of members, we have a very big variety in our big service region, it's 76 countries. So, we need to engage here, like Axel said. It's absolutely essential to use to engage. We can still influence discussions and decisions with technical, factual information, that is very, very important for us. And there are of course some challenges here.

Anyway, meeting like this, maybe do at the RIPE meetings where all of us in the service region, comes together, we discuss topics that are mutually interest for us is very good but it's not enough. Since many years back, RIPE NCC has been reaching out regionally, which has been very suck selves but even that is not enough any more. We see some growing need for some more granular approach, there are countries and organisations that are very, very different, different legislations, different matureness, thousand cooperate between sectors and how do we talk to each other and in many cases we need RIPE NCC's help for that. There are different level of development, we can talk about IPv6 introduction, we can talk about broadband development, Internet adoption and last but not least, many different politics, with 76 countries different policy platform here. That means like we understand, of course, this variety of different members and growing membership, that puts pressure on RIPE NCC. And it puts pressure also coming to the ‑‑ to national level and I can give you an example, actually: Last year the Swedish Government wanted to have, I saw it was our country was green on that picture so I knew it was Sweden ‑‑ anyway, the Swedish Government wanted to have an IPv6 meeting and they introduced or invited some players, I was invited as CEO for the Swedish University Network, Netnod was invited and the Swedish Government reached out to RIPE NCC and said, hey, you need to be here with us in Sweden to help us to discuss our challenges on national level with IPv6. That is just an example. And on Monday Athina was talking about the accountability, she was mentioning the IANA stewardship transition and she also said, like of course even though that is over and done with‑ish, that doesn't mean that everybody ‑‑ everything is accountable, everybody understands and accepts multi‑stakeholder model, no, that is not the case. She also mentioned, if I don't ‑‑ correct me if I am wrong Athina, somewhere here ‑‑ focus is shifting from ICANN to RIPE community or maybe technical community, what is the technical community and what is RIPE community, who is RIPE community, who is deciding in this community and what are the processes and so on. But of course, we have the answers and most of the answers for that of course, but does everybody understand that? Maybe we need to be a bit better to explain that. So that we actually can be in the driver's seat but when it comes to our core business and our responsibilities, our resources, we need to be in the driver's seat. We need to have control, and we need to be heard and we need to own the discussion, that is very, very important.

So governments has been mentioned before, as everybody knows, getting more interested in Internet related issues, their landscape is changing, like Axel also said and I see the same thing in my organisation in Sweden, for some years ago or many years ago when everything started in my organisation soon it was pretty much a technical business, we were running the network and so on, right now we are having a lot of interaction with our government, we are having services and discussions and we are having collaboration on completely other level as well.

So, as Internet is everywhere and serve dealing and wheeling with Internet of course Internet resources, amongst them of course is RIPE NCC Services and resource will be hit by legislation, public policy discussion and so on. So, that is something we must be aware of, of course, we must be prepared for it. So, early engagement, being proactive, actually that will make us, it's a possibility for us to be in the driver's seat, we can own the issues and the questions. It's also governments like you mentioned before coming to the RIPE NCC wanted to have information and we have many success stories here and I can mention one of the things from my own experience is when, it was a week meeting in Dubai, my last half a year working for the Swedish Government it was discussion about global Internet regulatory package and from the Swedish delegation and some European friends we reached out to RIPE NCC, please come and help us, we need to have a white paper, some factual information from you how stuff works, we want to sit there and be super clever and press the button and have our statements on board. We invited RIPE NCC to come and participate at the meeting in case of questions we can't answer and all of you know, if you remember it was some years back, that was a very ‑‑ success story, at least from our point of view, thank you thanks to RIPE NCC and their work.

Because we want to be the self‑governing body still, we want to be in control of the stuff we run and to have our process ourselves and decide ourselves, we need to be in the driver's seat to be able to do that. So, more things are being demanded from RIPE NCC because all this I am telling to you and I know that, as I told you also, because I have been on the other side, I see much pressure coming from the government and very good because grasping for information here from RIPE NCC and I think that is very, very good but it puts pressure and takes time and it takes resources, of course. But come on here, I am coming from the government, I know that is why ‑‑ that is why having this information and examples for the government but of course it's not all about governments at all, not only because the whole community is growing that different type of members and all these different types of members, including ‑‑ well, the community including governments, have different needs of course and RIPE NCC have pressure to meet all these needs. And we are talking about kind of information loop, we need to have information in, we need to have surveys and need to gather information, it could be technical information, policy information, we need to analyse that, we need to ‑‑ and we need to listen, listen a lot and be present, we also need to have information out, like explaining more what is all about, big ‑‑ we have a big knowledge about how the Internet works and we need to get that out. It's kind of a loop of information. And we being able to have that loop, will actually make us being in a driver's seat and own the questions and own the decisions.

And we want to keep the role of RIPE NCC.

So, we need to meet all these challenges and of course, like Axel also mentioned, the RIPE NCC management have discussed all these challenges, we had this retreat this summer and discussed this, Serge was talking about the survey, lot of information coming from awful that you answered, so all in all, you come to some kind of decision of course and some kind of solution with this.

So, this is what we approved on the board, I am not going to read it, you can read it yourself, we think with these resources we think that RIPE NCC will be able to meet these challenges. I think that is very important. And continuous positive outcome. We have a lot of good examples, a lot of good things that has been going so we need to continue with this. We need to continue to be in the driver's seat and to give information, we need to be there and be present, and we need to do this for the community because we want to continue to do what we are doing and to keep the role of RIPE NCC, and we want to have control over our own processes and the way we want to decide is the way we want to do it. So I think this is our approval from the Executive Board and for the best of the community. Thank you very much.
(Applause)

KURTIS LINDQVIST: Thank you, Maria. Any questions?

SPEAKER: Alexander. I like all the relations to government groups to, to states, different stakeholders, but as far as I remember, transparency is one of important part which all RIPE processes and RIPE NCC processes are based on. Unfortunately, I have not heard what transparency in the whole presentation but I hope that all this activities with all stakeholders would be maximally transparent.

MARIA HALL: Thank you very much for that comment. Of course, transparency is so closely connected to accountability so you are absolutely right.

SPEAKER: From Ukraine ‑‑

KURTIS LINDQVIST: Please state your name as well.

SPEAKER. UA registry. I am from Ukraine, I have read ‑‑ days or weeks ago and government blocked Ukraine bring to you, so many what government, does it mean that TCP packets will stop going from Ukraine to London back?

MARIA HALL: I am very sorry, that is question I can't answer.

AXEL PAWLIK: I don't believe so. We have had a couple of interactions with the local government and ministries and legal people on what various sanctions might mean, and so far we have always come out on the side of what you are doing is fine, so I do not see that, I haven't heard about this and I don't believe anything like that will happen. And our board has had a statement out, I don't know was it last year, that they have instructed us and to work as much as we can under local or to keep communications open and to serve our members wherever they are in our service region and that is standing policy.

SPEAKER: Thank you.

KURTIS LINDQVIST: Thank you, Axel. Any other questions for Maria? No. Okay. Thank you.
(Applause)

That then brings to us any other business and the open microphones, so we can leave the lights on for the audience if there is any questions from the audience? No. No any other business? Going ‑‑ okay. If that is the case, then we are done. Then, the GM follows at 7 o'clock, I am looking at Serge to nod, at 7 o'clock in the room next door, you need to be registered and have your little dot on your name badge to come in; if you haven't done that, it's apparently too late. Thank you all. See you next time.

(Applause)