Draft RIPE 91 Working Group Chair Meeting Summary

23 October 2025
JW Marriott Grand Hotel, Bucharest

Attendees: Ignas Bagdonas, Sebastian Becker, Markus de Brün, Ben Cartwright-Cox, Marco d’Itri, Rob Evans, Julf Helsingius, Peter Hessler, Raymond Jetten, Stavros Konstantaras, Franziska Lichtblau, Anna Maria Mandalari, Desiree Miloshevic, Moritz Müller (online), Brian Nisbet, Yevheniya Nosyk, Sasha Romijn (online), Marcos Sanz, Christian Seitz,, Stephen Strowes, David Tatlisu, Willem Troorop, Leo Vegoda, Stefan Wahl, János Zsakó

RIPE Chair Team: Mirjam Kühne, Niall O’Reilly, Anna Wilson

RIPE NCC Staff: Hisham Ibrahim, Phillip Oldham, Marita Phelan

Scribe: Antony Gollan

1.Introducing new RIPE WG chairs

Incoming chairs were welcomed: Ulrich Wisser (DNS), Wolfgang Tremmel (IPv6).

Rob Evans (RIPE NCC Services, returning).

Outgoing Chairs were thanked: Willem Torop (DNS), Nico Schottelius (IPv6).

2. Feedback about RIPE 91

It was noted that RACI fellows were now given the opportunity to display their work at a poster session alongside the Monday evening social. This was in response to feedback shared at RIPE 90 and it seemed to work well.

Other feedback from the meeting: requiring 2FA to rate talks seemed excessive and created friction; the ability to mute hand-held mics in the room was annoying – the ability for the speaker to control this should be in the requirements for future meetings; having the WG chairs seated outside the eyeline of the speakers (due to the width of the room) made it harder to chair sessions; printed housekeeping announcements were appreciated though the font could be larger; an additional courtesy screen would allow speakers to read the stenography without having to turn their back to the audience; noise levels at the social were high and it would be good to have a quieter space where people could talk. It was noted that around 30% of the participants had dropped off the Kahoot quiz during the RIPE NCC Services WG – this was likely due to an issue with the meeting wifi.

Chairs were reminded that they could always contact the PC if they thought a talk that had been submitted was suitable for their WG, though a shared Plenary/WG deadline may have made this more complicated for RIPE 91. It was noted that one speaker had given the same talk in both the plenary and a WG with differing levels of detail – this approach seemed to have worked well.

3. Feedback about the new submission system

For RIPE 91 a new submission system (Pretalx) had been used for the first time. Some points that were raised: a suggestion to have a permanent link that WG Chairs could manage and send to presenters; when sending mails via the system it was possible to set the ‘reply to’ and ‘bcc’ but not the ‘cc’; requests to make the process more lightweight for external speakers (e.g. a civil servant might be reluctant to create a RIPE NCC Access account to submit a presentation).

4. AOB

It was noted that since most chairs now handled the online Q&A themselves via Meetecho, RIPE NCC staff were no longer needed as chat monitors for WG sessions.

The session ended with a very warm thank you to Niall O'Reilly for his time supporting the community as RIPE Vice-Chair.