RIPE NCC services
24th October 2017
At 4 p.m.:
KURTIS LINDQVIST: Okay everyone. We have a rather full agenda so let's get started slowly. This is your favourite ‑ Working Group, that is the NCC Services Working Group. For those of you who are new to this, we ‑‑ the NCC Services Working Group will contain some of the presentations that will follow on to the GM but is open to everyone, including non‑members. If you haven't registered for a GM, you should now go out to the registration desk out there and get one of your GM stickers on your badge because we are going to start the GM directly afterwards in here, ish, 10, 15 minutes afterwards.
So again, for those new here, we finish the Working Group we would like you to help all the NCC staff by emptying this room as quick as we can so we can get set up for the GM. So that is for later.
So late get started then. We first deal with some administrative matters, welcome all to the Services Working Group. And we have a volunteer, the scribe from the NCC, which is Amanda, thank you very much, Amanda, for doing the best minutes we will have all week, and we then have the minutes from the RIPE 74, that was posted on the mailing list, there was no comments on them so unless there is any objections, we are going to approve them.
I forget to say, by the way, I am Kurtis Lindqvist, I am one of the co‑chairs of the NCC Services Working Group, together with Bijal Sanghani down at the front. With that, we are, unless anyone has additions to the agenda that was sent out, we have the Working Group chair elections, the outlook presentation by Axel and then the operation update by Andrew from the NCC, and update on the training from Rumy and the NCC Community Projects Fund by Paul Rendek and last RIPE Atlas.
That is the agenda. And then as usual, we have an open mic phone session for the Working Group.
With that, if you remember, my time as a Chair was up at the last meeting but we forgot to announce that in enough time before the last RIPE meeting, we are going to do Working Group Chairs elections this time, it's not going to be very much of an election but with that I am going to stand down and hand over to Bijal who is going to talk you through the election part.
BIJAL SANGHANI: Hello everyone. I am the co‑chair of the NCC Services Working Group. So Kurtis has just two‑year term, so as we posted the election process on the mailing list earlier ‑‑ well, actually last year, and Kurtis's term as the co‑chair of the NCC Services Working Group is coming to an end right now. He has now stood down and we sent a call for volunteers on the 1st September, we got one volunteer, which was Kurtis, and the good thing is there was support on the mailing list for Kurtis to continue being co‑chair of the NCC Services Working Group.
However, this has raised a few points that there is not enough nominations or volunteers coming forward for this position, so it's either that you are happy with the way that we are doing things, which is great, or there is something else which we are not aware of. So is there any comments or anything why people aren't standing up for the Working Group Chair positions.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Nat Morris Netflix. I am happy with the way that both of you are running things. I would be happy for Kurtis to stand again.
BIJAL SANGHANI: Thank you
GERT DORING: Working Group chair of another Working Group here and that basically matches what we have seen over there. If the standing chair is doing a good job and volunteering again, this basically scares away volunteers. So the moment you actually ‑‑ one of you steps down for good and you say, no, I am out, goodbye, you might see volunteers. But until then it's really hard for a newcomer to say I can do a better job than Kurtis or talk faster or anything.
BIJAL SANGHANI: That would be a challenge
KURT LINDQVIST: I agree with Gert, there is an issue if you have incumbent chair standing, would still have a challenged election, better for RIPE as a whole, maybe Gert has a point, a sign everybody is happy with what is going on. I hope I am not doing anything scary, I am trying not to be very scary. I think it's a fair point and I think also I don't plan to run forever. There is one addition on it, this is not part of the process but it's also we as Working Group Chairs when we step down we don't know there will be any nominations following which is a bit of an issue, something that concerns us, but rest assured I am not going to do this forever.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: From Hungary and I can only reiterate my support for Kurtis. I think you are doing very good job, you have been doing it for a while and if you are willing to commit to this community some more work then we are very happy with that. Thank you.
(Applause)
BIJAL SANGHANI: So with that, I will say thank you, Kurtis. You are now elected.
KURT LINDQVIST: Thank you.
BIJAL SANGHANI: Back to being co‑chair of the NCC Services Working Group and with that I will hand back to the Chair. Or sorry, is there ‑‑
KURTIS LINDQVIST: It's Axel you are handing over to.
AXEL PAWLIK: Good afternoon. I shall endeavour not to talk as fast as Kurtis. Sometimes I feel I am sort of guilty. All right.
Outlook from the NCC, what have we been doing this year and what are we looking at, what are our plans for next year.
Yeah. At the beginning of the week I saw a slide 17030 and I thought maybe I will get to 17060 but 17150 it is right now members, probably more by now, that was this morning. Members are coming in like crazy. Which is a good sign for something. We are dealing with it. So you will hear a bit more about that as the afternoon progresses.
So generally what has happened over the course of this year, what is sort of interesting for this crowd, ICANN remember ICANN was the big thing last year, the community has re‑shaped them, and also what happened is that this year the ASO review was up again. Every five years all of the supporting organisations need to do a review or need to be reviewed, so the ASO has commissioned the review to look at the ‑‑ all of the RIRs in the structure and to see how the ASO is doing there. The main complication this time around, that's why I started ICANN has redone itself, is the ICANN‑empowered community structure, that is something more formalised than we had before, more broadly also looking at the ASO and its contributions towards ICANN. So the independent review has been done by IT E M S international, the same people who have done it five or six years ago, the same organisation, different people this time, quite a number of recommendations has been set out, laid out, there are a couple of options what to do with them but that's just the review. The more important thing for me is that we have published the review to ‑‑ we have published it to you, and we would hope that we get some feedback from the community about this until the end of November, so that we as the NRO Executive Council can think about that and take your opinions into account. Of course, in some way your opinions are already in it because there was quite a lot of interviews with members from the community. We will see where that goes.
Basically, our point here is that we need to ensure ‑‑ my personal point is that I want to see your, the community's, needs represented within this whole ICANN thing. And we know we are a relatively small part of ICANN, but still we need to do the things that we want to do.
GDPR, what is that? Everybody is talking about it, it's on the news and in my Facebook time‑line and everywhere. It's General Data Protection Regulation from the EU. It's coming into effect, oh, my God, next year already. We have been working on the research for that and implementation of it since March of this year, basically looking at all the data that we have, all the weird and wonderful data sets, the obvious ones and also the less obvious ones, from obviously stuff, stuffing records, mailing lists, member records, member interactions, other mailing lists, the RIPE database, all sorts of things, making sure that we are right in line with the new legislation and looking good so far.
In the case that we should need to change our procedures with the, interacting with the community, with our members in any way, of course we will tell you before that happens, no surprise. And at the next RIPE meeting we will go into some more detail on this whole GDPR thing.
Government engagement, yes, for many years we have done governmental roundtables in mostly sort of in Brussels, we have done that again, but also we had one in Minsk and Bahrain so we go out to the regions and talk to the regional governments as well, it helps us all. I am quite glad there is some activity there, that we have a community interest in this and I actually I missed the last session so I am very sorry about that, but I hope that the outcome from these discussions with the community is helping the RIPE NCC to find its foothold, its, to understand its role in the whole I U T discussion.
Local communities. I am also talking about the community and I am pointing at you. Of course, we have a really wide, large service region with many, many, many countries in there, we try as much as we can reasonably do to go out and talk to everybody so where we go out, where we have any event in a country we quite frequently send out e‑mails to our members in the city and say, hey, we are in town, would you like to come and have lunch with us and tell us your concerns and just engage with us and not talk to us. So we have done, there is a whole long list of cities we have been insofar this year. Also of course we do the regional meetings, we had one in St. Petersburg and one in Minsk and again it's always great to see the people that we don't see at the large RIPE meetings and of course many people say come to our region, come to our town with the big RIPE meeting. Yeah, we would like to, it's a matter of having a host and the facilities in size and all those things. So it's great to engage with the local people.
Even more local then regional, it's national. We do also support network operators group in our region, we go there in person and there is a bit of financial support there for events available as well.
K‑root, you know that we are running the K‑root in the route server system, currently there are more than 50 instances around the globe, it's growing reasonably fast. And yeah, there is more in the next session about that type of thing.
RIPE Stat, giving you information about lots of things, Internet statistics. More than ‑‑ well, around, it was around 55 million queries per day, probably a little bit more by now. 2016 was 6 million so suddenly we see quite a surge in interest there in usage, which is great, that is why we do this. RIPE Atlas sort of similar, we aimed for the 10,000 probes that we would push very hard ourselves, we have those done and of course we continue deploying probes around the world. We have more than, again the numbers change all the time, 280, so beefed up anchors around the world as well, and at any moment more than 15,000 measurements running, which is also quite an increase.
You probably are aware of the surveys that we do every three years. Last year we did one of those larger ones and thanks to you we got quite a number of responses back from more countries than there are in our service region, which is lovely. And of course we also presented the 40 key findings that we take from your feedback and what we wanted to do and we wanted to act on them and on most of those things, most of those actions have been completed. There is a link on the slide, go and have a look at the details there. Generally it says we are listening to you and we implement changes as you would indicate to us that that would be needed.
We also talked with the Board about strategic focus. Of course we do what we do and we will probably do most of that in the future but what is precisely what we should be looking at over the course of next three years, and what comes out that is of course the registry and of course RIPE database. And service delivery and making sure we do the right things and we do it correctly, and we will hear I think from Andrew about that in a little while, on top of the priority list.
Engagement, again reach out to all sorts of stakeholders, our members, our ‑‑ core community, but also others, governments, regulators and the like. All to further the goals of the RIPE NCC in serving our members and the wider community.
The RIR system as such, there are five of us in very diverse parts of the world, and that is also long running thing but also we see ourselves on a bit more, on a bit more scrutiny over the last year or two years, we want to strengthen the global RIR system and ensure its accountability, transparency and resilience and again the member base, and understand who you are, who are our members and how are ‑‑ how is the member base set up changing the diversity there. And of course add value in RIPE NCC services for our members.
Good. Registry and RIPE database, accuracy and robustness of the RIPE database is very important. Like I said, service delivery, how do we deal with this? When the RIPE NCC was set up, we did this, we did our services, we did number allocation pretty much based on trust and a couple of slides or some ideas of what you are doing with the addresses. We see that this trust model is still valid, still a great thing to have but also there are folks out there who use it to their benefit a little bit more than we would have thought before so we need to look at a professional trust model there as well and that is what we are currently embarking on.
And of course growing membership, rapidly growing membership, what do we do, how can we be efficient and do what you want us to do in the overall background of again community trust, looking at processes also and procedures.
Engagement. Members, stakeholders and remote engagement. Of course, we, in a way, prefer the face‑to‑face, the personal interaction and that is always very, very, very popular, but so popular that we can't do it all face‑to‑face, so we are looking at remote engagement there as well, and training, we will hear about that some more. We want to go on to the local level within the whole service region more than we did before. And I think this is the right time, we have started doing that and get very good response to that. New challenges, things are changing, ICANN has changed itself, other things are coming like IoT and security and the like. We want to closely continue and to increase our close cooperation and coordination with the other organisations in the Internet community.
Confidence, building confidence in RIPE NCC and the global registry system, maybe even outside of this room to those who don't quite understand who you are, who we are and how this all works.
Reporting, improvements in reporting. We had a couple of comments, you go out to all those places and talk to those weirdos, out there, why is this? So we are trying to report on this a bit more, I don't know, succinct, more clearly to get the information out to you so that you know what this is about, also regulation.
I mentioned GDPR, whatever, that thing, Internet governance issues, just report more clearly about that.
That is the same, reporting back on inter‑governmental issues, on all sorts of levels. Facts, figures, analysis, you will hear a lit about this later on also from Christian, some things that we are doing there.
The RIR system, as you know the RIRs represent or implement or are part of the bottom‑up community‑driven model. The environment, like I said, is changing here and there and we need to be sure that we are at the forefront of those changes, that we understand them.
Membership is changing, new sorts of members are coming up. We need to show that we understand what this is about and that we sort of instill confidence in the system.
Accountability task force, yes, we had the report, I won't talk too much about this. It's important that we are accountable, that RIPE NCC is accountable, that I am accountable, that my staff is accountable and that you are accountable to your bosses and to yourselves as the RIPE community as well. So those things needs to be clear and watertight.
Member base, like I said, membership is our top priority because they pay our ‑‑ because they are good people and we like to serve them. Also they pay our salaries.
Understanding who you are, who the members are, why are there so many new members and are they different than the old ISPs from 15 years ago. That is something that we need to understand so we can serve them properly. That is basically the idea.
Other activities that we are doing good for the Internet, you heard about it, the Rob Blokzijl Foundation is in place with the intent to recognise individuals for the contributions to the community, also over the last couple of years we contributed financially to the odd project and the odd activity, we bundled that now and we want that bundle that under the community projects fund and it's not Paul who is going to report on that, it's Alain, and he will do his Paul Rendek impercent nation. RIPE meetings, meetings are generally on the growth track somewhere there as well. The next ones will be In Marseilles and Amsterdam for next year, you probably know that already. We will continue the regional meetings and on the slider here is the Moscow meeting and there will be a meeting in the Middle East but we don't know yet.
Financial overview and financials are part of the general meeting, generally, but it's interesting for everybody on some level as well, we expect that for next year the ‑‑ we know that for next year the fee will remain at €1,400 per year, we have a surplus, we will probably, if the members so vote, we ‑‑ we distribute that, there will be about 300‑odd euros per member. We are ‑‑ we are always torn between the optimistic/conservative and the pessimistic ‑‑I don't know, what we would like ‑‑ I don't know.
We look at the 16% increase in membership for next year, that is our best realistic guess. Like I said, members are coming and we need to service them, so we look at a 4% increase in FTEs, I think overall that is in good relation to the 16% there. Generally operational expenses for next year are supposed to go up by 6% also, not too crazy, I hope that you agree with that. And more financial details and so growing and shrinking activities present in the next session.
So, the general meeting happening as Kurtis said, after this. Be back quick. Draft RIPE NCC activity plan and budget, report from the Board and the likes of that. Topics to be voted on: Direct member interaction, redistribution of the surplus for this year, amendments of ‑‑ slight amendments of the articles of association and also of the conflict arbitration procedure. It's your association, it's your vote that counts, please do come. If you have any questions, I am happy to entertain those.
BRIAN NISBET: Brian Nisbet, HEAnet. So, the NCC Services Working Group at RIPE 76 will be the, what did I decide, 16th of May, GDPR comes into effect on 25th May. Personally, I would like some information in advance of that. So I know you are working on and it and that is cool but I think RIPE 76 is too late for an update on what the NCC are doing for GDPR.
AXEL PAWLIK: Yes, I will sort of assume that we will inform you of what has been done and no impact on you. If there should be impact on you, then yes we should do that earlier, absolutely, yes, I agree with you.
BRIAN NISBET: I think ‑‑ I think I would like to know a bit more about what is being done.
AXEL PAWLIK: We can make that happen. I have Athina with a microphone in her hand.
ATHINA FRAGKOULI: Just to expand on what Axel just said. The intention is that we will come back to the community with e‑mails, with updates and requesting consultation or informing you whenever appropriate before Marseille, of course. Thank you.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Actually, we have seen the explosion in the number of members for RIPE, which is very good. But it is similar to other phenomenon as going in the industry like explosion of utilizations of IBs and other services. What RIPE will doing in 2018 to balance this explosion? Will you go with the same traditional way of managing RIPE or make a new strategies to come and balance this explosion or make another channels for this explosion to give better experience for Internet users in the region?
AXEL PAWLIK: I think different things that we are looking at and Andrew will expand on some of them, generally I think this extreme growth that we are currently seeing is a temporary thing. I think it might have something to do with certain kinds of address space. So we see that. We also continually look at efficiencies in the way we run the shop and how we cannot only make our systems more efficient and more streamlined but also in how you as members interact with us and so what the mechanics of that are. So we are looking at that as well. Yeah, so those kinds of things we do. Thank you.
Anybody else? Don't be shy.
KURTIS LINDQVIST: Thank you, Axel.
(Applause)
Next up is then Andrew with the Operational update from the RIPE NCC.
ANDREW DE LA HAYE: Good afternoon. My name is Andrew de la Haye. I am the CO O at RIPE NCC. Usually I give a presentation, an Operational update with lots of numbers. Today I have a bit of a story more than numbers but those that are willing to look at the numbers, please come to me in the hallway and I will show you all the details that you'd like.
This presentation is a bit more meeting your needs. So when I started at the RIPE NCC that was in 2006, we said well, what is this organisation in fact doing from an operational perspective and allocating of resources, and we created this model ‑‑ Iused to be a consultant at that time, which was the Resource Lifecycle Management Cycle. And you see some of the services that we provided at that stage. Actually at that stage it was a rose garden, it felt like it, business as usual, some thorns here and there but not too many.
So, we are still in a phase where there is a lot of solid operations. If we look at IPv4, the statistics for the last /8 for example, we do see immense growth in allocation rate which is sort of similar to the membership growth, but we do see a stabilising effect in the growth. At the moment and for your information we still have 0.65 /8 remaining at this stage.
From an IPv6 perspective, we also have seen quite some increase in the allocation rate. It started with the depletion of IPv4, then we saw depletion in IPv4 in the APNIC region which all were spikes in the model, currently we are about 150 requests per month, which means that we have 72% of our members having an IPv6 allocation at this stage.
From an AS number perspective we also see a similar trend where we have of course have seen a drop when the PI requests were not possible any more because we went in to the last /8 policy, and we did see an increase of 80% of assignments over the last five years, but that goes along with the membership growth.
At this stage, and there was a presentation in the Address Policy Working Group, where about 70% of the numbers that are being given out are 32‑bit and we envision that that percentage will grow over the next couple of years.
At this stage, we still have a three‑year supply of ASN 16‑bit.
This is a graph with lots of numbers and I can go into detail but I won't bore you too much but I do like to highlight a few of these. These are some changes we have seen over the last five years. The first one is ARC and I will go into that in a bit more detail later on, but that is basically talking about the accuracy of our registry, and we do about 3,000 of those. We have seen an increase of course in the amount of transfers and it went up from about 20 to 1150, I need glasses, and it's an immense trend which we have seen, as well, because that the workload that goes along with the transfer is different from a first allocation as it was in the past. The same counts for Internet resource updates, merge and acquisitions, there is lots of information needed to process those requests, and it went up by ‑‑ from 18 until 3,000 over this year, and we are just in Q1 ‑‑ sorry, Q3 this year. There has also been some decreases, happily to say, we do constantly try to increase the services we provide to you make them more useful and intuitive which resulted in a 40% decrease in database tickets and that is a major step this year we have taken. It was also 10% decrease in billing tickets because also those processes we tried to improve for you. Now, with the membership base that is growing, we do focus on efficiency and if you look at, for example, one of the indicators is the staff level and that stays sort of similar. And I am happy to say the member satisfaction rating was 6.2 out of 7 which is really nice for my team, but it still leaves room to change.
Training courses also regular operations. We almost did 100 regular training courses in 42 countries and this is a picture of all the countries we went to. 14 tailormade courses and specific workshops and we reached about 2,500 participants during those trainings, and this is next to the webinars. We did about 36 webinars where we reached out to even more members, I think it's about 500‑plus or so. And the webinars, and Rumy will go into training a bit more and I will touch on it later on, are very, very valuable to get in contact with you. So this was the rose garden picture.
And then of course 14th September 2012 we reached the last /8, so the empty pool.
And since then, I mean, there is many trends I can talk about for hours but I'd like to focus on five trends today and the focus is on striking the balance between ease of doing business and securing and ensuring a high accurate registry. So this picture should be familiar to you now, this was 2006 and the green bits are actually the bits and pieces where our focus was in 2006, it was mainly requesting of resources, we did some monitoring and there was some changing of resources from one party to another but this was the picture from the past.
Where are we today. We do see a change in our business requirements, business requirements on your side and our side. And it's not weird, but everything is now considered to be in the changing phase of this cycle. And the monitoring phase, to keep the accuracy of the registry in place, which is one of the strategic focus points.
So new and changing processes, different through‑put time for many of these processes, and new members and customers coming in. Now, the scarcity, trend number two, made the price of an IP address goes up, that sounds familiar to you. And what is the effect of that? Just to give you a bit of insight of what we are dealing with on a daily basis, this someone maybe not fortunately, but we do get falsified death certificate, we were called bay person at a day, and he said, well, I'd like to talk to this and this person and we said well, we have a death certificate, you must have died three months ago. Those kind of things are happening. This is a bit of an extreme case but just to give you an idea of what the teams are confronted with nowadays, with this price going up. We have discussions on what accuracy is, what it means and I will touch upon that in a bit and we do see a lot of outdated contact details and that is something I would like to address at a later stage as well.
So out of these hijacks we see a lot of investigations happening and we have a team that investigates transactions and other data.
To give you an idea, over the last three years we went from 26 of those cases to 110 in 2017, and that is Q3, so we will see even more. That sounds quite an increase. What do we see during those investigations? We see inaccuracy or invalid information coming to the RIPE NCC. For your information, we had 65 resources which we deregistered which has an amount of about /14 because of information that was not valid. We did 600 independent resources, we moved them from one sponsoring LIR to another. We also had 25 resources that were abandoned so we contacted the person or the party and they didn't come back to us and they were basically abandoned and that was sort of ‑‑ /17 we received back. One of the trends we noticed is an increase in invalid change requests especially in the legacy area.
So as already was mentioned in the discussion with Axel just a few minutes ago, we did ‑‑ saw increase in membership and a shift in industry composition as well. This picture shows about the industries and we are tracking that via our system so what does it lead to? This is a picture of the industry demographics and I highlighted three areas. The first one is the telecommunication area, which is sort of average growing over time. And this is over time, I mean ten years. We do see large increase in the government area, where we saw an increase of 600%, many of those governments become members to receive IPv6 space, in fact. And there has been quite an increase in retail banking and industry and we saw an increase of 400%, and those are many organisations that usually would go to their ISP or upstream and now go to the NCC to receive a /22. From a country perspective, we see 132% increase over time for the last ten years, especially in Europe. If you look at this region specifically, we have seen an increase of 210% so I really try to dig into the details of the numbers to get a grasp of what is happening to our membership. So what is happening? We see an increase in industry diversity of our members, the new members do have different expectations on what they can expect from us. Those are often non‑traditional/non‑telecommunication related members and they are less familiar with RIPE community and RIPE NCC and we try to, through training, bring them to a different level. But I have to say it's still network engineers we are talking to so they are technically savvy.
Transfers, I don't want to spend too much time, if you want to have more information on that ‑‑ I see the five‑minute ‑‑ I will go into that in a bit more detail but we see an increase in stabilising effect of the A transfers. We do deal with 80 transfers that is not merge and acquisitions, transfers on a monthly basis.
Final trend is the reuse and registration of legacy address space. I am very fortunate to say that the community took a good decision in 2014 to make it possible to get in the contractual relationship or register your resources as a legacy holder with the RIPE NCC, and we are currently at 56% of legacy address space. That has been registered in our region.
With this legacy space, it has a consequence. There is a few people in this room who know all about these consequences. Those resources have been handed out, for example, 30 years ago and to make sure that we allocate them and register them properly we sometimes have to really do work looking for clues from the past and there is a lot of you helping with that, to make sure that this all helps, but these kind of process are extremelily complex, as you can imagine.
So the consequences of all these trends are we went from a trust based membership, something Axel addressed prior, to an area where we saw high economical value of IPv4, that made us in the RIPE NCC to try to secure your resources. Then we saw even more hijacks and then we saw an exponential increase in due diligence and legal requirements to process your requests. And that all led to an increase in ‑‑ pressure on the trust based model. And this is the picture that is showing it and this is showing your side and we understand and it's also showing our side. There is a tremendous additional burden in these processes.
So we want to address your needs. Form, we had a really good session with the Board in June, and as Axel already noticed there were a couple of strategic focus points that came out of this and I would like to focus on the review and we think of our service delivery model and understanding our membership base well and understanding still an accurate registry.
So how do we do that. We try to retrieve as much feedback as we can at this moment. We go to member lunches, we have a survey, we have staff reaching out, we do actually realtime user tracking, UI workshops with people, and we have two external consultants working for us as well at the moment, one is doing a mystery shopping project so goes to our processes to figure out where he runs into as a new member and the other side we have external audit on our registration services processes to see whether they meet the quality as we want to bring it in. And next to that we will be looking at an ‑‑ trying introduce an objective trust model over the next three years by eliminating bottlenecks for the members in good standing, because it's not everybody, it's a small group that makes it really hard for us and asks us to fortify our services, so the objective, ease of doing business and due diligence should come together from that perspective.
Integrated tools, we haven't been sitting still over the couple of years, last couple of years. As you can see some of you might remember the object editor, we were very fortunate to phase it out. We had tools in place where you were asked to go from the portal to the database and then were asked to go back but there was no real go back button and you really relogin and all that kind of stuff again. So by doing user interaction testing we are trying to drive change, we also do online interaction tracking to really understand what the hurdles are you are going through. With the aim to create a new platform which is my resources, basically the new platform for being the portal. What we will be doing over time is adding alerts, creating LAN DNS that it shows up, that you have an issue with that, and having management of contact information as an example to make it easier on you to manage your resources.
The other area we really working hard on is predictability and one of the things we have noticed is because of fortifying all our processes over the last two years we understand that you sometimes think we are inconsistent, but it's basically a piece of bandage on a piece of bandage and that is something we have noticed as well, and we will be working on that. And of course we have to deal with 74 economies with different legal systems. So what we are trying to do is make our process more predictable. We will focus on country‑specific needs and legal rules to make sure that we don't ask things in Amsterdam which are not applicable for the UK, for example.
The throughput time is one of the areas we will also be looking at, when I started becoming a member took ten steps, we brought it back to four, and we will also try do that for other processes. And I think we can do a lot more on clear communication, what our expectations are and how we can talk to you about that.
And finally the Trust Model which we are working on which will be based on a Risk Model framework.
Knowledge and awareness, I see some people waving at me, so this is the training courses, Rumy will give you update on that and the online engagement so I will skip through that.
This is my last bit, it's due diligence. There is a lot of attention on due diligence at the moment and one of the RIPE NCC's responsibilities is to maintain an accurate registry and keep the quality high. So we have been doing lots of ARCs which I showed you, in total was about 7,000 up to now. Average call takes 15 minutes and we talk to a warm body, going through their data and making sure that they update any information that is outdated or inaccurate at this stage. And to give you an idea, one of the prominent areas is the LIR contact data, which is really, really important for you to keep up to date because we talk to the contacts that are registered in the portal and if that is out of date, we might speak to people that should not speak to us any more.
Now, we also do a bit of survey after every ARC and we are very happy to see 4.6 out of 5, we score satisfaction rating for people, this was actually a really nice thing to go through once every now and then because I do notice that some of my data is out of date and I just talked to somebody in the hallway and it's painless, I can tell you.
What we also have is a report form, we get about 600 reports per year in, reports from people that report inaccuracy or perceived inaccuracy in our data which we provide, and that is what we will act on. We do ‑‑ we might want to do a periodic verification of data and one of the proposals in anti‑abuse tomorrow will be on abuse‑c, and this is sort of aligned with that, probably.
And finally we are also measuring the quality or the accuracy of our registry, and we measure that over three axes, the first one is comprehensiveness, are all Internet resources accounted for in the registry system. Correctness: We try to validate the address, for example, what we have in our registry, with an external data source to see whether they match. And currency when was it last touched upon. If you want to know about this specific project, there is community consultation on these, and I'd like to invite you to have a look at that as well.
My last slide. We are looking at re‑thinking our services delivery model. We are really focusing on ease of doing business for you, but I really, really like to stress to you that you keep your data up to date, that will make our processes easier but it will also make your processes easier.
And that is it.
(Applause)
KURTIS LINDQVIST: Any quick questions for Andrew? Thank you. Next up is Rumy, with the update on ‑‑ beyond classroom training.
RUMY KANIS‑SPRATLEY: Update on training is fine, too. I manage the training services department and I am going to tell you a bit about everything we do.
Let's see. As Andrew mentioned we do a lot of face‑to‑face training courses, the little map in the corner shows you how many countries we have been in this year. And also quite often to this region. We travel a lot. And we have been doing it for about 25 years, these training courses. Used to have one course in our portfolio, we have about eight in 2018, and obviously the team grew quite a bit as well. As Andrew said, and Axel as well, the membership has grown significantly, so our face‑to‑face courses are not the only thing we do any more; we try to find other ways in reaching out to our members. So that's what I want to focus on today with you.
In the Middle East specifically, obviously we do training courses, we have tried to increase that, we also have a staff member now in the Dubai office, I don't know if he is here sitting somewhere, there he is, so to be able to better understand your needs here and to increase the amount of training courses we do here. And you probably already know about IPv6 roadshows we have been doing that for a few years and we are also training trainers locally to help us out delivering training courses so we can do more because one of the things that often come back from the surveys we do is you want to see us more often, you can imagine with 17,000 members and a team of eight trainers, it's quite difficult to achieve that.
But what I would like to talk about today is not our regular face‑to‑face training courses. I would like to talk to you about the other activities we have been doing, to engage with our membership and beyond.
So again, as mentioned by several previous speakers, there has been a lot of change in our community the last few years. The membership has changed, the type of members we see have changed, we see different people coming to our training courses, the industry we work in has changed and is continuously changing, new technology is coming up, we have the IoT development, but also we have realised that we don't only need to train our members, there is a lot of stakeholders in our community that we need to reach out as well. You can think of law enforcement agencies, governments, universities. And finally, also training technologies and tools constantly change and we continuously look at ways in which we can improve on the services we offer.
So what I would like to emphasise actually is that all the training and the activities we do is not about us; it's about you. And in the past, I think very often, we were just focused on we come to you, we tell you how to do your job or how to interact with us and that is it. And actually it goes a lot further than that.
First of all, we learn a lot from you guys, we see trends that are happening in the industry, we see problems people are facing in IPv6 deployment, for example, and we see that we can help bridging or bringing that knowledge that we get during the training courses from our members and bring that back either by improving our training course material or by bringing people together so that they can learn from each other.
Also, the other thing we want to focus on is empowering our members and stakeholders regionally. So, for example, someone here in Dubai might know a lot better what challenges and hurdles are for deploying IPv6 than we do in our Amsterdam office. So bringing people together and sharing their expertise and experience is one of our main priorities.
So, now that I have done the introduction, let me just tell you about which activities we have been doing on top of the face‑to‑face training courses that achieved these goals. So the first one I want to mention is the webinars, and we have mentioned we have been doing that. In case you haven't seen them, they are one‑hour long sessions about variety of topics; at the moment we have I think about seven different webinars in our portfolio. We want to diversify the portfolio so from time to time we may do a webinar about the trend we have seen or we invite community experts to speak during a webinar because we have seen that our members really enjoy watching our people than just the trainers. So we help provide that platform and bring these people together. But also what we have been doing is use these webinar tool reach out to the other audiences, I have mentioned the law enforcement agencies earlier in my presentation, earlier this year we did a project with Europol, we trained 500 agents through these series of webinars. So you can imagine it was a very economically advantageous way of reaching out to these stakeholders without having to travel to these different countries. But just by bringing them all together and doing it online and obviously these sessions have been recorded and we are talking about different organisations as like, such as the United Nations to see how we can share that information with them as well.
The webinars are extremely popular, we do them almost weekly, and usually they are filled up within a couple of minutes after we nouns them. So during one of our brainstorming sessions this year we thought about how can we use this more and make more use of this since it's so popular. So we released a new initiative which is the RIPE NCC Educa, basically you can see the Educa is a series of webinars around one specific topic on one day. So, it's a life‑learning event and our idea is that we bring developers and community experts together. We had our first session on 5th October earlier this month, yes, it's still October, which was about RIPE Atlas and we ‑‑ I am pleased to say, it was a pilot, we were quite nervous, we didn't know it was going to work we had about 80 participants participating throughout the day and people from the community helping us present and we had developers from inside the RIPE NCC, and it was very successful, not only because there was a lot of interaction during the Educa but also as a result of it some of our open source tools were actually improved because it became apparent during the day that certain tools are not really useful and people who were following the Educa actually took the tool and played with it and suggested improvements. So, huge success for us, obviously, and we want to do more of this so we had a brainstorm session last week to see what our next topic would be, and we think it's probably going to be RPKI, again because it's one of the tools that we develop and it's very useful for us to get input from our community. So you will see an announcement coming out at some point, probably be early spring. But we are very excited that it was so successful and we definitely want to do this more, I think the Educa or the RIPE NCC Educa and the webinar platform is a very good way for us to reach more members without having to travel. I would like to adhere we will never phase out our face‑to‑face training courses because our members really appreciate seeing us face‑to‑face and having the opportunity to ask questions or talk about their problems during the breaks and we really appreciate it as well because a lot of people prefer to talk about some of the issues they have face‑to‑face and then we can bring that back into the organisation and make sure that our tools and services are aligned to the needs of our members. So this is a complement to our face‑to‑face training courses but definitely not a replacement.
And also I would like to talk about IPv6 programme management. We realised a few years ago that within the organisation we had a lot of loose projects related to IPv6 and that it was important that we coordinated these activities. And so a function was created for the IPv6 programme management function, which was done by Nathalie Trennaman, you all know her, I have lost her, but I can till you may have heard of Massimiliano Tucci who will take over responsibilities from from Nathalie. What do we do in this area? It's important for us to feel and know what is going on in the community, so we listen especially, we observe trends, we see what the technical hurdles are or the political hurdles and we try share that with our community so it's not just face‑to‑face training courses or online training courses but also writing articles linking people, having a feel on what is going on in the community, bringing that back into the organisation and bringing it back again to you guys, so it's very bi‑directional process of seeing what is going on in the community and we have had a lot of benefits coming out of this.
Now finally, last project I would like to talk to but is academic partnership programme. As I mentioned one of our stakeholders are universities and we are looking at ways we can better work with the academic world and one of the trends we see during training courses, we actually see that quite a lot of people who come to our courses, even if they are fresh out of university, don't have a strong understanding of the Internet ecosystem and the RIR system, and obviously this is a problem for us but it's also a problem I think for these students when they are fresh out of university and we think that we can bridge that gap and also another thing we have seen is we keep getting a lot of demands from universities or requests to come and do tutorials or workshops with them, which is great and we do it ad hoc, and the problem is that it doesn't scale, I mean the amount of universities we have in our service region is, I don't even know, I actually tried Googling to find out how many universities there are in our region, I couldn't find the answer but it's way too many to go and it doesn't scale to visit them all.
What are we working on? We are creating online learning programmes that can be integrated in university curricula. At the moment, we are working on a pilot with the American University of Beruit, we are very excited to work with them. You may havwe heard, we signed an MoU with them and we are going to create an on‑line course that they will integrate within the curriculum of their university and students will hopefully be able to get credits for it to participate or to get their degree.
So, the goals, well, obviously like I said, it will bridge the knowledge gap but also, and this is as Axel mentioned one of our strategic priorities to get more understanding for the RIR system. And another to reduce the ‑‑ or rejuvenate and diversify the community. Getting young people in. We consider university students to be our future community. So personally I believe you can't start early enough in getting this knowledge out and awareness and understanding for the RIR system. We reduce costs because it's relatively minimal investment on our side to create these courses and we can target and reach a huge amount of students in the service region.
So it's a very exciting project.
And if you have any ideas or if you work for university yourself and you are interested in this, please come talk to me because we are very interested in working together with you, first we will finish the pilot with the University of, the American University of Beruit so we can make sure that content is really fine tuned to the needs of the students and fits the curriculum. We want to do more in this area, we have the RIPE NCC Educa and theacademic partnership and webinars and our online learning platform which is the RIPE NCC academy where you can learn online and get certified but things to think of longer term future, I would love to have an accreditation path, why not become RIPE NCC certified engineers so we are thinking about how we can educate our community better without spending too much money and also reach 17,000 members and learn from your needs and bring your needs back into the company and adjust our services.
So, as I said, I would love to hear your thoughts. If you have any questions or comments please come talk to me. And finally, it doesn't fit this presentation but I did want to plug it: We are launching a new course. And this was actually based on feedback and trends we have seen in the community, obviously security is a big deal and IPv6 is a big deal so we are launching an IPv6 security course in January 2018, and we will spread it out throughout our portfolio throughout the service region and we are thinking of ways of creating an on‑line course for this. There you go. That was me. Any questions?
(Applause)
MARCO HOGEWONING: From the remote participation channel, from Iran asks as, you know, currently RIPE NCC training webinar are not accessible by Iranian members. This is a long‑standing issue and I am interested to know if you have any plan to solve this?
RUMY KANIS‑SPRATLEY: We do, it's one of the projects working on how we can reach the countries that cannot access or connect. There is different ways, I must say the webinars are recorded so it is possible for people who can't work with the Adobe Connect,to watch the recordings afterwards but obviously we do understand that people want to interact with us so we are definitely looking at ways of reaching out to members who cannot connect via the other tool. It's a high priority. Thank you.
KURTIS LINDQVIST: Any other questions? No. Okay. Thank you.
Next up is Alastair with the RIPE NCC community project fund.
ALASTAIR STRACHAN: Good afternoon. I have been at the RIPE NCC for five years in the customer service department, and I have recently moved to external relations where I will be dedicating most of my time to the Community Projects Fund. Before I go on, if there is anyone who will challenge Kurt at speaking fast, it's me so apologies to the stenographer in advance.
The project fund, the RIPE NCC has a long history of supporting projects in innovative ideas, good example of this has been mentioned earlier, the K‑root operation. Over the last few years we have seen more and more projects and initiatives approaching us for help, help with funding and resources, and what we are looking to do with the community's project fund is really formalise these efforts so it's more transparent and accountable process.
So the RIPE NCC will be providing up to €250,000 per year to support non‑commercial projects of value to the operatal and resilience of the Internet.
The project was initially proposed during the general meeting in November 2014 as one of the several goofed the Internet initiatives, included with that was the Rob Blokzijl foundation, it received further support in the general meeting in October 2016 and was included in the annual budget and activity plan for 2017.
So the selection committee. The selection committee will be made up of one Board member and three volunteers from the community. We received ‑‑ so the call for volunteers went out on 3rd August, we received 13 or 13 members volunteered from the community. They were selected by the Board, really based on their range of knowledge and diversity of experience. Salam will be the board member, Noona Garcia who may be here or not, no. Andreas Larsen.
So the selection committee themselves will serve a minimum term of one year. There will be annual reviews by the Board as to how they are progressing and can serve a maximum of three years respectively.
So what is next? Well, the call for funding is now open. We will be accepting applications up until 24th November. Once all the applications are submitted they will all be forwarded to the selection committee, who will review and make their final decision by the end of the year and obviously the successful applicants will be informed by that time as well.
So what next. The funds will be allocated on a case‑by‑case basis. This is really dependent on the project size and the fund, requirements. Successful candidates will need to provide ongoing reporting and updates, so there will be regular updates from the RIPE NCC, from myself on the decisions made by both the selection committee and also how each successful project is progressing. Once again, we really want to make this as transparent and as open to the community.
So guidelines and criteria, there have been strict guidelines that have been written up and they really cover who can apply, how the funding can be used and really just the required information to request help ‑‑ help funding.
Now, preference will be given to projects from within our service region, but the selection committee will consider projects from other regions. The fund was really envisaged as something for the good of the Internet, something that crosses borders and regions much like the Internet does. So if an application or project truly benefits the Internet community, regardless of that location, they will be considered.
I guess what we need now is the community. I really think that we as the community have the potential to help some really awesome project ideas become reality. Projects that will not only benefit our region, the RIPE community itself, but the Internet as a whole. So please, spread the word. If you know of any projects, anything that may benefit from help from the RIPE NCC, and the Community Projects Fund, please, please let me know. You can find me, just look for the overdressed man in the corner outside, I will be dedicating most of my time to make sure that RIPE community project fund is a success so if you have any questions at all you can always e‑mail me, call me, find me. I guess now if there are any questions? I see one.
SHANE KERR: I work for Oracle; but I am not speaking for Oracle. I want to say thank you, I think it's a great effort. I think one of the things RIPE has done ‑‑ RIPE NCC has done is to encourage the growth of the Internet in the region. So yeah, great, it's good to see it formalised and well structured.
KURTIS LINDQVIST: Thank you. Any other questions? I was a bit wary when you say you speak as fast as me, you were challenger for the Working Group co‑chair position.
(Applause)
Next up is Christian with the RIPE NCC country report, I think was the title.
CHRISTIAN TEUSCHEL: Thank you, Kurtis. From the beginning slide you saw that, well I am not Kaveh, I am Christian, I work in the research and development department of the RIPE NCC. And today I have the pleasure to present you a new tool, a new product, actually, and in essence it's actually very simple, but ‑‑ what it is, it is a tool, it is analytical tool to provide insight into the ‑‑ more than 15 ‑‑ I have some extra slides for exactly that case.
So it is analytical tool to provide insight into the status and the development of countries, and the reason why we are doing that is that we want to provide help in the decision process for Internet stakeholders. Think of governments, regulator, but also about organisations that are trying to assess a new market. So, for this reason we imagine we will have technical and also non‑technical users and we adapt the country reports accordingly. Another reason for the country report we want to extend the value of the RIPE NCC data. With the country reports, we want to promote the RIR perspective and also the members' perspective on a global scale. And we would like to provide reports like organisations like Akamai, with the state of the Internet or the OECD digital outlook on the economy. And I think there are multiple of reasons that I can list why we are doing this country reports. But let me just highlight two very important ones.
Axel mentioned before the member survey, which was done last year with more than 4,000 participants, and according to what our members request from us, we see that we have country profiles very high on the list, but country reports will not only satisfy that request for country profiles, it will also satisfy market analysis or historical comparative data or a tool to analyse and compare data. So we cover actually quite a lot of these requests.
Another reason for developing the country reports is the increased demand for country analysis. So far, these country analysis have been done manually and you can imagine that crunching the data, analysing and tailing towards a country is very labour intensive, and if you want to do that for all of the 76 countries that we have in the RIPE NCC region, then it would simply not scale and this is another reason why we want to work on the country reports to automate that.
As part of the development of the country reports, there was one development that could be seen as a fall out of the country reports, and that is ‑‑ well, I call it generic data pipeline but it is an application that allows you to get from raw data to a visualisation with minimum effort. And I discovered that in research and development and I guess in many other technical departments, people are very good with dealing with raw data, it's very easy to crunch data but as it comes to representing this data to some external stakeholders, then it's getting a little bit difficult. And for that, I developed this generic data pipeline. And I think if this is something interesting for our community then we can also make it accessible for our members.
So I was talking about data. The entire country reports is data‑driven. And we have all together three types of data: First of all, the RIPE NCC data. This is registry data, routing data, active measurement data, you know all about that.
The second data set is Internet related data set and that could be Internet penetration, national spending in Internet infrastructure.
And the third data set that we are going to use in the country reports to create the holistic picture with the data is country‑related data and that could be socioeconomic data like population GDP.
There are three main concepts that were employed to make the country reports happening, and I quickly explain all of those. The first one is aggregation. Aggregating means we are going to take smaller units, information that we have on smaller units and aggregate that on a national level. Example is the information that we have for an ASN.
The next one is comparison. We allow with this tool to compare one country to another country or another region.
The third one is correlation. Since we use three different data sets from quite different domains, it makes sense to correlate these different data sets to create new insights. What that means in practice, I want to show you with a really lightweight analysis. And I really need to stress that, this is not a full‑blown country analysis because it would not fit in the scope of this presentation, and is also not meant for that right now.
So what are you going to see here is the number of IPv4 resources for the UAE. And next to it you are going to see the address space that this translates to. I think this is nothing out of the ordinary; you should be used to this data, we also use it in RIPE Stat. But let me come to the first example, which is the comparison part.
Here, and that might be a little bit of unfair comparison because I put the UAE next to the MENOG region, related to the size that is of course unfair comparison but it should just illustrate what the comparison part would entail.
Another data set and that is not coming from the RIPE NCC but from the world bank, it's illustrated here. So we have the population, we have the Internet penetration and based on the population and the Internet penetration we can calculate the Internet user. Same here, we have the one for the UAE and we have it for MENOG. What this picture already shows is that the Internet penetration in the UAE is higher than the Art metically mean of all the countries in the MENOG region. I just picked the arithmetical mean to illustrate this example but theoretically you could use other statistical representations. For the people that are interested, I printed statistical descriptive values for that, but again, this is not part of this ‑‑ or should not be the focus point of this presentation. If you are going to go right now to example of correlation, we tried to combine RIPE NCC data with other data sources and then we are going to find something very interesting. On the left side you are going to see the Internet users per IPv4 address. And this is statistically. So in statistical means we have 2.2 Internet users per IPv4 address. That could provide some information about netting, about how much of an IP address has to be shared between users.
On the right side we have the same for the MENOG region and we see that it's higher. And what I also plotted on this graph is the annual growth of the population, because if you want to make decisions as a regulator, then I think it's not only important to know what the situation is right now but how will it develop. And for this one it's very important that you see how the population will grow or will shrink in a way. So here again I printed the statistical values for that.
To roughly understand what the situation in a country, you should not only look at the current situation but you also should look at the historical situation, that is also something that is being covered in the country reports. And that basically brings me to the highlight of the presentation, that is the country reports.
We have developed this tool and at the moment it's in Beta status, that means that we have certain limitations. The limitations we have right now according to the data set is we only include the 76 countries of the RIPE NCC region and some of the regions in the ‑‑ within the RIPE NCC region, so for example, that would be MENOG or ENOG. So if you are going to go to this URL.ripe.net/country‑reports, you can try it out and compare up to two countries. And you might think that the user interface is very familiar, that is intentional, because we built this tool based on the battleproofing technology of RIPE Stat, and just on the weekend we got more than 52 million requests per day, which just shows how mature the system is.
My idea would be that for the next steps, that we could integrate your feedback into the further development. We already have some ideas on how to move forward with the country reports but it will definitely depend on your feedback. I give you some examples.
What we want to integrate right now is routing data, because what you are going to see right now on the platform is only registry information. We also want to integrate external data sets. I refrained of doing that already with the Beta version because having external data sets makes it much more difficult because this is also a point that I want to stress, what we need on this platform is more information. If we really want to give a tool to regulators or governments to fully understand what the impact of this data could mean, we really need to explain and describe it into details. Some more metadata, more explanatory data will be necessary and will be included. And I hope you would ‑‑ you watch this space because in the next few weeks there will be a lot of changes and hopefully based on your feedback.
Another thing I want to stress is we want to add more analytical features, in the simplest case it would be a comparison based on relative terms, because what we have seen before between the UAE and MENOG was unfair comparison but if we are going to break that down on capital then it is very easy to be comparable in a way. Then what we want to also include is data mining and machine running technologies, one example is recommender, which would help you, that if you were going to look at a country, it would suggest other countries that have similar data path. And I think that would improve the user experience and it would also increase the insights that we could get interest the data.
And I think I mentioned that feedback is very important. That is why I would like to put the URL there, so if you are going to go to stat.ripe.net/feedback you will find all the different feedback channels and I would really like to hear your feedback on that.
And that you don't forget about the country reports and providing feedback in the next few days. We have a give away, and I have to say it's a bit limited, we only have 150 of those. But it is a compass. It is not only a compass, it has also other features. The compass itself has been tested by us and I think the accuracy is good enough to not get you in trouble. Additionally, it also has a thermostat which could be very handy if you want to measure the difference between the inside and outside temperature and it has a whistle. I am not sure if I should right now test it because I think that would make me the first whistleblower in the RIPE NCC Services Working Group and I don't want to do that.
So, I think that also concludes my presentation, and I could go over to the questions if there are any questions? And if not, there is one slide that I would like to squeeze in if that's possible from the time.
KURTIS LINDQVIST: Any questions for Christian?
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Sebastian. I love the idea of putting that data set together. I am a little bit concerned about in some cases putting data that is from different dates, from different years, so the World Bank and some high level surveys that work every year or every other year and the allocations are more or less live, so you will be comparing metrics from different time periods. So that might skew your data or confuse the consumers of the data. That is ‑‑ that is easily solvable so it's not a non‑stopper. And if you want a suggestion, I think the forecasting, so super easy to use forecasting library from Facebook called profit so you can, with a time series, you can have what it's going to look like in the next six months, easy feature.
CHRISTIAN TEUSCHEL: Thank you very much. That was very good feedback. I didn't point that out during the presentation, the data that we saw from the world bank was related to 2015. It is a very valid point and, for example, the world bank provides this data only up to 2015, so it is ‑‑ it is at least two years old, and only once a year, which is completely different to the data sets that we have, that are up to date to the minute. But we try to address that. And that makes the progress in the project a bit slow because with the tool that we developed, it would be very easy to plug in 100 data sets in there but I think that would be the wrong way. We need to put a really strong focus on data quality. And thank you for the tip for the Facebook library. I was thinking more about Google's flow system, but I think that could be in the end a battle between to giants in a way, but yeah, applying data mining technologies, time series regression and doing predictions on that, this is definitely something we have in mind and focus on.
KURTIS LINDQVIST: Anyone else? No. Next slide.
CHRISTIAN TEUSCHEL: So, when I read this report, it was for me a little bit of an eye‑opener. Okay, it's from 2010, World Bank maybe is always a little bit delayed, I don't know. But it is a very interesting correlation. So the World Bank did a report and discovered the data correlation between spendings in Internet infrastructure or telecommunication infrastructure and the GDP, what you are going to see there in the graph is from fixed telephoning, for example, if you are going to spend 10% in increase on this medium, then you can expect, depending if you are in a low income or high income country, that your GDP goes up, and the strongest one is for broadband. The definition of broadband from the World Bank is 256 kilobits, so I think that is rather low. But I think it's very interesting to see the forces behind that, because this is not just pouring money in a economy and suddenly something changes, I think it's enabling people and we do this in this community by, for example, giving Internet access to teenagers that play around with mobile phones and figure out there might be a solution to a problem that I have. These people create the new chop engine because right now we are living in times where optimisation is being done quite meticulously and big companies, they reduce workforce because they become more optimised, more efficient. And it's basically left to the start‑ups that create new jobs and for me I think that was very interesting to see that what we are doing here is very tightly related with the entire economy, so it's not only the economy of the Internet and the Internet community, I think it has much wider impact on the entire national economy.
KURTIS LINDQVIST: Thank you, Christian. Any comments on that or questions?
CHRISTIAN TEUSCHEL: We had that already, thank you.
KURTIS LINDQVIST: Thank you very much.
(Applause)
So that brings us to the end of the agenda of NCC services. We have one point left which is the any other business and open microphone, which is your chance to bring feedback, comments, to the NCC or the operation of the NCC services that hasn't been discussed on any other topic. No one is walking to the microphones. Someone is.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: I wanted to ask some question and maybe give some feedback. We face, time to time, a lot of difficulties with RIPE NCC and we wish to have possibility to give some feedback for tickets. So if people talk to RIPE so they are able to rate the answers of the RIPE NCC staff, for example, and another one, I think ‑‑ companies who take participation in IPv4 transfers, they want to control how these transfers going on. For example, brokers, they want to be able to submit documents for companies or just to check status of the ticket or something like this.
KURTIS LINDQVIST: Okay. I think that is two very good comments. I will let Andrew answer you.
ANDREW DE LA HAYE: RIPE NCC. Thank you very much for your input. As a matter of fact, I didn't want to mention it in my presentation because it's a bit of internals, but we have a fairly old ticketing system which we are replacing over the next couple of days. It might actually impact a bit of the SLA we are having with you, so please bear with us. But the new system will provide us the opportunity to rate any results from tickets from members. And we will also allow us to get better contact and get a better process in place for transfers. So that will be next on our list. So if you have more then please talk to me off‑line and we will see what we can facilitate from that perspective. Thank you.
KURTIS LINDQVIST: Are you going to publish that to the membership, how that is going to work then?
ANDREW DE LA HAYE: Of course.
KURTIS LINDQVIST: The second question was the status on the transfers.
ANDREW DE LA HAYE: There will be an option if you log into the LIR Portal to see what the status of your ticket is. Yes.
KURTIS LINDQVIST: But if you are doing ‑‑ I think the question was, if you are doing a transfer, can you see what the status of the document processing of that transfer is, not just the status of the ticket.
ANDREW DE LA HAYE: No, no, no. That is currently not a possibility. One of the things we do want to introduce over the next coming years is to make sure that the process becomes more predictable so that you know if you send in document A you expect we will review it and expect a certain answer and due to the changes over time, which I highlighted in my presentation, we can imagine that the predictability is sometimes hard to envision so that is something which is on our list for sure. Thank you. Any other questions, comments? Okay. With that, we are done. And we are, as ahead of schedule, we would like you to empty the room as quickly as possible so we can get the this room for the general meeting and I was told by Serge that we are going to start the proceedings at 6 o'clock, as we are ahead of schedule, so the quicker you leave the room the sooner you come back here.
(Applause).
