RIPE Programme Committee

The RIPE Programme Committee is responsible for ensuring that the RIPE Meeting programme consists of interesting, relevant and inspiring content. We recruit, select and schedule the plenary of the RIPE Meeting.

Contact the RIPE Programme Committee: pc [at] ripe [dot] net

Biographies

 

Osama I. Al-Dosary
MENOG Representative

Osama Al-Dosary has 18 years of local and international industry experience. He currently works for VMware’s Networking and Security Business Unit covering MENA. He joined VMware in 2013, designing solutions to meet technical objectives and developing visions, strategies and roadmaps.

Previously, Osama worked at Cisco Systems for eight years with various roles including as a consultant in Cisco’s Emerging Technology Group. He has actively volunteered in various educational initiatives and industry associations.

Osama holds a Masters of Science in Computer Networks from the University of Southern California and a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from King Saudi University.
He enjoys reading, presenting and cycling.

Leslie Carr
Leslie Carr
PC Vice Chair

Leslie Carr is the Infrastructure Engineering Manager at Clover Health and a Board Member of SFMIX.

In her past life, Leslie most recently worked at Cumulus Networks in devops, helping to push automation in the network world. Prior to that, she was on the production side of the world at many large websites, such as Google, Craigslist, and Wikimedia.

Leslie is a lover and user of open source and automation. She dreams of robots taking over all of our jobs one day.

Maria Isabel Gandía Carriedo
Maria Isabel Gandía Carriedo

Maria Isabel Gandía began working with networks in 1997. She began as a trainee at a non-profit organization called CESCA and evolved to a Network Technician, a Network Expert, a Technical Leader and finally the Head of the Networking Unit at CSUC, the Consortium for University Services in Catalonia.

At CSUC, she is also an ITIL expert and she manages the regional research and education network in Catalonia, Anella Científica and the internet exchange, CATNIX.

On the world of research and education, she has participated as an organizer, speaker or program committee member in several Géant and RedIRIS task forces and working groups like SIG-NOC (Special Interest Group for Network Operation Centers). Regarding the internet exchange, she collaborates as part of the Benchmarking Club for the Euro-IX association. She is also an active member and an organizer of the ESNOG (Spanish Network Operators Group) meetings.

Her main topics of interest are network monitoring, BGP routing, DNS, IPv6, multicast and network operations improvement.

One of her hobbies is to help artists to work with the network. She has helped organizing multisite performances and master classes from Barcelona, and she has also participated in several editions of the Network and Performing Arts Production Workshop with collaborators from Internet2 and Géant, among other amazing people.

Peter Hessler
Peter Hessler

Peter Hessler currently works as a Network Administrator for Hostserver GmbH. He is also a developer with the OpenBSD project, and is involved with OpenBGPD.

Working with computers for 20 years, Peter comes from helpdesk and Unix System Administration. He has been involved in most aspects of the networking industry since 2008, including technical support, vendor and operations.

Peter’s interests include BSD-licensed open source, urban exploring, and combining protocols in unexpected ways.

Mike Hughes
Mike Hughes

Mike is a freelance consultant with over 15 years of industry experience, specialising in areas of multi-stakeholder relations, peering and interconnect, and technical evangelism.

Despite having a degree which has nothing to do with computing, Mike’s technical skills were forged in the fires of dial-up ISP tech support and network ops in the mid- to late-1990s, having to do mighty hacks to make things work, and the power of asking someone to /”Reboot and if it still doesn’t work, phone back”/.

Mike also serves on the Board of Directors and Programme Committee of UKNOF, and is Chair of the Board of Trustees of University of Greenwich Student’s Union.

Jelte_Jansen
Jelte Jansen

Jelte Jansen is a research engineer at SIDN Labs, the R&D team of SIDN. His research and development topics include the domain name system, Internet protocols, and privacy/identity management.

Jelte has made several contributions at the IETF on the topics of DNS and DNSSEC, and worked as a software engineer on DNS implementations such as BIND, NSD, Unbound and ldns.

Jelte holds an M.Sc. (2004) in computer science from the Radboud University.

Franziska
Franziska Lichtblau

Franziska is working as a PhD student in the field of Internet Measurement at TU Berlin. Her main focus is on inter-domain traffic measurements, IXPs, security and Internet infrastructure. She has a background as system administrator and is active in the free software community.

Brian Nisbet
PC Vice Chair
RIPE Working Group Chair Representative

Brian Nisbet is the RIPE Working Group Chairs representative on the RIPE Programme Committee. He has been active in the RIPE community since RIPE 48 and he currently co-chairs the Anti-Abuse Working Group. His day job is Network Operations Manager for HEAnet, the Irish NREN, where he mostly makes sure the packets are flowing in the right direction.

Benno Overeinder
PC Chair

Benno Overeinder is managing director of NLnet Labs. NLnet Labs is a non-profit research lab whose mission is to build a bridge between academic results and practical deployment of new technology in our networks. In this context, Benno is particularly interested how results from research have practical and operational implications on how we run our networks.

Before joining NLnet Labs in 2007, Benno obtained his MSc. and PhD. in Computer Science from the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Until 2001, he was a researcher at the University of Amsterdam, and from 2001 to 2007, he worked as an assistant professor at the VU University Amsterdam. His topics of interest were parallel and distributed computing, run-time support and middleware systems, grid computing and resource management, intelligent autonomous systems and autonomic computing and networking.

At NLnet Labs, Benno’s topics of interest are Internet infrastructure stability and security, and the interplay between (open) standards, software development, operational practices, and policies and governance. The main focus is on two key components that turn a network of networks into an open Internet for all, namely DNS and BGP.

Khalid Samara
Khalid Samara
MENOG PC Chair

Khalid is a telecommunications and ISP expert with extensive experience in Internet, mobile, engineering and security technologies. He has acquired over a decade of experience in network planning, operations management, security and telecommunications policy development. 

Khalid currently serves as PC Chair of the Middle East Network Operators Group (MENOG), an international forum dedicated to elevating communication and awareness about Internet best practices. Having been actively involved in providing consultation and advice to ISPs in the Middle East and Arab region, Khalid concentrates specifically on network strategies, design, Internet technology, and operations, as well as configuration and training. He has played a major role in training Middle East ISP and network engineers through MENOG roadshows and conferences.

Khalid is based in Jordan. Prior to his current role with ORANGE Telecom in the field of information security, he worked extensively with several regional and international telecom/ISP operators and has come to be considered a well-known face in the Internet industry in the Middle East.

Alex Semenyaka
ENOG Representative

Alex has more than 20 years of industry experience, from extra large operators to startups. He currently operates as Global Network Strategist for Qrator Labs, in addition to being External Relations Officer for the RIPE NCC with a mandate to focus specifically on the former Soviet Republics.

Alex is a member of the RIPE Programme Committee as ENOG representative.
He is also Vice-Chair of ENOG PC.

Ondřej Surý

Ondřej Surý is a Technical Fellow at CZ.NIC, the .CZ domain registry. He focuses on the domain name system, Internet protocols andsecurity. He is currently responsible for Knot DNS and Knot Resolver projects (free-software DNS servers). He previously held the position of CTO at CZ.NIC where he helped build and launch Fred, the new registration platform for .CZ. He also founded and led CZ.NIC’s R&D department. and founded and led the R&D department.

Ondřej is one of the RIPE NCC Arbiters and a member of ICANN’s RSSAC Caucus and Registry Services Technical Evaluation Panel. He also participated in the first ICANN KSK Ceremony as one of the seven Recovery Key Share Holders for DNSSEC Root Zone Key. Ondřej is a free-software enthusiast promoting use of free software, contributing to many free-software and open-source projects himself.

Ondřej holds a BA degree in psychology/sociology.

Jan Žorž
SEE Representative

Jan Žorž started his professional career in the RS-232/VAX VMS world in 1992 and continued through Novell and Windows environments all the way to Solaris and other UNIX derivatives that represent the native environment for the majority of his projects.

Jan is one of the pioneers of SiOL, the Slovenian national ISP, and has been involved in the organisation from the beginning. Among other activities, he began experimenting in 1997 with Internet streaming multimedia content. Based on these experiments, he successfully accomplished projects such as “Dhaulagiri ’99 Live” (an Internet multimedia transmission of Tomaz Humar’s solo climb of the south wall of Dhaulagiri (called Death Zone) in the Himalayas), “Ski Everest Live 2000″ (an Internet live-video transmission and monitoring of extreme skiing from the summit of Mt. Everest by Davo Karnicar) and other similar projects. Together with two other members of team “Dhaulagiri ’99 Live”, Jan received a media award/statue “Victor” for special achievement.

For the last seven years, Jan has been working as a consultant in the IT field, specialising in IPv6. He co-founded the Go6 Institute (not-for-profit), a Slovenian IPv6 initiative whose main objective is to raise IPv6 awareness in Slovenia and alert the community to the fact that we are approaching extensive changes on the Internet.

Due to the Go6 Institute, Slovenia is currently leading the EU as the country most prepared for IPv6 (according to the RIPE NCC’s IPv6 RIPEness study). Jan has been invited to present around the world on his work, the model of the Go6 platform, and IPv6 awareness raising and deployment at the national level. These speaking engagements have included conferences such as many RIPE Meetings and the Google IPv6 Implementors Conference 2010, Internet Governance Forum meetings, World IPv6 Congresses in Paris and London as well as national forums in Germany, Greece, Norway, Macedonia and many others.

Jan is also primary co-author of very successful procurement (specification) paper, published as an official RIPE Best Current Practice document RIPE-501, entitled “Requirements For IPv6 in ICT Equipment”. This document is translated into more than 10 languages and is used around the world by enterprises and governments when requesting IPv6 in ICT equipment purchases. RIPE-501 was recently replaced by RIPE-554, also co-authored by Merike Kaeo and Sander Steffann.

Full CV