Hi all, I am following this topic for a while now, but did not have the chance to write down something, finally got the chance.
As one of the organizers for SHA2017, I have been through this whole debate, and it kept popping up ever since OHM2013. There is this whole idea of "us" vs "them", and trust me, it goes both ways. At SHA2017 we (the foundation) decided that it was not feasible to have organisations as sponsors with known links to the Dutch Ministry of Justice. This had nothing to do with the sponsor, but with their client, at that time it was "Ivo Opstelten", who basically rattled the cage for most of our visitors. He was the cause of a lot of people throwing tantrums and leaving, even caused board members to step down due to their affiliation with the Ministry. Thanks to sponsors like RIPE we could make the event awesome. I have to say that education is something that needs to be done, and if the client pays someone from RIPE to give a workshop, so be it. You like a list of all 3500+ participants that watched Becha on our event, based on "transparency"? Would be a long list, and I am pretty sure that I am legally not even allowed. If RIPE starts to exclude certain teams based on their profession, then you will be sure that they will find someone else to get educated by, and trust me, they are not always the "good" guys. Education is key, no matter your background. Greetings, Julius ter Pelkwijk Secretary IFCAT On Thu, Mar 29, 2018 at 6:07 PM Gordon Lennox <[email protected]> wrote: > On 29 Mar 2018, at 12:07, Jim Reid <[email protected]> wrote: > > Law enforcement, regulators and so on are members of the RIPE community. > > > So they should come to RIPE meetings? > > NCC has been good in reaching out to various communities. But I would have > hoped the result would have been that these communities would have seen the > benefit in then coming to participate in RIPE meetings. There ought to be > no barrier. They just need to pay and turn up like everybody else. Unlike > academics, for example, these organisations have the funds. > > We have to work with these sectors, just like we engage with IXPs, ISPs, > privacy activists and so on. > > > We had a range of participants in IETF 101 - from NSA and NIST to EuroPol > and various European governments (albeit sometimes discretely in the form > of experts and consultants) to human rights folk. I think this is good and > what we should aspire to: wider participation, a healthy level of > transparency. > > Gordon >
