Dear colleagues,
Listening to the discussion and without going into detail about the proposal Jordi sent to the list, I would like to clarify a few things about the process. After Jordi sent his policy proposal to the RIPE NCC on 5 October 2020, the Policy Officer and the RIPE Chair Team worked extensively with the proposer on the content and language of the proposal. We specifically discussed the part of the proposal that referred to RIPE NCC bodies and suggested improvements to make the proposal more suitable for submission. During this process, the proposal went through a number of iterations, but we remained concerned about the lack of a clear problem statement. At the same time we felt it was not wise to propose a change to the very process we were reviewing. Therefore we suggested to defer the publication of the policy proposal until the review of the appeal has been finalised. After having looked more thoroughly at the Policy Development Process and the review of the appeal, the RIPE Chair communicated to the proposer on 1 December: “Therefore Niall and I believe that the RIPE Policy Development Process already adequately excludes participation in its appeal process by the people responsible for the decision under appeal. We may have missed something; if so, we would be glad to see a problem statement which makes this clear.” In the meantime we worked with all parties involved in the appeal on a review of the appeals process. That review has now been published as a draft document: https://www.ripe.net/publications/draft-and-discussion-files/review-of-the-ripe-appeals-procedure together with a thorough analysis of the evolution of the PDP: https://www.ripe.net/publications/draft-and-discussion-files/evolution-of-the-ripe-policy-development-process We are currently working with the RIPE NCC to have both documents published as RIPE documents. As soon as that is done, we would like to have a community-wide discussion about the recommendations made in these documents. I would like to stress that the RIPE NCC Policy Officer followed the process very diligently. She provided excellent support to the proposer and the RIPE Chair Team and cannot be blamed in any way for delaying the publication of the proposal. Also, at no time was the RIPE NCC trying to influence the RIPE policy process. Kind Regards, Mirjam Kühne RIPE Chair
