The NomCom gives all nominees the opportunity to post statements here for the community to see. This is Anna’s:
My first RIPE meeting was RIPE31 in Edinburgh, Scotland, and it was eye-opening. I knew the principle that the internet operates on rough consensus; we all just agree to use the same root name servers, for instance. I hadn’t expected to see the principle of consensus run up and down throughout the entire community, and throughout its decision making processes. I certainly hadn’t expected that it would *work so well.*
That’s the realisation that propelled my career in the following years. It’s not only possible to form communities to agree how to build something; it is often the best way to coordinate and build the largest, most intimidating projects.
It took a while for me to grasp that communities like this don’t form by accident. There’s no law of physics that says that the internet *must* be run this way. Many of us at RIPE are still competitors, and it takes more than just enlightened self interest for us to be able to share our expertise and our experiences. Setting up an environment in which this is the norm is difficult; maintaining it as it grows and new members join is perhaps more difficult still.
If someone from outside the community asks what the RIPE Chair team does, it can be tough to give a detailed answer because of this context. The RIPE Chair doesn’t set policy, or even approve it; that’s the working groups’ job. The Chair doesn’t administer speaking rights; anyone may participate. The Chair doesn’t decide terms of reference for working groups; the community, in plenary, agrees their charters.
So my answer is that the job of the RIPE Chair team is to sustain the environment in which all that can happen. The Chair team needs to support working group chairs as they shepherd policy proposals and other coordination activities through their working groups. They need to have a deep enough understanding to be an interface with the RIPE NCC when implementation issues arise. And, when the RIPE community is doing good work that requires deep context to understand, the Chair team needs to be able to communicate the extent of that work to other interested organisations, while defending the bottom-up organisation of our community.
My own career so far, since graduating from a Computer Science programme, has allowed me to be a network engineer, network planner, project manager, people manager and back to being an individual contributor again as a technical architect. During that time, I’ve also been chair or co-chair of two different RIPE working groups, spent six years as an elected member of the ASO Address Council, co-authored some policy proposals, and chaired the discussions around RIPE Chair selection that eventually led to the NomCom.
I’ve also been active in other technical communities, particularly GÉANT, the organisation of European National Research Networks, who were kind enough to award me the GÉANT Community Award in 2019.
It’s been important to me to pick up a wide spread of skills and interests throughout my career, because I think that you can be most effective in a field when you have not just a deep understanding of that field, but are able to bring insights from elsewhere. (My current left-field obsession is learning about aviation safety, and trying to bring some of those hard-won lessons into my own work.)
But the biggest lesson I’ve learned, as I have grown as an engineer, is that doing great engineering only gets you so far; you accomplish much more by assembling groups of people, sparking their interest, and letting each member do their best work.
Doing this as a manager of employees and as a member of a group of volunteers requires different skills. My time as participating in RIPE has taught me many of those skills. I would be delighted to put them to use as vice chair.