Dear working group, I fully support Piotr, William & David to be the new team of chairs. I find in the below answers very encouraging signs that William Sylvester and David Hilario will be good co-chairs, I thank them for stepping forward as volunteers. I think the three of them present a good, diverse outlook on the RIPE database and its constituents; not only with solid "behind-the-scenes" experience, but also the much needed real end-user perspective on things. Furthermore I'll emphasizse that Piotr, William & David are members of our community in good standing. One of their common traits that comes to mind first is a willingness to help, to listen to the community. I seek in DB-WG's next leadership not only a clear view on how the database works and its potential, but also the ability to act as a bridge between different-minded people. A continuation of the consensus-based, bottom-up model is crucial to the database's future. Kind regards, Job
Can you elaborate further on your motivation why you want to volunteer as chair of the DB-WG? What role does the database play in your professional work?
On Fri, Nov 04, 2016 at 03:31:34PM +0000, William Sylvester wrote:
Thank you for your questions, I use the database daily in my professional work as our customers depend heavily upon the accuracy and usability of the database. We use the database for writing data to the database and also for reading the data in the database. I am very involved with customer education, object maintenance, and interacting with the many interfaces provided for the database. I have volunteered to help the working group because we need to be looking to the future of the database. As a co-chair, I would like to work to increase the working group member participation, work with my co-chairs to identify consensus for the many initiatives, and through consensus provide the necessary features to all the users of the database. The database is a global system used around the world. As a working group we have many items to discuss. Items like data validation, object access control, authentication, usability, and concerns from law enforcement. Finding consensus on these items has a great impact on the Internet as a whole. I would like to leverage my 20+ years of experience in Internet directory services to help the working group address our changing Internet environment. Best regards, William
On Fri, Nov 04, 2016 at 10:18:36AM +0000, fransossen@yahoo.com wrote:
Thanks for the questions.
I left the NCC a little over a year ago and I am now going to be working with the RIPE Database again as part of a new job, mainly simple contacts and network registration. When I first started using the RIPE Database, it was an open Database where users could change almost any data and break any policies. It was confusing for the users and generating a lot of work for the RIPE NCC staff.
Many new users were confused as to why they were able to make changes that were not allowed, many experienced users were having "bad script days" and making changes that then required the intervention of the RIPE NCC to fix.
While working for the RIPE NCC I was involved in creating the sets of business rules that prevents the deletion or modification of data considered "maintained" by the RIPE NCC.
That greatly improved the overall data quality and lowered the amount of time spent by the RIPE NCC in restoring information and having to to contact the users and also improved the user experience at the same time.
Many hours were spent in testing new releases to test new functionalities and discovering what would eventually break the expected behavior of the RIPE Database.
I would like to continue with that and help in further enhancing the usability of the RIPE Database, I know how it works and how to not break it fundamentally when implementing changes to its behavior. I am not a coder, my views and use of the RIPE Database is one from a user perspective only, based on the available public tools only.
I like to investigate how to achieve the intended goals of the RIPE Database, registration of networks and contacts while adhering to the RIPE policies, all this in the less cumbersome way possible. That experience should be as painless as possible for all users, basic users and power users alike.
Any changes should always be analysed with pros and cons to see what will break if implemented, and how to then circumvent this and ensure continuity of expected functionalities.
Cheers, David Hilario