Hi everyone!

It’s nice to see the support for Peter as I think he’s a well eligible candidate and I agree with his approach on many levels. That said, I’d like to provide another option by venturing to nominate myself!

TL;DR: [Jump to the last paragraph!    -->]

Now mostly remembered for my comics, I was introduced to the RIPE community at RIPE 74 as part of the RACI program and spoke about my master studies on human factors as security risks in IT operations. Later that year, I was invited to talk at the first RIPE IoT Roundtable Meeting in Leeds where I got to discuss the implications of my studies for the IoT, as well as the implications of rapidly and diversely spreading IoT technologies for the RIPE NCC – the latter of which shortly after has been moved to its own working group! :)

Meanwhile, I work for an IT management consultancy and have not seen a single strategy paper without IoT as a focus topic. Having a considerable number of clients in the energy sector, all of them urged onto the trail of “smart everything”, I’m well and truly concerned about the various approaches they take as, one or two steps further, the security impact on critical infrastructures even beyond the Internet could be disastrous.

We do indeed need best practices and standards, which is why such endeavours will, by all means, get my full support. Thereby though, we should not forget that, despite existing standards, the IoT is still a huge playground and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. “Internet all the things!”, whether or not there’s a quality seal attached. Hence, to date and from my point of view as someone who studies more service contracts than she’d like, I also see a very high value in creating governance concepts for IoT networks. The role of ISPs in this, e.g. as a kill switch, has been discussed before, and we should develop a position on responsibilities and liability within (and outside) those infrastructures.

[-->]       My specific fields of interests aside, my main goal as a co-chair is to enable the members of the working group to get into an active exchange – be it by co-organising another IoT hackathon and presenting the results in the IoT session which has been (a lot of work but also) a huge pleasure for me before and during RIPE 79, by documenting and communicating topics of the WG (with or without comics), or by providing the enterprise perspective and a link to a variety of industries that employ IoT technologies. We’re a comparatively new and still somewhat inactive working group and I’d like to change that.

Cheers from Berlin!

~ Constanze