Hello Elvis, Thank you for your interest in the document and the call we have made. Short answer to your concerns is that the current document is a "DRAFT" document, as both my mail and the tittle on the relevant webpage points, as well as having a time set in the future (5 February 2014) for comments. You can find a longer answer with further clarification below: Regarding the Vice Chairs: As you may know, following a Task Force's proposal, the RIPE Programme Committee was supported and was setup at RIPE 62, in May 2011. I joined the RIPE PC in the following meeting and was selected as the Vice Chair to the Chair (who was Todd Underwood by then). So RIPE PC had Vice Chairs to assist the Chair operationally almost since the beginning of its formalisation. But this was not mentioned in the document previously (ripe-531). As we were updating the document this time around, RIPE PC decided to include this too, to document the status-quo more clearly. Regarding your other point, the intention of the PC with this is very clear: We updated our Charter, outlining our responsibilities and functions the best way we can think of. RIPE Community advocates for transparency and the RIPE PC follows this principle. In this spirit, we shared the draft document with the RIPE Community on the ripe-list and set a future date for comments. If you have suggestions on how to do this any better, please let us know that too. I hear you that the document having a number already assigned to may be seen as somewhat puzzling. As we are informed, this is how the RIPE NCC's document management process works. It is an operational matter and out of the scope of the RIPE PC as we do not actually update any pages or assign numbers to documents. RIPE NCC told us though that if the final document's content would be different to the current draft, it would receive a new number indeed. Kind regards Filz On 15 Jan 2014, at 18:12, Elvis Velea <elvis@velea.eu> wrote:
Hi Filiz,
On 15/01/14 17:28, Filiz Yilmaz wrote:
Dear colleagues,
As the RIPE Programme Committee, we have done some house-keeping recently and updated our charter.
The most prominent parts of the update are for the reflection of a previous change in the size of the membership of the Committee (from 8 to 12 seats) and for the documentation of the possibility of removal of a PC member based on unanimous vote, following Committee's decision at RIPE 67.
Just to document the changes, I see there's a third difference, which you do not mention, between the two documents. "The PC members also select up to two Vice Chairs who aid the Chair as necessary."
further, the responsibilities of the Vice Chairs are: "The Vice Chairs will work towards to ensuring active participation of PC members."
I also see that the PC has already selected the Vice Chairs, basically accepting the changes to the Charter before any feedback could be offered.
Isn't active participation of all the PC members the main responsibility of all it's members? Will the Vice Chairs have any other responsibilities in the future RIPE Meetings?
Further updates were for wording improvements towards better readability.
The updated draft document is at: https://www.ripe.net/ripe/docs/ripe-600
and is to replace: https://www.ripe.net/ripe/docs/ripe-531 ripe-531 has already been marked as obsolete.
"This document is obsoleted by ripe-600"
We will ask the RIPE NCC to publish the updated draft document as a final RIPE Document on 5 February 2014. Until then, please let us know if you have any comments. It's already published as a RIPE document and AFAIK any further comments would require a new RIPE document to be created. Not that I have any comments to the changes you guys have decided, it is up to the PC how it organizes it's activity.. I am commenting on the way you request the comments on the changes made to the charter.
You are requesting feedback on some changes that have already been documented, approved by the PC (which has already chosen it's Vice Chairs) and published in ripe-600 (thus rendering any comments useless).
Kind regards Filiz Yilmaz, Shane Kerr & Benno Overeinder PC Chair and Vice Chairs cheers, elvis