Become a Member of the RIPE Programme Committee

The RIPE Programme Committee is responsible for recruiting and selecting presentations for the RIPE Meeting Plenary sessions. As the term of two RIPE PC members end, we are looking for new members in 2014 who will be elected by the RIPE community at RIPE 68 in Warsaw.

The Charter of the RIPE Programme Committee provides more information about the composition and roles of the RIPE PC.

There are currently two seats up for election to the RIPE PC. Please send nominations, with a biography, statement of interest and photograph, to pc [at] ripe [dot] net before 15:00 on Thursday, 15 May 2014.

Please vote for the next two RIPE PC members: online voting takes place on Friday 16 May, from 10:00-11:00.

Questions about the RIPE PC can be sent to pc [at] ripe [dot] net.


Candidate Biographies (in alphabetical order)

Joao Luis Silva Damas

Joao-Damas

Biography

Joao is a Principal Architect at Dyn Inc.

I am also the founder and chief engineer of services and consultancy company Bond Internet Systems. Previously I worked at ISC (Internet Systems Consortium) in a variety of roles where I was responsible for the expansive anycast deployment of the DNS F-root server, and managed the evolution of BIND and the startup of the BIND 10 Project.

Earlier, I served as Chief Technical Officer at RIPE NCC. While at RIPE I worked on the redesign and implementation of the RIPE Database, analysed and updated internal systems, worked to define RIPE policies together with the ISP Community, and designed and started implementation of the RIPE LIR portal (now in production).

I regularly speak at RIPE, IETF, NANOG, APNIC, and LACNIC; I work on several working groups within these organisations, including chairing the routing Working group at RIPE. For around 7 years I organised the RIPE plenary programme and launched the current RIPE programme committee.

Statement of Interest

Having participated in the process of RIPE plenary programme organisation and the setup of the current system, I decided to step down a couple of years ago to allow the new system to evolve without the weight of the past. I am really happy to see how it is working and since I believe I can still contribute to the process of collecting and collating input for the plenary I am applying for one of the open positions.


Meredith Whittaker

Meredith-Whittaker

Biography

Meredith Whittaker is a Program Manager at Google Research. She works on open source initiatives relating to reproducible network measurement, useable security and privacy technologies, and auditing, nurturing, and validation of critical infrastructure. She graduated from UC Berkeley and learned most of what she does by doing it.

Statement of interest

I’d like to take a larger role in the RIPE community because I care about the future of human communication, association, and freedom of information. Implicitly and explicitly, the decisions made at RIPE and by its members are fundamentally important to this future. My goal — in whatever I’m up to, and here — is to more clearly and practically connect core technological details with their real-world, real-life impact. Through making that connection I hope to further a future in which technology meets human requirements, not the other way around (all the while doing this with a respect for how these technologies actually work).

Drawing on my current contacts in the open source, network research, and human rights technology communities, I would like focus my involvement on recruiting new RIPE participants and speakers, and productively broadening the scope of discussion to allow examination of specific assumptions “higher up the stack” under the light of the rich RIPE community brain trust. I believe that this will perpetuate and refresh the process of generative self-correction and enthralling debate that makes up the real engine at the center of the Internet. I am able to travel and I’m an enthusiastic advocate for transparency, science, music, and sane consensus.


Jan Žorž

Jan-Zorz

Biography

Jan Žorž started his professional career in RS-232/VAX VMS world in 1992 and continued through Novell and Windows environments all the way to Solaris and other UNIX derivatives that today represent the native environment for the majority of his projects. Jan is the Internet Society’s Operational Engagement Programme Manager. He works on operational initiatives to ease the deployment of IPv6 and other technologies. He is also working to help the industry document best-current operational practices and to improve operator feedback to the IETF.

Jan is one of the pioneers of SiOL, the Slovenian national ISP, and has been involved in the organization from the beginning. Among other activities, he began experimenting in 1997 with Internet streaming multimedia content. Based on these experiments, he successfully accomplished projects such as “Dhaulagiri ’99 Live” (an Internet multimedia transmission of Tomaz Humar’s solo climb of the south wall of Dhaulagiri (called Death Zone in the Himalayas), “Ski Everest Live 2000″ (an Internet live-video transmission and monitoring of extreme skiing from the summit of Mt. Everest by Davo Karnicar) and other similar projects. Together with two other members of the team “Dhaulagiri ’99 Live”, Jan received a media award/statue “Victor” for special achievement.

For the last seven years, Jan has been working as a consultant in the IT field, specializing in IPv6. He co-founded the Go6 institute (not-for-profit), a Slovenian IPv6 initiative whose main objective is to raise IPv6 awareness in Slovenia and alert the community to the fact that we are approaching extensive changes on the Internet.

Due to the success of Go6 Institute, Slovenia is currently leading the EU as the country most prepared for IPv6 (according to the RIPE NCC’s IPv6 RIPEness study). Jan has been invited to present around the world on his work, the model of the Go6 platform, IPv6 awareness raising and deployment at the national level. These speaking engagements have included conferences such as RIPE Meetings, Google IPv6 Implementors Conference 2010, Internet Governance Forum meetings, OECD meeting, World IPv6 Congresses (Paris and London), as well as national forums in Germany, Greece, Norway, Macedonia, Oman, Brazil and many others.

Jan is also primary co-author of a very successful procurement (specification) paper, published as official RIPE Best Current Practice document RIPE-501, titled “Requirements For IPv6 in ICT Equipment”. This document is translated into more than 10 languages and is used around the world by enterprises and governments when requesting IPv6 features in ICT equipment purchases. RIPE-501 was recently replaced by RIPE-554, also co-authored by Merike Kaeo, Sander Steffann and Jan Žorž.

Jan is based in Škofja Loka, Slovenia (EU).

Statement of Interest

I have been working with the current PC for one term now and I would like to continue contributing towards the meeting programs through another term.