Summary

  • RIPE NCC’s Articles of Association separate two member powers: a group holding 2% of possible votes can add a subject to a General Meeting agenda, while 10% can require the Board to convene a meeting.
  • For October 2026, RIPE NCC published 395 members as the support threshold for a member proposal. Its official page now says the two-week window has closed and lists no proposals.
  • The final agenda lists two Board-proposed resolutions and no member proposal. That outcome does not show whether nobody submitted a text, a proposal fell short of 395 supporters, or someone withdrew it.

The October 2026 RIPE NCC General Meeting has a small number at its entrance: 395. That is the number of members the organisation published as the support threshold for a proposal. It is not a vote on a policy, a measure of attendance, or evidence that the wider Internet community authorised a decision. It is a procedural condition attached to a specific member right.

Article 15.6 of the Articles of Association states the threshold as two percent of all possible votes. Members who jointly hold at least that share may send the Executive Board a written application accompanied by the exact text of their proposed resolution. It must arrive at least two weeks before the meeting. When those requirements are met, the subject is added to the agenda, and the Board must immediately send the proposed text to all members. Article 15.7 then limits voting to resolutions whose verbatim text was circulated as required.

The October meeting announcement translated the percentage into 395 members. The member-proposals page said that any member could propose an agenda subject with an associated resolution; the two-week period has now ended. The page currently says there are no proposals. The final agenda for the 28–30 October meeting lists two resolutions: how to handle a 2026 surplus or deficit, and proposed changes to RIPE NCC’s Articles of Association concerning Board structure. Both are Board proposals. The agenda also includes a discussion of the 2027 activity plan and budget, an election for six Arbiter Panel seats, and an open microphone.

Those records establish what reached the agenda. They do not show how the empty member-proposal list came about. The public page does not say whether nobody submitted a text, whether a submission failed to reach 395 supporters, whether it was withdrawn, or whether another procedural condition was unmet. Reading “no proposals” as “members had nothing to say” would make a status page carry evidence it does not contain.

A second route is available, but it is not simply a larger version of the first. Article 15.8 allows a group with at least ten percent of possible votes to require the Board to convene a General Meeting within four weeks. If the Board has not complied after fourteen days, the applicants may convene it themselves. The distinction is material: the two-percent route adds a subject to a meeting already planned; the ten-percent route can create another meeting. Neither percentage itself passes a resolution. A properly circulated text and a vote by eligible members are still needed.

This distinction matters because an agenda item, a vote, attendance and feedback are different forms of participation. Members can ask questions through the open microphone or email comments to the Board. Those channels can inform discussion, but they do not replace the written Article 15.6 application or create a voteable resolution by themselves. The right to attend and vote is also separate from the right to add a subject: RIPE NCC says members for more than six months may attend and vote, while the agenda and meeting-call powers use their own collective thresholds.

The denominator is institutional, not regional. Article 16.7 gives one vote to each member that is not suspended and excludes candidate members from voting. That defines the association’s corporate electorate. It does not make RIPE NCC’s membership a proxy for every network operator, customer, government or Internet user in its service region. Heng Lu’s Note 73 is useful here only as an editorial lens: participation can bring expertise or warning, but attendance alone does not create a mandate over absent parties.

For this meeting, the Board’s resolutions are visible in the published agenda. What is missing is not proof that the member route was used or blocked, but a public record of its state. A reader can see the 395-person bar and the final result, but not how many proposals entered the system, how many supporters they gathered, or where a submission stopped.

That makes the October list a test of process transparency rather than a verdict on member engagement. The 395 threshold may be high or low depending on the coordination burden across members; the public record does not settle that. It does support a narrower request: publish a proposal log with counts for received, complete, supported, withdrawn and agenda-listed submissions, protecting supporter identities where necessary. A visible path would help distinguish no proposal from a proposal that did not clear a rule.

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