Summary

  • Mick O’Donovan won the RIPE 93 Routing Working Group co-chair poll with 39 votes against Tom Strickx’s 34 on 28 October.
  • The group’s published selection process generally calls for consensus among those present. The meeting instead ran a five-minute Meetecho ballot for one chair seat.

Five votes changed the hand on the Routing Working Group’s agenda. At the end of its RIPE 93 session, Ben Cartwright-Cox read out 39 for Mick O’Donovan and 34 for Tom Strickx. He congratulated O’Donovan and thanked Ignas Bagdonas, the departing co-chair, for his years in the group. The result was settled in the room. The accounting around it deserves the same clarity as the number on the screen.

This was a seat with a job, not a ceremonial ribbon. RIPE-861 gives working-group chairs responsibility for agendas, workload, meeting discussion and mailing-list moderation. They decide which proposed talk gets room time and when a contested issue returns to the list. In a routing group where operators argue over RPKI, ASPA and the Internet Routing Registry, that is a useful lever. The authority is procedural: it determines what gets heard and how disagreement is handled.

The group’s own chair-selection page says it aims to maintain two chairs and that they are generally appointed by consensus of those at a working-group meeting. At RIPE 93, the chairs announced a Meetecho poll, asked participants to find their emailed link, heard the candidates and left the poll open for five minutes. A ballot supplied a clean winner; the public rule still describes a different customary method. Both are part of the official record. The page gives neither a voting threshold nor a turnout denominator, so 39–34 is the recorded candidate tally, not a headcount of every operator affected by Routing WG debates.

O’Donovan’s candidate note describes an engineer at Asiera, Ireland’s research and education network, who has attended RIPE meetings since RIPE 66 and served on iNOG’s programme committee and GÉANT’s SIG-NOC steering committee. In the room he offered no grand platform; he asked to help run the group and spoke warmly of his rival. Strickx likewise spoke about giving back to the community that shaped him. Their cordiality makes the institutional question sharper: a close election between colleagues still needs a process everyone can read after the applause.