Summary

  • The Foundation Board set spring 2026 at RIPE 92 as the next award date and asked the community for award-committee volunteers. In October 2026, its secretary said the Board had not supported that committee enough to deliver the award.
  • The Foundation’s rules assign the Board the committee appointment and the committee the awardee selection. A four-person committee is now named for 2027; its public calendar and Board support plan are not.

Analysis

The Rob Blokzijl Award did not slip quietly into a forgotten web page. At the RIPE 93 Community Plenary on 29 October, Foundation Secretary Daniel Karrenberg took the microphone to apologise. The Board had, in his words, “dropped the ball” on the 2026 award. Volunteers had been involved, he said, but the Board had not given the Award Committee enough support for the work to happen.

That is unusually clean accountability. It also raises a question more useful than another round of ceremonial regret: what exactly was the committee supposed to be able to do, and who was responsible for making those conditions real?

The public calendar began more than a year earlier. On 16 July 2025, the Foundation Board resolved to present the next award in spring 2026 at RIPE 92. The same minutes set a near-term staffing plan: assemble a core committee before RIPE 91, appoint the committee during or shortly after that meeting, and ask Falk von Bornstädt to serve as Board liaison. On 16 October, the Foundation published a call for a committee of no more than seven people from the RIPE community. The Board would appoint it; the committee would issue the call for nominations and choose the awardee.

The Foundation asked people to volunteer, suggest a candidate for the committee or offer general advice.

Then the date passed without the award. The secretary’s RIPE 93 account supplied the missing outcome: the Board had failed to support the committee sufficiently. The Foundation was restarting for 2027.

The public record does not identify which support was missing, when the committee handoff failed, or when 2027 nominations and a ceremony will be scheduled; a dated Board-to-committee assignment with milestones would settle the operational question.

The organization chart matters here. Article 5 of the Foundation’s Articles of Association puts governance of the Foundation with its Board. Article 8 gives the award committee responsibility for selecting the people to be recognised, requires the committee to outline and announce its selection procedure, and says the Board appoints committee members. The Foundation’s public call described the same division in plain language: Board appoints, committee solicits and selects.

That split is sensible. The body choosing the honouree should have room to judge nominations. But independence does not run on goodwill alone. Someone still has to appoint members early enough, provide a working route for nominations, answer administrative questions, reserve a ceremony slot and keep the process from drifting between meetings. The published records do not say which of those tasks failed in 2026. They do establish who acknowledged responsibility: the Board.

The date also sits awkwardly beside the Foundation’s own clock. Its Articles say the Foundation shall strive to grant an award at least every two years. The official archive lists awards in 2018, 2022 and 2023. That record already has a lumpy rhythm: a four-year gap, then a one-year gap. After the 2023 award, the Board chose spring 2026 for the next one. The target was a year beyond a simple two-year interval before the committee missed it.

Those dates do not turn the Foundation’s award into an Internet operations service. They do make timing part of the institution’s own promise. The award recognises substantial and sustained technical and operational contributions to Internet development in the RIPE NCC service region, including people who enabled others to do that work. A recognition programme that repeatedly asks volunteers to supply judgement but leaves its own schedule loose asks the community to take the ceremony seriously while the institution treats the machinery as optional.

The first award’s public record shows the machinery in view. In 2018, the Foundation said the committee had solicited and evaluated ten nominations. Its report thanked committee members and also credited RIPE NCC and Mirjam Kühne for support in making the award a success. The Foundation’s own account treated committee work and institutional support as parts of delivery; the ceremony did not run by itself.

Karrenberg’s statement removes one easy scapegoat. He said volunteers existed. The failure he described was not that nobody cared enough to help; it was that the Board did not support the committee enough to make the award happen. Naming the volunteers without naming the Board’s missing handoff would invert that account. The committee’s role is to select. The Board’s role includes making a functioning committee possible.

The 2027 reset has started with names. Karrenberg announced a four-person committee: Patrick Bussmann, Vasja Krizmancic, Paul Thornton and prior awardee Gert Döring. He invited suggestions for the recipient and said the committee could still be broadened for diversity. The Foundation Board had also been augmented with Franziska Lichtblau and Lars Yap Lehmann. That is a real beginning, and it is more concrete than a line in a future meeting plan.

It is not yet a delivery plan. The next public signal should be a nomination notice with eligibility, opening and closing dates, the committee’s announced selection procedure, the Board liaison and a ceremony target. A small public milestone list would let volunteers see whether the process has moved from appointment to nominations to selection. It would also let the Board spot a stalled handoff before a meeting date turns into an apology.

This need not become a bureaucracy about a community award. The Foundation can keep nominations private where people deserve privacy, and it can leave the committee free to make its choice. What should be public is the calendar and the allocation of work: when the Board appoints, who supports the committee, when nominations open, and when the community can expect a decision. Those are the mechanics that protect the committee’s independence while making the Board answerable for the conditions it controls.

RIPE meetings rely on volunteer time for far more than awards. A volunteer is not a substitute for an operating plan. The people who agree to judge nominations should not have to guess whether the Board will supply the basic support needed to finish the job. A named committee is a start; a dated route from nomination to ceremony is the proof.

The 2026 slot cannot be restored by appointing a 2027 committee. The Foundation can still make the new cycle count. Put the next dates in public, name the Board-side owner, and give the committee enough support before it has to ask for it. Recognition begins when an institution keeps its own promise to the people doing the work.

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