Summary

  • In 2014, Rob Blokzijl handed the RIPE Chair role to Hans Petter Holen in a well-supported transition while also asking RIPE to establish a formal selection process.
  • Between 2016 and 2020, community discussion produced documented Chair and Vice Chair rules, a five-year term with a two-term limit, and a NomCom mechanism using randomly selected volunteers.

The important story is not that a disputed appointment was corrected. The evidence does not support that description. The 2014 handover from Rob Blokzijl to Hans Petter Holen was well supported. Its significance lies elsewhere: the handover exposed how much continuity could depend on personal trust, and it came with an explicit request to build something more durable.

That distinction matters in communities where authority is exercised through participation, reputation and consent rather than through a conventional corporate hierarchy. A respected incumbent can make a transition work. But the same arrangement can leave the next transition dependent on another respected incumbent making a similar judgment. The question facing RIPE was therefore not whether the 2014 handover had been legitimate. It was whether the community could convert a successful personal transition into a repeatable selection system.

A handover with a second instruction

In 2014, Blokzijl asked Holen to take the Chair role. According to RIPE-727, the request also included the need for a formal selection process. The two parts of the handover point in different directions. The first provided immediate continuity. The second acknowledged that continuity should not remain tied to a personal succession decision indefinitely.

Holen entered the role through trust that already existed in the community. That trust was useful: it allowed the Chair function to continue without a damaging interruption. Yet trust alone does not specify how candidates should emerge, who should assess them, how a community should confirm a choice, or how a successor should take over when circumstances change. Those are process questions, and they become more visible once an institution has moved beyond a single founder or a small circle of familiar leaders.

The formalisation did not happen immediately. Holen began the public discussion in 2016. Further meetings and mailing-list exchanges followed. The result was RIPE-727, published in 2019, which set out principles for selecting the Chair and Vice Chair. This sequence is important because it shows governance being assembled through discussion rather than announced as a finished design by the incumbent.

RIPE-727 was a community document with multiple authors and a broader provenance than Holen alone. Daniel Karrenberg edited it and wrote most of its text. Anna Wilson is also part of the document's contributor record. The appropriate credit is therefore collective: Holen helped start and carry the discussion, while the resulting rules reflected work by several people and the surrounding RIPE community.

Designing a role, not just naming a person

The principles in RIPE-727 addressed several weaknesses inherent in an informal handover. They re-established a Vice Chair and linked the Chair and Vice Chair terms. They set five-year terms with a two-term limit. They also assigned the selection task to a community NomCom, subject to procedural confirmation.

These details do more than create administrative clarity. A Vice Chair can provide a visible transition path rather than leaving succession to a last-minute search. Linked terms can make the relationship between the two roles explicit. A fixed term gives the community a predictable point at which to reconsider leadership, while a two-term limit limits indefinite accumulation of role-specific authority. A NomCom creates an intermediary between the full community and the candidates, while confirmation procedures preserve a route for community scrutiny.

None of those mechanisms guarantees a good outcome. Rules can be misunderstood, applied unevenly or tested by circumstances that their authors did not anticipate. Their value is that they make expectations inspectable. Participants can argue about the design, propose changes and identify where discretion sits. That is a different form of accountability from relying on everyone to trust that the right person will make the right private recommendation.

RIPE-728 supplied more detail about the NomCom itself. Its procedure used randomly selected community volunteers and drew heavily on established IETF practice. It specified a group of voting volunteers, an appointed non-voting chair, community consultation, and procedures for confirmation and recall. The design did not claim that randomness could remove every bias or ensure a correct decision. Instead, it sought to create a transparent and bounded way to assemble the people responsible for the selection work.

At RIPE 79, Holen reported a concrete checkpoint in that process: 36 volunteers entered the NomCom pool, and ten voting members were randomly selected. That report showed that the mechanism had moved from a document into operation. It did not prove that every later judgment was unbiased, nor did it establish that random selection by itself produced the best candidates. It demonstrated something narrower and more useful: the community had a documented method for constituting the body that would handle succession.

When the system had to work

The process faced an immediate practical test in 2020. Holen became RIPE NCC Managing Director after an executive search, with the appointment announced in March. He stepped down as RIPE Chair after taking up that role in May, but continued temporarily until the planned transition on 1 September.

The timing made the distinction between personal leadership and institutional process visible. Holen's appointment created the need for a Chair transition. It did not mean that he selected his successors, and the evidence does not support any claim that his Managing Director appointment determined the NomCom's choices. The selection and transition should instead be understood through the documented community procedure.

In July 2020, the RIPE NCC announced Mirjam Kühne as Chair and Niall O'Reilly as Vice Chair. They took over on 1 September. The announcement confirms the outcome and timing; it does not disclose private deliberations or establish a comparative assessment of the candidates. What can be said is that the succession occurred through a process that had been developed and documented before the transition became urgent.

That is the durable part of the episode. The achievement was not choosing a successor himself. It was helping create conditions in which the next Chair and Vice Chair could be selected through a community-endorsed system. The process did not eliminate leadership judgment. It placed that judgment inside a structure with defined participants, terms, consultation and confirmation.

The institutional lesson

The period from 2014 to 2020 illustrates a recurring leadership problem. The personal credibility that makes an institution stable in one phase can become a dependency in the next. A leader who understands that problem can treat succession planning not as an admission of weakness but as part of the role.

My editorial inference is that institutional maturity sometimes requires an incumbent to reduce the system's dependence on the same personal trust that enabled the incumbent's appointment. That is an inference from the sequence documented in the sources, not a direct quotation from Holen or a claim that the process was perfect. The evidence shows a trusted handover, a request for formalisation, a multi-year community discussion, documented mechanisms and a later transition. Connecting those events produces a useful interpretation of the leadership work involved.

The RIPE example should not be presented as law, a corporate board election or a universal governance template. Its value is more specific. It shows a technical community addressing a succession question in its own institutional language: working through meetings and mailing lists, recording principles in community documents, adapting an established NomCom model and preserving a role for confirmation.

It also shows why attribution matters. Holen was central to the arc, but RIPE-727 and RIPE-728 were not personal products. Their authority came from community discussion and multiple contributors. Treating the result as one leader's invention would reproduce the very concentration of authority that the process was intended to moderate.

The chair that Holen received in 2014 was sustained by trust. The chair that changed hands in 2020 was supported by a documented route for succession. Those are not opposing forms of leadership. The first made continuity possible; the second made continuity less dependent on a single act of personal judgment.

Sources