Summary

  • The report of RIPE’s first formal Chair and Vice Chair Nominating Committee says Hans Petter Holen was initially its only candidate for Chair. More names appeared after further canvassing. Holen withdrew when he accepted the RIPE NCC Managing Director job.
  • Holen told the RIPE NCC Executive Board in March 2020 that occupying the community Chair and registry executive jobs together would create a conflict. He stepped down at the end of April. With no Vice Chair in place, the working-group chairs asked him to act as an interim bridge under the new selection procedure.
  • The Nominating Committee chose Mirjam Kühne and Niall O’Reilly; the board confirmed them on 22 June, the public announcement followed on 2 July, and they assumed office in September. The dates show how a volunteer community created a succession rule while its incumbent moved to the institution that served it.

One name on a new form

If a chair search begins with the sitting chair as its only candidate, the application form looks a little lonely. That is how RIPE’s first formal community Chair search opened. The 2020 Nominating Committee’s own report says Hans Petter Holen was initially the sole nominee. The committee asked for more names and received Filiz Yilmaz, Nigel Titley and Mirjam Kühne. Then the one candidate with the longest experience of the job accepted a different one.

The RIPE NCC announced Holen as its next Managing Director in March 2020. He had chaired the RIPE community since May 2014, when Rob Blokzijl handed over and urged the community to devise a proper way to choose the next person. Six years later, the mechanism was operating for the first time. The opening shortlist was thin, and the incumbent’s new employer changed the calculation before the committee could finish.

RIPE is the Internet coordination community; RIPE NCC is the regional registry that gives it administrative support and has its own management and board. Their names travel together so often that the division can vanish in casual conversation. A person chairing the community while managing the supporting registry would sit on both sides of a consequential institutional boundary. Holen named that boundary himself in the minutes of the RIPE NCC board’s 26 March meeting. He said the two positions would create a conflict from 1 May and confirmed he would leave the Chair role by 30 April. He also offered to help as an interim chair until successors were chosen.

There was no theatrical resignation. The awkwardness sat in the dates. The Managing Director job was due to begin on 1 May; the Chair selection had not yet produced replacements. If the old chair departed without a bridge, an already new procedure would have to operate in a vacant office. If he simply stayed, the separation he had just identified would become harder to explain. The compromise needed a constituency outside the executive office to ask for the bridge and a rule describing its limits.

The chairs asked him back for the interval

The RIPE Chair Selection Process, RIPE-727, supplied the continuity rule. When neither a Chair nor a Vice Chair was available, the Working Group Chairs Collective would select an ad-interim Chair. The collective’s RIPE 80 planning-call record records Holen’s resignation and its request that he take that temporary role while the selection was accelerated. This was a community-side request in a gap the written process anticipated.

The sequence is easy to mangle. Holen resigned from the ordinary community chairmanship; the working-group chairs asked him to serve for the transition; the board formally installed him as Managing Director on 1 May. The board’s 1 May minutes still identify him among attendees as RIPE Chair. Read alone, that label makes it tempting to draw one unbroken line across the calendar. Read beside the March minutes and the working-group chairs’ record, it describes an interval with a different basis of authority. The spelling on a meeting attendance line is shorter than the actual arrangement.

Holen’s part in this episode was unusually exposed. He was both the person whose departure created the vacancy and the person asked to make the vacancy survivable. The NomCom had initially treated him as a candidate; his new job removed him from that slate. The chairs then looked to his experience for a short-term handover. The same name appears in three places for three different reasons. Following which body made each decision matters more than assigning a single title to every appearance.

The first formal selection was unfolding while RIPE 80 was being planned remotely in 2020. Meetings, nominations and transition planning had to run through written notices and calls. That made the documents unusually revealing. The board minute states the conflict. The chairs’ call records the bridge request. The NomCom report describes candidate supply and selection. There is no need to imagine a private conversation to understand how the office changed hands.

Four dates, one handover

The NomCom report describes what happened to the candidate pool after Holen accepted the registry post. The committee canvassed again and tried to keep the interim period short. Its final candidate list contained Filiz Yilmaz, Niall O’Reilly, Nigel Titley and Mirjam Kühne. It selected Kühne as Chair and O’Reilly as Vice Chair. Those names passed to the RIPE NCC Executive Board for confirmation under the process.

The board confirmed the selection on 22 June. The RIPE NCC’s public announcement came on 2 July. The RIPE NCC’s 2021 activity plan records that the pair assumed their roles in September 2020. Selection, confirmation, announcement and assumption were separate events. Collapsing them into one date would conceal the very interval that Holen and the working-group chairs had to manage.

This was also the first real outing for the system Rob Blokzijl had urged the community to build. The public announcement recalls the 2014 handover and his recommendation that RIPE establish a procedure for choosing future chairs. A procedure can look comfortably complete when it is adopted; its first use shows where candidate supply, appointment powers and continuity meet. Here the test arrived with the incumbent taking the registry’s top executive job, a Nominating Committee still looking for options and a pandemic-era meeting schedule.

The NomCom was designed as a separate selection body drawn from volunteers. Its report makes the shortage of early nominees visible rather than smoothing it away. The board’s confirmation gave the result an institutional checkpoint. The working-group chairs’ temporary appointment kept the community office staffed while those stages ran. None of these bodies could perform the entire handover alone. That division of tasks is the useful part of the story: an office can retain continuity without pretending that continuity is the same as a fresh mandate.

A registry and its community share a hallway

The RIPE NCC is deeply embedded in RIPE’s practical life. It runs the registry, provides staff and supports meetings; the community’s policy and chair selection are separate. Holen’s move exposed how close these roles stand to one another. A Managing Director can answer for staffing, budgets and operations. The community Chair helps coordinate a forum whose legitimacy rests on participants and open process. Combining those vantage points in one person, even temporarily, calls for a clear account of who requested the arrangement and when it ends.

The March board minute is particularly striking because Holen did the naming himself. The appointment did not force outsiders to discover an invisible conflict months later. He put the overlap into the board record before taking the executive office. The working-group chairs’ record then shows the community body making the short-term request. That chronology gives the ad-interim role its proper shape: a finite operating arrangement while the new selection ran.

The alternative of a vacant chair was hardly attractive. A Chair coordinates meetings and helps the community’s processes keep moving. In a year of remote planning and a first-time selection, an empty position would have added another moving part. The written continuity clause let the chairs choose someone who already knew the work. Their choice was Holen. The result was odd enough to deserve explanation, and legible enough that the explanation survives in public records.

The first NomCom had to solve a less photogenic problem too: nominations. A process can be well drafted and still have almost nobody on the ballot. Its report’s initial single-name detail is the hinge of the narrative. Holen’s move did not merely replace one candidate with another; it pushed the committee to ask more people, refine the slate and complete the decision before an interim bridge became a season. Volunteer governance has a supply chain. The volunteers have to volunteer.

What the paperwork actually shows

The archived sequence supports a precise account of responsibility. Holen accepted a named job at the RIPE NCC, identified the dual-office conflict, left the community chairmanship, and answered an ad-interim request from the working-group chairs. The NomCom sought candidates and selected successors. The RIPE NCC board confirmed them. Kühne and O’Reilly began their roles in September. The report gives the selection story; the minutes tell us who raised the conflict and who asked for the bridge.

The official staff biography places Holen’s earlier RIPE service and registry appointment in one career. It is tempting to turn a career page into a seamless line of offices. The 2020 documents resist that simplification. One institution employed him, another community had relied on him as chair, and a third selection mechanism was finding the next officeholders. The story lives at their junction, where a job change has procedural consequences.

For a reader outside Internet governance, the scene may seem hilariously modest: no ballot-box raid, no dramatic walkout, just a board minute, a chair collective and a NomCom trying to get enough candidates. Yet this is how durable process is often built. The awkward case arrives before the procedure has enjoyed a comfortable rehearsal. People write down which body may act, acknowledge when roles collide and carry a temporary arrangement only until a new mandate exists.

Holen did not solve the succession by staying permanently, and the NomCom did not solve the interim by selecting faster than its own process could run. Each acted within a narrower job. The outcome was a Chair and Vice Chair chosen through the first formal search, with a dated record of the passage between them and the incumbent. If the first form in the new system looked lonely, the finished file was crowded with named decision makers. That is a healthier sort of paperwork.

Source record