Summary

  • RIPE NCC’s 2021 restructure consolidated community roles, activities and budgets that had previously sat under three senior managers.
  • Ibrahim’s published framework used purposes, programmes and quarterly OKRs to expose choices about participation, retention, quality and spending, without proving that any single metric captured community impact.

Hisham Ibrahim’s appointment as RIPE NCC Chief Community Officer in July 2021 joined several functions under one remit: community development, learning, public policy, Internet governance and membership engagement. The organisational change mattered because it made previously dispersed work easier to view as one portfolio. Ibrahim later described community roles, activities and budgets as having been spread across three senior managers before the restructure.

Consolidation did not solve the question of value. It made that question harder to avoid. An event can fill a room without producing durable participation. A training module can be completed without changing professional practice. A positive satisfaction score can coexist with barriers faced by people who never joined the survey. Community management therefore cannot be reduced to counting activity, but neither can it operate responsibly without evidence.

From purposes to programmes

At RIPE 84 and in a 2023 RIPE Labs report, Ibrahim described a framework organised around three purposes, programmes and quarterly objectives and key results. The purposes shaped the activity plan and budget. Staff closest to the work were asked to propose meaningful key results, connecting delivery decisions to strategic outcomes instead of treating every activity as self-justifying.

That design changes the internal conversation. A programme must say whom it is for, what change it seeks and which observation would alter the next decision. Ibrahim wrote that a 100 percent OKR result could indicate that the target had been set too safely. The point was not to celebrate failure. It was to prevent measurement from becoming a ritual in which teams select only numbers they already know they can deliver.

The evidence for this framework is institutional and first-person. It shows how Ibrahim and RIPE NCC described their management approach; it does not independently establish that the approach caused better participation, learning or Internet governance. The distinction is essential. Measurement can discipline a decision without proving the social outcome that decision was intended to support.

What happens after the first visit

One example shows how a metric can improve the next question. RIPE NCC initially tracked newcomer attendance. Once that target was met, the engagement team shifted attention towards retention. The meaningful issue was no longer simply how many new people arrived, but whether they returned and found a continuing place in the community.

Retention is not a complete measure of inclusion. People may return for different reasons, while some valuable contributors may participate intermittently. Yet the shift reveals a useful management habit: treat a successful indicator as a prompt to investigate the next constraint, not as permanent proof of success.

The same caution applies to the wider set of figures in RIPE NCC’s reports. Net Promoter Score, Customer Effort Score, survey responses, participation, retention and learning-module completion answer different questions. They use different denominators and describe different moments in a participant’s relationship with the institution. Combining them into a single impact score would create precision without meaning.

Measurement meets the budget

The 2023 retrospective made the trade-offs especially visible. RIPE NCC reported 3,899 survey responses alongside meeting-level satisfaction data and learning-module completions. It also reported an EUR 850,000 spending reduction after a projected revenue shortfall, plus roughly EUR 450,000 in sponsorship and in-kind support against a EUR 500,000 target.

Those figures should not be read as proof of efficiency. A spending reduction may protect financial resilience, reduce service quality, or do some of both. Sponsorship can extend a programme while changing its dependencies. Participation data can show reach without showing whose needs remained unmet. The value of putting these facts together is not that they yield one verdict; it is that they expose choices that would otherwise remain separated between programme reports and budget discussions.

Ibrahim’s role in this period is therefore best understood as building a management surface. The work made it possible to ask whether resources followed stated purposes, whether an achieved target revealed the next bottleneck, and whether quality measures added information beyond attendance. Credit belongs to the teams that designed and ran the programmes and to the community members whose participation produced the evidence. The sources do not support attributing every outcome to one executive.

The limit is part of the method

Community value is partly relational: trust, shared practice, willingness to volunteer and the ability to resolve disagreement. These qualities resist easy measurement. That does not make metrics useless. It means that each metric needs a declared scope and a decision it can inform.

The strongest lesson from the 2021–2023 record is not that RIPE NCC found a formula for community impact. It is that measurement made management choices inspectable. Once purposes, budgets and indicators appear together, participants can ask why one activity was protected, why another was reduced, which group a score represents and what evidence would justify changing course.

That is a modest conclusion, but an operationally important one. A calendar records that work happened. A measurement framework can reveal what the institution believed the work was for, where it saw uncertainty and which trade-offs it was prepared to make.

It also creates a record against which later choices can be examined. If a programme changes after retention weakens, observers can ask whether the response addressed the relevant barrier. If a budget falls while satisfaction holds steady, they can still ask what was no longer offered and who stopped participating. If sponsorship closes part of a funding gap, they can examine whether the supported work remains aligned with the institution’s stated purposes. None of these comparisons supplies a final answer. Together, however, they make it harder for a favourable headline number to conceal a change in scope, access or dependency.

That is the practical benefit of a measurement system that treats its own limits as evidence rather than as an inconvenience.

Sources