Mirjam Kühne and the Infrastructure of Neutral Process

Summary

• The RIPE Chair Team page identifies Mirjam Kühne as RIPE Chair since 2020 and says the role facilitates the collaboration and coordination needed for the stable operation of the Internet.
• In June 2025, RIPE announced that the community had chosen Kühne to serve again as RIPE Chair, with a second five-year term beginning at RIPE 91 in October 2025.
• RIPE governance documents describe the RIPE Chair as a facilitator of community function, meeting agendas, working-group support, consensus around procedures, reporting, and communication, while also making clear that the Chair does not formally represent RIPE in other organisations.
• The IETF Datatracker identifies Mirjam Kuehne as chair of the IETF Administration LLC Board, and a January 2026 NomCom announcement says she was selected for a second three-year IETF LLC Board Director term beginning in March 2026.
• The useful reading is bounded: Kühne should not be treated as a unilateral policy maker or as a stand-in for RIPE, RIPE NCC, or IETF standards work. Her importance is the process layer that makes open technical governance durable.

The internet has many visible forms of infrastructure. Fibre routes can be mapped. Data centres can be photographed. Address registries can be queried. Routing incidents can be measured in dropped prefixes, leaked routes, and broken reachability. The quieter layer is harder to see: the meetings, mailing lists, agenda rules, working-group practices, appeals procedures, leadership selection, community conduct norms, and administrative boards that decide whether shared technical institutions remain trusted enough to work. Mirjam Kühne's public career belongs to that layer.

That makes her a useful subject for people coverage precisely because her significance is not reducible to a heroic invention or a single institutional title. The evidence places her in multiple parts of the internet-governance commons: RIPE Chair, long-time RIPE community member, former RIPE NCC Senior Community Builder and Director External Relations, creator and curator of RIPE Labs, former Internet Society Senior Program Manager, former IETF Education Team chair, and current chair of the IETF Administration LLC Board.

Taken together, those roles describe a kind of work that can look ceremonial from the outside and operational from the inside.

The public question is simple: why should anyone who is not already part of RIPE or the IETF care who chairs community process? The answer is that open technical communities are not self-maintaining machines. They rely on participation norms, procedural memory, institutional separation, documented appeals, neutral facilitation, and enough administrative continuity that people with competing interests can still trust the room.

In the RIPE region, those rooms influence number-resource policy, registry accountability, data stewardship, working-group practice, and the legitimacy of a Regional Internet Registry that serves a large and diverse operating community.

Kühne's current role is anchored by the RIPE Chair Team page, which identifies her as RIPE Chair and says she has served as Chair of the RIPE community since 2020. The same official profile describes the chair function in unusually infrastructural language: it is about facilitating collaboration and coordination that help enable stable operation of the Internet. That framing matters. It does not present the chair as a ceremonial host. It presents the chair as part of the community operating system.

The RIPE community then reaffirmed that role in 2025. A RIPE NCC news item published on 16 June 2025 said the community had chosen Kühne to serve again as RIPE Chair following her 2020-2025 term. It also said Anna Wilson would take over as RIPE Vice-Chair from Niall O'Reilly at RIPE 91 in October 2025, and that Kühne and Wilson would serve for a five-year term starting from that meeting. The selection process described there is itself part of the story: a nominating committee formed from community volunteers chosen at random, community candidate feedback, and RIPE NCC Executive Board confirmation that the process was followed correctly.

That process does not make the role political in the electoral-party sense. It makes it accountable to a community that has to govern common resources without becoming a closed club. The RIPE 2025 announcement also points to Kühne's first-term focus on inclusivity and diversity work, including the RIPE Diversity Task Force, Code of Conduct Task Force, fellowship programmes, and mentorship programmes. These can sound like soft institutional themes until the infrastructure context is made explicit. A working group that people do not trust will not produce useful consensus.

A policy forum that feels inaccessible will overrepresent incumbents. A technical community without conduct norms eventually loses voices it needs.

RIPE-714, the governance document titled "The RIPE Chair", gives the clearest view of the job beneath the title. It says the Chair's function is to ensure that the RIPE community functions well. The duties are practical: set agendas for RIPE Meetings, chair those meetings, ensure consensus about how RIPE operates, help establish or dissolve working groups and task forces, make sure working-group chairs are selected, support the collective of working-group chairs, monitor the work of RIPE, communicate RIPE work to the RIPE NCC and other parties, report actions to the community, and delegate tasks when needed.

Those are not symbolic tasks. They are maintenance work on the governance surface that operators, vendors, researchers, civil-society entities, and registry staff use to settle shared problems.

RIPE-714 also draws an important boundary. It states that RIPE is not formally represented in other organisations, and therefore the RIPE Chair does not formally represent RIPE anywhere. That caveat is crucial for reading Kühne properly. She is not a diplomatic ambassador with a mandate to speak for every entity. She is not a single decision maker above working groups. She is a community chair inside a bottom-up technical forum. The authority is procedural and relational rather than executive. That makes the role less glamorous, but it also makes it more interesting.

The institutional boundary around RIPE and the RIPE NCC is another reason this work matters. RIPE-838, the 2025 document on the relationship between RIPE and the RIPE NCC, describes RIPE as an open, inclusive, informal community. Anyone can participate; no membership or formality is required. RIPE works through consensus in working groups, task forces, plenary discussion, and mailing lists. Working groups are chartered by community consensus and choose their own chairs. The document describes the RIPE Chair as ensuring that RIPE as a whole functions well, with selection through a nominating committee.

The RIPE NCC, by contrast, is the operational institution with legal and registry responsibilities. RIPE-838 describes it as a not-for-profit association under Dutch law and as a Regional Internet Registry that distributes and registers Internet number resources. It also describes the RIPE NCC as secretariat and support organisation for RIPE. That separation is not bureaucracy for its own sake. It allows an open community to set policy and norms while a formal association executes registry operations, member services, and administrative support. If the two are blurred, legitimacy suffers.

If they are too disconnected, operations lose community grounding. The chair sits near that tension.

This distinction is easy to miss from the outside because both names share history and operate close to each other. Yet the line between RIPE and the RIPE NCC is one of the small constitutional facts that keeps number-resource governance credible in the RIPE region. RIPE needs a low-threshold community process. The RIPE NCC needs formality, auditability, membership accountability, staff, infrastructure, and legal existence. RIPE-838 says RIPE NCC neutrality is a major asset. The chair's work exists in a setting where neutrality is not an adjective but a design requirement.

The policy process makes the point even more concretely. RIPE-781 describes the RIPE Policy Development Process as open to all, bottom-up, transparent, consensus-based, and documented. Anyone interested in the well-being of the Internet may propose a policy and take part in discussion. Proposals move through creation, discussion, review, and conclusion. Working-group chairs summarise discussion and determine consensus. The RIPE NCC provides administrative support, publishes proposals and discussions, tracks deadlines, makes announcements, helps with drafting when asked, provides facts and statistics, and publishes impact analysis.

There are review, last-call, and appeal mechanics.

Those mechanics may sound dry, but they are how abstract legitimacy becomes operational. If the policy process is open only in name, resource holders will suspect capture. If consensus is unclear, contested policy outcomes become fragile. If impact analysis is weak, good intentions can damage registry operations. If appeals are inaccessible, procedural legitimacy erodes. If mailing lists and meeting minutes are not public, memory becomes private power.

The RIPE policy page gives the same message in reader-facing terms: policy development happens at RIPE Meetings and working-group mailing lists, the lists and meetings are open to everyone, discussions should not be rushed, and formal policies are publicly documented.

The pace point is worth pausing over. Internet operators often need answers quickly, especially when scarcity, abuse, routing security, or registry data becomes operationally painful. But a policy process that moves too fast can give well-resourced entities an advantage over people who need more time to read, translate, consult, or understand the operational consequences. The public policy page's insistence that affected parties should have time to review and provide input is therefore not procedural politeness. It is part of how the community reduces hidden capture.

Public archives serve the same purpose. Mailing-list history and meeting minutes let entities reconstruct why a decision was made and whether objections were answered. In a community built around voluntary coordination, memory is a governance tool. Without public memory, institutional veterans become gatekeepers by default. With public memory, newcomers can audit the conversation, understand the arguments that shaped a decision, and decide whether a new proposal is a genuine change or a relitigation of settled ground. Chairing such a community means caring about the conditions under which memory stays usable.

Working-group chairs also become part of the infrastructure chain. RIPE-781 assigns them the responsibility to summarise discussions and determine consensus, while RIPE-714 puts support for the working-group chair collective inside the RIPE Chair's function. That division matters. It prevents the central chair from becoming the policy judge for every topic, while still giving the community an escalation and coordination layer. The result is a federated process: specialist groups do the detailed work, and the RIPE Chair helps the whole community remain coherent.

This is one reason Kühne's RIPE Chair role should be read through stewardship rather than hierarchy. In a hierarchy, accountability moves up to a single decision point. In a consensus community, accountability is distributed across documents, lists, chairs, meetings, staff support, and visible process. The RIPE Chair's task is not to collapse those surfaces into personal authority. It is to keep them connected enough that the community can still recognize itself as one community when debates are technical, regional, political, or commercially uncomfortable.

This is the context in which Kühne's biography becomes more than a list of titles. The RIPE Chair Team page says she has been a RIPE community member for almost thirty years. It says she worked at the RIPE NCC as Senior Community Builder and, previously, Director External Relations. It says she created and curated RIPE Labs, described as a collaborative platform to showcase work from the RIPE community and RIPE NCC staff. It says she worked at the Internet Society as Senior Program Manager and was involved in the deployment of technical workshops, primarily in developing countries.

It says she served as Chair of the IETF Education Team for more than ten years. It also says she obtained a master's degree in computer science at Technical University Berlin and lives in Amsterdam.

The IETF Datatracker profile, using the ASCII name form Mirjam Kuehne, aligns with that record. It identifies her as chair of the IETF Administration LLC Board of Directors and as Chair of the RIPE community. It describes the same RIPE NCC, RIPE Labs, Internet Society, IETF Education Team, and TU Berlin background. It also records no RFCs and no active Internet-Drafts as of July 2026. That absence is not a weakness in this article's frame. It clarifies the kind of influence at issue. Kühne's IETF relevance is not primarily protocol authorship. It is education, community infrastructure, and administration.

That distinction is important because internet governance often rewards the wrong mental picture. It is tempting to treat authority as belonging only to those who write standards text, run networks, chair corporate boards, or control formal budgets. Those roles matter. But open technical communities also require people who teach newcomers how a process works, curate community knowledge, run inclusive agendas, maintain procedural norms, and prevent the administrative frame from overwhelming the technical commons. Kühne's public record is unusually concentrated in that connective tissue.

RIPE Labs is a useful example. The profile sources say Kühne created and curated it as a collaborative platform for work from the RIPE community and RIPE NCC staff. A platform like that is not simply a blog. In an internet operations community, shared writing becomes a way to surface experiments, explain policy, preserve institutional memory, and let entities see each other's work outside the narrow pressure of meetings and mailing-list threads. The quality of such a platform affects who learns, who contributes, and how knowledge circulates.

The same logic applies to the Internet Society technical workshops noted in her biography. Workshops in developing countries are not the same as registry policy or IETF board governance, but they point to a consistent pattern: building capacity around the internet's shared operating practices. The fixed sources do not support a detailed reconstruction of each workshop or outcome. They do support a career arc around community enablement rather than product ownership. In infrastructure institutions, that can be a high-leverage role.

The IETF Education Team history fits the same pattern. Chairing that team for more than ten years suggests long engagement with the problem of how people learn to participate in a complex standards community. IETF participation has its own vocabulary, expectations, draft culture, meeting habits, and procedural norms. Newcomers who cannot navigate that culture may be formally welcome but practically excluded. Education work is therefore not public relations. It is a participation bridge. Without it, open process becomes open only to those already fluent in the institution.

Kühne's current IETF Administration LLC Board role adds a different layer. The IETF Datatracker group page lists the IETF Administration LLC Board of Directors as active and lists Mirjam Kuehne as chair. It describes the LLC as the corporate legal home for the IETF, Internet Architecture Board, and Internet Research Task Force. The wording is administrative, but the function is structural. The IETF's technical legitimacy depends on a legal and operational vehicle that can support meetings, contracts, finances, staff, tools, and continuity without turning technical decision-making into ordinary corporate governance.

A January 2026 IETF NomCom announcement says Kühne was selected to serve a second three-year term as IETF LLC Board Director beginning in March 2026. That does not mean the IETF LLC Board writes protocol standards. It means she is part of the corporate and administrative support layer that lets the standards community continue to operate. Again, the same pattern appears: not the protocol text itself, but the conditions under which people can produce, review, maintain, and trust it.

This IETF role also helps explain the phrase "IETF-adjacent" in a precise way. The fixed sources support governance and education work, not protocol authorship. The Datatracker profile says there are no RFCs and no active Internet-Drafts recorded for her as of July 2026. Her public work sits next to standards production, supporting education and administrative continuity rather than claiming authorship of protocol substance. That distinction protects both accuracy and respect for the actual role.

Neutral process work becomes infrastructure when several conditions are true. First, the underlying community governs resources or norms that many independent parties depend on. Second, no single actor can legitimately impose durable outcomes. Third, entities have different interests and levels of power. Fourth, the process must remain open enough for new evidence and new entities while stable enough for operators to rely on it. RIPE clearly meets those conditions. So does the IETF. Kühne's roles sit in institutions where process failure can become infrastructure failure.

Consider number-resource policy. IPv4 scarcity, IPv6 deployment, transfer rules, registry data, reverse DNS, RPKI, abuse contact expectations, database accuracy, and membership accountability are not mere paperwork issues. They affect who can receive and document resources, how operational responsibility is signalled, how routing security is supported, and how the community adjudicates change when legacy practice no longer fits current pressure. RIPE policy documents do not require every reader to become a policy specialist. They show why the process that produces policy must be trusted.

The chair does not decide those policies. That is the point. In a healthy bottom-up community, the chair's authority is not to produce outcomes alone but to maintain the environment in which legitimate outcomes can emerge. That involves agenda setting without agenda capture, meeting management without silencing dissent, working-group support without replacing working-group chairs, and communication with institutional actors without pretending to represent everyone. The role has power because it is constrained.

The 2025 RIPE chair-selection announcement highlights that constraint. It frames the result through a Nominating Committee and community feedback, not appointment by a private board. The RIPE NCC Executive Board's role is described as confirming that the process was followed correctly. That construction matters. It gives formal assurance without turning the RIPE NCC into the selector of the open community's chair. In a community that depends on the separation between RIPE and the RIPE NCC, the selection method is part of the legitimacy story.

The same announcement's reference to inclusion, code of conduct, fellowship, and mentorship should be read through that lens. In technical circles, inclusion work is sometimes treated as peripheral to the real engineering. In community infrastructure, it is closer to capacity planning. Who can safely participate? Who understands the rules? Whose operational experience reaches the policy list? Who can afford to attend or knows how to contribute remotely? Who leaves because the room is unnecessarily hostile? A consensus process can be captured not only by formal power, but also by attrition.

That is where the topic of consensus capture becomes practical. Capture does not always look like an overt takeover. It can look like procedural fatigue, agenda bottlenecks, list dominance, private knowledge, inaccessible meetings, or a tiny set of recurring voices becoming the de facto boundary of the possible. The RIPE process relies on openness, documentation, public archives, working-group chairs, impact analysis, and appeals to reduce those risks. The chair function, when done well, helps keep those safeguards alive. Kühne's public record is important because it points to exactly that kind of stewardship.

The July 2026 RIPE Labs Chair Team report provides current evidence that the role is active, not archival. Authored by Kühne with Anna Wilson listed as contributor, it covers RIPE 93 preparation, policy proposal updates, working-group chair procedures, NRO NC completion, RIR governance-document expectations, and community activity updates. The report is not a dramatic announcement. It is a maintenance note. But maintenance notes are often where infrastructure reveals itself. The community needs to know what is moving, what is waiting, where procedures are being updated, and how work in separate parts of the institution fits together.

The report also illustrates why process work is easy to underestimate. A policy proposal update is not glamorous. A working-group chair procedure is not a product launch. An upcoming meeting agenda rarely looks like infrastructure from the outside. Yet these are the surfaces through which the community coordinates the rules and expectations that registry operators, network operators, vendors, researchers, civil society entities, and governments later treat as part of the operational environment. The boring part is the load-bearing part.

Kühne's biography also shows the value of institutional memory. A person who has moved through RIPE community participation, RIPE NCC external relations, RIPE Labs curation, Internet Society workshops, IETF education, RIPE chairing, and IETF LLC Board governance has seen multiple forms of technical coordination. That does not make her infallible. It does give her public record a particular texture: she has worked repeatedly on the question of how people join, understand, trust, and sustain technical communities. For open institutions, that is not a side problem. It is the central problem.

The phrase "neutral process" should not be mistaken for absence of judgment. Neutrality in this setting means the process is not owned by a single commercial, governmental, or personal interest. It does not mean every idea is equally sound or that every entity has equal operational knowledge. The chair's work has to create enough fairness and clarity for real technical judgments to be made. It must let strong arguments win without letting strong personalities own the room. It must allow disagreement without turning disagreement into paralysis.

That is a demanding form of neutrality because the RIPE community is not neutral in the sense of being detached from consequences. Its entities run networks, use registry services, build products, regulate communications, research measurement, defend users, and depend on address policy. They have interests. Neutral process does not pretend those interests vanish. It asks whether a shared method can make them visible, test them against operational evidence, and produce outcomes that can survive public scrutiny. The chairing function helps preserve that method.

The RIPE NCC relationship document makes this especially sensitive. The RIPE NCC is not only a community supporter; it is also a membership association and RIR with staff, systems, budgets, services, and legal obligations. Community policy can affect its work, and RIPE NCC analysis can affect community understanding of a proposal's feasibility. A healthy relationship therefore requires trust in both directions. The community needs the RIPE NCC's operational knowledge without letting the registry institution become the policy owner. The RIPE NCC needs community legitimacy without treating consensus as a customer-service formality.

Kühne's public biography gives that boundary practical relevance because she has worked on both sides of it: as a RIPE NCC community builder and external-relations leader, and later as RIPE Chair. The sources do not turn that into a private narrative about motives, and the article should not do so. They do, however, support a public interpretation of institutional fluency. A chair who understands RIPE NCC support functions, RIPE community culture, and IETF-adjacent governance is operating with knowledge of the places where process can either enable trust or accidentally concentrate it.

The same point applies to RIPE Labs. A community platform can look like soft communications work, but it shapes who understands the institution and how complex technical issues become shareable. If policy and operations are visible only to insiders, openness becomes theoretical. If technical explanations are public, curated, and attached to named contributors, the community gains a wider surface for learning and critique. Kühne's creation and curation of RIPE Labs therefore belongs in the article not as a branding achievement, but as part of the knowledge infrastructure around RIPE.

There is a temptation to separate hard internet infrastructure from soft institutional work. The split is misleading. Address allocation rules, routing-security practices, database contact norms, and registry accountability all depend on documents and decisions that people can understand, challenge, and apply. A well-run meeting does not move packets. But a badly run process can produce fragile policy, alienated operators, weak legitimacy, or decisions that people route around in practice. The internet's technical layer is full of social dependencies. Kühne's public record sits inside those dependencies.

That balance is especially important in a region as broad as RIPE's. The RIPE NCC service region spans many economies, regulatory environments, operator sizes, languages, and political contexts. A small access provider, a global cloud platform, a university network, a government agency, a civil-society entity, and a registry staff member may all enter a discussion with different risks and incentives. The process cannot make them identical. It can make the rules of engagement visible enough that disagreement produces policy rather than distrust.

Membership accountability also enters here. The RIPE NCC is a membership association, but RIPE policy participation is broader than RIPE NCC membership. The public policy page says a proposer need not be a member or regular RIPE Meeting attendee. That openness is one reason RIPE can be more than a trade association. It also creates a constant governance challenge: how to preserve open participation while keeping policy operationally implementable and the registry institution accountable to its members and public-interest role. The chair function helps the community navigate that difference without erasing it.

Institutional legitimacy is not a static possession. It has to be renewed through visible process. The RIPE community has to believe working groups are real venues for decision-making. The RIPE NCC has to implement policy without being seen as quietly rewriting it. Entities have to believe appeals exist for a reason. Newcomers have to believe the room is not already closed. Other internet institutions have to understand what RIPE is doing without assuming that one chair speaks as a foreign minister for the community. This is why RIPE-714's caveat about formal representation matters so much.

The IETF LLC Board role widens the pattern beyond RIPE. The IETF has its own standards process and leadership bodies, but the LLC exists to provide legal and administrative continuity. In a standards community that prizes open technical contribution, administrative infrastructure must be present enough to support the work and restrained enough not to overrun it. Chairing the LLC Board is therefore a governance role with a delicate mandate: keep the organisation capable without confusing administrative stewardship with technical authority.

The public sources do not show the internal decisions of the IETF LLC Board. The board page supports the current chair role and the LLC's purpose. The NomCom announcement supports the second-term selection. The Datatracker profile supports the broader educational and community background. That is enough for a careful conclusion: Kühne operates at the administrative and community layer adjacent to IETF standards work, where continuity, education, and institutional reliability affect whether the technical process can function.

This is a different form of infrastructure leadership from running an autonomous system or building a data centre. It is also easier to undervalue because its failures are diffuse. When governance works, people notice the policy outcome, not the agenda design. They notice registry stability, not meeting facilitation. They notice newcomer participation only when it is missing. They notice administrative continuity only when a board, legal home, or support system becomes dysfunctional. Process leadership is most visible when it fails.

Kühne's public profile should therefore be read less as a biography of prominence and more as a map of hidden dependency. RIPE, RIPE NCC, RIPE Labs, Internet Society workshops, IETF education, and IETF LLC governance are not the same institution. They are different parts of the internet's technical commons. A career that passes through them shows how much of the internet is sustained not by command authority, but by people who keep institutions porous, legible, and disciplined enough to outlast any single meeting or controversy.

There is also a cultural argument here. The internet's operational communities often prefer rough, practical norms to grand institutional language. That preference can be healthy. It keeps process close to people who have to make networks work. But it can also hide governance labour under the label of common sense. Someone still has to shape agendas, preserve records, keep conduct rules credible, support chairs, explain procedures, and notice when a process is no longer serving the community. Treating that labour as ceremony makes the infrastructure more fragile.

Kühne's profile resists that mistake. The official sources describe community building, external relations, collaborative publishing, workshops, education, RIPE chairing, and IETF LLC board leadership. None of those roles alone is the whole story. Together, they make a coherent subject: the person whose public record shows the internet's procedural layer as an operating layer. That is the article's strongest claim, and it does not require exaggerating her authority.

It is also important not to turn the article into an institutional tribute. The sources support a critical reading as well as a respectful one. Official governance pages can tell us what roles and procedures exist, but they cannot prove that every entity experiences those procedures as fair. A chair-team report can show activity, but not the full quality of outcomes. A second term can show community confidence, but not universal agreement. An IETF board role can show administrative trust, but not technical authorship. Responsible people coverage should preserve those boundaries.

Within those boundaries, the importance is still substantial. The internet's shared resources need institutions that are not easily captured, not overly formalised, not dependent on charismatic founders, and not closed to new entities. They need enough procedure to make decisions credible and enough openness to keep decisions legitimate. They need people who understand both the technical community and the institutional machinery around it. Kühne's record puts her in that position.

The strongest public image of her work is not a podium speech or a title line. It is the recurring cycle of community operation: a RIPE Meeting agenda assembled, a working-group chair process clarified, a policy proposal moved through discussion and review, a community update published, a newcomer trained, a public platform curated, an administrative board kept aligned with its limited purpose, a second term granted through a transparent selection mechanism. Each act is small. Together they form a layer that other infrastructure depends on.

That is why neutral process is infrastructure. It carries load. It distributes authority. It makes participation possible. It preserves memory. It converts disagreement into governed change. It lets a registry institution implement policy without owning the community that creates it. It lets a standards community keep administrative support without surrendering technical control. It gives smaller entities a path into rooms where resource policy, operational norms, and institutional expectations are shaped.

For readers outside the RIPE and IETF worlds, the lesson is broader than one person's titles. Every mature infrastructure system develops a process layer. Energy grids have regulators, market rules, reliability councils, and operating procedures. Financial networks have clearing rules, settlement practices, and supervisory mechanisms. The internet's equivalent is more distributed and more culturally informal, but it is not less real. Chairs, mailing lists, working groups, secretariats, public archives, nominating committees, and legal support boards are part of how the system governs itself.

Kühne matters because her public work makes that layer visible. She is not presented here as the sole guardian of RIPE, the voice of the RIPE NCC, or the author of IETF standards. She is presented as a person whose roles show how open technical communities remain usable: by treating facilitation, education, documentation, accountability, and administrative continuity as serious infrastructure work. In an internet that depends on shared resources and voluntary coordination, that work is not a ceremony around the real system. It is one of the systems the real system runs on.