Summary

  • Mirjam Kühne, a coauthor of RIPE's Chair selection rules, was selected for a second five-year term by the 2025 Nominating Committee.
  • Fifty-two volunteers entered the committee pool; ten voting members were drawn, gathered community input and unanimously selected Kühne and Vice Chair Anna Wilson. The RIPE NCC board confirmed that the procedure had been followed.

The interesting part came after the draw

A lottery filled the committee. The conversation began when its members took their seats. In RIPE's 2025 account, 52 people volunteered for its Nominating Committee, ten received voting places through a public random selection, and those ten were given a much less mechanical job: work out who should chair a community of network operators, researchers and policy participants for five years. Mirjam Kühne was one of five nominees. The committee reached Kühne's name through deliberation after the draw.

Kühne had helped write the rules. RIPE-787, published in 2023, lists her among its four authors. It gives the Chair and Vice Chair linked five-year terms, limits each to two terms and places the choice with a committee drawn from volunteers. The RIPE NCC Executive Board appoints the committee chair and later checks that the selection procedure was followed. Kühne had served since 2020, and the 2025 run would decide whether she carried on.

The pool was not small. The final committee report lists 52 volunteers by the December 2024 deadline. It also records a tiny administrative drama: one form arrived so close to the deadline that the chair had to decide which timezone the deadline meant. He chose UTC. A governance process can discuss community legitimacy in lofty terms; its first test may still be a clock.

Five people agreed to have their nominations made public: Ferghas McKay, Kühne, Olena Kushnir, Anna Wilson and Rob Evans. The committee collected feedback before and during RIPE 90. Members held office hours over lunch; nominees spoke with them at length. A seat chosen by random numbers thus became a listening post. When Randy Bush left the committee in May to run for the RIPE NCC Executive Board, the first reserve, Vasja Križmančič, took his place under the procedure. The backup list did exactly the unglamorous work it was there to do.

The report also captures a less flattering response from the room. Some attendees were surprised that the committee existed in its current form or that it operated independently of the RIPE NCC. Others questioned its diversity. The comments expose a distribution problem: a process can be published, and still be missed by people who have a stake in its outcome. The final report itself asks the community to make the RIPE Discussion List's governance role more visible and to widen the future volunteer pool.

On 26 May 2025, the voting members unanimously, without abstentions, selected Kühne as Chair and Wilson as Vice Chair. Five days later the RIPE NCC Executive Board confirmed that the committee had followed the community's process. The sequence assigns each actor a specific job: volunteers supplied the pool, chance selected the voting committee, people supplied testimony, the committee chose the leaders, and the board checked the procedure. RIPE NCC's announcement says their new term would begin at RIPE 91 in October. Kühne received five more years by passing through a mechanism she had helped put on paper.