Summary

  • At the RIPE 92 Community Plenary, Remco van Mook reported 62 responses to a survey about the Secret Working Group. Delivery, content and relevance averaged about 9.6–9.7 out of ten, but comments exposed jokes that newcomers needed years to understand and a wish for more diverse presenters.
  • Van Mook proposed inviting new contributors at RIPE 93–97, moving himself from writer, editor and host to mentor, and joining the audience from RIPE 98. The official session record identifies the talk as a survey and a discussion of the group’s future.

The Secret Working Group had the sort of survey result that a conference organiser could frame and hang beside the coffee machine. Van Mook put the averages at roughly 9.6 to 9.7 out of ten; the median was ten. Sixty-two people responded, 27 left comments. Then he said the numbers missed the story. A joke club whose audience loves it can still become a joke club whose audience has to know the old jokes before it can laugh.

On 21 May 2026 in Edinburgh, van Mook told the RIPE 92 plenary how he entered this peculiar institution. Around RIPE 61 in 2010, an absent presenter left Nigel Titley without his usual partner; van Mook offered to help. Other hands joined over the years. The group’s origin, he said, lay somewhere in the 1990s, with even its regulars waving their hands at the exact date. This is oral history with a microphone, not a charter with an embossed seal.

The group’s job is to puncture a room inclined to take its procedures and personalities too seriously. Van Mook recalled the late RIPE founder Rob Blokzijl’s warning, in paraphrase, that communities often come apart when they grow solemn about themselves. The Secret Working Group performs that warning in public. Its members turn shared technical culture and conference ritual into material for a show. Its very name is a joke aimed at the prestige of being inside the room.

The survey was less flattering when read line by line. One respondent thought the show was appropriately cringe; another said levity mattered to RIPE culture. Others wanted more variety among presenters. One complaint said it took years to understand the jokes. Van Mook read that as the group reproducing the insider problem it was created to mock. A newcomer cannot participate in a joke that demands a decade of backstory, however brilliant the old hands find the punch line.

His solution had dates and roles, which made it funnier than an improvised promise to “bring in fresh voices.” From RIPE 93 through RIPE 97 he would tell interested people where and when the group works, recruit contributors and move slowly from writing, editing and hosting into mentoring. From RIPE 98 he hoped to sit in the audience. He also asked volunteers to approach him. The scheme keeps the comic machinery running while the person who knows every lever gives someone else a turn at it.

Van Mook thanked the meeting team for moving balloon arches, finding props and once turning a room into something like a rave on request. That labour matters. A tradition can look spontaneous from the seats because people behind the stage keep making it possible. The handover must transfer access to those people and that practical know-how, along with a microphone. Otherwise the succession plan changes the face on stage while the same small circle keeps the keys.

The stakes are small enough to laugh about and large enough to recognise. RIPE can write formal selection rules for serious chairs. Here its most informal stage has reached the same test: can someone new get in, make a different joke and be heard? Van Mook’s answer begins with an invitation and a retirement date. The next test is whether a newcomer gets a real line in the script.