Remco van Mook’s plan for a RIPE policy manual

Summary

RIPE’s public catalogue already lists separate IPv4, IPv6 and resource-transfer policies. Van Mook’s proposal targets consistency across that stack.
His RIPE 93 plan starts with an index, then moves resource chapters one at a time, verbatim, through separate proposals. Each move would leave a visible community decision behind it.

Analysis

An operator can find RIPE’s address-policy catalogue in a few clicks. The harder job is reading the pieces as one set of rules. RIPE publishes IPv4 policy as RIPE-826, IPv6 policy as RIPE-738 and resource-transfer policy as RIPE-807. Each document has its own history and scope. Remco van Mook says the collection still lacks one consistent body of address policy, and that the RIPE NCC ends up absorbing the ambiguity.

He brought that problem to the RIPE 93 Address Policy session on 29 October. The title on the meeting programme is “Moving to a RIPE policy manual.” His first move is deliberately small: build an index that points to the current documents. The larger change would move resource chapters into the manual one at a time, verbatim, with one policy proposal for each chapter. He names the already-consolidated transfer policy as the starting point.

That sequence matters. A folder of PDFs can be complete and public while still forcing readers to reconstruct definitions across documents. RIPE’s own policy-development page says policies are formally documented and public, and that the community discusses them in meetings and working-group mailing lists. A manual would put the joins on the page. It could show where a term is reused, which current document supplies it and what discussion would be needed to change it.

There is a live example of the work such a map would face. RIPE proposal 2026-03 entered its Discussion Phase on 19 October. Its stated aim is to clarify the post-provisioning lifecycle for IPv6 policy and align that text with IPv4 policy. The proposal moves through RIPE’s existing process; van Mook’s manual is still a proposal on the RIPE 93 agenda. The two records show why an index and a consistent text are different jobs: a catalogue points to rules, while a policy proposal changes them.

Van Mook also says the population sustaining consensus has fallen by a factor of three in a decade. The public session record gives no annual counts or definition of that population; a year-by-year count of active policy contributors would show how much the change supports his case for a manual.

The manual’s credibility will rest on its paper trail. “Verbatim” is a useful boundary only when readers can compare each chapter with its source, see the proposal that moved it, and find the adopted version. RIPE’s policy index already helps locate the rules. The proposed manual would make their connections and change history easier to inspect.