 Hello everyone Mostly to the people in the internet and also to the people in this room. Thank you for being here on Saturday and greetings from Berlin I'm Vesna from RIPE NCC and I'm speaking at bits and trees Conference I won't try to say that in German here in Berlin today and The goal of my talk is to connect the RIPE community with the Communities that are gathered here, which is in my understanding academics activists hackers So that we can together work on the internet that is environmentally sustainable this is a very busy slide about me and The most important thing is that I am Kind of sitting in between the the RIPE technical community, which I will explain in great detail and the hackers community and I love three-letter acronyms That's why I have chosen to structure this talk by mixing two Layers of obstructions theories, which is TCP IP and NVC NVC stands for nonviolent communication and I'm When I was learning this many many years ago, I have I've been surprised how it actually kind of is analogous to the TCP IP stack in a sense that when you are communicating using nonviolent communication you're supposed to Say your observation feelings needs and then make a request and then at this and then On your counterpart side, you're supposed to empathically listen to other people's observations feelings needs and request So it's kind of going up and down on the stack in order to establish connection and the one minute summary of my whole talk is Going to be structured in this In this exact format as in I will give you for some observations of facts What is the RIPE community and how does it fit within the internet governance structures and What are the facts and what is the situation of climate crisis and again? How does that impact internet infrastructure? Then I will go more into my feelings and What I have kind of noticed about Other communities how they deal with this topic and then go deeper into needs Which are universal and there I will also express like what do I need from you? Or what do I think right community needs and what can you? Have which needs can you have fulfilled from participating in the RIPE community and then at the end some concrete requests and offers So this is like a crime seen picture of internet governance Created by somebody else. I now of course have stolen it from the internet, but there is a Link here where you can find the original. So this has been created at the time of the transition of one of these organizations with acronym names Ayana From the US government towards the multi-stakeholderism that have been already explained in other talks in this conference and this actually describes Protocols and names and numbers, but I'm only going to talk about the numbers when it comes to the internet governance because of the RIPE NCC being part of the regional internet registry structure, so we Like the whole regional internet registry structure distribute IP addresses and so-called autonomous system numbers to Internet service providers and everybody else who needs them in a hierarchical way. So we do it Based on geography. So in Europe or this whole area Colored in in mustard yellow The RIPE NCC operates and then in Latin America. We have LACNIC in Africa, AFRINIC APNIC for Asian Pacific region and airing for North America and we all operate in a similar way in a sense that These are all not-for-profit membership associations So we are only distributing these resources and we are stewards of this resource and treat it as commons So there is No selling and buying there is no market economy. At least this was how it was envisioned many years ago So more about RIPE NCC and RIPE So RIPE stands for RISO-IP European, pardon my French and it was created in 1989 when people thought that mixing French and English acronyms was a cool thing and it was at the time when the IP networks internet protocol networks were being connected in Europe and The handful of operators of those early networks got together and said hey We have to talk to each other. How are we going to interconnect? How are we going to keep track of registering who has which network? What are our contact details and so on and From that the RIPE community has now grown over many years to a very active very International community, but because it's informal. We don't have like numbers like how many people belong to the RIPE community On the other hand RIPE NCC is a network Coordination Center for the RIPE community and that is an as I said not-for-profit membership association Located in Holland This is our office And because of COVID it's empty. No, it's just the picture looks better when there are no people in there So we have an office in Amsterdam and we have a very small other office in Dubai And so we are secretariat for the RIPE community. There is about 150 people working for the RIPE NCC and we come from about 25 different countries from all around the world our official language is English even if we are in registered in Holland and we As I said we distribute those resources But we do many many other things because we are this coordination center for the network operators who need a neutral and impartial body to Distribute the resources fairly and openly and openly and transparently So we publish a lot of documentation about how decisions in RIPE were made Why did we assign addresses this way or the other and the policies that we follow have been Actually agreed within the RIPE community so in addition to the RIPE NCC you can see here the history of Internet governance bodies and how does that overlap with the history of the global war? So while we were discussing how does the Internet function and how should we do this growth and make it fair and Talking about all these technical topics at the same time There are larger forces in the world that we also now have to deal with so this is partially why I want to Introduce these topics back to the RIPE community, but I need your help I need more people to come and talk about these topics in RIPE so It all looked very nice 50 years ago when we thought the internet is going to bring equality and democracy and Education to the to the world, but now we can see that The internet is also bringing The problems of the society together with the development of the internet with with us so Some people call this effect data is the new oil So we can't live without data, but it is actually at the same time ruining our lives in one way or the other so there is a Lot of energy consumption. There's a lot of pollution and Exploitation of workers exploitation of nature like digging out and extracting all these precious metals and of course exploitation of youth in the Impoverished countries that have suffered from colonization and now they are suffering from the digital colonialism so That's what we are doing to the environment, but how is the environment impacting the internet infrastructure? Well, we can't escape the effects of The sea level rise and the storms and there's a lot of reports on how they are impacting for example operations of data centers the forest fires too and The the data centers and the whole internet of course is using a lot of electricity and a lot of water and because of the heat waves There is a shortage of water and that is again impacting The operations of data centers and so it is very important for the business Case of these internet providers to pay attention, but I would say that it is even more important that we Work on finding solutions in which the internet is not going to use so much water and electricity Because it's making it unavailable for the human population and for the animals and the plants so those were the Observations and they do make me Have mixed feelings because I used to be very optimistic I used to see the internet through the pink glasses and think oh, it's going to improve the world and then About 12 years ago. I kind of flipped to the other side and started being very pessimistic and thinking oh my god This is like all dystopian and apocalyptic future that is awaiting us because every Technological solution that I was seeing around us was making the situation worse, but I couldn't escape so here I am still and To put things in an even Brother context We are facing a lot of other crises And it makes me really stressed and sad to have to worry about my own future and the future my children That are exposed to the pandemics is Because there is a plural. I don't know even how to say a plural of pandemic pandemics is There's many wars going on. I have Listed here mostly the ones in our part of the world but of course in the global South there is Other wars happening and then the climate chaos is impacting us all so that's all very doom and gloom and at the same time there is Reasons for celebrating for example this event is amazing and it gives me a lot of hope and positive energy to see that there is people interested in this and We are here we are together. We are healthy more or less and so we can do something about it So all these feelings are kind of mixed and here's the illustration some visuals about it and then Again, this is a slide with kind of mixed feelings. So We have been dealing with these topics in ripe and still I'm thirsty for much more so One of the authors Featured on here Chris Adams is in the room. Thank you, sir for Coming to ripe and and talking about it. So if you want to be also thanked in public next time please join us and some other people have been talking about like e-waste greening of the internet how to make the business decisions in a Sustainable way and this is one possible aspect and of course personally I would really prefer to have much more activist approach, but let's see what what works So on the other hand, I'm very frustrated with the fact that my community the ripe community is taking very slow small steps in Acknowledging the the climate impact and the topics that they already listed and I was wondering why so I found this chart which describes like Why are the people? How are they explaining to themselves? Why do they have to delay the climate action and for us? The most important one is the one highlighted there in yellow, which is technical optimism and That's understandable because the people who come to ripe. They're all engineers Well, not all the core is the engineers who have been building this network for many many years and so our primary Goal used to be growth. We were supposed to connect the next network more users that country rural areas to bring more and more users to the internet and So now it's really hard to kind of change track and think like hold on maybe this cannot go on this endless growth then it is another very interesting like kind of House solution. Yeah, but we'll make it more efficient But that is a paradox because that has been described in many other areas like the moment you add more capacity To fix the problem It's not that all of a sudden the speed or anything that you're trying to solve becomes better People just start using more. So that's this paradox of efficiency and we have to be aware and see beyond that and then of course the internet has moved from those early days of a kind of utopian thinking and Doing things in a communal way and consensus building and not for profit to the more Yeah mainstream neoliberal capitalism business models and so it's very hard in that way to start thinking about Taking steps for far in the future if they're not bringing the short-term profits So fighting all of those is is really hard and then we have other unacknowledged beliefs like the tech is neutral So don't talk about politics because we only bring technical solutions and whatever people do with them It's their problem or we are the good guys We have been building this internet Which is a good thing and whatever we do because we are good guys is going to be a good thing So these kind of ethical conundrum are Hard to to deal with and to help us all out here is a better picture of nicely illustrated How these kind of thinking is Justifying the the delay in taking the climate action You can take a there will be slides later So I have also listed a lot of other resources how technical communities are dealing with these topics and Here are the four that are mostly colorful. So the first one ccc Congress in 2019 had a Beautiful slogan resource exhaustion and there were many talks about the climate and environmental topics Which I have covered in this blog post on on our right labs then the association for progressive communication also has been doing a lot of work in imagining how can the technology of the future be more environmentally sustainable and But still this is not done with these kind of engineers in mind So there has to be a lot of translation between these kind of communities activist communities and The the engineers and the network operators. So the the hackers Camping that happened this summer in Holland is coming a little bit closer to that here is the one of the presentations featured by Igor who is a Professor of complexity studies at the University of Delft So academic and the hacker and so he has been Presenting a lot of like scientific facts, which is what is really needed and then other pair of academics and hackers to bias and Doris have come up with the 13 Propositions about the internet in the burning world and they have been presenting in the technical conferences for example APNIC and so I'm hoping that This is going to bring like a critical mass so that we start talking about these topics more and Here again, it is documented for you on the slides So some more hopeful solutions There's a lot going on from the decolonizing and D growth to the community networks per my computing and and Intersection of a lot of these Yeah, how can I say oppressions that exist on many levels and then are reflected in the infrastructure of the internet so How to bring all of this together what are my needs? Well, I need your help and I also want to help you But It is really hard to talk about this to techies So I have made another analogy between the OSI layers and the muscle of pyramid of needs and Also like extended OSI layers to include the financial and political Because again technology is not neutral technical decisions are political And so the work in the ripe is divided into working groups So I have tried to map here. How do these working groups? correspond to some skill sets or Which needs can you fulfill and where would you then go if you want to come to ripe and when I say come I don't mean physically because we have mailing lists since forever And in the more modern times we also have forums and slacks and telegram and like all kinds of other ways in you in which you can join some of these working groups and so for the political discussions we have So-called cooperation working group where the governments or the legislators Or the Like national regulators come and talk to the network operators. So this is like not purely technical Place to discuss these things then when it comes to application layer, which is web We are also not overly concerned with that and specifically don't want to talk much about content, but for example the Important let's say overlap could be the open-source working group where we can talk about the free software solutions for making thing for making internet infrastructure more sustainable or Anti-abuse working group where we can talk about the actual use of the of the infrastructure that we are building measurements analysis and tools Then when it comes to the transport layer, we can talk about the internet of things the hardware e-waste the materials needed for the production of the Equipment and so on and then the routing working group So again, this is more mostly about protocols But we can also talk about the equipment vendors how to make the production or maybe recycling of the equipment more fair and So on then the connectivity So here we you can talk to the people who are running internet exchange points or CDNs content delivery networks because they also come to to ripe to talk about the policies and interconnection between their businesses and Finally at the at the most fundamental layer you can talk to ripe NCC members Because those are the businesses that actually make the the internet function. So we have about 23,000 members which traditionally used to be Internet service providers and telcos and mobile operators, but also universities banks anybody who wants to have like independent resources and They are all members and they get to vote on the decisions So if you influence the membership of the ripe NCC you can influence the future of the internet in in Europe and the surrounding areas sales pitch Okay What is more dear to my heart? The topics or the needs of justice equity diversity and inclusion and it's also interesting to map that to the UDP protocols But I don't have much time to spend on this now. So you can take a look at the included links later And so I come finally to these requests so I Don't want to come here as a helper in this power over Relationship and I don't Kind of ask for your help in that way either But I want us to work together because our shared liberation depends on each other For me as a person who privileges it is really hard to kind of get used to this So this is also more reminder to myself But also to project to everybody like this is the attitude in which I am approaching this cooperation So if you do want to take part in our events we Yeah, as I said, we have a lot of online things with mailing lists, but also twice a year We have a meeting it used to be in person and then because of COVID it was virtual and now it's hybrid We're about thousand people get together in those working groups to agree on Let's say solutions for the future of DNS or the routing or the internet protocol version six So this is where you can also fit We also support academics with funding So the students can get a free ticket and and the travel costs Paid and we also have a fellowship program Which is not only for students, but for anybody from underserved regions or marginalized groups So once you become a bit more familiar you can take part in these power structures You can volunteer as a working group chair or you can be on the program committee and then determine the program of the of the conference if you Are interested in more like localized content We also organize a lot of trainings and smaller events and finally We have a blog where you can also publish your work to reach out to the right community. I Believe that the tables or beautiful data visualization tools So this is my attempt to illustrate how there are many skill sets or or many kind of Areas in which you can be an expert or You're eager to learn and there are many activities in you in which you can engage In taking part in ripe or any of these other adjacent technical communities So it's not only for techies and engineers We need documentation We need journalists we need people who talk about Business or law we need a lot of caring and healing. We need facilitators So whatever your skill set is and whatever you're interested in you can find some activity in this table So on the other hand we also offer funding for the projects which are mostly dealing with free software or open data Because we are not for profit and we get all this membership money from all these Companies that I mentioned and we can't keep it. We give it back to the community so every year we open a community projects fund and Five to ten projects per year receive money and so we could help you back in that way if you come to our events we also offer the mentioned funding but also the childcare mentoring and if you're a speaker you can also get a free ticket and I'm still proud of this kind of grassroots bottom-up community self-governance that exists even if the internet itself has moved all the internet Infrastructure business has become like very economically driven in this community. You can still influence things by just participating and by being active So the next Big event is the end of this month in Belgrade. That's my birthplace. So I'm Especially proud that we will be hosting this kind of international event and there is still time to apply People down there Do everything last minute so you will fit right in if you only now apply and register for this meeting and There's also other interesting events that deal with green tech. These are just a few already at this conference I have heard of many more so I'll be updating Our calendars with with many others. So the interesting One is this internet architecture board workshop about the Impact so the internet active architecture Okay Internet architecture board is the governing body of IETF which is internet engineering task force and they come up with all these Protocols and so this is a great place to actually talk to the engineers who develop Protocols are not really running the networks, but making the underlying protocols for running the networks And so that's like impacting the the future and Then maybe hopefully there will be a CCC Congress in person. So I hope to see you there And to to finish I want to say that the network operators and the engineers That have built the internet and a part of the right community are having a great power in their hands by shaping this tool and Because of that we also have a great responsibility to make the technology that we are creating Be beneficial and not harmful to the society and to the people and To the planet including squirrels so We cannot be hiding anymore about saying that our Decisions are only technical and that what we are doing is building a technology And it's not our department of what is that technology being used for? No, all the technical decisions are also political and we have to take the politics and environmental sustainability In account when we are developing these Internet standards and building internet networks and So to finish with this kind of funny version of the muscle of pyramid, which says that underlying all the needs is Actually Wi-Fi or the battery well Underneath all that is actually the living planet and There can be no internet on the burning planet and we should all rebel and Make the the planet thrive together with us. Thank you questions Comments They have more slides. Yes So this is the summary again and that tomorrow I'll be in the other building across the street and we can talk about Ripe and empathy while drinking tea. I brought a Lot of tea and tea cups and everything from Amsterdam. So we can sit together and and have discussions Now, thank you for your attention Do speak up. Now is your chance. We still have how much do we have? Let me see. Yes You notice thank you Okay, we are done then thank you very much and see you around