RIPE NCC General Meeting 2026: The 394-Signature Wall

1. That is how many RIPE NCC members have to put their name behind a topic or resolution before it can reach the final agenda of the 2026 General Meeting. Below that line, an idea does not get debated, voted, or recorded; it simply is not at the meeting. The GM looks like a deliberative body, three days of sessions in Edinburgh from 20-22 May, in person and online alongside RIPE 92, with a published agenda and floor votes. What it mostly does is ratify. The number 394 is why.

The standing budget and activity plan arrive already drafted by the Executive Board. The membership's only lever to add something is the Member Proposal Form, and it does nothing until 394 members co-sign. So the meeting that looks open is, on the inputs that matter, closed by the time anyone walks into the room. And the clock on it is short: the agenda locks on 6 May, weeks before the room ever convenes.

The RIPE NCC frames 394 as a quorum for relevance. I read it as the line that separates the members who shape the meeting from the members who merely attend it. If you run an IPv4 estate that depends on RIPE policy, and at InterLIR, brokering and leasing addresses, we run several, that distinction is the one worth understanding before you decide whether the GM is somewhere you act or somewhere you watch.

This is not a recap of an announcement. It is an argument about where the leverage in this meeting really sits, why the threshold makes the General Meeting a ratification body more than a deliberative one, and what a member who wants influence should have done before the agenda froze rather than after.

What 394 signatures actually filter out

The draft agenda is open for amendment until 6 May. The standing budget and activity plan are already drafted by the Executive Board. The membership's lever is the Member Proposal Form, and that lever only engages once 394 members have co-signed a topic. Reach the number and your item is debated and voted on the floor. Miss it by one and the item simply does not exist for the meeting, regardless of how technically sound it is.

394 names sounds modest until you try to assemble them. There is no party whip in a community registry. Every signature is a separate operator deciding your issue is worth their name, inside a window measured in weeks, while running their own network. The threshold does not filter for good ideas. It filters for ideas with a pre-existing coalition, which means the real organising happens in working groups and on mailing lists months earlier. The proposal form in late April just collects the result.

The consequence is a meeting that is excellent at ratifying and poor at originating. A board-drafted plan that nobody can muster 394 signatures against passes by default. Acclaim has nothing to do with it. I do not think that is a flaw worth being outraged about. A registry serving 75-plus countries needs administrative finality more than it needs a permanent open mic. But operators should be clear about what the GM is. It is the place you confirm or block direction, using support you built earlier. It is not the place you invent it.

The fees on the table, and the ones nobody is hiking

Because the GM ratifies the 2026 charging scheme, the meeting attracts a predictable round of fee speculation. So state the actual numbers plainly, because the headline figure is that there is no headline. The annual LIR contribution holds at EUR 1,800, the same as the prior year, maintained deliberately for member stability. There is no proposed increase to that fee in the 2026 scheme. The one real change runs the other way: the Autonomous System Number assignment fee reverts to EUR 50 after a temporary lift to EUR 75 during 2025. A separate EUR 75 charge applies per independent number resource a member holds or sponsors.

The interesting line is the ASN reversion. Rolling a fee back is rarer than holding one, and it nudges in favour of operators who run multiple autonomous systems rather than maximising revenue per assignment. The flat LIR fee cuts the other way over time. A fixed contribution against a backdrop of rising European energy and operating costs is a quiet real-terms discount for large established holders and a relatively heavier load for small ones, a genuine tradeoff baked into the stability everyone praises.

None of these figures is a surprise on the floor. They are confirmed at the meeting, not negotiated there, which is precisely why the time to object to a fee is during the proposal window. By the time the vote is called, the figure is already settled.

Hybrid voting is a privilege you have to test in advance

Members attend in Edinburgh or online through Meetecho, with a livestream for observers and online ballots for eligible voters. Registration runs through the LIR Portal. On paper a remote vote carries identical weight to one cast in the room, and that equality is real for the ballot itself.

It is not real for everything around the ballot. The part the hybrid model cannot replicate is the corridor: the informal alignment that happens between sessions, where a wavering holder is talked round before a contested item is even read out. A remote member casts the same vote on the final text but misses the drafting nuance that decided what that text said. For a binary ratification this gap is tolerable. For anything you actually care about shaping, physical presence still buys influence that the stream does not.

There is also a failure mode worth naming, because I have seen the registry-portal version of it bite people. Online eligibility is gated on identity and registration state in the LIR Portal. If your organisation's portal record is stale, a lapsed admin contact, an unverified role, an address that no longer matches your standing, you can discover at the worst possible moment that your "eligible" vote is not eligible at all. The platform does not loudly warn you in advance. It simply declines you when the poll opens.

The fix is unglamorous and it is the whole game: verify portal standing and test your access well before 20 May. Leaving it to the morning of the vote is how the surprise happens.

Reading the proposal window before it closes

If you intend to use this GM rather than just watch it, the work is front-loaded into the period that is closing. Very little of it happens at the meeting itself. The question is less whether you should attend and more what you were trying to achieve, and whether you built for it in time. Each goal maps to a different lever, and every one of those levers has a deadline that lands before the room convenes.

Say you want to put a topic to a vote. Your lever is 394 member co-signatures gathered through the Member Proposal Form, and the only way to reach that number is to have built the coalition before late April so the signatures are in before the 6 May lock. Blocking a board-drafted item works the same way and on the same clock: you need organised opposition with the same signature reach, in the same window, because silence in that window reads as consent. Neither of these is a meeting-day move. They are coalition work that has to be finished before the agenda freezes.

If your ambition is more modest, the levers are easier but the deadlines do not soften. To simply vote on the final agenda, you need your eligible status confirmed in the LIR Portal, verified and access-tested before 20 May rather than discovered on the day. To shape the wording rather than just the outcome, you need to be physically in the room in Edinburgh, which means travel and registration arranged early enough to matter. Lay these out side by side and one pattern dominates: every meaningful action has a deadline that lands before the meeting opens. By 20 May the consequential choices are already made. The GM is where they are recorded.