Foundation Board

Nigel Titley – Chair

Nigel Titley graduated from Oxford University in Engineering Science and Economics, more years ago than he cares to remember. Upon his graduation, Nigel started work at British Telecom’s research labs, where he worked for a number of years on different projects, eventually gravitating towards the new-fangled Internet protocol in the late 1980s. He played a part in the Internet’s introduction to the UK and Europe, by arranging for BT to be a substantial player in the early days and by designing and operating the first (unofficial) BT email relay, shifting email between BT’s internal systems and the Internet.

After helping to design and operate BT’s first commercial Internet service, he left to design and oversee the applications services (DNS, email, NTP and Usenet news) in Level 3’s new European network. The advent of ethernet over IP led to his becoming one of the founders of PacketExchange, a company which set out to exploit the technology.

From there, he went on to become Peering Manager for FLAG Telecom and then finally to Easynet, where he remained until early 2014. His current job involves the development of his long-time small business designing and selling environmental logging equipment and specialist electronic components. On his journey, Nigel found time to help found the London InterNet eXchange (LINX) and serve on its board for 12 years, to found Nominet (the UK registry), to act as co-chair for the RIPE Database Working Group, to launch 6UK (an organisation dedicated to encouraging IPv6 use by businesses in the UK) and, of course, to serve on the RIPE NCC Executive Board, from which activity he stood down in 2019. Nigel has been active in the RIPE community for many years, having co-authored a number of policy proposals related to transfer policy, fair run-out, certification, and recovery and re-use of IPv4 resources.

As Nigel is now effectively his own boss, he is able to dedicate whatever time he feels appropriate to serving the Internet community and he intends to continue to help in whatever way he can.

Niall O’Reilly – Treasurer

Niall is a long standing active member of our community. He retired from the University College Dublin IT Services in 2014 where he was responsible for network infrastructure, including planning the introduction of IPv6.

Niall was elected to the RIPE Vice Chair role, which was reintroduced to support the RIPE Chair’s workload and allow for succession planning.

Niall has been designated as a board member by the RIPE Chair.

Daniel Karrenberg – Secretary

Daniel Karrenberg is one of the pioneers of the Internet in Europe. In the 1980s, he helped build EUnet, the first pan-European Internet Service Provider (ISP). In 1989, Daniel was one of the founders of RIPE (Réseaux IP Européens), the key collaborative forum in Europe for Internet coordination. In the 1990s, Daniel led the formation of the world’s first Regional Internet Registry, the RIPE Network Coordination Centre (RIPE NCC), serving Europe, the Middle East as well as, initially, parts of Africa and Central Asia.

Since the year 2000 Daniel has been the Chief Scientist at the RIPE NCC. In this role he has led a significant number of activities, including the RIPE Routing Information Service (RIS), the global measurement platform RIPE Atlas, DNS Monitoring Service (DNSMON), RIPEstat and, together with NLnet Labs, the Name Server Daemon (NSD). His current interests remain the Internet in general as well as trust, identity, quantum networking and measurements on the Internet in particular.

In 2001, Daniel was awarded the prestigious Jon Postel Internet Service Award “for two decades of extraordinary dedication to the development of networking in Europe and around the world”; he was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2012.

Daniel lives in Roermond, the Netherlands.