[lir-wg] Re: 50% increase in RIPE fees ? Since when ?

> The burst of the dot.com bubble has indeed impacted the RIPE-NCC, but 
> not as much as one can imagine: the Internet is still growing, 
> although there are less players providing services, and therefore the 
> amount of addresses to be assigned/allocated is obviously still 
> growing. In addition, as already explained by Axel, closing LIRs 
> create at least as much work as creating new ones.

Ok, so for next year we will see a staff reduction or a 
"re-prioritistion"? Just to be clear, I am no way advocating staff 
reductions. But I think that the RIPE NCC have to be way more clear on 
where they put their priorities and where the money is spent. If it is 
claimed that this money is needed to run the NCC at a certain support 
level - fine, but then the paying members need to be abel to see that.

> 2) The vast majority of expenses of the RIPE-NCC are wages. The 
> RIPE-NCC is now comprised of about 100 employees. These people were 
> hired during the fat-cows years both to support and improve the core 
> activities such as registration services and database, as well as 
> activities proposed during various RIPE working group meetings, and 
> approved by the AGM. To fire 1 employee in NL takes as much money as 
> to pay his salary for a full year (the financial impact/

Well, after have been part of doing layoffs at a Dutch company I know 
more about this than I ever wanted to. What you are saying is both true 
and not true. But let's leave that for the time being.

The interesting part is that by keeping the employees the RIPE NCC 
signals either of two things :

1) The "extra" staff will lead to a significant improvement of services
2) The "new LIR" rate will pick up in a year.

I hope that the plan is 1), otherwise I think the RIPE NCC mgmt will 
have some explaining to do in a years time.

> improvement would be apparent only on the second year), so since the 
> contingency fund was almost gone we had to recover the money and 
> replenish the reserves as explained by Axel.

So does this mean that we need to plan for an increase for next year as 
well?

> 3) The board is now concerned (and focusing) with long term scenarios 
> that guarantee the stability of the core services and take in account 
> the industry

I would very much appreciate some details on what is mean with 
"stability".

> Year 2003 will be a transition year: we believe the membership survey 
> will help in understanding what the membership expect the RIPE-NCC to 
> do and whether it is prepared to pay for such activities (beyond the 
> core activities). We will also closely monitor the discussion in the 
> LIR-wg and other lists, and try to collect as much input as possible 
> from RIPE meetings. We will then work with Axel to prepare a business 
> plan for 2004 that reflects what we learned.

I am now playing the devils advocate so don't take this literal - the 
RIPE NCCs number one focus is to provide adequate registration 
services. Anything else is pure bonus. That said, there is a lot of 
that bonus that is worth paying for, but currently there is little or 
no insight into what that bonus is costing us - and why.

Best regards,

- kurtis -