[members-discuss] Some thoughts I was not able to say at GM-2011

Hello everybody,

At the beginning I'd like to apologize for my poor spoken English which
prevented me to clearly state my opinion at GM. It is not related to any
problems with EB preventing me to do that! Thank them for the
opportunity given and sorry for emotional expressions.

I hope that something from my speech at GM was understandable, but to
make my position more consistent I'll sum the thoughts I wanted to
express.

My main concern is about openness of the decisions if we speak about
money, not technical and police things. All the three interrelated
finance documents (The Activity Plan, which defines the expenses and is
the base for the Budget, which defines the balance between the expenses
and incomes, and the Charging Scheme as a result of defined incomes to
cover expenses) were compiled inside of the RIPE NCC and were not clear
to me and (according to several posts here in the list) to several other
members. For example, who exactly gave the feedbacks for initial RIPE
NCC Proposed New Charging Scheme 2012? The members-discuss list was
pristine innocent about this "the current Charging Scheme model is
complex and makes it difficult for individual members to easily
determine their own fees" complains. Private conversations? Maybe... But
it shouldn't in my opinion be private as soon as it relates to all the
members! The new published EB email which enables another private
channel between a person and the EB is a bad thing according to the
logic of my sentences above. The main and the only "panel" for
discussion should be either the members-discuss list or new
"finance-discuss?" list, opened maybe only to members (I don't mind if
it is completely opened). As stated by Nigel Titley, the Chairman of the
Executive Board,  at the GM the things are going to change to the next
GM.

The lack of discussions about the documents before GM-2011 was in my
opinion related to usefulness and the source reasons in the documents.

Speaking about the Activity Plan - we (members) asked the EB about
adding cost to each activity in 2007-2008. Without the numbers the
Activity Plan is a way of stating things, but not evaluating
effectiveness of the services. Discuss "marked on stone" statements is
not very rewarding venture. Thankfully the numbers will appear soon in
the document. Second point in the matter - the procedure of changing the
Activity Plan - it is not exist now and should be invented. There was
already the suggestions about it in the list I won't going to repeat
them now.

Speaking about the Charging Scheme... I'm not against the increase of
the amount to pay, I'm against of the misty motivations for the rise and
some predictability of expenses. There should be clearly defined
"resource classes" included in each membership category, and clearer
definition of fairness. (I'd also decide on the consulting about the
taxation issue, but it in unrelated thing up to now.) I can give many
examples of that but I'm trying to make this message as short as
possible. For example, I don't agree with the "free" IPv6: the LIRs
would pay for the blocks indirectly, through IPv4 counting, anyway -
whom we are going to trick then?

The last thing which is the most important to me - the services of the
RIPE NCC above the main baseline of "providing unique blocks of numbers
and register them on the DB". It is related to the Activity Plan
certainly, but I'd like to mention them from different point of view -
in term of including some of them in the Charging Scheme. I'm repeating
- I'm not against developed services "made in RIPE NCC", think that many
of them (not all though) are very useful, but why some of them deserves
to be mentioned in the Charging Scheme, the others - not? Why not
related to the main activity things should be mentioned in invoices at
all? I think of it like "tie in sale", not very pleasant thought of
course.

 

Regards,

Vladislav Potapov

Ru.iiat

 

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