[members-discuss] Proposed 2012 Charging scheme, Board comments

Hi Hank,

> We do not get much of a say as to how much budget should be applied for
> regional meetings, consultancy, training courses, RIPE meetings,
> marketing,
> r&d, etc.  We are given a budget that increases every year and are told
> to ratify it - of which only 5% of the membership vote.  Most LIRs don't
> care if the fee is 3KEuro or 10KEuro since it just gets absorbed as a minor
> cost overhead as passed on to customers.  And RIPE knows it.

That means that you only need to convince a hand-full to get the votes your way.
The majority of the members simply don't care to attend the RIPE meetings and/or vote .. (or both.)

So the minority rules.

However if you look at the more active players in the community, most of them represent a LIR that has been around for years.
And most likely they are in the medium sized LIR or larger. (This is my gut feeling, not sure if that is actually the case..)

Especially the smaller LIR members probably don't see RIPE as a vital part of the Regional Internet community and most likely see the extra activities diminished to a system where they would opt-in if they wanted to pay for a system like the Atlas system or training or RIPE meetings.
Perhaps it will take some time (over a couple of years) for companies that start to appreciate those kind of services.

Having said all this .. what RIPE NCC does with the memberships fee (based on the activity plan) is a separate discussion imho to how we get charged for it.  Both should be discussed prior to the GM as they are related and one can't decide what the charging scheme would be if there isn't a consensus on where to spend it on.

And I would like to see those split up in 2 separate discussion on the members-discussion list as well.

1) a discussion about what is the cost and do we want to keep the cost allocation as is. For instance, do we keep a 650k Euro loss a year for the RIPE meetings or is a change in operating / cost allocation required ?
2) a discussion about how the charging scheme should look like, regardless of the required budget.

Regards,
Erik Bais