[members-discuss] Charging Scheme 2011, additional information

Dear all,

Thank you all for your valuable feedback and your patience.
Please find below some more information and clarification
on some of the issues being raised on this mailing list.


- Charging scheme

The proposed charging scheme for 2012 was drafted after discussion with
the membership, as Nigel said earlier.

We avoided making any radical changes to the charging scheme as the
current tax ruling is favourable. The tax ruling will have to be
reviewed if any major change is made. Changing the charging scheme in
the way that many of you are suggesting (sliding scale or fees per
allocation)
will almost certainly lead to the RIPE NCC incurring a corporate tax
liability of
25.5% on any surplus and, in the worst case, on the organisation's reserves.


- Using IPv4 as an indicator of involvement in Internet operations

As we were thinking about fairness in the Charging Scheme, it was clear
that a simple scheme in which each member pays the same amount would
not be meeting the fairness target, as members of large corporate
size are likely to benefit from RIPE NCC services more than the small
local ISP - the more and deeply a member is involved in the operations
of the
Internet, the more it is likely to benefit from our services.

In looking for a yardstick to measure "Involvement in the oparations of
the Internet", we proposed that IPv4 serve as the basis because it is a
known
factor. This is fully independent of the impending IPv4 runout, or its
technical
relevance.  See also my mail from August at:
http://www.ripe.net/maillists/ncc-archives/members-discuss/2011/msg00174.html


- The RIPE NCC budget

There have been many opinions expressed about the RIPE NCC's budget and
I'd like to add some facts and reasoning to the discussion:

The RIPE NCC's budget has varied over the years, decreasing after 2002
for a couple of years and then increasing again since then.

The receent increase is due to a continually strong membership growth,
an increase in outreach activities across our service region and defending
the bottom-up, industry self regulation in response to newly interested
stakeholders.

Looking at the last 10 years, the average cost per member decreased by
more than 7 % from 2001. Measuring against 2005, it has increased again by
just over 3 %.


- Webinars vs face-to-face training

Face to face trainings are extremely valuable for us; we need to engage
with you to gather important feedback and to disseminate information.
Trainings are also very popular with members, as has been indicated in
our membership surveys. Online training also has been offered on our
E-learning centre for several years:
http://www.ripe.net/lir-services/training/e-learning


- Meeting costs

There is no large financial benefit from holding meetings in the same
city. Spreading meetings across the region is important as some of the
community are unable to travel easily and value the occasional closer
RIPE meeting.


- Budget and personnel costs

A large part of the RIPE NCC's budget has always been personnel costs -
there's no change there. Even thought we are a not-for-profit
organisation, we still need to compete with commercial organisations to
ensure that we have competent and experienced staff. We can only do this
by offering comparable salary and benefit packages.

Over the last couple of years, we've implemented some organisational
changes in order to streamline our activities and have focused on
attracting high calibre staff to serve our members and the community and
to promote and defend our interests in regional and global arenas.


- RIR activities

The RIPE NCC has its roots in the technical coordination and operation
of the Internet. The task of Internet number resource distribution was
added later. In addition, we perform many more activities for the RIPE
community and for the general well-being of the Internet, including
operating the K-root server, operation and maintenance of the RIPE
Database and performing Internet measurements. All our activities are
outlined in the RIPE NCC Activity Plan:
http://www.ripe.net/ripe/docs/ripe-506


We strive to gather input and feedback from our members and the RIPE
community by regularly surveying the membership and various stakeholder
groups. We also use feedback gathered from face-to-face contact during
training courses and meetings and your opinions and suggestions are
reflected in the activity plan. It is a challenge to strike a balance
between continuity of operations and reacting to what our numerous
stakeholder groups expect of us and from us - but we are continually
listening to what you need.

I'm sure you understand that we cannot implement every idea that you
bring forward; however I do believe that both RIPE NCC staff as well as
the Executive Board have worked particularly hard this year to gather
your opinions and ideas, to examine the risks, and to bring forward
a Charging Scheme that combines known elements with a set of changes
aiming to marry fairness to simplicity.

We all look forward very much to see many of you personally at
the Vienna RIPE meeting, and also are very excited to see that
the ability to use electronic voting on all resolutions in the General
Meeting has minimised the threshold for participation.



kind regards,

Axel Pawlik
Managing Director
RIPE NCC