[members-discuss] [ncc-announce] [news] 167th RIPE NCC Executive Board Meeting - Summary Notes

On Fri Jul 14, 2023 at 02:05:45PM +0200, Sander Steffann wrote:
> Personally I think the outcome of the recent vote was a bad decision. Inflation causes salaries for staff to have to go up, and if we as members refuse to pay for that, what does that say about us?

It is not about us, it is about how we want RIPE to manage decreasing
membership and increasing costs.
 
It does not say anything about salaries, though some may have a view
on that. RIPE will have to balance their salary and other costs however
they see fit, we were not asked to consider that detail.

> I hope that in the future the board will do the voting in another way:
> - First vote on what we want the NCC to do, and thereby deciding on how much money needs to be spent
> - Then vote on the charging scheme to decide on how the members will contribute to fund what has been decided on

The two are linked, having them separate in a time of high inflation
and reducing membership is a problem.

RIPE set themselves up to fail.

If it had been a simple vote for an inflation linked increase I
would probably have voted yes.

Instead a change to the charging scheme was proposed which would
reduce the charge for the large number of recent members, perhaps
in an attempt to retain them as it is predicted many will sell their
newly aquired addresses.

However the new scheme was tiered rather than a per IP scheme

This would have moved the bulk of costs of inflation and decreasing
membership on to slightly larger members who would see significantly
larger fees in future years too.

So I voted for the old scheme, and no increase, to tell RIPE they need
to address the increasing costs and falling membership rather than
expect us to just carry on paying more.

> Now we have voted to give the NCC too little money to compensate its staff for inflation, yet we still expect the same (or better) service. That doesn???t make sense.

It is perfectly sensible. It is saying we want the costs controlled
not rapidly increasing fees and unfair new charging schemes.

brandon