[members-discuss] GM topic

Dear Patrick,


On the autoresponders, I share your frustration. We have been working to 
remove them and have seen a reduction, and we will continue to do this.


The Office of the Managing Director, apart from the 2.6 FTEs, includes 
1.2 million in contributions with the remainder being employment and 
operational expenses as well as the Board travel and expenses. The costs 
for the rest of the Executive Team are not included here - these are 
spread over the activities they are responsible for.


This area saw 24% budget cuts compared to 2023. More details are in the 
Activity Plan and Budget 2024:

https://www.ripe.net/publications/docs/ripe-814/#4.6%20Office%20of%20the%20Managing%20Director 
<https://www.ripe.net/publications/docs/ripe-814/#4.6%20Office%20of%20the%20Managing%20Director>


It’s a fair point about ASNs. We did want to include options on how to 
divide the costs based on resources held in a way that fits with the 
“one LIR account-one fee” model because this offers the short-term 
simplicity I have been talking about.


And as for why we didn’t use the time since the last GM to develop new 
proposals, the simple answer is that our priorities were on cost-cutting 
efforts, which has taken serious work that still continues. Together 
with the rejection of the category model last year, we felt it better to 
propose a simple model that would cover costs for 2025 and 2026.


I understand the frustration but given the feedback last year was mainly 
focused on our budget, we felt the need to invest all our efforts into 
reducing costs wherever possible while maintaining our current services. 
Developing a completely different model with financial, legal and impact 
analyses from the Registry and other parts of the organisation is no 
small task and takes quite some time. But we are willing to invest that 
time to arrive at a better solution given the strength of opinion from 
members.


Best regards,

Simon Jan Haytink RIPE NCC CFO

On 30/04/2024 15:09, Patrick Velder wrote:
>
> Hi Simon-Jan
>
> Thanks for your words. Let me add my 2 comments:
>
>  1. Mailing list: If I ever unsubscribe this list, it will be due to
>     thousands of ticket systems, which are auto responding to
>     literally every single mail. Or other members trying to
>     unsubscribe me from the list, after posting. Or people posting
>     "unsubscribe me!!!".
>  2. Funding: I agree, that the RIPE NCC needs enough funding for its
>     core services. As long as the CEO's office is listed in your
>     budget with 2,2mio € (this is >120x my rent, and I'm not living in
>     a cheap country), I guess you are funded very very well.
>
> Apart from that, the membership said "no" twice to ASN fees. 
> Introducing them through the back door is not fair and will probably 
> fail a 3rd time. Please accept the fact that the community does not 
> want ASN fees.
>
> Regarding the proposals: RIPE had one year time to work on several 
> proposals. Unfortunately they were published just a few weeks prior 
> the meeting and no input of the discussion was used to develop these 
> models.
>
> Best regards
> Patrick
>
> On 30.04.24 13:55, Simon-Jan Haytink wrote:
>>
>> Dear Mihail, all,Defining what exactly a diverse group is will be 
>> difficult. There are 20,000 members and over 5,000 subscribed to this 
>> list, with many obviously following closely. It is also interesting 
>> to note that over 400 people have unsubscribed from the 
>> members-discuss list in this month alone. Some are very committed to 
>> this topic, while others are actively removing themselves from the 
>> conversation. This highlights how difficult it can be to reach a good 
>> consensus or make sure all members are engaged on the topics that 
>> matter.
>>
>> But clearly there are strong opinions from a large set of members 
>> that we can’t ignore. Translating this into a good Charging Scheme 
>> for all members will still be a difficult task, and one that we will 
>> have to invest a lot of time and effort into together with the 
>> membership. And I completely agree that we should not be afraid to 
>> discuss our budget or other things that the members want to discuss. 
>> In fact, that discussion is vital if we are to arrive at a good model.
>>
>> Every year during the Activity Plan & Budget process, we do 
>> everything we can to get input from our members, but it seems this 
>> discussion mainly takes place when we discuss the Charging Scheme. As 
>> a financial person, I do understand why, as it can be seen as a 
>> boundary for the Cost Budget. But the intent of the Charging Scheme 
>> is to ensure sufficient revenue to execute our committed activities. 
>> Our Activity Plan & Budget defines these activities. The 
>> redistribution vote required by our governance is the safeguard to 
>> ensure an excess of funds can be returned to our members (it can also 
>> ensure a shortage of funds is charged to our members). As CFO, I will 
>> do what I can to ensure we remain conservative and reasonable, but at 
>> the same time, we must ensure we have sufficient funds.
>>
>> Active participation is something that is always high on the agenda 
>> of the RIPE NCC. But I do want to highlight the position we are 
>> currently in. We see requests to ensure active engagement, and to 
>> give more training and carry out communication in local languages, 
>> but to increase these efforts, which we are more than willing to do, 
>> we need to ensure we have sufficient funds. We also have priorities 
>> such as enhancing the security of the Registry and members’ resources 
>> and accommodating the greatly increased complexity in the registry. 
>> In short, we are being asked to do significantly more while 
>> significantly cutting costs, so something will have to give somewhere.
>>
>> I do think this is a challenge every organisation faces, whether it’s 
>> a for-profit company or a not-for-profit company. We have accepted 
>> this challenge and will continue to focus on cost efficiency, but to 
>> be successful in this challenge we also need a stable association, 
>> and financial uncertainty does not help stability.
>>
>> Kind regards,
>>
>> Simon-Jan HaytinkRIPE NCC, CFO
>>
>> On 26/04/2024 10:40, Mihail Fedorov wrote:
>>> Hello Simon!
>>>
>>> I appreciate your work and thanks for noticing this discussion.
>>>
>>> You’re mentioning a significant and diverse group of members. As you can see in proposal just overnight it was signed by 450 LIRs from different places in the whole region, big and small. Does it count as diverse group? I honestly believe it’s majority of those who actually read this list.
>>>
>>> Member proposal is formed as simple “do not change” because current logic clearly prohibits to propose anything else. I thinks it’s terrible on its own.
>>>
>>> Proposed by board charging scheme was posted as a draft just recently and got hundreds of disagreements instantly. This clearly indicates it needs to be reworked. Yet it wasn’t done. Me, and many other members want to see clear answer why it wasn’t even tried.
>>>
>>> Reasoning behind not doing anything is absurd:
>>>
>>> 1. If members didn’t voted for this last year - you should not remove such option this year. Maybe they changed their mind?  After all if members disagree with anything other proposed they still can vote for original scheme.
>>>
>>> 2. Members clearly indicated that RIPE budget decrease MUST be discussed. It’s always sounds scary, but this happens and there is no shame in discussing that.
>>>
>>> Pardon my wording, but I still see no clear reason why different scheme wasn’t worked, only friendly responses without intent to do something. Sometimes not even friendly, just statements that it won’t be discussed.
>>>
>>> If you state that board is not opposed to different charging scheme or budget cuts - please clearly indicate why it was not done.
>>>
>>> Thanks!
>>>
>>>> On 26 Apr 2024, at 10:59, Simon-Jan Haytink<simonjh at ripe.net>  wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Simon
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> members-discuss mailing list
>> members-discuss at ripe.net
>> https://mailman.ripe.net/
>> Unsubscribe:https://lists.ripe.net/mailman/options/members-discuss/lists%40velder.li
>
> _______________________________________________
> members-discuss mailing list
> members-discuss at ripe.net
> https://mailman.ripe.net/
> Unsubscribe:https://lists.ripe.net/mailman/options/members-discuss/simonjh%40ripe.net
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://www.ripe.net/ripe/mail/archives/members-discuss/attachments/20240501/55cacfee/attachment-0001.html>