[ncc-services-wg] Enhancing members involvements in NCC-Services-WG and RIPE NCC General Meetings

Dear colleagues ,

Some ideas have been circulating in various emails aiming for a bigger
involvement of RIPE NCC members in both the NCC Services WG and the Annual
General Meeting that, in my view, deserve consideration.

I support the following ones:

1)  Active Participation On-line:
As far as I know the last RIPE meeting in Barcelona offered a webcast
facility in one meeting room for the first time. I support the continuation
of this service (in all meeting rooms) and its proper visibility to invite
members unable to attend in person to do it remotely. I propose in addition
some means to allow contributions to the open microphone sessions from
remote attendants: either by phone (multiconference), by instant messaging
and/or email. Proper consideration should be given to the remote
contributions as much as those made "in person" in the meeting room.

2) Decision Making Tools On-line:
RIPE NCC members interested on participating in the voting of  items that
affect them but unable for one or other reason to attend the Annual General
Meetings should be given some more facilities than voting by proxy.
Nowadays it is quite difficult to find 2 companies that have the same view
on everything and therefore it's unlikely that a RIPE NCC member feels
attracted to give its proxy to another one. If we believe on the services
that we provide to our customers over Internet we can use them as well.
Many international bodies have well established methods of approval on-line
quite easy to implement. I propose that RIPE NCC sets up one in 2004.

3) More than one "Member type" for RIPE NCC:

Some voices are expressing doubts about the cost/benefits regarding the
RIPE NCC services that are not strictly related to IP registration. When my
company joined RIPE NCC (3 years ago) these kind of services where already
offered and we accepted them as a "bonus" on top of the pure registration
services. The extra costs associated with these services impacts in our
membership fee, that's true but, as it has not reached a painful threshold
yet, we don't complain. I must say that we don't use the addtional services
that much, but....... here there are just in case. It seems that the impact
of the cost of the additional services is already painful for other RIPE
NCC members. I must clearly say that if this trend of increasing the
services provided reaches in the future a level that we consider
unreasonable, we will complain as well.
In the light of the previous words, I think that it is worth considering
the possibility to set up 2 level of membership for RIPE NCC (in parallel
to the present split by size) depending on the services required:

- Basic RIPE NCC member:  only registration services
- Full RIPE NCC member:  registration services + additional services

Maintaining this "double membership" approach will cost some money for
administrative tasks that will require consideration and cost/benefit
analysis before moving further but I think that it is worth studying it.

4) Installing a fallback decision making procedure in addition to consensus
for RIPE NCC WG:

Consensus is the best decision making procedure and should be the preferred
one in this new WG as much as it is the only one in the other WGs of RIPE.
Having said that and considering that the decisions taken in this WG will
probably have direct financial implications for the members, it is very
likely that consensus is never achieved as the points of view differ. I
think it is necessary to set up a fallback decision making procedure when
consensus is not achieved in order to make progress. Voting rules as those
applicable in the AGM may be considered.

I would like to get these ideas debated in the next RIPE meeting.

Regrettably I would not be able to be in Amsterdam  as the RIPE meeting
overlaps with another one that I have to attend in ETSI, but if the
chairman of the NCC Services WG and/or the chairman of the AGM are so kind
to input these ideas into the debates, I would be grateful. By the way, I
still have some problems identifying where to accomodate these issues,
whether in the NCC Services WG (for the services)  or in the AGM (for the
associated impact on budget and fees) as services and budget are always
linked.

Finally I have a question to make. Is this email list (ncc-services-wg)
only available for RIPE NCC members? I guess so but I am not sure. Please
confirm.

Kind regards,
Azucena


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