[ncc-services-wg] reviewing and developing requirements for NCC services

On 09/04/2009 02:06 PM, Jim Reid wrote:
> Of course members are entitled to decide how their money is spent and
> know how that money is spent.
> 
> However there are limitations. It's utterly impractical for the
> membership to micro-manage every aspect of the NCC's activities. Which
> presupposes the membership has the time and interest to do that. Imagine
> if the membership had to debate how much the NCC pays for a plane ticket
> or who supplies its paperclips or which model and configuration of
> routers it should buy. Can you imagine how difficult it would be for the
> membership to reach consensus on these things at that level of detail?
> If you accept the principle that decisions about implementation matters
> have to be delegated, the question becomes one of deciding where these
> delegation points are and what happens at them.

Of course, nobody will do micro-management of every detail. But on
important tools - and LIR portal is important tool, there should be some
interaction between RIPE NCC and members about changes, implementation
of new features and member requirements. There are methods for feedback
- like surveys. If RIPE NCC can "spam" us with just informative 3rd
party surveys about IPv6 deployment, why cannot similar survey just run
in relation to LIR portal, where they collects some inputs from members.
I cannot recall such survey in past two years. LIR portal is tool for
us, members, and there must be this interaction. RIPE NCC has to ask us,
what we really need...

> There is a reasonably clear chain of authority/control here. The
> membership decides the NCC's overall strategy by voting on the annual
> activity plan and charging scheme (which of course determines the
> overall budget). They also elect the NCC board. The board delegate the
> actual running of the NCC to the management, particularly the CEO, and
> direct them to carry out the tasks in the activity plan. The board does
> not get directly involved in operational matters. The NCC's executive
> uses its expertise to manage the organisation's resources to deliver the
> services that the membership have asked for. The output from this WG
> helps shape the activity plan.

But this doesn't mean, that the only activity of member is voting on
general/wg meetings among few-page general documents. These materials
are obviously targeted to (top) managers. Members should have detailed
informations easily available, if they're interested. It's about
transparency of operation, nothing else.

> IMO the information in 1.4.2 of the current activity plan covers the
> operation of the LIR portal in appropriate level of detail. This says
> what the LIR portal does and what its goals are. Within reason, it
> shouldn't matter to the membership how the NCC actually implements that
> portal. Of course if someone does have questions about those internal
> details, they can ask and will get answers. For instance if someone
> wants to know precisely how much the NCC has spent revamping the LIR
> portal, a question to the CEO, CFO or a board member is all it takes.

Informations like "LIR portal need complete rewrite, because..." are
important and should be stated in activity plans, if they're know. Just
because complete rewrite will cost money. This is important information.
Section 1.4.2 describes existence of interaction method, not really
development plans and budget required for improving, these plan are in
section 3 instead. We really don't know, how much money we spent in LIR
portal development, for example. We even don't know, how much we spent
in new software development in general, how we distribute available
ressources.

> Note that membership decisions about the activity plan have practical
> considerations too. In theory I suppose the activity plan could detail
> every line item of the budget for the coming year. And the membership
> could vote on each of these at the AGM. But would it work in practice?
> Would LIRs have the time or inclination to go through something that
> detailed? And would that be an efficient or effective way to manage the
> NCC? Can you imagine the number and extent of the rat-holes that such an
> approach would open up?

But significant development expenses should be covered and stated. We
should know, how much we spent for DB, portal, RIS and another
development. This helps in arranging of development priorities, focus to
things mostly requested by members (surveys mentioned above).
Another source of informations are usage statistics. It's better spend
money in tools widely used instead of developing tool for 2-3 people.

> I agree wholeheartedly. Perhaps this WG could suggest some processes
> which would allow more discussion and review on requirements?

Again - we can start with general member surveys. I thing, that not so
much members watch activities in WGs, but they can give valuable feedback.
If there are plans for development of new features (or review existing),
we can simply ask members, if they're seeing particular feature helpful.
Who's interested, will ansver here.

> Note that there's also difficult balance to be struck here. As a
> predominantly technical group, LIRs will tend to focus on the minutae of
> implementation detail: buy $VENDOR's $MODEL hardware, use such and such
> a version of MySQL/PHP/Linux/whatever, etc, etc. It's all too easy to be
> side-tracked into these rat-holes. When that happens, no progress gets
> made and reaching consensus becomes harder. Which would leave the NCC in
> limbo if it needs to get membership approval/consensus for (say) a
> reskin of the LIR portal.

Of course, these are topic we should NOT discuss, there's no reason for
these discussions. I personally really don't care about $VENDOR etc.
Maybe this would be interesting information, but nothing else. I just
would like to have properly working tools needed for my work.

> RIPE and the NCC are open and transparent. If policies or processes need
> to be tweaked or changed, there are mechanisms to do that. IMO it's up
> to people like you to come forward with constructive proposals for
> making things better.

I'm not sure about NCC transparency. Many internal informations aren't
implicitly accessible. Maybe they're available on request. But, why I
cannot just login somewhere and download them, if I'm (or someone else)
interested? This will be really transparent. And I thing uploading
document to some store isn't really hard work. In result, this saves
time and money, probably these documents are stored somewhere already
(if I'll request something by email, someone from NCC will process it,
search for requested document and this takes much more time/money). Of
course, I'm talking about documents with no sensitive personal data.
We're talking about documents covering new development plans and so on.

> Broadly speaking the membership is content with the NCC's services and
> fees: though I accept there may well be grudging acceptance in some
> quarters. [There are a few services I'm convinced the NCC should not be
> doing but the membership disagrees. Oh well.] However if there was a
> significant concern about the fees and services, this would presumably
> be reflected in the votes at the AGM.

Voting on AGM its locked to be on-site at this time, this requires
traveling (mainly) around the Europe, this is a big barrier. According
to Axel Pawlik presentation on last AGM, there never voted more than 5%
of members on-site. This isn't really representative. For comparison, in
online membership survey 2008 we had ansvers from around 11% of members
- this is still not very high number, but is better...

This is another argument for better interaction with members over
electronic surveys, for example. This will provide much better and more
representative results/feedback compared to NCC meetings.

Daniel