I just noticed that this message never made it to the list. Resending… Hi Daniel,
It appears this mailing list does not get used very much
Thank you for working on making it more active :)
but I would like a direct comment from each proposed candidate up for election on the charging scheme changes, and your view point on if RIPE should be reducing its budget and how the current situation is being handled.
I'm still holding the same opinion as expressed during the open-house call (https://www.ripe.net/membership/meetings/open-house/meet-the-may-2024-execut...). We need to separate the discussion between the activity plan, the resulting budget, and the charging scheme. The activities determine how much money the RIPE NCC needs to execute them, and the charging scheme choice should purely be about how to divide the cost for that amongst the members. When talking about the activities, there are a few things that the RIPE NCC *has* to do: be an RIR, which involves the work from the registration services team, maintaining the database and whois services etc. There are also a lot of departments that need to facilitate the registration services, like the legal team, software development, data protection specialists etc. There are things that I personally think the RIPE NCC should be doing because of their unique position, such as working with and educating government and law enforcement. That benefits the whole community. And then there are activities that the RIPE NCC does because they can, and because they are useful, and because nobody else was doing it, such as training, research, RIS, Atlas etc. For some of the latter ones, I think it would be good if the RIPE NCC didn't do them all by itself. I'd personally prefer if some of those activities were done and funded more in collaboration with others. But these are very rough and personal ideas. In the end the membership should decide on the direction, the board will take that and formulate a high-level strategy that the RIPE NCC executive team can then execute. For the charging scheme there is a lot of work in the near future, as the board has already communicated. I personally don't have a strong opinion on the style of charging scheme. I'm a self-employed LIR, and I don't mind paying what I'm paying now. But I understand that I am from a wealthy country, and that I'm in a privileged position. So I also understand the drive towards a scheme where large resource holders pay more and small ones pay less. I will support whatever the community feels is preferred in this day and age. I think the current board should have done the vote on the charging scheme differently last year. Combining the amount and the style of charging in one vote made the meaning of the results unclear. What they are doing this year is right: they determined how much money can be saved, how much money is needed to fund the activities, and gave the choice between three models that end up roughly with the same total amount of income. At the same time they are working on both the activity plan and more diverse charging schemes for the future. They are putting the stability of the RIPE NCC first, while working towards what the members want step by step. I think this is the correct approach: stability and reliability over speed. I hope this answered your questions. If not, please let me know where you would like more clarification! Cheers, Sander