Hello, Recently a few colleagues and I have been talking about the way we interact with the people in the RIPE NCC when dealing with customer assignments (and some other matters). One of the things we thought could be beneficial is if Hostmasters had more experience of the kind of issues we in the ISP community face on a day-to-day basis. We thought it might be a good idea if some of the Hostmasters were able to visit an ISP and see how they work, meet the people they deal with and perhaps work alongside them for a period of time. With this in mind we first thought of inviting individual people to come and visit us, or perhaps addressing the NCC asking if this were possible. However, we soon realised that this would have neutrality implications, and that it could be damaging both to the RIPE NCC reputation and to ours, and that for this reason it was unlikely to be accepted by them. In the last week or so I've been in touch with people in several other LIRs here in the Netherlands on an informal basis, and we all seem to agree that, were visits made to multiple registries by multiple members of the staff of the NCC, then this would have fewer neutrality implications. It seems like there are several registries who would be happy to offer help with this if it has a potential benefit for all LIRs. I realise that this has been discussed in various forums before, but feel personally that we are now able to remove many of the barriers which might prevent it happening. Do other LIRs feel that this could be beneficial to everyone in the RIPE community? What do RIPE NCC staff themselves think about it? What kind of restraints do people feel should be placed upon any such scheme? How should it be organised? Should it be discussed at a meeting? Looking forward to any comments on the lir-wg mailing-list, Best wishes, Sam