Dear all, I am finally back in Amsterdam (got in the airplane on Thursday afternooon, off the plane on Saturday morning) and I can now reply to your mails with the attention they deserve. Apologies if anyone thought we were not paying attention. First a formal point: some issues here seem to refer only to members of the RIPE NCC Association and the proper forum would therefore be the local-ir@ripe.net list, rather than the lir-wg@ripe.net, but anyway, since there is nothing to hide, I don't mind having this discussion here at all. Let's start by making a list of the points raised: 1) Getting the RIPE NCC hostmasters to get in touch with the day to day operations of ISPs and other members. 2) Training. 3) Who is the NCC accountable to. 4) Hostmaster turnover 5) The wait queue. Current situation. Statistics. Solutions. 1) This discussion started some time go and then died without an implementation decision. The RIPE NCC looked at the goals that were being requested by the membership, all legitimate, and studied the pros and cons of the proposed solution. We took into account the impact it would have if it were implemented as suggested and looked at other possible ways of achieving the same goals with the minimum possible impact. I think this is just sensible management of resources and I hope you agree with this so far. The RIPE NCC, as any other company needs to keep its employees up to speed with the environment they work in. This is achieved by training. The current internal training situation can definitively be improved and we took the initiative of hiring a technical advisor/trainer with the goal of having someone who can provide technical advise on latest technologies to hostmasters when they get complex requests and also, setting up a good internal training system to be able to get new hostmasters up to speed faster and then keep the ones that are already here up to date with developments in the Internet that affect hostmaster work (eg. new GSM/GPRS services, new approaches to network design people are using, etc). This person will be in charge of preparing and delivering this sort of internal training. We proposed using this function as a very good candidate to visit a few LIRs (not all of them are ISPs, by the way) so that the vision that is transmitted to the hostmasters is not only a "textbook" one but rather the practical applications and implementations are also analyzed as part of the courses. The original proposal to the LIR-WG was seen as having a very big impact for the NCC and as consuming too many resources. Of course, if the membership is willing to really put up with the additional costs to obtain what I think would be the same practical results, then fine with me, just propose it at the annual members meeting and we'll accomodate it in the budget. 2) The RIPE NCC's training policies are pretty much internal, like salaries, HR policies, etc. We will not normally discuss such internal matters with the membership other than in the proper forums, of which this is not one. I think the General Manager, as main interface to the members will be able to elaborate on this if requested. In my opinion, the membership should evaluate the results, which as I said before can be improved (and we are already taking steps to do so). I don't think it is appropriate to report here on which hostmasters (or other NCC staff) attend which courses, when, where or why. I would like to add though that the only issue we have had with training has been a recent incident where a member of staff enrolled in a course without waiting for a response from management. 3) Well, this is actually pretty obvious. We are accountable to the membership as represented by themselves and the Executive Board. 4) Lately we have had a bigger than usual turnover, which has strained Registration Services. We are addressing this by implementing better internal training and some other modifications in the way work is carried out in order to make the hostmaster work less tedious, more efficient and more satisfying. We hope this will reduce turnover. It will also diminish the impact of the remaining turnover, which will never be zero. 5) The wait queue is currently high, or at least higher than we want it to be. It currently stands at about a week. Most people here are trying very hard to get a quick ticket response time, but there are several factors that have so far prevented this bo noticed by you. During the last 3-4 months the rate of incoming requests is about 50% higher than it had been last year. To make matters worse, the sickness rate has been above average. Since taking over the position of Head of External Services 2 months ago, I have embarked, together with Nurani Nimpuno [Registration Services Manager] in a full review of the current situation, looking at staffing issues, training, work environment, etc in order to improve things wherever possible. A preliminary view indicates that there is a lot of room for improvement in the tools that hostmasters use. Software development does, however take some time to get from requirements, to desgin, to implementation. In the meantime, the way to get the wait queue down is to throw more human resources at the problem. We have recently offered positions to 4 new hostmasters (in part to replace some that are leaving, to be musicians, webmasters and system administrators) and to increase the total amount of people dealing with tickets. We may hire some more in the near future. At the same time, as I said above, we are working on improving the startup period of hostmasters and the life quality of existing hostmasters by hiring an advisor/trainer. We shall present statistics about the current profile of requests as well as other matters relating to the tickets handled by hostmasters in the upcoming RIPE meeting (Budapest). From those statistics we can probably discuss if any changes to the assignement window would affect the situation. This is a registration policy and therefore up for debate by lir-wg. The RIPE NCC shall make a recommendation at the meeting, if the wg chair agrees to put this on the agenda (there will be a few more policy related question, I hope, soon). So this is it for now. Apologies for the long mail If you feel I have left out some points from the discussion that you would like to see discussed, feel free to raise them and I will address them. Jetlagged, Joao