I am sure you know that Inflation by itself does not necessarily lead to nominal wage growth and certainly not in nominal wage growth by the inflationary rate itself - or in excess thereof - to compensate the drop in real wage (inflation adjusted) from one's nominal (paid) wage. If only we could all be so lucky.

For NL, publicly available data from CBS(.NL) show that Dutch CPI rose by 10% while HICP rose 11.6% in 2022. Wages certainly did not go up by the same amount, for example the collectively agreed (CAO) wages seem to have gone up by 3.2%. While not an expert on the Dutch labor market, I imagine that non-CAO wages haven't been increased by the amount of inflation, either. Certainly, in other countries wages have not been raised to compensate for the effects of inflation by the amount of inflation or higher.

Perhaps your question was rhetorical but to me it indicates that the membership (or at least the majority of those who voted in 2023) would like to stop being an ATM for everything NCC does, even if the association's objectives written in AoA in §3 are quite comprehensive. Now, IF membership fees are at a level of x (1400 euro) but the NCC expenditure per average member is x+20% (1680 eur or so) AND members do not want to increase their fees.. what to do? I would read it as expenditure needs to be lowered to the level of fees per member - all other things being equal - to get it to an equilibrium. Another alternative is to use short- or long-term assets from the balance sheet, of course, but that cannot go on forever.

As for the budgeting/planning activities (or chicken/egg issue), it was mentioned during the discussions on this list in March that it is weird that members first get to vote the budget for the next fiscal year and once that is locked in, they get to choo^Winfluence the activity plan in the form of providing feedback. It does not seem to be a choice only for the board as the budget and activity plan are covered in the AoA in some detail as to when and how. Still, changing this slightly, might not require rewriting AoA as in §15.5 is the word "or" meaning that the AoA would allow doing these simultaneously during the same meeting. There does not seem to be any exclusions preventing this.

Finally - If 12% voted in the GM and 88% did not, should that be understood that 12% are interested in influencing what the association does or that 88% are happy with how things are and have better things to do in life? I am very curious on the survey results myself.

Have a nice weekend. 🙂

Kaj

From: Sander Steffann <sander@steffann.nl>
Sent: Friday, July 14, 2023 15:05
To: Kaj Niemi <kajtzu@basen.net>
Cc: <members-discuss@ripe.net> <members-discuss@ripe.net>
Subject: Re: [members-discuss] [ncc-announce] [news] 167th RIPE NCC Executive Board Meeting - Summary Notes

Hi,

> Considering that the membership recently voted not to increase fees for 2024 it is slightly surprising that increasing membership fees would again be on the agenda for the following year.

The membership votes on the charging scheme every year, so of course we can vote on price changes again for 2025.

Personally I think the outcome of the recent vote was a bad decision. Inflation causes salaries for staff to have to go up, and if we as members refuse to pay for that, what does that say about us?

I hope that in the future the board will do the voting in another way:
- First vote on what we want the NCC to do, and thereby deciding on how much money needs to be spent
- Then vote on the charging scheme to decide on how the members will contribute to fund what has been decided on

Now we have voted to give the NCC too little money to compensate its staff for inflation, yet we still expect the same (or better) service. That doesn’t make sense.

Cheers,
Sander