Hi all,

I barely engage in such discussions on mailing lists, but...

Am 17.04.18 um 16:22 schrieb Alexandr Gurbo:

I understand position EU people, I ask you try to look on this eyes of people in Eastern Europe or Arab Region. You have all the levers of control, we are nothing.

I dare to call this not true. RIPE is clearly steered by membership, and every member has the same rights and powers. The change in the structure of the members (especially referring to their country of origin) has been reflected in the locations of the RIPE meetings at least since 2006, with more and more "eastern" cities also hosting such (Istanbul, Tallinn, Dubai, Prague, Ljubljana, Warsaw, Bucharest, Budapest).

Many are mistakenly think, that in these regions the service will be bad. Nobody to talk about move all RINE NCC, let's do few steps towards each other and crete new eg technical/support/developer office in CIS/Arab region. Everything is discussed.

The location of RIPE itself and the RIPE NCC is obviously due to historical reasons, and it's "known good" - so why change it.
Cost efficiency is clearly a valid argument, and of course cost of employment is (at the moment) much lower in certain countries than in the Netherlands/Amsterdam.
Still, it is not a convincing argument from my POV.
Having people together on one site compared to a distributed setup always wins from a productivity POV.
Having people in an area (time zone, e.g.) where the majority of the members is sitting, has clear advantages.
See https://labs.ripe.net/statistics/lirs-by-region and https://labs.ripe.net/statistics/membership-by-country
Transforming a well-running, single-site organisation to a distributed org which would include replacing significant numbers of staff who are in many cases with the org for many years involves tremendous effort and cost that you for quite sure underestimate.

And again, the question is: Why? For what benefit?

Just for the sake of squeezing the (rather insignificant) membership fees down?

I don't see the point.

Cheers,

Malte (speaking for himself only. My employer might or might not share this opinion.)

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