______________________________________________________________________ DRAFT TRANSCRIPT Session: APNIC Member Meeting Date: Friday 3 March 2006 Time: 11.00am Presentation: RIPE NCC report Presenter: Axel Pawlik ______________________________________________________________________ AXEL PAWLIK: I'm the managing director of the RIPE NCC. And I'm giving you the usual short RIPE NCC update since, basically, the last meeting we've attended here. You might have seen that we have come up with - come down - I don't know - with quite a number of people. I think I counted through eight or nine. There was a board member here as well. Of course, there is a reason to that. You see our offices there and here, currently, it looks like this and when we left there was a light dusting coming down and it has accumulated. We are not looking forward to going home. Probably we'll stay here for another few days. LAUGHTER Alright. Short update. Documentation - we have strived over the last few months to make ourselves clear and understood and that sometimes is quite difficult. We have acquired a distasteful lot of passives in the writing and lots of funny fill words. So we try to be easy on our readers and speak slowly and write clearly and all these things. So we have new request forms. We have new improved ones in the works and we try to, as I said, have all our publications easily understandable. Not easy. Training. Also here we have material revised. We also try to go to other locations, other conferences. We have little forms that we give out at our events that allow people to book our speakers on topics that we know things about, possibly also other topics. But these things are being used now and we see that is quite a nice thing. We don't have to do our own events all the time. We can also go to others and evangelise there a bit. The really great new thing, similar to APNIC, we have started an E-Learning centre. We have started with the whois database and there is a number of other courses available soon or over the course of the year. So, if you want to have a look at how we do this, you are welcome to that that out. Alright. I said previously that this year we won't do much work in terms of things that are publicly visible. We have last year and are continuing this year to look at our internal systems. We have a new telephone switch now that was a fairly easy installation in terms of one-to-one replacement of functions we used previously. Of course, it was difficult to look at all those various options on the market. We narrowed it down and have one now. Now, of course, the fun part starts. We are looking at the SIP server integration with Voice over IP. That's also something with regard to our IP resource analysts that we want to make available to people out there, carefully. We will be doing it slowly, with dial-in telephone support. We're doing it carefully but also we want to do it cheaply. Our internal network is being revamped. The ticketing system is being replaced and that of course is also quite a substantial change. We are now at the stage where we have seen a prototype. We have some thoughts about integration with our other systems. It's interesting. But we'll see that it comes into use later this year. Right. Membership liaison and enhanced cooperation. What is that? You might know that we do regional meetings. We have been told by our members from the more outlying regions that they feel or felt somewhat left behind so we made an effort starting last year to go out there and meet them where they are. So last year, again, or the previous year, actually, we started that. Last year, again, we wept to Moscow and we went to Moscow and it came to our minds that apparently the Russians are our biggest group of members. We have more than 400. Currently we have about 4,300 members overall. So that is quite a significant group and they are far over there on the map and they probably rightly felt unappreciated so we make an effort and go out there regularly now. Similar with the Gulf region. We've been in Qatar this year and that was quite a nice meeting. Also in terms of enhanced cooperation. We do roundtables for governments and regulators. We've done two of them. The first was in Amsterdam last year and then we did a joint round-table with GAC at the Luxembourg ICANN meeting I think as it was in our region at the time but that was a rather short one. It was a nice session but really, really short. Normally we do them for about three-quarters of a day, fly into Amsterdam, have a meeting there, have drinks and fly out again. So it worked quite well in February this year. We had about 40 participants, wide spectrum from totally newcomers that we haven't seen before, to old and hard GAC members, ICANN board was there, one ICANN board member was there, ICANN staff, of course, as well. It was quite nice. Amsterdam again is central Europe and to we do want to go out and meet our friends in Russia, obviously, and also in the Gulf region. So those are our plans for the rest of the year - go to Moscow once for a short meeting and have somebody organise something like this in the Gulf region. In terms of corporate governance again, we had a general meeting late last year where we did the planning - the planning for this year was nodded off. Activities and budget - Australia Paul has indicated, it goes slightly differently from here. How we do it is we draw up our green budget, then cut it a bit and then present that together with a plan for activities that we foresee for the next year. We present that to our members and the public and, well, then, we discuss at the general meeting. Of course, we have some interaction with our members and some discussions and the executive board of the RIPE NCC then later in the year, towards the end, finalises this, approves the final budget, final activity plan. The charging scheme, however, is something that the members are responsible for themselves. How we do it is basically, as I said, we draw up a list of activities we want to do next year. Then we associate a budget with that and we roughly divide the budget by the number of members we have. Of course, we have five different member sizes from very small to very large. The fees are in euros indeed and they range from 1,500 per year to 5,750 this year. So how this goes over the last few years is that we have a stable budget more or less, very slightly growing only. We have a nicely growing membership. So the fees for everybody normally go down. We had the instance, like, three years ago, four years ago, where we made an annual loss of 2.5 million euros suddenly so we presented to our members a draft charging scheme that would go up by I think over 50% per category. They didn't like that but they approved it. So now we are back to where we were before in terms of levels. And that of course is a membership fee, a service fee for everything we do for them. There is no direct relationship to - direct relationship - to the number of addresses they have. OK, we have a general meeting coming up again in seven weeks roughly. This will be about last year - approval of the financial report and discharging of the board basically and there will be executive board elections. One seat will be free and we will need to free that seat. Everybody is welcome to that meeting in Istanbul. It will happen in - at the end of April. So in about seven weeks. We hope it won't snow there and there won't be an earthquake there. We've heard this is right on the fault line but we go there and we are confident that we'll come back unharmed. Now, if you have any questions or any requests for information, then I should present to you that I'm happy to do that next time. If you have any questions, I'm happy to answer them or ask somebody else to answer them. Thank you. PAUL WILSON: OK. Thanks, Axel.