NCC issues and other threads

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 at ripe.net list, rather than the lir-wg at 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