[members-discuss] Some thought on how to lower membership fees follow bottom up principle

 Dear Lu,I am glad you were also a member of Ripe at the time when Ripe was for everyone and when billing was rather affordable, ironically now Ripe lays great emphasis on being a non-profit but the billing is absolutely ridiculous, just to cut the long story short for this specific reason i am humbly requesting that you give me your support to the Ripe board because it has to change, my LIR is:
John Issa Erivona treading as " Intigrad Technologies ".
Thank you for your nomination and for the high number of nominations that i have gotten so far i am very humbled.  








    On Wednesday, May 3, 2023 at 03:18:38 PM GMT+2, Lu Heng <h.lu at anytimechinese.com> wrote:  
 
 Dear Colleagues:

Some thought on fees for RIR’s in general, and how it could also apply to RIPE. 

I personally started in RIPE when I was in my early 20s when I was studying in the Netherlands, nearly a decade ago.   While I never feel the pain to pay any RIR fees, as it is relative low proportion to the business built on it, I do know for lots of smaller members it is difficult to pay in one go, especially when you are coming from relative low-income countries. We need to be supporting these businesses, so they are given the same chance to grow and develop.

RIRs at its core, is just a registration database with few hundreds megabytes of data, it’s not expensive or technically complicated to manage. Most of RIR’s expense are coming from its outreach activities and additional service it’s provided to the public.

So how about members of RIR decide what service are important and what activity are essential at individual level of members?

For example, for RIPE, we can divided the fees into (numbers are just example):

Core service: (RPKI, registration service)(200euro/year)
Additional service:
RIPE stats(100euro/year)
RIPE atlas(100euro/year)
Etc

Outreach activities:

RIPE conference(150euro/year)
Additional conference:
ICANN related(100euro/year)
Other RIR related(100euro/year)

And we let each member voluntarily choose to pay what service they believe is good for the community. For the service that does not get enough funding, either those member of staff who were hired for the service should ask for donations to support those services or those service should be dropped as community doesn’t find value in them and does not want to pay for it. 

And we should also incorporate per capita income into the equation, for example,  Central Asia member should pay 40% less than member in norway for example justified by per capita income for each of the service.

So, only the core service would be compulsory to be paid, and therefore the minimum membership fee for a developing country small ISP can be as long as few hundreds euro per year. This will give those members a fighting chance to build their businesses without paying for services they don’t need and can’t afford

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Kind regards.
Lu

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