http://www.ripe.net/ripe/draft-documents/ap2004.html Section 5: "Incident Response Service (IRS) Procedures will be set up to quickly provide RIPE NCC members, the Internet community and the general public with authoritative data about unusual events on the Internet, such as DDoS on the RIPE NCC." Yet another unwanted and unneeded service that is handled quite well by many other organizations whether they be FIRST or nsp-sec or INOC-dba or Terena's CSIRT: http://www.first.org/ https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/nsp-security http://www.pch.net/inoc-dba/ http://www.terena.nl/tech/task-forces/tf-csirt/ No e-voting. No informal poll of what services are needed. RIPE NCC just keeps rolling along. Based on: http://www.ripe.net/ripe/draft-documents/budget2004-aoa97.html 2004 2003 2002 Total Expenses 10,263 9,811 10,442 I see no major cost reductions. Poll any of the 3500 LIR members and ask them what their budgets look like in 2004 as compared to 2002 and 2003. The problem is (and I know other NGOs in similar situations) that NGOs lose track of what is going on out in the real world and therefore feel that they have cut the budget if it is reduced 2-4%. The other problem is the apathy of the LIR members. 3500 LIR members and 95% are silent on the RIPE lists. Their employer doesn't pay them to sit on these lists. They pay them to get IPs and ASNs. A 10% reduction in membership fees - which would save perhaps 250-500Euro per year, is not worth fighting about, their employers didn't ask them to save them the money and such a small savings is noise to most budgets and not worth the manpower needed to argue and fight to get it changed. Looks like we are stuck with the status quo for a long time to come :-( -Hank