[ppml] Policy Proposal 2003-15: IPv4 Allocation Policy for the Africa Portion of the ARIN Region

[Jeff S Wheeler]

On Thu, 2003-09-25 at 06:09, Michael.Dillon at radianz.com wrote:
> >Who's 
> >going to fund AfriNIC's 4 offices in 4 countries with >4x the overhead of 
> 
> >a single office?
> 
> It's their organization...

<rant>

They will most likely be more efficient with member funds than the ARIN.
$400k annually for office space; and $2M last year spent via what is
essentially an ARIN salad account for travel, lodging, etc?

ARIN's annual reports remind me of a start-up I once worked for, where
the CEO contracted a long-time friend to fly in for two days, conduct
interviews of six of our employees (there were < 25 total), give them
SCANTRON exams, and evaluate them to be psychiatrically fit to be in our
employ. The fee for this service was $170k, and as it turns out, this
CEO had been hiring this individual at various start-ups and re-orgs he
burned through for years, along with a slew of other consultants.

I find it hard to believe that the ARIN's expenditures are remotely
justified for an operation that should be run by a couple of
unixy/sql/perl/c folks, a small help desk crew, some billing folks who
don't need post-it notes to keep track of who has paid what, and a
couple of heads to evaluate applications for new space or AS number
allocations.

With multi-million dollar surpluses and a $2M slush account the ARIN
should be paying members to come represent themselves at meetings
(think, rural electric/telephone co-operative), not charging a fee.

</rant>

--
Jeff S Wheeler