From: Michael.Dillon Date: Thu Mar 24 11:34:52 2005
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The other consequence is that the membership takes on the responsibility for ARIN's actions. Not the staff's actions, but ARIN's actions. If there is any dysfunction in ARIN, I suspect that it lay here.
Yes, this is what I believe. The ARIN membership is more passive than I think is healthy for the organization. Thus, the organization is dysfunctional.
I agree, I'd certainly like to see more people actively participate in the process. If nanog folks believe that the ARIN membership is not getting the right stuff done... How do we fix this problem? How do we get more operators involved and active in the RIRs? I think colocating 1 ARIN meeting/per year with Nanog in the fall has been a help. ARIN isn't perfect but it could be a lot worse. In some ways I think the issue you describe is an industry wide problem. There are many different groups (RIRs, ICANN, IETF, Nanogs, etc...) and participating in all of them is a lot of effort, especially when most of us already have full-time jobs. We could of course create a huge beuarcratcy with lots of people to study the issues and make policy, but that hasn't been the way the Internet has developed and is counter to what many operators think is best for the Internet. That also requires money. Is that what people want? I don't think so, but I could be wrong. Andrew (also a member of the ARIN Advisory Council)