On Aug 14, 2010, at 12:32 AM, Jeffrey Lyon wrote:
John,
I will concur with Randy that much of the travel that ARIN funds is excessive. ARIN has a booth at trade shows so i'm going to guess that entire setup with travel costs about $20,000 - 50,000 per show. Why? To convince me to use ARIN for my IP space needs? To convince us to switch to IPv6? I'm not really understanding this, ARIN can hear from the community for free and without spending tens of thousands of dollars.
Why can't we save that money and use it to provide tangible services, like providing advisory and implementation assistance for companies wanting to convert to IPv6? We could use it to fund investigations targeting IP space abuse (see my previous post a few minutes back).
This year ARIN has undertaken a major initiative in outreach specifically regarding IPv6, and this includes time of several ARIN staff, trade show participation, travel for volunteers from the AC or Board, PR firm, etc. I'd estimate this additional initiative to be near $500,000 in expense within ARIN's $15M/year budget. The goal is to get the message about impending IPv4 depletion and IPv6 transition out to more organizations in the region. One side effect of this is that hopefully you're seeing the IPv6 issue appearing quite a bit more in both trade and business press. While we may think that the IPv4/IPv6 situation is common knowledge, we are running into ISPs and hosting companies each day that believe we've got enough IPv4 addresses for many decades to come. Now, we're doing this because we've had people at the microphones at nearly every ARIN public meeting asking us to do more to increase the visibility of IPv4 depletion and IPv6, so this is definitely something that should get some more discussion at the next ARIN meeting if you feel otherwise. /John John Curran President and CEO ARIN p.s. Ongoing threads on ARIN financials should probably move over to ARIN-discuss sooner or later (out of respect to those on Nanog who didn't think they signed up for that on this operational list...)