Summary

  • AusNOG’s Membership FAQ awards 100 points for each annual conference and 35 points for each .Local event, using attendance over a rolling period to determine membership level.
  • Its constitution gives Platinum, Gold and Silver members 35, 15 and five votes respectively at general meetings; Bronze members may attend and debate but do not vote.
  • The public rule makes participation consequential, but class totals and weighted-ballot denominators are needed before anyone can measure how power is distributed in practice.

The formula is unusually explicit

Many operator communities praise sustained participation without writing down what it buys. AusNOG has chosen a more concrete architecture.

Its Membership FAQ says a member’s level is calculated on 1 January from attendance at AusNOG events during the preceding five calendar years, with a stated adjustment for the pandemic interruption. An annual conference is worth 100 points. An AusNOG .Local event is worth 35. The published thresholds are 500 points for Platinum, 400 for Gold, 200 for Silver and fewer than 200 for Bronze.

Those labels are not merely status badges. Clause 11.2.1 of the constitution gives a Platinum Member 35 votes at a general meeting, a Gold Member 15 and a Silver Member five. A Bronze Member may be present and take part in debate but has no voting right. Directors are included among Platinum Members.

The institutional chain is therefore visible: attendance creates points; points determine an annual class; class determines formal voting weight. Five annual conferences across the stated window reach 500 points. Four reach 400. Two reach 200. Local events can add to those totals. The arithmetic does not reveal how many people occupy each class, but it does establish the rule that produces the classes.

Admission and classification are separate gates

Attendance is not the first gate. The constitution says the Board may prescribe membership criteria and the application form. It also says the Board may accept or reject an applicant without giving a reason. Only after someone has entered the legal membership does the class-and-vote system become relevant.

That distinction matters because “the AusNOG community” is not one measurable constituency. Conference attendees, .Local participants, mailing-list subscribers, applicants, admitted members, classed members and people who actually vote can overlap without being identical.

The Board page says AusNOG is run by a Board that jointly organises the annual conference and acts as custodian for the organisation. That puts the Board near both the event system that supplies points and the corporate framework that recognises membership. It does not prove manipulation or bad faith. It does mean an accountability account should keep admission, class criteria, event records and ballot administration distinct enough to audit.

What the rule rewards—and what it cannot prove

There is a serious defence of the model. Repeated participation can produce knowledge, relationships and institutional memory. A member who attends for years is likely to understand the organisation’s programmes and constraints better than a person who joined yesterday. Weighted voting can recognise that investment and protect the institution from decisions made by a transient electorate.

The cost lies in the same mechanism. Formal voice follows the capacity to appear repeatedly at recognised events. Travel, employer support, geography, disability, caring obligations, time and professional seniority may affect that capacity. The inspected sources do not measure those factors, so none can be asserted as the cause of any person’s membership class. They remain questions that the rule makes relevant.

Nor does a high class prove a wider mandate. An engineer with 35 votes may be deeply trusted inside AusNOG while still voting in a personal capacity. Conference attendance does not show that an employer authorised a position, that a network delegated control, or that Australian operators as a whole consented. The vote governs AusNOG’s corporate affairs.

The missing denominator is weighted

Ordinary election reporting asks how many people were eligible and how many voted. AusNOG’s structure requires an additional denominator: how many votes were eligible in each class.

Imagine a resolution receiving 350 votes. That figure could represent ten Platinum members, more than twenty-three Gold members, seventy Silver members, or a mixture. Without class counts and eligible weighted votes, the same aggregate can describe very different distributions of participation. A headcount alone would also be incomplete because one person does not necessarily carry one vote.

The public sources inspected for this article do not publish current membership totals by class, eligible weighted votes for a particular meeting, ballots cast, abstentions or class-level outcomes. That absence does not show the records do not exist. It means the public record cannot yet answer whether voting power is broadly distributed, concentrated among a durable core, or simply unused.

A proportionate accountability record

AusNOG need not publish individual attendance histories. An annual table could show the number of Platinum, Gold, Silver and Bronze members; the total eligible votes in each class; and how many members moved between classes. A meeting result could then report eligible weighted votes, weighted votes cast, abstentions and the result, alongside the number of individual voters.

Criteria changes deserve their own trail. Because the Board may promulgate class criteria, a dated version history should show what changed, when it took effect and which future attendance records it affected. A member should be able to reproduce a class from the published rule and their own event record, then use a defined correction route if the result is wrong.

The system is not hidden. Its most consequential formula is already public. The next accountability step is to publish the denominators that show what the formula does.