- accountability-tf - mailman.ripe.net

Updated Draft Report Ahead of RIPE 77
by Antony Gollan 24 Sep '18

24 Sep '18

Dear task force members, We have an updated draft document (attached) that we are hoping to publish ahead of RIPE 77. We have edited the text a fair bit throughout the entire document. We are planning to hold a call on Monday, 1 October at the usual time (2pm UTC+2). Please take some time to review the document and let us know your thoughts. WebEx details and an agenda will follow. Cheers Antony

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Notes from 20th call
by Antony Gollan 17 Jul '18

17 Jul '18

Dear task force members, Here are the notes from Monday's call. Cheers Antony +++ Accountability TF call minutes - 20th call Attendees: Athina Fragkouli, Antony Gollan, Malcolm Hutty, Alexander Isavnin, William Sylvester. Agenda: 1. Recap of community feedback from RIPE 76 2. What changes are needed to the draft? 3. Next steps 1. Recap of community feedback from RIPE 76 Antony ran quickly through the feedback from the BoF at RIPE 76: - Values: the community seemed to prefer that they stick to the more established values of open, transparent, bottom-up, etc. Daniel had stated that they had deliberately avoided "motherhood and apple pie" statements from the beginning. Their goal had been to allow operators, who were often in competition with one another, to cooperate. And for that you needed to be open/transparent, etc. He noted that Salam had supported having something along the lines of "who am I, why am I here?" but not pushing it too far. - Consensus: there was the comment that the community used consensus not because they were hippies, but because it was the best way to ensure cooperation in an environment where everyone could vote with their feet. There were some comments about not confusing consensus (as a method of negotiation) with the decision-making of the community, and some comments that perhaps these could be described separately. Ruediger had also noted having a well-described process was important for external accountability. - Capture: Nurani argued that they shouldn't take themselves too seriously - if somene caputred a WG Chair position, the community would survive. Because no one had too much power, it wasn't a concern. It was noted that one risk of capture was from process geeks who wanted to document everything. Filiz had noted that there was not really such a great separation of powers - WG Chairs could also be RIPE NCC Board members at the same time. - Retaining community trust over time: Shane had argued that they could only retain trust by being trustworthy and as long as they were open to newcomers, they would be sharing their values with them. It was noted that there could be a divergence between the community and RIPE NCC membership. And Randy and Daniel had noted that documenting these types of things for newcomers would be valuable and a good task for the task force - but that maybe this should be more like a history or an informal explanation. William said they would need to integrate BoF feedback in the document. This would probably mean an internal revision that they would share with the task force for a review before they published it to the community. Malcolm asked what the problem had been with the substantive values. William said this was partly because by documenting them they would exclude people who didn't share these values. And these values would naturally drift over time, so there was a risk that the document would quickly lose meaning or become out of date. Antony said that there had been been pretty consistent feedback from the community that they wanted to avoid writing down the more abstract "substantive values" and in fact had deliberately chosen not to right from the beginning, for example in the RIPE Terms of Reference (RIPE-001). William said there was comments that it was better to leave those values at a higher level and let the process (open, transparent, bottom-up) produce them naturally. Alexander said they were working on this document because the situation was changing dramatically since the community had created those first documents. What they were doing was in response to all those changes. Maybe if they were getting these concerns, they should address them - by pointing out that things had changed over 25 years and that now the world had come to them. Malcolm said he was more sympathetic to Alexander's point of view. 2. What changes are needed to the draft? William said regarding the draft, they'd needed to take another solid review. And they'd need to add essential feedback they had gotten from the meeting. And then they could use the same process that they'd used ahead of their earlier Go/No-go meeting. He knew Malcolm had some comments that he wanted to be integrated. Then they could take this new revision and send it out for feedback. Did they need another Go/No-go meeting to decide if they were ready to send to the community? William said the next step would be to take another editorial review, adding feedback and sending this to the group. The group agreed with this. Malcolm asked how widespread this opposition to substantive values was. Antony said this had been pretty sustained throughout the whole process, including the email they had sent ahead of the previous meeting. William said this feedback had been from the old guard who thought it was better to keep this ambiguous, because they all had an idea of what this meant and didn't want to create problems. Because the values that were established were the social mores of the community. People might not want to sign on to this because it would not get revised in the future. Antony added that there had been a couple of people who had stepped up in support of documenting these values. Athina suggested they not focus too much on values and address other parts of the document first. She hadn't really seen any substantial support on this. And she was concerned this would generate negative comments on the report. Malcolm said clearly something had to change in the document, if they were getting push-back on it. On the other hand, he found it difficult to believe that people objected to a "stable and reliable Internet", or "RIPE has a defined scope", etc. If they were getting this much feedback, maybe they could take the parts out of that section and work it into other areas of the document as more of a background approach. Alexander said he had two suggestions: 1) if they didn't believe that they would have complete support for their report, they could allow themselves to have a minority report. They might have consensus on one part, but might have a different opinion on some of the topics. That would not completely ruin the idea, as there was no minority report on anything about RIPE. 2) If they couldn't get support, they could start working on a negative report - they had tried to define their accountability and failed, and here was why. William said he didn't think they wouldn't have support for the overall report, they just didn't want to have a negative response to some of its parts when they presented it to the community. William said he liked the idea of integrating some of this content (substantive values) into the background of other sections and they would see what they would do here. 3. Next steps William said if their goal was to have this ready for the meeting, hopefully they should aim to get something ready for the group in early August. Malcolm said last time they spoke they were comtemplating publishing this. The basic sense was that the document was about right, but didn't have quite enough explanation - but now they were thinking that maybe what they had down in the document wasn't quite right either. Their experience from the last meeting showed how important it was to have a clear Go/No-go decision and not get trapped into artifical deadlines. William agreed and said they'd also learned a lot through the BoF process. Malcolm said they needed to do the same thing again - look at the meeting dates and work back from there to see out when they needed to publish and when they needed a Go/No-go decision. William said they had their aimed to have their next meeting early August. And he could work with the secretariat to propose a timeline to the group soon. Malcolm noted that when he opened the version with Carsten's comments, it crashed his Word. The version that Antony had sent opened fine. William said they would plan to keep their next call in two weeks to track progress and see where they were.

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Re: [Accountability-tf] Accountability TF Call Monday 16-Jul @ 14:00 GMT+2
by William Sylvester 16 Jul '18

16 Jul '18

TF Members, Monday (16-Jul) will be our next call at 14:00, Europe Summer Time (Amsterdam, GMT+02:00). The call and webex details have been sent in a separate email. Here is the current proposed agenda: 1. Recap of community feedback at RIPE 76 2. Where do we stand with the draft do - what changes are needed? 3. Next steps 4. Assignment of tasks 5. Review of action items 6. Any Other Business (AOB) We look forward to speaking with everyone later today. William Accountability TF Chair

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Accountability Task Force 20th call (WebEx details)
by Antony Gollan 11 Jul '18

11 Jul '18

Dear task force members, Our next call is scheduled for Monday, 16 July at 2pm (UTC+2). You can find the WebEx details below. Cheers Antony +++ Accountability Task Force 20th call Monday, 16 July 2018 2:00 | Europe Summer Time (Amsterdam, GMT+02:00) | 1 hr Meeting number (access code): 709 778 249 Meeting password: accountability Add to calendar: https://ripencc.webex.com/ripencc/j.php?MTID=mb28e8fc2b3b97085eadd2511ec9b4… When it's time, join the meeting: https://ripencc.webex.com/ripencc/j.php?MTID=m40fb9397c02ed41fe97de2215e8ce… Join by phone +44-203-478-5289 Call-in toll number (UK) Global call-in numbers: https://ripencc.webex.com/ripencc/globalcallin.php?serviceType=MC&ED=622510… Can't join the meeting? https://collaborationhelp.cisco.com/article/WBX000029055 IMPORTANT NOTICE: Please note that this WebEx service allows audio and other information sent during the session to be recorded, which may be discoverable in a legal matter. By joining this session, you automatically consent to such recordings. If you do not consent to being recorded, discuss your concerns with the host or do not join the session.

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No Call on Monday
by William Sylvester 01 Jun '18

01 Jun '18

Task Force Members, There will be no monthly call on Monday 4-Jun-2018. The secretariat is working to compile the details from the RIPE meeting. We are working to revise the draft report and will update the task force for feedback with the latest revision when available. Thanks, William

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Notes from Accountability BoF at RIPE 76
by Antony Gollan 01 Jun '18

01 Jun '18

Dear task force members, Here are the notes from our BoF at RIPE 76. Cheers Antony +++ RIPE Accountability Task Force BoF - RIPE 76 14 May 2018 1. What are the RIPE community's values? Randy Bush said the reason he participated within RIPE was for two things: stewardship of the address space, and agreement among operators who were competitive in business but who still needed to cooperate to run the network. Athina gave some background of the need for accountability in the wake of the IANA transition. The RIPE NCC and other RIRs had showed that they were accountable by publishing an overview of their corporate structures and transparency of processes early into the ICANN transition and it had resulted in a good outcome. After the IANA transition, the focus of the discussion had shifted to the communities, such as RIPE. The question being asked was how accountable were these forums/communities? The task force had looked into this and found that it was accountable. But a lot of faith was placed in individuals – what happened when they started to leave and new people came in to the community? She said it was about values – by developing something that they could agree to as a community. Daniel said they had inherited ICANN from the government crowd and the people who wanted to influence communities by looking for levers. So they decided to own the process. That was the short description. Regarding values – their goal was to be a community where operators came together to coordinate. These people were often competitors. So they wanted to bring these people together so they could keep talking with one another. Motherhood and apple pie (open Internet, etc.) was never part of their values - at least not directly. They had consciously tried not to make these kinds of statements. The values that came to mind – openness, equal access, transparency. These seemed to cover most of it. From that followed how they structured themselves. There had been an evolution from the early days when it was very loose, with no rules – where they’d said “we'll just talk.” But then they gradually formalised over time. When he thought about values, he thought the ones he’d described were all they needed. David Farmer said he’d heard a couple of things - and “accountable to whom?” came to mind. He thought they were pretty accountable to themselves, but not accountable to the general public and maybe they could improve here. He said some of this stuff came from the fact that they were competitors – they needed to avoid creating suspicion. Randy said he thought they were part of an ecosystem and they should let protocol design mostly lie in the IETF, with the community taking a baseball bat to them when they did things that weren’t useful or needed. He thought the same could be said for the role of ISOC – from Vint Cerf’s “the Internet is for everyone”. They were about the responsible operation of the Internet – not the socialisation of it or the promotion of it. It wasn’t that these were not useful things. They were the administrative network information centre - the RIPE NCC as an RIR was the most expansionist. But the directions that it had expanded were operationally useful. And they were about operating and administering the Internet. The job of operating it was hard enough. Daniel supported this statement. Salam Yamout said from her perspective coming from Lebanon – she liked open and transparent. This was hard to understand at first, but she liked it very much. The fact that the Internet was operated by its users was quite good. She liked the idea of doing some kind of “who am I, what am I here for?” But maybe not pushing it too far. It was also about legitimacy as well as accountability. By them having a minimum of rules, maybe the whole exercise was about writing them down. They needed to be more cohesive, because the day of the questions would come and they would need to prove they were legitimate as a community. Shane Kerr said RIPE historically had a role in the Internet. People who weren’t operators and participated in the community also obviously got something out of it and contributed to it. One of the issues was that RIPE was whatever it wanted to be – with Open Source and IoT opening recently as WGs for example. There was only so far you could go in terms of defining RIPE’s values. And he said he’d be interested in seeing a scope of RIPE. Alexander Isavnin said he would like to remind everyone that RIPE was created to support global IP connectivity. And all it's actions and WGs and meetings and even the RIPE NCC were actually there to support this. They needed to explain this to the broader world, especially because the Internet had become a significant part of modern life. Also, they needed to explain that RIPE was the best at doing this IP connectivity support, to counter anyone else who wanted to do the same job at a local/UN/country level. Daniel said the RIPE Terms of Reference (ripe-001: https://www.ripe.net/publications/docs/ripe-001) had been developed years ago and he thought this was still as good as anything they could come up with today. He said they had carefully considered the wording in this document. These were the current terms of reference, so if they wanted to change these, they would need to get a community consensus. 2. How do we define consensus? Randy Bush said there was an excellent article a few years back about how consensus was subject to both conscious and unconscious attack (such as DoS attacks): -Article is here: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/05/consensus-occupy-wall-street-general-ass… Anna Wilson said she wanted to go back to first principles. They used consensus in RIPE not because they were hippies – but because this was how the Internet worked. The legitimacy of ICANN came from the fact that they all agreed to use the same Root. If a bunch of people don’t agree, it just won’t happen. It always came back to what could you persuade people to change. It bounded the question nicely – because whatever mechanism you had needed to go through that check. Peter Koch said he was trying to respond a bit to Anna. They could have week-long discussions on consensus. Looking at the development of policies was already available. While Anna had said people “voted with their feet” in terms of the Root zone, that was the nuclear option. They were trying to describe what took place at the meeting – which could easily devolve into mob rule and social media-type decision making. Consensus was about a process, it was not something that took place at a single moment. And some things couldn’t be decided by consensus and thinking in terms of +1s and -1s could just turn to voting. He agreed with first principles – but explaining how the decision-making of the RIR community around policies was legitimate was a tougher problem. Lars-Johan Liman said this consensus thing carried some weight. But if you were going to try to defend processes that you had defined through consensus-mechanisms, you needed to show that there was some basis for these decisions and that they were made through consensus. From working on the IANA transition, he was concerned about how governments saw these kinds of processes – because they liked having power and were used to having responsibility. In order to make that work on both sides, there needed to be channels between both sides to convince the other that the approach works. There were people outside that wanted other mechanisms other than open/transparent and bottom-up and had power to change things. Nurani said it was useful for newcomers to have these kinds of discussions, but they should be careful not to fool themselves that if they came up with the perfect discussion they could sit back and be done. She liked Anna’s comments around what made good operational sense. The reason she always cringed when she saw other communities do variants of voting/temperature taking was that it ultimately didn’t result in good policy. If 50% of the room agreed and 50% didn’t – that didn’t guide her in any way. So, to her, consensus was what made good policy development and good operational sense. Randy said they shouldn’t confuse how they negotiate with how they decided. Having a legitimate decision-making process was important, but then again they could legitimize anything – even emperors if they wanted. Ruediger Volk took Nurani’s remarks to mean that quality counted. Quality was easily lost by people who only looked at processes. He appreciated the work that went into the RFC that described the IETF’s rough consensus process. But for external accountability, having well-defined processes was important. Filiz agreed that consensus could be defined as a process and decision making could be described separately. But a third component that was necessary was values. You had to get that all described well. 3. What is the role of chairs Hans Petter Holen said he wanted to apologise for the idea of taking a bottom-up approach for replacing WG Chairs. He thought maybe it wasn’t worth having different approaches for each WG. William noted that he himself been selected as Database WG Chair out of a hat, because of the process in that WG. Hans Petter said you wanted a process so you could explain how something happened. “because no one objected’ worked well when you were 20 people – but it didn't scale to a community of 800 quite as well. An audience member said that not having a replacement procedure for chairs was a problem if the RIPE Chair was captured. He thought they had good people in these positions, but it would be good to have something in place that made it a bit more robust and current for the times so people could have faith that it would be the right person performing this role and doing well for the community. 4. Capture Nurani said they shouldn’t take themselves too seriously. She wasn’t too worried about someone taking over the role of IoT chair. They would survive and it would be worse for the person involved. At ICANN they had put these powerful people at the top – and then spent a year working out how to remove them because they had too much power. They should avoid that as a community by not giving people not too much power. And because no one had too much power she wasn’t worried about it. Lars said he was worried about becoming irrelevant. They should maybe include something explaining why these positions were relevant/why the community was relevant. Randy said the kind of capture he was worried about was by process geeks who wanted to document everything and have it all ruled, and the space-cased hippies who just wanted someone else to do it. And as individuals in the community each of them was somewhere in-between. Filiz said capture sounded quite scary – when it really wasn’t. She said there wasn’t such a separation of powers as William had alluded to – someone could be in a WG announcing consensus calls, and could also be on the RIPE NCC Board at the same time. At the end of the day, it was about having things somewhat documented and having one process around things like how a WG named its chair. 5. How does community retain trust over time Shane said he’d been working at ARIN many years ago when it became separate from Network Solutions. At the time they’d been struggling to build a community. One of the things that ARIN looked towards RIPE for was that they wanted the sense of community that RIPE had – and John Crane had said the best way to get people to trust you was to be trustworthy. He thought they could do the right thing and people would recognise that. It was easy to lose that, but he didn’t know what else they could do. He thought they could be friendly and open, and as long as there were many newcomers, they would be sharing these values with them. Daniel agreed with Shane. He thought they could integrate new people. He thought the charter of the task force was to produce something that explained this for newcomers. Ruedieger asked whether divergence of the RIPE NCC community and membership could come into play. He thought right now the community and the membership were about an order of magnitude apart. He guessed that a lot of the members were members not because they wanted to join the community – so you couldn’t expect them to subscribe to the values of the community. The trustworthiness of the community would ultimately be about what the organisation had in its executive branch. Randy agreed with Daniel’s point that they should document the way they did things. But he would like to subtext that with the idea that it could be more like a history or an informal explanation like the Tao of the Internet – to give people the feel of that.

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article on consensus
by Randy Bush 15 May '18

15 May '18

unfortunately, offers no solution(s) https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/05/consensus-occupy-wall-street-general-ass… randy

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BoF - record, minutes etc.
by Alexander Isavnin 14 May '18

14 May '18

Hello everyone! As i was just informed by NCC there will be no remote participation or record for BoF. It's really pity, hope there will be possibility to have minutes or report or something like that from BoF. Thanks, Alexander Isavnin

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Notes from 19th call
by Antony Gollan 09 May '18

09 May '18

Dear task force members, Here are some notes from last week's call. I have received these second-hand from Athina, as I wasn't on the call myself. The group discussed the nature of the plenary presentation at RIPE 76. Please send an email to the list if you have any comments on the proposed structure. Cheers Antony +++ Accountability TF call notes - 19th call Attendees: Athina Fragkouli, Malcolm Hutty, Paul Rendek, William Sylvester The group discussed the slides that would be presented in the plenary presentation at RIPE 76. One slide on what has been done so far: we have reviewed RIPE structures, we believe they are accountable. One slide noting that the accountability of these structures relies on the trust that the community has in people in key positions (WG Chairs, etc). If at any point these people are replaced, there is a concern that the new people may have a different opinion on how these structures work. There is also a concern around whether whether newcomers will understand how the RIPE structure works, so they can respect and trust it themselves. There is also a concern about ensuring that external people understand how RIPE works so they can respect its integrity as a community. One slide noting that we have been working on a report which describes this and we want the community's ideas and feedback on certain areas: - Capture of RIPE community - Values of the community - Consensus - The best way to record the essence of this The presentation can finish by inviting people to the BoF on Monday evening.

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Accountability Task Force 19th call (WebEx details)
by Antony Gollan 30 Apr '18

30 Apr '18

Dear task force members, Our next call is scheduled for Monday, 30 April at 2pm (UTC+2). You can find the WebEx details below. Cheers Antony +++ Accountability Task Force 19th call Monday, 30 April 2018 14:00 | Europe Summer Time (Amsterdam, GMT+02:00) | 1 hr Meeting number (access code): 702 329 871 Meeting password: accountability Add to calendar: https://ripencc.webex.com/ripencc/j.php?MTID=m4bf29bf0a3000c1d9ae165c73fd25… When it's time, join the meeting: https://ripencc.webex.com/ripencc/j.php?MTID=m8b8034ee86e9ae3ea0a54b57f7e00… Join by phone +44-203-478-5289 Call-in toll number (UK) Global call-in numbers: https://ripencc.webex.com/ripencc/globalcallin.php?serviceType=MC&ED=609543… Can't join the meeting? https://help.webex.com/docs/DOC-5412 MPORTANT NOTICE: Please note that this WebEx service allows audio and other information sent during the session to be recorded, which may be discoverable in a legal matter. By joining this session, you automatically consent to such recordings. If you do not consent to being recorded, discuss your concerns with the host or do not join the session.

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