We had a pretty good discussion under 3) RIPE community principles - TF members who couldn’t make the call might want to read this part.

Cheers

Antony

RIPE Accountability TF Meeting Notes

3 July 2017

Attendees:
Antony Gollan, Malcolm Hutty, Alexander Isavnin, Peter Koch, Wim Rullens, Carsten Schiefner, William Sylvester

1) Review of action items
2) Face to face meeting preparation
-Logistics
-Agenda for the meeting
-Note: If TF members have any topics to discuss, the RIPE NCC can gather supporting information ahead of the F2F meeting
3) RIPE community principles – following recent discussion in RIPE Chair discuss mailing list:
https://www.ripe.net/ripe/mail/archives/ripe-chair-discuss/2017-May/000114.html
4) AOB

1) Review of action items

20170606-1: Malcolm to send some thoughts on what the group should discuss during the face-to-face meeting to the mailing list.

Malcolm said he hadn’t had time to do this yet but had been meaning to email the group with some thoughts on things they would discuss - were they a technical organisation, were they a bottom-up organisation. He said his email to the chair-discuss list had covered a lot of this off. He said he would send something through ahead of the meeting.

20170606-2: Alexander to send thoughts regarding the mapping document on the list.

Antony noted that Alexander had sent an email ahead of the meeting so this could be closed.

20170606-3: William to ask Nurani and Filiz if they are still interested in contributing to the TF.

William said this one had been completed and could be closed.

20170509-1: TF Chairs to put together work plan after the meeting.

Antony said this one was still pending.

20170509-2: RIPE NCC to look at arranging another (longer) face-to-face meeting for the task force.

Antony said this was still being done, and they could talk about this in the next agenda point.

20170306-1: RIPE NCC to further develop accountability mapping document with task force input.

20170306-2: Task force members to review and comment on accountability mapping document.

Antony said these two were on hold until the TF decided it wanted any further work done on the document.

2) Face to face meeting preparation

Antony said he was still talking with their travel department about the details but understood they would fly most people in the night before (5 September) and fly most people out at the end of the second day (7 September). He would be emailing people to ask them where they’d be flying from, their full name, and the dates of travel.

They would have the meeting in their offices.

He currently had about five or six task force members who had responded positively to the poll (depending on whether Carsten could make it). They would have four RIPE NCC staff –Athina, Paul, Marco (Policy Development Officer) and himself.

Malcolm asked if the RIPE NCC would be booking their flights for them, or if they could book these themselves and bill the RIPE NCC.

Antony said he understood that their travel department would book the flights, but he would find out if this was an option.

***Action: RIPE NCC to look into whether TF members can book their own flights and bill the RIPE NCC.

William said it would be good to have an agenda for the meeting. At the moment they were assuming they would be looking at the mapping document. He was aware that some TF members might have differing ideas.

Alexander said he had identified a lot of ideas and issues in his email to the list. It would be good if people who had been in the RIPE community since the very beginning, such as Hans Petter, could participate.

William said as they would be in the RIPE NCC’s offices, maybe they could draw in people from there with this experience.

Antony said he could see if there were suitable people in the office who would be available.

Peter thought if they opened the meeting to everyone, it might be destabilising, as they had finally gotten the TF down to a kind of core group.

William said Alexander's point was just about getting some historical perspective – they could invite someone into the meeting for a short time to provide some input or explanation. But maybe this wasn’t necessary – he was open to TF members’ input on whether they would like this.

William asked if they should enable dial-in for people who wanted to participate in the meeting but were unable to attend in person.

Carsten asked if it was disruptive when he joined remotely in Budapest.

William said it wasn't a big deal for an hour, but for two-days it would be difficult and exhausting for the person calling in.

Antony added that as they had noted in the agenda, if anyone knew of a topic they wanted to explore, the RIPE NCC was happy to look into the history or gather any supporting information around this. For example, if they wanted to discuss anything policy related, they could have Marco (their Policy Development Officer) look into something for them.

Alexander suggested they look into past presentations delivered by RIPE Chairs or good discussions or statements made on RIPE community mailing lists or other public presentations that would be relevant to the task force.

***Action: RIPE NCC to look for past statements/presentations that might be relevant to the TF’s work.

William said they could discuss this further on the mailing list. People could feel free to propose agenda items or ask any questions.

3) RIPE community principles/values

William said the link to this had been sent out in the agenda (https://www.ripe.net/ripe/mail/archives/ripe-chair-discuss/2017-May/000114.html). He asked if anyone wanted to discuss thoughts on community principles and what they thought was going on in the RIPE Chair Discussion mailing list.

Alexander said one of the main principles in his email was about building trust and having the RIPE Chair as the anchor for this trust. He had thought a lot about how to finalise this. There were a lot of questions – what were they doing and why – one of the reasons was to help people get an understanding of what RIPE was, not just for newcomers, but also for community members who were trying to interact with RIPE. That's why he had referenced big international organisations like the UN. Another reason he felt that wasn't stated publicly, was that huge legal entities like states or other organisations noticed the existence of RIPE. They needed to show them that RIPE as a community existed and that they were equivalent to them.

William thanked Alexander for his input. From his perspective, they definitely wanted to take into consideration efforts going on throughout RIPE as they documented accountability moving forward. He suggested they move this to the mailing list – specifically trying to understand what the RIPE community was and how it established participants and leaders.

Malcolm said that building on what Alexander said, in the context of external stakeholders: to whom was RIPE accountable? What did their mechanisms need to reflect in order to show what their community wanted and expected? What were the boundaries to this? When there was an engagement that was not internal to their community but rather between their community and some external stakeholder – this was different to being accountable internally.

William said this raised another point around who these actors where - how did they feel their relationships with organisations like the IETF should be? He added that there were vendors out there, many of whom worked for organisations that were providing services to the community.

Carsten asked if Malcolm's point needed to be discussed right now on the mailing list, or if it could wait until the face to face meeting in September.

Malcolm said he was putting this on the agenda for the face to face meeting. Another question was how specific they needed to be with these definitions. And maybe someone could be “us and not us” at the same time. It was blurry.

William said they had one more call in August coming up. He asked if they should spare some time on the call agenda for this.

Malcolm said it would be better to wait for the face to face.

William said if they had any other thoughts on the agenda, to send those to the mailing list.

William said another thing he wanted to note around community principles was that there was a series of unwritten rules of conduct for community members. There seemed to be a way that people would pull someone aside and say "I know you work for a company, but you should contribute a bit more and sell a bit less, because otherwise you may be shunned." You saw this often with hardware vendors who were just there to sell. He didn't know if it was in their purview, but maybe they should document some of these kind of unwritten expectations along with the community principles. He asked what the group thought.

Carsten said coming up with a list of activities that were unwanted might not be a good idea – it had the potential to become an endless list. Perhaps it would be better to come up with a positive list of activities that were wanted.

Peter said most recently they saw more and more of these conduct discussions and documents and he wasn't sure they should jump on the bandwagon and engage the TF in this sort of thing – except in terms of examining the legitimacy of the process that produced such codes of conduct. Most recently something went on in some mailing list, where to get a situation under control, a code of conduct came out of the blue that was seemingly installed by the RIPE Chair. So maybe they should be looking at the legitimacy of these things that seemed to be coming up more and more.

William said he agreed with that. He could think of several instances where the community wanted to censure someone and maybe it was their role to identify the ways that could be done appropriately, or maybe not, or maybe how they could establish the code of conduct – but more to identify the fitness of what the community had today, whether there was quality work there or whether they needed to do additional work.

Malcolm agreed with Peter that this was something they should look at. How did someone claim the authority to say that something was inappropriate. Regarding Carsten’s point about framing things in the positive, he mentioned the lightning talk at RIPE 74 where the speaker suggested that RIRs could take back IP addresses from governments who shut down the Internet. This was very strongly opposed at the meeting, but he thought the PC had decided that even though they didn't support it either, they had thought it a breach of their duties to prevent him from presenting his idea. It seemed that they had internalised a view of accountability that he completely supported. That question of responsibility to the process of community action – the separation between substance and the opportunity to be heard was one of the values they could look at. This seemed to be the right kind of question and an example of the PC feeling accountable in a positive way.

William said there were ideas in parliamentary procedure where they majority may have the rule, while minorities had rights, and he thought there were many in the community who supported that notion. So finding some way to capture that was very important for their community as a whole.

Carsten saw Malcom's point, but he wondered if they could come up with a clear distinction between a) content that was unwished for, and b) content that was wished for but quite a few people felt uncomfortable with, but was nevertheless valid for a RIPE community discussion. He said maybe it was worth coming up with a distinction to write this up.

Malcolm agreed and said they should avoid the term "unwanted content". In this case there was very little support for the viewpoint of the anti-shutdown proposal – but nevertheless a belief that the viewpoint should be heard. If you considered another case of unwanted content – a vendor giving an unwanted but entirely non-controversial commercial pitch – you might have no trouble with the content in itself, but still have a lot of people wanting this presentation to be vetoed.

William said that on the WG Chairs Collective mailing list, Nick had sent out an email about the Dubai government's requirements for speakers at RIPE 75. It raised the question about governments putting requirements on what the RIPE community could say. He said it seemed that the community needed the power to identify not what they didn’t want, but to build frameworks to test to see if something was being rejected for the right reasons.

Malcolm said that suppose for the sake of argument a future RIPE Meeting host country said "here are a list of things that can't be said from the stage" – RIPE could either say it would instruct the community how to comply, or another approach would be to say that they wouldn't hold the meeting at that location. He was in support of both approaches, but it raised the question of who made this choice, how, and under what circumstances.

Malcolm added that if someone had some objections about this (going to Dubai again in the future) – who did he tell it to, what kind of authority did he have, and how did he ensure his voice was heard.

William said there had been some discussion about this in the chairs list.

Malcolm asked if his earlier question about shutdowns would even be permitted in Dubai.

William said he understood the concern was more about discussing wars in the region. He said if a speaker got up to an open mic, thankfully they weren’t included in the requirement to register in advance. He said these rules even applied to remote participants. He said they should have a think about how these rules affected things in terms of accountability.

4) AOB

Carsten said he understood the discussion about having a new co-chair for the task force was over. He wondered if they should discuss this further.

William said the lack of discussion on the mailing list seemed to indicate that no one really wanted to spend any more time on this.

Malcolm said he'd be happy to leave this open – not to decide that they wanted only one chair, but rather to say they were happy with the current situation and could always change it in the future if they wanted to.

William said he was happy with that.

Carsten agreed.

William said Alexander had made a great post this morning and encouraged others to take a look at this. He recommended people share any other concerns or ideas on the mailing list.

Action Items

20170703-1 RIPE NCC to look into whether TF members can book their own flights and bill the RIPE NCC.
20170703-2: RIPE NCC to look for past statements/presentations that might be relevant to the TF’s work.

20170606-1: Malcolm to send some thoughts on what the group should discuss during the face-to-face meeting to the mailing list.

20170509-1: TF Chairs to put together work plan after the meeting.

20170509-2: RIPE NCC to look at arranging another (longer) face-to-face meeting for the task force.

20170306-1: RIPE NCC to further develop accountability mapping document with task force input.

20170306-2: Task force members to review and comment on accountability mapping document.

Closed Action Items

20170606-2: Alexander to send thoughts regarding the mapping document on the list.

20170606-3: William to ask Nurani and Filiz if they are still interested in contributing to the TF.