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RIPE Accountability Task Force Meeting Notes
30 November 2016

Attendees: 
Athina Fragkouli, Antony Gollan, Malcolm Hutty, Alexander Isavnin, Nurani Nimpuno, Paul Rendek, Wim Rullens, William Sylvester, Filiz Yilmaz

Agenda:

1) Introduction / finalise the agenda
2) Selection of chair
3) Scope of the Task Force
4) Deliverables
5) Openness and transparency
6) Information for website
7) Next meeting call
8) AOB

 
1) Introduction / finalise the agenda

Athina added another item (5) – about how transparent they wanted to be in terms of allowing observers to join Task Force calls or participate on the mailing list.


2) Selection of Chair

Alexander nominated Athina as Chair. Malcolm and Nurani supported her.

Nurani said they should have a RIPE community member for co-Chair. She suggested Hans Petter Holen could take this role.

Paul agreed they needed someone from the community, and suggested someone from the ASO AC.

Filiz said she was happy to help chair, but couldn’t commit without knowing what the time commitment would be.

Paul said the RIPE NCC would do the heavy lifting. The Chair would just need to help the group make decisions and keep things moving forward.

Filiz said they needed Hans Petter at the helm, but was happy to assist him in this. If he declined then they could find another solution.

Alexander offered to help co-chair.

William said he could also help with co-chairing, especially if Hans Petter was not available.

Athina suggested they not decide this on the call. She could act as interim Chair in the meantime until they had an opportunity to ask Hans Petter and discuss this further.

Nurani suggested they define the scope first, which would help them to understand the time commitments involved – this could be a month, a year, or they might end up as Chair of a new WG.


3) Scope of the Task Force

Athina suggested they do a round and give comments.

Alexander said accountability was primarily related to legal or commercial entities, but RIPE was not like these entities. When they moved into the ground of deliverables, they were stepping into the realm of governments and police, etc. RIPE was not a typical entity and perhaps they should start from there.

William said they needed to think what the current status of accountability was – who the stakeholders were, who they had accountability with. He noted that when registrars and registries were introduced into the domain space there were a lot of inbuilt accountability measures right from the start.

Filiz agreed with William and said communities could have accountability even when they didn’t have legally established identities. They could look at things like how the community selected Chairs and other individuals – this could be expressed somehow. They had been dealing with accountability issues over past several years and the Task Force could document and track these so outsiders could make sense of them.

**Action Item: Filiz suggested an action point should be for each of them to come up with a few topics they wanted the TF to address and share this on the mailing list.

Nurani said it might be good to put this into a context. Accountability questions hadn’t come from nowhere. RIPE had been improving its structures over the past 25 years, simply because it wanted high-performing structures. A lot of this work had been done over the years – some of this could be improved, but a lot of it just needed to be explained to the outside world. A lot of these questions were triggered when coming up for the Number Community’s proposal as part of the IANA transition and the CRISP team had been interviewed by the US Government’s accountability office. While they were satisfied with their answers, there were a lot of assumptions people had about the community’s accountability that were not correct. A lot of CCWG-Accountability’s work had come back to the RIPE community as well, and the CCWG wanted to impose their own accountability measures onto RIPE. RIPE didn’t have anything to hide and didn’t need to be in a defensive position.

Malcolm agreed with Filiz and Nurani. He suggested they identify what they were trying to do with these structures – what values they were trying to uphold, such as transparency or openness. Once these values had been identified, they could identify the mechanisms that were used to achieve them and provide an overview of how they might be improved.

Athina said there was an understanding that the RIPE community was accountable and did have its documents in place. Maybe they needed to review what was there and see if anything was missing. RIPE had to be able to explain how it worked, so it wasn’t seen as avoiding accountability questions.  She added that they were noting everyone’s comments and could use this to create a consistent scope.

Paul replied to Alexander’s earlier comment that RIPE didn’t have the accountability of other entities. He said that after the transition RIPE was now the body that made important decisions and this had exacerbated things. It was important to get this accountability effort off the ground, because they needed to be looking at things that were further off. He said they needed to separate CCWG-Accountability from RIPE accountability.

**Action Item: Paul said the RIPE NCC could examine areas to see where they already had accountability features in place. If they could map this out and show it to the Task Force, they could use this as a starting point to work from.

Malcolm supported Paul’s suggestion.

Athina said they could discuss this further on the mailing list.


4) Deliverables

Athina understood that the deliverables would be the review they would make, along with any new documentation that would be needed.

Malcolm said they could break this down into two separate categories: 1) A review of how things currently stood, which would result in a report with recommendations. 2) Communications materials for different audiences (to be developed after the review was completed). Some of this would be for external audiences like governments, and some would be for the RIPE community itself, particularly newcomers. He hoped the RIPE NCC could do the heavy lifting on the development of these materials.

Athina said the RIPE NCC was committed to providing any materials that would be needed.

Nurani agreed with Malcolm – mapping, review, suggested improvements, and communications efforts (noting efforts might involve more than just materials). They should also consider the possibility of an external view – which might help them to identify blind spots or gaps. This neutral party would have to chosen carefully.

William agreed with Malcolm and Nurani and said the review should include recommendations. A third party would add credibility as a stop-gap to ensure they weren’t missing key pieces. The deliverable should be an accountability scorecard or some measure – because accountability was not a finite value but something that would change over time. He said they should also think about community policies that might need to be established or maintained, possibly by a WG. This was something to consider, though it might be that accountability was just in the community’s DNA and wouldn’t require a policy.


5) Openness and transparency

Athina asked how they wanted to operate in terms of allowing outside observers to subscribe/participate on the mailing list or attend Task Force calls.

Malcolm contrasted the models of RIPE WGs that were open to participation by anyone (including casual one-off participation) – vs the CCWG – where there was open participation with no limitations, but you had to officially join. While he thought the Task Force should always be open, he didn’t have a strong view on which model should be used.

Nurani said they should report back to the community and the material should be publicly archived. Her only concern was if there was information that came up in a review or external report that would put the RIPE community in a difficult position – they would need to handle this in a sensitive way. She could see why they might not want to allow outside comments on a conference call, but a good chair could handle this. She supported generally being as open as possible.

Filiz agreed that membership should remain open. But if people were not members, they should be limited to observing. She didn’t want a situation where there was interference from observers who were missing context. She agreed they could allow observers to make comments at the end of meetings if they had good chairs. She suggested they open the mailing list for posts so the Task Force could receive comments from observers – but make it so that observers couldn’t receive emails from the list.

Athina noted that they would still have access to the public archives. 

Alexander noted that they had no deliverables to make “open” which was why he suggested they postpone this question.


6) Information for website

Athina noted that other Task Forces typically included things like scope, participants, email archives, etc. Given that they had no scope at this point, she suggested they include on this page the structure of the Task Force along with participants’ names. She said they would develop something and share this with the Task Force.

 
7) Next meeting call

It was agreed that they would run the meetings monthly, but would have one more meeting in December. Athina said she would create a doodle poll and share it with the group.

 
8) AOB

Filiz said they could move the chair selection discussion to the next meeting. The group agreed.

Athina said this would be an agenda point for the next meeting, and they could have some discussion on the mailing list to prepare.

END OF MEETING.

 
Action Items

20163011-1 - Task force members to each come up with a few topics they want the Task Force to address and share this on the mailing list.

20163011-2 - The RIPE NCC to map out areas where accountability features are already.