Dear task force members,

Last email from me today - here are the notes from Monday's call.

Cheers

Antony

***

Accountability TF call minutes - 13th call

Attendees:
Athina Fragkouli, Antony Gollan, Malcolm Hutty, Alexander Isavnin, Carsten Schiefner, Marco Schmidt, William Sylvester

Agenda:

1. Welcome back, finalise agenda
2. Review of open action items
3. Plan moving forward to RIPE 76 / Work plan for upcoming calls
4. Malcolm's document on consensus
5. Gathering TF feedback for the RIPE NCC to fit into document
6. AOB

1. Welcome back, finalise agenda

There were no changes to the agenda.

2. Review of open action items

20171204: RIPE NCC and TF Chair to publish an updated call schedule with additional "working calls" for each month.

William said they were planning to have more calls that would be focused on working through the document. They would take whoever was available and they would be a bit more casual. He suggested they could also create a slack group or use some other kind of collaboration tool for work between calls.

He asked what people thought would work best for their schedule. He asked if the 2pm slot worked for everyone and if they were happy using WebEx.

Everyone agreed that 2pm was fine, and WebEx was working well.

Alexander supported the idea of using some kind of collaboration tool.

20170907-1: Malcolm to finalise the mind-map as a supporting document for the task force.

It was clarified that this was really about tidying up the mind-map with any final comments or tweaks before it went into the supporting documents. William said they could close this item for now.

20170703-2: RIPE NCC to look for past statements/presentations that might be relevant to the TF's work.

Antony said they had looked at some presentations and gone through a number of mailing lists, but it was difficult without some direction in terms of what they were looking for.

William asked if they had spoken with any staff members who had experience with the RIPE community's past. He said they could close this one.

Antony said they were happy to if there was some direction on what they should be asking about.

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

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 there wasn't much to say about these other items. They were mostly placeholders that they had kept open for some time.

William said they could close the two relating to the accountability document, as that was mostly done. He asked if there were any new items they needed to add to the list.

***Action: Task force members to provide input on draft outline document.

***Action: Finalise draft report.

***Action: Review task force website content, add links to presentations.

3. Plan moving forward to RIPE 76 / Work plan for upcoming calls

William asked if they needed to make any more updates to the task force's web page. He asked if they should add the mapping document.

Athina said she wasn't sure they wanted to share documents that hadn't been discussed in the community and that were just supporting documents. She supported putting up the slides they had presented to the community. Putting the mapping document up without context might confuse people.

William said it looked like they needed to add links to presentations on the website, but agreed with Athina's point about their other working documents.

Carsten asked if there was anything they were afraid of sharing with the community.

William said information without context might just confuse people. It might be better to present this in one go to the community once they had done the work. He asked if Carsten thought people reading the document would understand it.

Carsten said he was just wondering if a maximum of transparency would be the way to go.

Athina said publishing the document might distract from their goal of publishing a draft report. The mapping document was in their mailing list archives and was in their presentation slides. It would make more sense for this to be attached to the final report. As long as it was a work in progress, it was enough that it was where it was currently.
Carsten said he was happy to rest his case for the time being.

William said the goal was to get input to finalise the document and publish the draft in time for the community to see it at RIPE 76, and then publish the final ahead of RIPE 77. The goal was to present this to the community, gather any feedback, and finalise the document and any other deliverables. They had a lot of work ahead of them, so they'd need to move ahead with bi-monthly calls to get through this. On these calls they could work on their actual deliverables.

Malcolm said they needed to have a decision point ahead of RIPE 76 where they could decide whether they had enough to put something forward to the community. If the answer was no, perhaps they might be willing to share what they had, with the understanding that they were not presenting it to the community in an official sense. They would need a date for this decision.

William said they probably didn't want to do it any earlier than 18 April and no later than 1 May. April would be aggressive, and the challenge in May was that they would be right up against the meeting.

Malcolm said his concern was that it should be a deliberate decision to present something to the community, and not something they stumbled into.

Alexander agreed they had a lot of things to do ahead of RIPE 76. They needed more active assignments to be given to task force members - like paragraphs to complete in the final document. They could also test their draft document on community members in a focus group.

William said those were both great points worth discussing further. As an arbitrary suggestion, he proposed 15 April as the date when they could decide whether they were near their goal and needed a couple of weeks, or whether they needed to change their strategy from publishing a draft to giving an update on their progress. He took Malcolm's point that they should publish something they supported, and not just publish something because they felt they needed to publish something.

Carsten cautioned against using a focus-group of community members - he didn't think this would go over well with the wider community.

William said the idea was just to test out their ideas by running them in front of a few people (possibly with RIPE NCC staff) to see how it would go over. They might want to discuss who would be in this group. It might be as little as running some stuff past a couple of people to see if they had any feedback to make it better.

4. Malcolm's document on consensus

Malcolm said this could be a key accountability tool itself once it was finalised, so he had taken a first shot at it. He was looking for everyone's reactions. It was quite complete in terms of the parts that were written (as a first draft), but he had noted in brackets that they needed some discussion on the critical role of the chair, which hadn't been written. He had also noted that there should be a brief description on the differences between RIPE and the IETF's understanding of consensus.

Alexander asked that any concerns or things that needed further discussion be clearly indicated in the text. As a non-native English speaker, there was the possibility that some of this might not be immediately obvious.

Malcolm said he had tried to write this clearly. But he agreed they were a community with differing levels of English and he could take another look at it with this in mind.

William said Alexander's feedback was important - this was something that should be a concern for the task force when they published their final deliverables, so anyone in their community could understand it. He thought Malcolm had written it quite clearly, but they could look at this when they were at the wordsmithing stage.

Malcolm noted that there had been a recent discussion on the role of the chair recently in the Address Policy WG that they could pull from.

***Action: RIPE NCC to post the relevant parts from the Address Policy WG's discussion one the role of the chair.

William said most people thought of the chair as the tie-breaker. He asked if that was consistent with the group's view.

Malcolm said there was some subtlety here. He didn't think the chair was a tie-breaker in terms of being the deciding voice that chose from one of two conflicting views. It was more in terms of helping the community to work to reach an agreement. One of the things the chair did was to define the terms of an objection. It either meant there was no consensus, or that someone was objecting in a way that was insufficient to hold up the process. As a community they relied quite heavily on the chair to make this determination. Malcolm said there were various reasons why a statement of "no" might not be a barrier to rough consensus being found. They wanted to see if they had an exhaustive list in the document, or whether they were only some examples.

Athina said she would be interested in understanding more about when the objection came from many voices. On what basis would the chair evaluate that this was not a valid objection? For example, how could a chair say that a massive objection was not the community's opinion and rather an effort to capture the process. That might be something they wanted to touch upon.

Carsten said as much as he agreed with Malcolm and Athina that they needed to discuss this point, he had a feeling that this wasn't the main role of a chair. The main role was to keep the WG running - managing the proposals, and other tasks.

William said this discussion was specifically related to the chair's role in terms of rough consensus. Chairs had many responsibilities and one of those was to moderate consensus.

Malcolm said that to capture Carsten's point, perhaps he should modify the heading to say it was the critical role of the chair in making a consensus decision. This wasn't about creating a job description for the chair - the chair had many roles - this was only in terms of consensus.

Carsten suggested they should add a paragraph to this effect.

William proposed that Carsten draft something and send it to the list.

***Action: Carsten to prepare paragraph for chair section of consensus document and send to the list.

5. Gathering TF feedback for the RIPE NCC to fit into document

William said the format of the working calls would be to get the section headings they would be discussing out to task members ahead of the meeting so they could speak to these and the RIPE NCC could feed this back into the document.

6. Any Other Business (AOB)

There were no AOBs.

William encouraged everyone to read the recent emails on the ML and share any comments.


Action Items

20171204: RIPE NCC and TF Chair to publish an updated call schedule with additional "working calls" for each month.

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

20180205-1: Task force members to provide input on draft outline document.

20180205-2: Finalise draft report.

20180205-3: Review task force website content, add links to presentations.

20180205-5: RIPE NCC to post the relevant parts from the Address Policy WG's discussion one the role of the chair.

20180205-6: Carsten to prepare paragraph for chair section of consensus document and send to the list.


Closed Action Items

20170907-1: Malcolm to finalise the mind-map as a supporting document for the task force.

20170703-2: RIPE NCC to look for past statements/presentations that might be relevant to the TF's work.

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.