Dear task force members,
Here's the minutes from Monday's
call. Let me know any changes or clarifications.
Cheers
Antony
+++
RIPE Accountability Task Force Meeting Notes
4 December 2017
Attendees:
Athina Fragkouli, Antony Gollan, Malcolm Hutty (temporarily), Alexander Isavnin, Peter Koch, Wim Rullens, Carsten Schiefner, William Sylvester
1. Welcome,
finalise agenda, adopt minutes
2.
Review of open action
items
3. Review open questions to the task force.
4. Discuss follow up from RIPE meeting to the community
5. Any Other Business (AOB)
1. Welcome, finalise agenda, adopt minutes
William said they would be changing things up a bit and the secretariat would be doing some of the heavy lifting with capturing input from the TF and writing this up, and maybe they could look at moving to more regular calls to get through this work.
Peter added that he wanted to note something in the AOBs.
2. Review of open action items
Antony went through the action items.
20171009: RIPE NCC to put together a list of questions to ask the community based on TF discussions.
This was completed.
20170907-1: Malcolm to finalise the mind-map as a supporting document for the task force. [Added after the call].
This was still open, but there was no urgency here.
20170907-2: RIPE NCC to research and report back on what governance obligations are there for the RIPE NCC to abide by community policy.
Athina had looked into this, and aside from one reference in the yearly annual report produced by the RIPE NCC, there was no such stated obligation. They had raised this in their questions to the RIPE community ahead of RIPE 75. This could be closed.
20170907-3: the task force to clarify with the community: Is public benefit a core aspirational factor, or are RIPE community members working for their own benefit? (There is also likely some research that can be done into RIPE Documents here as well).
This was completed.
20170907-4: Malcolm to draft a definition of consensus/rough consensus that can be presented to the community.
Malcolm had sent this just ahead of the call and this could be closed.
20170703-2: RIPE NCC to look for past statements/presentations that might be relevant to the TF’s work.
They had looked into this somewhat, but there was likely more that could be done and so they could leave this open.
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.
While the mapping document had been updated recently, these three items could be kept open as placeholders.
3. Review open questions to the
task force.
William said they could go through the headings in the outline for the draft report that they had prepared in their face-to-face meeting in September.
1.What is accountability
William said accountability was about how the community performed checks and balances to ensure they lived by their values of openness and transparency, how they were able to resist being unduly influenced by external factors, and about ensuring they were able to operate on consensus, and giving people the ability to be heard.
Malcolm said accountability was about the mechanisms, processes and structures that ensured they adhered to/conformed to the values that they had agreed on. Accountability was also about providing mechanisms to correct the community when it erred.
Antony asked
if the ability to justify the community’s decisions was also a
part of this.
Malcolm said if you could establish that the community’s processes were accepted and agreed upon, and then you would be able to justify the community’s decisions on the basis of those principles.
Malcolm
said he had also been thinking that when they wrote up the
community’s values
and so on, they would have to deal with counter-examples – where
something had
happened in the past that seemed to contradict the stated
values. He said there
were three categories here: 1) A misunderstanding of what had
happened in a
particular case, 2) Where something was a mistake and shouldn’t
have happened,
and 3) The TF had gotten it wrong and something might not be a
core value (for
example). He thought many people would assume 3), but the first
task would be
to work out which of the three cases it was.
1.1
Contributions of documentation to accountability
1.2 List of usefulness and risks of over documentation
Antony suggested
they address these two headings together and they could decide
later whether
they should be combined under one heading. The first was about
the value of
documentation in contributing to accountability – the second was
about calming
community fears that the group would be setting out to document
everything –
and explaining that there were actually risks from
over-documenting everything.
William
said there had been some documents that were marked as obsolete,
and there
seemed to be a feeling that this was sometimes done in error.
This might be
something that they wanted to raise with the community. Maybe
they wanted to
have another “historical document” category.
Alexander
said in some cases they had documents that were obsoleted by
another document
and it was clear. However, in other cases documents were
obsolete and there was
no way to know what they were obsoleted by or why they had been
obsoleted.
Athina
said in Dubai when they were drafting the slides for the
presentation, they had
a short discussion about the values of documentation and the
risks of
over-documenting. They were talking about how documentation
created certainty
for the community, but over-documentation made it more difficult
for others to
join the discussions, and took away elements of flexibility and
trust that
underlined the community.
1.3
Benefits of Accountability
1.3.1
Resistance to Capture,
including insider capture
William
said resistance to capture seemed to be the important thing
here. But
accountability was also about how they conducted themselves as a
group.
Carsten
asked if the resistance to capture came up in the presentation
in Dubai, or if
this was something the TF would address at some point.
William said this was something that the TF had repeatedly discussed. As they looked at the transition of the IANA functions contract, much of the wider Internet community’s discussions had been about how you ensured the various communities weren't subject to capture. There were also questions about how to protect this from people who might want to harm this system in some way.
Athina said this was placed in this section because when you were talking about accountability and who the beneficiary parties were, they were saying that accountability mechanisms were there so that all parties could have a say and be represented. But when you had a capture of this by one group, then the other groups felt they lost room to advance their interests.
1.4 What
is the subject of accountability
1.4.1 Processes
1.4.2 Roles
1.4.2.1 RIPE Chair
1.4.2.2
Working Group Chairs
1.4.2.3
Participants
1.4.2.4
Groups of
Participants
1.4.3 Plenary
1.4.4 RIPE NCC
Carsten asked
if accountability really ended with the RIPE Chair and the WG
Chairs, or
whether also the WG participants themselves should be held
accountable in some
way or another.
William
said he could see this being relevant when it was a group of
participants as a
whole, such as the plenary.
Carsten
wondered if there was any sub-group to the plenary that should
be accountable
as well.
William asked
if this would include TFs or BoFs and whether these would fit
under the plenary.
He asked if an individual participant should be accountable.
This was relevant
when they talked about the code of conduct and when they looked
at examples
where WG chairs had been removed in the past. In the Anti-Abuse
WG, the chair
supposedly had a personal agenda they were trying to advance
through their WG,
the group rejected it and forcefully removed them as chair. He
asked about
someone contributing from the floor – did the community have
processes for
censure or to not recognise someone who was acting out of order?
He couldn’t
think of any specific examples, but noted they had some heated
discussions in
the GM, so it wasn’t hard to imagine.
Athina
said the idea here as she understood it was to identify the
structures and
processes of the community that showed accountability. There
were people that
performed specific roles within these structures. Here they
could show how the
community ensured they were held accountable. So, for a WG Chair
– they were
selected by the WG to perform a specific role, and during this
period of time
they were accountable for performing this role correctly –
ensuring there was
an agenda, coordinating discussions, declaring consensus calls
as appropriate.
So, these people in certain roles were held accountable by
certain procedures
that were either well documented or were not documented but
everyone understood
them and they made sense to them.
Peter
said he wanted to respond to the recollection of the WG Chair
removal. The
so-called code of conduct was interesting from an accountability
perspective –
because they could look at how this came into being and who made
that decision.
The code of conduct didn't exist when that chair was removed,
and there weren't
really any provisions in there that the chair broke, rather it
was other
community expectations. He mentioned the recent case with the
chair in the Database
WG who had stepped down – which was about someone acting both as
a person and
as a particular community role. There was a higher expectation
towards people
in a role as compared to others. But this was documented nowhere
– it was a kind
of spontaneous mob decision making – or something like community
shunning – it
didn't really exist in an accountability context. He said the
plenary being accountable
was an interesting concept.
The
group agreed to add individual participants and groups of
participants to the
list under roles.
4. Discuss follow up from RIPE meeting to the community
William
said that going forward they were thinking about how they could
produce a draft
report to show to the community. The idea was to take feedback
from the Dubai
meeting to share to the list. He encouraged everyone to read
Malcolm's document
and share any thoughts with the TF. He thought for the most part
they were just
looking to confirm what they thought was already out in the
community. As they
looked to accelerate some of this work between now and RIPE 76,
they were
looking at setting up optional interim working calls where they
would run
through some stuff on the screen, and then keep the regular
calls for
coordination.
The goal
was to build a final draft that could be shared and they could
then go through
the process of communicating this with the community as they had
in the past.
He thought they'd had some good community discussion after their
previous email
and good support during their presentation at RIPE 75. The
primary feedback
from Dubai was that everyone wanted more detail. They had shared
some
high-level stuff on ripe-list and talked about what they'd done,
but everyone
wanted to know more about what they’d looked at and some of
their findings. For
example, on this call they'd talked about the removal of a WG
chair, but two
WGs still didn't have any process around chair removal, so this
was one case where
they could take details back to the community and say here's one
thing that
could be a part of creating a new WG – documenting a selection
procedure.
Peter said William’s suggestions
made perfect
sense. One of the points was about increasing the pace a bit –
there were four
or five regular calls until RIPE 76, and if they looked at the
dates, one was
on Easter Monday. They might want to adjust the exact dates -
the RIPE NCC could
do this with the Chair. He agreed that maybe they needed extra
calls in the
middle of the month.
5. Any Other Business (AOB)
Peter said a number of things had recently been discussed on the ripe-list – such as the role of the RIPE Chair, things that happened in and around Dubai, and around the chair of one WG. He said they might want to collect some of these hot topics and interesting observations shared between members of the TF that wouldn't necessarily lead to action, but would inform their discussion. He promised he would send one or two emails to the mailing list.
William said this was a good idea.
He said ripe-list
discussions about the role of the RIPE Chair would be
interesting. He agreed that
they should publish an updated call schedule ahead of the RIPE
Meeting. With
the "inter-sessional" meetings, they wouldn't need the whole
group –
just whoever was available. Anything they came up with would be
shared with the
rest of the group. The idea was that these one-hour meetings
were probably not
the best way to work through these details.
***Action: RIPE NCC and TF Chair to publish an updated meeting schedule with additional "working calls" for each month.
Action Items
20171204: RIPE NCC and TF Chair to publish an updated call schedule with additional “working calls” for each month.
20170907-1: Malcolm to finalise the mind-map as a supporting document for the task force. [Added after the call].
20170703-2: RIPE NCC to look for past statements/presentations that might be relevant to the TF’s work.
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.