Dear task force members, Here are the notes from yesterday's call. Cheers Antony *** Accountability TF call minutes - 16th call (working call) Attendees: Antony Gollan, Alexander Isavnin, Wim Rullens, William Sylvester 1.5. How are the subjects held accountable? -Appears to be held to agreed processes -Applying a standard or value or norm 1.6. To Whom are the subjects held accountable? 1.6.1. Who is the RIPE community? 1.6.2. Broader Internet Community Alexander said the RIPE community as it was formed was accountable to the idea of global Internet connectivity. With this in mind, they could discuss who the RIPE community was: a community of people interested in working on and supporting global Internet connectivity. Maybe those people who were using [rather than working on] connectivity could be understood to be the "broader Internet community". William said he thought they did have the broader Internet community as a stakeholder. Internet users were affected by the things that RIPE did. They also had governments and states. And they had ICANN. The other RIRs were also all stakeholders in what they were doing. He asked if they had commitments to these parties. Antony noted that in their face to face meeting, someone had said that RIPE should only be accountable to itself. Alexander said this was a good point. At the meeting they had also discussed that if they went down the road of being accountable to things like human rights or "the greater good", they would be opening the door to involvement from other parties such as governments and this could backfire. They might want to include some kind of statements on what they thought about these aspects. William said he agreed with the point that RIPE was accountable to RIPE. Others might benefit from RIPE's activities - and people from other communities were free to participate, but that didn't mean that RIPE was accountable to these communities. Alexander said they had talked about how RIPE was open to everyone, but people forgot the idea that RIPE was about IP connectivity. So people might have the feeling that their business was affected by IP connectivity (e.g. intellectual property advocates) but they didn't have a role to play in improving IP connectivity and so were not part of the community. 2.2. Values 2.2.1. Process - Transparent - Accessible - Open Participation - Bottom-up self-regulatory structure - Consensus-Based decision making William said this was a good segue to the point on RIPE being open to participation. They did encourage others to engage, and anyone could participate within the community. Everything was open, there were clear communications and they had bottom-up mechanisms for decision making. Alexander asked if they had something in the mapping document about this. Antony said they had a section called "Open/Transparent/Inclusive/Bottom-up" near the end of the document. The things that were included under that heading, such as archived mailing lists, were intended to serve as evidence or "documentation" that the community had these features. Antony asked if they should include some wording on "why" the community had chosen to make these values (open, transparent, bottom-up) such a central part of its processes. Alexander said he thought these were default European values at the location and time where the community was formed. He had first come to the community with very different values and it had taken him some time to get used to how the community worked. If these values had not been there since the beginning of the community, it could have formed grown into else and likely would not have been as successful. William said the community had lasted a long time and overcome adversity because of its values - this was an important point to make. If they didn't have these values, they might not have been supported by the greater Internet. The values were part of their DNA and who they were as a community. Alexander said the Internet couldn't have become the Internet if it didn't have these values. In the ITU, those values might be stated somewhere, but they did not live up to them: governments and corporations had oversized influence there. That's why the Internet model overcame their model. Keeping these values, which had led to the growth of the Internet, allowed them to make a statement about the RIPE community being accountable to itself. They shouldn't shift their accountability outside of the community - because being accountable to themselves led to the success of the broader community. William said by setting and adhering to these values, the community held itself to a higher standard and kept itself accountable through the way that it conducted discusions, made decisions, etc. 2.2.2. Substantive - Everyone can use the Internet - Inter-connected Networks (core network value) - Stable and Reliable Internet - RIPE has a defined scope William said that as a community they provided support/enabled the interconnection of networks and supported operational needs. Antony asked if they wanted to talk about the distinction between Process vs Substantive values and some of the implications around this. Alexander said that Malcolm had been the one to really make this distinction and it might be worth letting him comment here. William suggested they leave it there, and hopefully some of the other task force members would be able to share their thoughts on the mailing list.