RIPE Accountability Task
Force Meeting Notes
3 April 2017
Attendees: Athina Fragkouli,
Antony Gollan,
Malcolm Hutty, Peter Koch, Nurani Nimpuno, Paul Rendek, Wim
Rullens, Carsten
Schiefner, Marco Schmidt, William Sylvester, Filiz Yilmaz.
1)
Welcome, finalise agenda, adopt minutes
2)
Review of accountability mapping document
3)
Draft scope - feedback from mailing list
4) Review of timeline
5) RIPE 74 preparation
(presentation and
tf meeting)
6)
Review of action items
7) AOB
1)
Welcome, finalise agenda, adopt minutes
There were no changes to the
agenda. The
minutes were adopted without comment.
2)
Review of accountability mapping document
Antony ran through the
changes to the
accountability mapping document. He said that after looking at
this, they had
decided it would be worth evaluating the importance and quality
of the existing
documentation that they had already identified and so had added
columns for
this. This could help the TF to prioritise which issues they
should focus on.
He said they had also been
thinking that
another important aspect was whether the “output” that resulted
from the
performance of a certain function was also documented. For
example, while the
RIPE Chair’s authority to determine the location of RIPE
Meetings was well documented,
from an accountability perspective it might also be important
that the
individual decisions were themselves documented.
Most of the links supplied
in this column
were examples, as these were often singular instances (e.g. a
specific mailing
list announcement).
When it came to documenting
things that
took place at RIPE Meetings, they had provided an example of a
Daily Meeting
Report, Steno Transcript and a Video Archive – but they weren’t
sure if this
indirect or ad-hoc documentation was adequate for some areas,
such as decisions
taken by the plenary.
Athina continued and said
that for certain
bodies, some powers were implied but not explicitly given in the
documentation.
For example, for the WG Chairs, there was a power to assign
action items to the
RIPE NCC – however this power wasn’t explicitly documented
anywhere. She wanted
to flag that there could be instances where a WG assigned a task
to the RIPE
NCC, but the Executive Board disagreed. What did this mean in
terms of
accountability?
The procedure to replace WG
Chairs differed
between WGs and was of varying quality.
For the plenary, it was not
entirely clear which
parts it was responsible for or where the power of the RIPE
Chair ended and the
power of the PC began.
Regarding the role of RIPE
Meeting
attendees, remote participation in PC elections was allowed, but
you needed to
physically attend a RIPE Meeting to vote in NRO NC elections.
She noted that task forces
were defined in
ripe-004 but this document was obsolete.
Filiz said this was great
work – it was
structured and would help them to identify gaps. In the past the
RIPE PC had
tried to categorise what ran into the plenary, and they had
encountered these
kinds of issues – what were BoFs, and what were task forces,
etc. If they
continued with this documentation approach, they should note
down the
highlights of the analysis – what was missing in general.
William
noted that after a discussion
with Antony the previous week, they would send around an updated
version of the
document after the call with the various parts numbered – this
would make it
easier for the TF to discuss and track specific changes to the
document.
Nurani said it was good to
get this
document and it showed some gaps they were not aware of – for
example she would
have thought they had adequate documentation for task forces. In
other
communities, there was a tendency to become overly bureaucratic
once you
started looking at these kinds of things. There was a tendency
to think that
you needed to document everything to achieve accountability.
This could be
counterproductive. In ICANN for example, if you were an expert
in procedures
you did fine – but if you didn’t know them you often found it
difficult to get
work done. For the RIPE community it might be fine or even
desirable that some
things were loosely documented.
Peter shared some of
Nurani’s concerns,
particularly given some of the feedback they had received. He
said they should
also consider whether these gaps had ever caused a problem. But
looking at these
documents, maybe it was important to consider also where some of
these
documents had come from – e.g. the RIPE Meeting code of conduct
hadn’t been approved
by the RIPE community but rather by the WG Chairs and the PC.
Some changes to
the PDP had come from the WG Chairs collective and might not
have made the
rounds through the community. He added that he was pretty sure
that there had
been adequate task force
documentation in the past, but maybe it hadn’t survived an
earlier website
redesign.
Paul
and Carsten also supported
Nurani's point.
Filiz agreed with Nurani's point regarding unnecessary
complexity but said the
importance and quality columns in the document would help to
prevent this. She
said they were still in the stocktaking part of the process.
Malcolm agreed with Nurani, but said it would be helpful for
newcomers to find
documentation that explained things that “old timers” in the
community already
knew.
Filiz
noted that several RIPE Chair
roles were “pending” in terms of the documentation – she asked
what that meant.
Antony
clarified that this referred to
the Draft RIPE Chair Function Description and the Draft RIPE
Chair Selection Procedure
that were currently circulating for community comment. As they
had noted in the
mapping document, if these two documents were accepted by the
RIPE community,
then most of the current gaps relating to the RIPE Chair
function would be
filled.
Filiz
asked that a link to these draft documents
be included there.
Filiz
noted that WG Chairs also had the
power to make additional consensus decisions on anything in
their WG and this
wasn’t included in the document.
Athina said they could add that.
Peter noted that not all WG outputs would be "best practice
documents"
as the document currently indicated. He added that the
publication of RIPE
Documents might have some gaps.
3) Draft scope - feedback
from mailing
list
Filiz said they needed to respond to Daniel's feedback on the
RIPE Discussion List.
Nurani said she didn't think anyone in the TF thought they
needed to produce
new processes for the community. She did take his point about
the timeframe. If
they hadn't been clear enough, they could improve this. They
shouldn't be
making this overly complex - but that didn't mean they couldn't
map out what was
already there. And procedures could also be simple – something
could be as
simple as "a Chair declares consensus in a room".
Athina said the crux of the issue seemed to be the second bullet
point -
"Document existing RIPE community structures or processes where
needed." She thought that where they had an easily accepted
practice, the
TF could produce something documenting this. This seemed to be
what he was
objecting to. She noted that TFs had documented procedures in
the past. She
thought they should clarify what they intended to do around this
point. The
concern was that the TF might create a document and the
community would have no
idea where it came from, but this could be solved with clear
communication and
regular updates.
Malcolm said he thought the key point with that bullet point was
"existing".
Peter said he believed that Daniel's wider point was about
applying formality to
a community that generally believed "in the absence of rules,
common sense
will prevail". They needed to clarify that they didn't have to
fill in all
of the gaps they found. He could see where Daniel was coming
from here.
Filiz said the draft scope wording might be problematic but what
they were attempting
to do was not - their main purpose was to review existing
accountability, and
identify gaps that would be worth filling, and document them in
a way that would
help the community to discuss the issue.
Carsten said it might be a good idea to offset this a little
bit, where the
first part was the work to be done, and the second part was the
results they
were trying to achieve.
Peter said he'd rather not see them do a pure paper-status
evaluation - they
weren't certifying RIPE for an ISO standard. The important part
was to map the
reality to the documents and vice versa. It was about looking at
the PDP or the
WG Chair selection processes and how things worked in practice.
Maybe this was
already covered in the scope, but he didn't read it that way.
He'd like to have
the reality-check aspect included in there rather than just
producing papers
and having others produce papers.
Filiz asked Peter to elaborate.
He said that looking at what was documented was valuable – but
there was a real
life component that they might miss if they only looked at
accountability in
terms of documents. The PDP was used in various WGs, and the way
it was lived and
mapping this against how it
was documented
seemed to be the
real task in front of them. He didn't see this reflected in the
current scope.
Filiz asked if he was looking for a more detailed scope. She
added that they
should change "ensure" in the first bullet point to
"verify".
Peter said if they just looked at the documentation they could
find that
everything was fine and safe. Accountability meant more than
that to him. The
bullet points to him seemed to be about producing documentation.
Nurani understood Peter's point that just mapping and
documenting didn't in
itself improve accountability. But she needed to separate the
mandate of the TF
from the community. She thought the TF did have the mandate to
fix some things.
If they saw that something was broken, they could either point
this out to the
community and ask what they thought, but in some cases, it might
be a simple
fix where they could come up with a recommendation. But it
wasn't up to them to
try and fix all the broken processes in the community. In some
cases the
community might say "we are fine with this broken process, go
away"
and that would be fine.
Malcolm said they clearly didn't have the authority to change
processes, they
could only raise things with the community which would include
recommendations
of why and what – and maybe recommendations of how to change
things. He didn't
think it was out of their mandate to recommend something. He
thought that this
was ultimately a small detail and they shouldn’t get hung up on
it. He said
they all agreed that they wouldn't be dreaming up incredibly
complex new
processes, but they might be able to say to the community "here
are some
things we've found and here are some recommendations to get the
ball
rolling".
William said if there were any more comments, TF members should
share them on
the list sooner rather than later, as they needed to wrap this
up.
4) Review of timeline
Antony ran through the draft timeline he had prepared:
https://calendar.google.com/calendar/embed?src=89m7nafm0qmn2dk1phn76ek48c%40group.calendar.google.com&ctz=Europe/Amsterdam
He
said the idea was just to create a
series of regular deadlines for work to be passed between the
RIPE NCC and the
TF, structured around a call on the first Monday of every month.
He said the
RIPE NCC could maintain this and TF members could email him with
anything they
wanted to add.
There were no comments.
5) RIPE 74 preparation
(presentation and
tf meeting)
Filiz said the RIPE NCC had helped to prepare some draft slides
that she had
submitted to request a slot. They had gotten 30 minutes on
Tuesday morning at
9am. She said they would try to keep the presentation to a bare
minimum and
gather comments from the audience. She said she would like to be
able to share
their draft mapping document with the community ahead of this
session with most
of the fields completed.
Antony ran through the organisation of the TF’s face to face
meeting at RIPE
74. He said it would be during the Tuesday lunch break and he
would send around
a poll to get attendance numbers for the catering.
Athina asked if they should enable remote participation options
for the
meeting.
William said could ask this in the poll and decide when they had
an idea of attendance.
6) Review of action items
20171801-02: RIPE NCC to come up with draft timeline for the TF.
William
said they could close this
action.
***Action:
Respond to community
comments on ripe-list regarding draft scope.*
***Action:
TF to revise draft scope.*
***Action:
RIPE NCC to send around poll
for face to face meeting at RIPE 74.*
7) AOB
William said next meeting would be in one month. In the
meantime, he encouraged
TF members to comment on the document that would be circulated
after the call.
Paul
said he wanted to make sure they
were on the same page about how they presented the mapping
document to the RIPE
community. He said it was quite a lot to digest and they needed
to find a way
to distil the findings in the document down to something that
could be
understood easily.
Malcolm said the document was just a working material they had
come up with to
help them to identify what needed to be worked on. They were
just starting out
and this was all this document represented.
Filiz agreed with Malcolm but saw Paul's point. She said the
decision about
what to do at the RIPE Meeting seemed to be the correct one –
she said
previously the idea was just to give an update, so in that 30
minutes just to
give a status update to show the community where they were, and
they had a
document they were digging into to get them to the next phase.
She agreed that
they needed to communicate this well – because this was not the
output. She
said they would work with Antony and Paul about how they should
message this.
William thanked everyone and said they should continue this on
the ML.
Action
Items
20170403-1: Respond
to community comments on
ripe-list regarding draft scope.
20170403-2: TF
to revise draft scope.
20170403-3: RIPE
NCC to send around poll for face
to face meeting at RIPE 74.
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
20171801-02:
RIPE NCC to come up with
draft timeline for the TF.