Dear all,

Here are the notes from yesterday's call. Please let me know any corrections or anything I've missed.

Cheers

Antony



RIPE Accountability Task Force Meeting Notes

 

6 February 2017


Attendees:

 

Athina Fragkouli, Antony Gollan, Hans Petter Holen, Alexander Isavnin, Peter Koch, Nurani Nimpuno, Paul Rendek, Wim Rullens, William Sylvester, Filiz Yilmaz

1) Welcome, Finalise Agenda, Adopt Minutes
2) Reviewing Action Items
3) Agreement on Updated Scope
4) Task Force Membership/Mailing List Subscriptions
5) Agreement on Website Content
6) Timeline and Workplan
7) Scheduling Future Calls
8) Participation of Task Force Members



1) Welcome, Finalise Agenda, Adopt Minutes

There were no changes to the agenda. The minutes from the last meeting were adopted.

2) Reviewing Action Items

Antony ran through the action items. He noted that most of these had been done. There were three remaining items:

20171801-2: RIPE NCC to come up with a draft timeline for the TF.

An initial version had been shared with the Chairs and the RIPE NCC would be updating this before sharing with the task force.

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.

They were still waiting for task force members to share these topics.

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

The RIPE NCC was still working on this and needed a little more time.

3) Agreement on Updated Scope

The updated scope was adopted without comment.  

4) Task Force Membership/Mailing List Subscription

William noted that at a meeting between the Chairs and the RIPE NCC, Antony had volunteered to email each new subscriber and ask if they were interested in joining the task force or were just going to observe. He noted that trolling or a flood of messages from non-task force members might be a problem, but he felt that they could deal with this if and when it arose. He said if anyone had any issues with this approach they could reach out to Filiz directly.

5) Agreement on Website Content

The task force agreed on the website content.

6) Timeline and Workplan

Antony shared the initial draft timeline and noted that most of the deadlines were related to preparing and agreeing on the draft scope. Since the task force had already agreed on this, they could remove most of these. The only other thing they really had to add at the moment was relating to the action item where the RIPE NCC would outline various accountability areas. Initially they had planned to have this ready by 6 February but they needed a little more time.

Athina noted that this timeline had been prepared with the expectation that the task force would have a call around every month. The RIPE NCC could then send any revised text based on what they heard from the call, and then have a deadline for feedback. She understood that the group had now agreed on the scope, so they could move the sending of the scope to the RIPE mailing list forward. She said they could keep the dates that were already in the timeline for other types of  feedback they needed, so they could keep up the momentum around calls and commenting periods.

Nurani agreed that they should send the scope to the community now. There were no objections.

7) Scheduling Future Calls

William said they would look at scheduling each call for the same timeslot each month (2-3pm, UTC+1) and if people weren't able to make it, they could send comments to the Chairs.

8) Participation of Task Force Members

Filiz said this was something that they all needed to talk about - traditionally a task force was a group that was assigned a specific project. The task force sat down and got the work done. So in that sense, they were a little over 10 people and they were expected to produce some results. This was not a working group - they were all committed towards the work to be done. She asked if they were all on the same page, whether some people had timing issues, or the information being sent out was not early enough or not mature enough to produce ideas from the group. If they were to continue like this, were they okay to base everything on two or three people participating?


Nurani agreed and said they were a task force and would get to work. They weren't making any future decisions about the RIPE community. Looking at the scope was a mapping exercise, so provided that they reported back to the RIPE community and got its feedback, they were fine. She asked who were the task force members, if it was whoever was on the call. And if there were only three members on the call, could they move forwards? Maybe this would be clearer once they started distributing tasks. So maybe they also needed to ensure they stuck to the scope and didn't turn the task force into something much bigger than what it was.

Filiz ran through the list of task force members that was published on the website. She said as far as she knew, everyone on this list had either sent something to the mailing list or had attended a call. She knew what Nurani meant, they didn't make decisions on behalf of the RIPE community, but they did make decisions on behalf of the task force. So perhaps they needed to institute a minimum number of task force members to respond to something.

Paul suggested that the RIPE NC could send whatever the task force required to the mailing list with a deadline to respond. That way they wouldn’t need to worry so much whether someone was on the call.


Filiz agreed that they needed some kind of deadlines and said they would heavily rely on the RIPE NCC in this respect.

Paul said the RIPE NCC was happy to hold all of this - maintain the deadlines and send reminders. He said the task force could agree on what was an appropriate deadline, and if nothing was received by then, the Chairs could make the decision to send something to the community or to hold on to it and give it more work.

Filiz said she was seeing comments from the chat that they were in agreement here. She thought that if one person proposed something, another person agreed, and there was only silence from others - then it was on the Chairs to do a sanity check and decide whether it should go ahead. She asked the group to be responsive as this would probably move pretty fast.

Peter noted that they were still in an administrative phase and hadn't had much to work on yet. He thought they could improve on the mailing list discussions which would save time and keep things moving between phone calls. He also thought a face to face meeting would be helpful, and hopefully they would have one at RIPE 74. He hoped they could arrange this soon, so they could arrange travel times. He thought the Monday morning slot was usually the best.

**Action: RIPE NCC to arrange face-to-face meeting for the task force at RIPE 74.

William said there were some things scheduled for working group Chairs on Monday mornings, so this slot might be difficult. He added that they were also investigating getting a plenary slot at the RIPE Meeting.

Nurani said an update at the meeting would be valuable and if they could make this an interactive session it would be an opportunity to get more community feedback.

William suggested they could also try and create a policy where people just checked in on the mailing list - even if it was just to agree with what someone else had said - to show that they were reading it.

Alexander said he was interested in seeing the results from the RIPE NCC's accountability mapping.

The Chairs asked task force members to send any other comments to the mailing list.

 

Action Items


20170602-1: RIPE NCC to arrange face-to-face meeting for the task force at RIPE 74.
 
20171801-2: RIPE NCC to come up with a draft timeline for the TF.  
 
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. 

 

Completed Action Items

 

20171801-1: RIPE NCC to capture the wording of the TF’s comments on scope and produce an updated document to send to the mailing list.  
 
20171801-3: Filiz to start a discussion about transparency/web documentation on the mailing list.  
 
20171801-4: Filiz to start a discussion regarding openness of TF calls on the mailing list.  
 
20171801-5: RIPE NCC to make poll covering Feb, March, April, and one meeting before RIPE 74. The deadline for TF members to enter their                preferences should be one week.  
 
20171801-6: Filiz to start a discussion on the mailing list about how open the TF should be.