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.*