Dear TF members,

Here are the minutes from our second call. Let me know any changes/corrections.

Cheers

Ant

***

Draft Minutes - Code of Conduct TF: Second Call
19 October 2020, 17:00-18:00 (UTC+2)

Present:
Denesh Bhabuta, Antony Gollan, Brian Nisbet, Leo Vegoda, Salam Yamout

1.     Minutes/Agenda

The draft minutes from the last call were accepted.

The group agreed to record calls from now on.

There were no changes to the agenda.

Leo asked if they should aim for a regular meeting every two weeks.

Brian said by now it was clear they wouldn’t have anything substantial ready in time for RIPE 81. He supported meeting every two weeks, provided this worked with their updated time frame.

Leo said the reason it was important to have regular meetings was that they had three work items: the updated CoC itself, a document about selection of the CoC Team, and a document outlining procedures. This could take a few months, and having some predictability was definitely an advantage.

Action: Antony to share a poll with the group to agree on a regular bi-weekly meeting.

The group ran through the questions document that Leo had put together:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fbJaJVaOPlCjr40kVMvWkV2AhRPFRrCeJJNrgAIWk6I/edit  

Introduction

Antony asked if some of the parts in the introduction about how the CoC applied to could be moved to the “Scope” section later in the document.

Brian said he liked having this in the introduction - he wanted them to make it clear that: “Yes, this definitely applies to you.”

Denesh said the W3C’s CoC had a glossary at the end. One thing that struck him from looking at the RIPE community’s draft was that they talked about “participants” but didn’t define what that was. They also didn’t consider the people running the event.

In Scope

Leo said he’d asked about people who might be engaged to run the meeting. This made sense to him, as it was the CoC for “RIPE” rather than “RIPE Meetings”. So, RIPE NCC staff should be covered, as the purpose of the RIPE NCC was to help RIPE do its job.

Brian said he agreed with this, but he was also concerned that trying to force the RIPE NCC as a legal entity/employer of staff to do something might lead to adoption problems.

Antony said he’d checked this with their HR department when putting together the impact analysis on the draft v3.0. They hadn’t raised any concerns – and said they would link the RIPE NCC’s internal staff CoC to the RIPE community’s.

Protected People

Leo explained that the list started with people who were almost certainly covered (e.g. RIPE Meeting attendees) and that this became less clear as you went down the list. The idea was to identify where the boundary was. For example, if a person attended a RIPE DNS session and a DNS OARC session, he thought they shouldn’t be bound by the RIPE CoC in the latter venue, as they didn’t bring any “RIPEness” with them.

Antony asked if someone could show a pattern of abuse by a someone in another venue – would the CoC Team not take this into account?

Brian said this was one of the biggest issues with CoCs that he’d come across. The general feeling was that evidence could be presented (“Person X did something terrible at Meeting Y”) and this was certainly relevant information. But they couldn’t say their CoC applied to people at a different meeting, so the answer was both yes and no. He thought this was out of scope – they couldn’t turn around and say to that their CoC applied to other events because some of the attendees had been to a RIPE Meeting in the past. What they could do was try to encourage communication. Another aspect was that this approach led to issues around defamation and things of that sort.

Denesh agreed.

Leo said one of the examples was someone attending a different event in the same venue. Were they protected by the RIPE CoC because the offending person was a registered RIPE Meeting attendee?

Denesh asked if this came down to whether the other person complained (as the offender would be wearing a RIPE Meeting badge). If not, it would be very difficult to prove.

Brian said he wouldn’t necessarily see this as something that fell under their CoC. If someone reported that an attendee had done something, then it came back to the hotel and it was a grey area. All of the CoCs he’d seen only talked about people at the event – they didn’t extend enforcement to these things. If someone punched someone outside a RIPE event, they might expect some repercussions from that, even if they didn’t come from the CoC team.

Denesh said this was similar to the way schools could receive complaints when people were in uniform and got into trouble outside of school – students might be suspended or punished on that basis. He wondered if this might be similar to someone outside the event wearing a RIPE Meeting badge.

Leo said now they were talking more in terms of protecting the reputation of RIPE as an organisation, which was a different dimension.

Antony asked if it could be problematic to go down that route – they might have someone criticising RIPE on a mailing list for not supporting a policy proposal, for example.

Brain agreed and said this should be out of scope. This was where people talked about “rules lawyering” a CoC. They might also hit a situation where someone did something to someone and the RIPE NCC had to take their badge away because the hotel had told them they were no longer welcome in the venue. This was separate from the CoC; they shouldn’t try to protect the world.

Communication Protection to Non-Participants

Leo asked how they communicated that people were protected so they knew they could make a complaint and who they should make it to.

Antony said the RIPE NCC could probably handle this in terms of venue staff.

Denesh said at UKNOF, if sponsors wanted to run their own events with their name attached, they had to agree to abide by their code of conduct. This seemed like more of a contractual issue on the RIPE NCC’s side.

Brian said he wouldn’t expect to see physical signs up, as this would be more for community members in terms of something they agreed to when signing up.

Agreement on the Code of Conduct

Leo asked about “tourists” – people who didn’t register for the meeting but were nevertheless on the periphery of the event to network with people. He personally thought this was too difficult, but he had included it so they could find the boundary in terms of the scope.

Denesh asked how the RIPE NCC was policing people in the venue without badges.

Antony said he was pretty sure they’d used venue security to check badges since their last meeting in Amsterdam. In the past they had relied on staff to spot people. People definitely needed a badge to be in the meeting space.

Brian said this seemed very straightforward – if someone was at the meeting without a badge, they could be asked to leave on that basis.

Antony asked if Leo was thinking in terms of people on the boundaries of the meeting space.

Brian said they allowed that as a courtesy and so it was straightforward to ask these people to leave. Where this might become more interesting was if someone had bought a +1 ticket for the RIPE Dinner. He suggested they could include something which said that all people attending the dinner agreed to adhere to the CoC, and the person who bought the ticket was responsible for their +1 in this respect.

Salam agreed with Brian and said they didn’t need to worry too much about tourists. The purpose of the CoC was to bind the RIPE community together and they needed to keep that in mind. This was the border in her opinion – she was not overly concerned with exceptions or edge cases.

Understanding

Leo referenced the feedback that people who were on the spectrum might have difficulties understanding the CoC. He noted that in the CoC it said they didn’t need to tell people what it meant to be a decent person. He asked if they did in fact need to tell people what was decent behaviour, or whether they should double down and say that they didn’t need to do this.  

Denesh said he liked the W3C CoC as it explained expected behaviour and what they didn’t like, but he thought it might be worth giving some examples.

Salam said she thought they could assume that people were good and explain their values, rather than catering for the exception.

Brian said he really liked the expected behaviour part in the W3C document but noted that it was very long. He suggested maybe this was something to look at a future update to the CoC.

Salam said she didn’t see how they could describe what decent behaviour was, except by stating what their values were in the CoC.

Denesh said things like that could always be updated. He thought clarification was a good thing, but suggested this could go into an appendix. At the end of the day, some people did want guidance, but this shouldn’t be prescriptive.

Salam asked if they should have FAQs. One of these could be: “What is decent behaviour?”

Leo said he liked the idea of having this information separate, because it meant they could make a readable document and people who wanted the extra detail could find it.

Reporting an Incident

Leo asked what mechanisms should be available to submit a report.

Brian said he preferred in-person and email, and possibly web form. Instant messaging was complicated – you would need to have an official account and someone to staff it. He’d seen it happen where people ran to Twitter to report an incident; as a team they had to ask people to use an official format for reasons to do with reporting, logging, confidentiality, etc.

Action: Athina to provide input on where the legal boundaries are regarding reporting incidents and what is not acceptable/what is preferred.

Mediation

Leo noted the v3.0 document talked about investigations and decisions rather than what the RIPE community was meant to be about – bringing people together to reach consensus. Someone might say something rude and this could result in a report to the CoC Team. Hopefully, this would lead to a discussion and an apology – and hopefully an agreement for the future. He suspected the authors of the last version had this in mind, but it wasn’t documented. He asked if the group wanted to formally include this.

Brian said the one piece they needed to avoid was a situation where a potential abuser had more access to the person they abused. While it was good to have mediation as an option, it was important that it couldn’t be used to slow things down or force the victim to face their abuser.

Salam said that by the time she made a report, it would be because she wanted the other person gone. She wouldn’t want to have to deal with them after making a report and wouldn’t want to be reminded of how she felt about that person. Not all reports would result in sanctions, but she wouldn’t want it to put her across from her aggressor.

Leo said that what he was hearing was that they didn’t need to make this compulsory, but it might be good to have it as an option and note that it would need to be handled with some delicacy.

Brian agreed with Salam’s point. The ideal situation was that if someone did something bad, it was pointed out to them, they apologised, and everyone moved on. Some level of mediation was good, but it was important that no one was forced into a situation they didn’t want.

Jurisdiction

[Skipped until Athina could be on the call].

Investigation – professional qualifications

Leo asked if the CoC team would be qualified to perform investigations. And when they completed their investigation – who made the decision – should it be the same group or should there be some separation? He asked if the group would prefer a RIPE NCC staffer with a legal or HR background to drive this.

Salam asked if RIPE had some kind of Ombudsman.

Antony said they had the Trusted Contacts – one RIPE NCC staff member and one community member. It had been the same two people for some time now, and they’d both done external training on how to handle reports. This training was more in terms of how to receive a report and support someone in distress rather than how to conduct an investigation.

Leo said he was thinking if they wanted the investigation to be run by someone from the community or if they wanted this to be done by the RIPE NCC’s HR or Legal department. This was because they would be approaching this as professionals who went through all of the relevant development and training. This would be more of a challenge if they used volunteers, who would not be able to maintain the same degree of training/skills over time. The way he read v3.0, it sounded like the Trusted Contacts or the CoC Team who would be leading the investigation and making a decision at the end.

Brian said this was what they had intended, because this was the model that was employed in other communities. Because RIPE had a secretariat and money, perhaps it was an option to have someone with a professional background in this role.

Leo ran through the actions and proposed a few additional ones based on the group’s discussion.

- RIPE NCC to share a poll with the group to agree on a regular bi-weekly meeting.

- Athina to provide input on where the legal boundaries are regarding reporting incidents and what is not acceptable/what is preferred.

- Add some model behaviours to a web page or an appendix.

- Include wording in the updated document that mediation is an option but not mandatory.

- TF members to review the draft document and add comments.