Dear TF members,

Here are the minutes from our last call.

Cheers

Ant

***

Draft Minutes - COC TF Seventh Call: Seventh Call
8 January 2021, 16:30-17:30 (UTC+1)

Present:
Denesh Bhabuta, Athina Fragkouli, Antony Gollan, Brian Nisbet, Leo Vegoda.

Summary:
The Task Force continued reviewing the draft CoC, looking at what was in/out of scope. The TF agreed that unofficial social events within the meeting venue (such as the Whisky BoF) should be in the scope. Other events, such as a group of meeting attendees going out to dinner, was considered out of scope. The TF agreed that it was best not to take an overly deterministic/legalistic path here, and that the community would need to trust that the future CoC Team would be mature enough to deal with any grey areas. The TF agreed that RIPE’s CoC implementation was separate from other communities' such as SEE, MENOG and ENOG; it should be up to these communities to decide whether or how to implement a CoC. The TF discussed whether PDP decisions should be out of scope of the CoC, but it did not reach agreement on this point before the end of the call. Regarding "People and Organisations Bound by the Code", it was discussed that this only applied within the context of participating within the RIPE community.


1. Minutes

The TF agreed to move this to the next call, as the minutes had only been shared a few hours earlier.

2. Agenda

There were no changes to the agenda.

3. Review status of actions

-    RIPE NCC to request more detail from the Trusted Contacts on workload.

This had been carried over from the previous call. Antony said he had gone back to Vesna, who had been reluctant to give a definite time, as this could vary widely. However, she had agreed to say: “Up to four hours per RIPE Meeting where a report has been made.” He also confirmed that the recent actions of a certain mailing list participant had not resulted in a report being made to the Trusted Contacts.

Brian asked if that was four hours total or four hours per person.

Antony said he wasn’t sure; Vesna had been very reluctant to give a number. For example, at the last meeting there had been the case of the RIPE NCC sending out an ill-advised tweet, which they had already started handling before the report was made. He imagined this might’ve taken them all of twenty minutes to address. Vesna had also suggested the TF share its updated draft with the Diversity TF as a courtesy when it published this to the RIPE List.

Leo said that was a good idea. He said he took Vesna’s feedback to mean: “up-to half a day, with wide error-bars.”

-    Athina to come up with text for Criminal Activities not in scope.

Athina said she had added some text to the document – not only for criminal activities but also to make sure they clarified the purpose of the CoC and how it deferred to national law, whether criminal or civil. In the draft document, she had come up with two lines for this (under the heading “CoC and National Law”):

“This CoC only refers to an ethical behaviour for the purposes of the RIPE activities. It is not meant to define legal or illegal activities, which are defined by the relevant, applicable national law.

If the RIPE CoC Team is alerted to acts that should be reported to and investigated by the relevant authorities, they will ask the reporter to make a report to them. If necessary, the CoC Team or RIPE NCC staff will relay the report.”

Athina said this showed the point of the CoC and highlighted that it didn’t create law.

Denesh asked which national law applied to online meetings.

Athina said when it came to online meetings, attendees had to agree to terms and conditions, and these were under Dutch law.

Leo said he assumed people would also have to abide by the national law of the country they were physically in. So, if Denesh was in England, he would need to abide by English law in addition to Dutch law. He supposed it was a case of “both” rather than one or the other.

Athina said there was a whole discipline which dealt with this, called International Private Law. The nature of the dispute determined which law prevailed, unless there was an agreement which specified that it was under a particular set of law. It really depended on the specifics. If they were talking about violation of the CoC, this would be under Dutch law. If they were talking about violation of the law in the jurisdiction they were in, such as with a criminal case, then it would depend on the location of the crime. If it was about a service, it depended on where the provision of that service took place, and so on.

Denesh said this seemed complicated. He lived in England, but he might attend an online meeting from in Scotland. So, it was interesting to think about whether Scottish law would apply there.

Athina said it could depend on someone’s nationality, where the act took place, where the service was provided, and so on.

Leo said he hoped they would not have to get into any of that during the implementation, because it sounded very complicated and there seemed to be little benefit to the RIPE community from correctly resolving whatever the legal situation was.

-    TF members to make comments on the draft announcement text by Monday, 21 December.

Leo said he’d sent out the announcement, so this was completed.

-     TF members to continue discussion of Document 1.

Leo noted that he’d seen some of this discussion taking place.

-    Leo to propose an updated meeting schedule.

Leo said he had seen some updated invitations, so this was done.

Denesh noted while they had received the updated invitations, the one for 5 February hadn’t changed.

Antony said he would take a look at this.

4. Publication
 
The TF continued reviewing the draft CoC, starting from “Scope”.

Scope

Leo said they now had a list of where the CoC applied and where it did not apply.

Athina noted that she and Antony had come up with a list of events they thought were out of scope.

 “Unofficial social events, organised by RIPE Meeting attendees or their employers” was one item currently within scope. Leo said they also had the Whisky BoF, which was facilitated by the RIPE NCC to some degree, even if it didn’t actually run the event. He asked if these unofficial events should be in scope.

Brian said he understood there were things like the Whisky BoF that were in the meeting venue/hotel and had some involvement of the RIPE NCC and to a certain degree were an “accepted” part of the RIPE Meeting. But there were other examples like the INEX Cheese BoF, where INEX members and a few others went out to dinner. Other organisations like LINX did similar things. This quickly became a grey area.

Denesh noted that he ran the Pastéis Interest Group, which took RIPE Meeting attendees out for Pastéis de Nata. He asked whether this was also in scope.

Leo said this was what he wanted them to think about before they took their draft to the RIPE community. Because, if they got feedback that the Whisky BoF or Cheese BoF should definitely be in scope, they needed to be able to explain why they had deliberately included/excluded these events.

Brian repeated that this was a grey area. He asked if the CoC should apply to people going out in the evening (which seemed excessive). They could say that it applied to the RIPE Meeting venue, which would cover the Whisky BoF. This was such an established part of the RIPE Meeting that he would make a report if he saw something there; he would be less inclined to do so if it was a dinner organised by a third party.

Denesh asked if the RIPE NCC knew of past issues from these sorts of social events.

Antony said didn’t know of any; there hadn’t been any such cases in the information he got from the Trusted Contacts either.

Brian said it could be that there was a report, and it could be that the right thing to do was to have CoC Team mediate as a result. However, he was concerned about having this as an explicit item in the scope – he asked if this should extend to drinking at a café at 3am, for example.

Antony asked if there could be a bad perception if the Whisky BoF was out of scope.

Brian said he didn’t want to exclude the Whisky BoF, which was why he was thinking in terms of the meeting venue. It was a question of how far they went and where they drew the line. Perhaps they could share their current draft with the community and avoid tying themselves into knots.

Denesh suggested they say that unofficial social events within the meeting venue were in scope and see what the response was. He added that if the meeting venue was something like they had in Rotterdam, with a lot of attendees in the hotel bar after the meeting, then that shouldn’t be covered. But perhaps they could address this based on the community’s feedback.

Brian asked about cases where they had a conference centre and a designated hotel – should the hotel also be seen as the meeting venue? It would be good to know what the community thought here.

Leo said he thought making the CoC too deterministic could undermine the future CoC Team. They knew the CoC was a little vague and he was fine with that, because it created space for mediation and a little maturity, rather than taking overly legalistic path. He thought they should rely on the CoC Team being intellectually and emotionally capable people. He asked if that was a fair summary.

The group agreed.

Looking at what was out of scope, Leo said that he was glad to have the text that Athina and Antony had provided. He noted that ENOG, MENOG and SEE Meetings were out of scope. He asked if the CoC would need to be updated to include any future meetings the RIPE NCC started organising in the future.

Antony said they could make this more generic: “Other community events organised by the RIPE NCC”.

Leo suggested “Events organised by the RIPE NCC for other communities.”

Brian said he was didn’t like ENOG, MENOG and SEE being exempt, though he understood why. He thought other events organised by the RIPE NCC should be in there. He thought if there were future meetings equivalent to ENOG/MENOG/SEE (with their own Programme Committees), it shouldn’t be hard to simply update the document.

Leo said there might be other events like the European Peering Forum that were adjacent to other meetings. He asked where one ended and the other began.

Brian said adjacent events had nothing to do with the RIPE CoC – they were different meetings that should have their own CoC. Similarly, he didn’t think they needed to point out that other RIR meetings were out of scope, as they were external to the RIPE community. The only reason he thought ENOG and MENOG should be mentioned was that they were organised by the RIPE NCC and similar to RIPE Meetings. If they tried to list everything that didn’t apply, they would end up with a very long list.

Leo said this was why he had added some wording around this (“other events organised under a different flag”). He was trying to be non-specific and to say that if someone had agreed to a CoC at a different meeting, then the RIPE CoC didn’t apply.

Athina said it might be best to leave this at “events organised by other communities”, because if an event didn’t have a CoC, that didn’t mean the RIPE CoC applied. She asked if it was up to the RIPE NCC to choose when the CoC applied to the other events it organised (“The RIPE NCC might choose to apply…”)

Brian asked if they should say those communities or events rather than putting it on the RIPE NCC.

Leo said he’d put it this way because Athina was talking about a contractual relationship, and he was thinking of the RIPE NCC as an event organiser, rather than MENOG or SEE as communities. He was thinking the CoC could be part of the event terms and conditions that the RIPE NCC maintained.

Athina said the issue with MENOG, ENOG and SEE was that they might not want these rules or a committee that wasn’t necessarily part of their community judging whether their behaviour was acceptable.

Leo said this would be a separate implementation, i.e. it wouldn’t be the RIPE CoC Team but rather the ENOG CoC Team (for example); the implementation/CoC Team wouldn’t be external to their community.

Athina said they would need to make this clear. Not necessarily in the CoC itself, perhaps in the next document when they talked about the CoC Team. In that case, she thought they should reference “other communities”.

Antony said it might be better to avoid naming these other communities and focus on RIPE’s CoC. They could deal with these other aspects later.

Brian said if that was the case, then the current paragraph worked – because it said the RIPE NCC might apply this, and other communities can choose to develop their own implementation. The link here was the RIPE NCC. This also covered the RIPE NCC Executive Board aspect. Hopefully, it might also cause other communities to decide that they wanted to their own CoC, but that would be their conversation to have.

Athina said it might raise some red flags if they said the RIPE NCC would apply this CoC “wherever”. At the same time, she understood Antony’s point: would they take a position on whether ENOG and MENOG were within the RIPE community?

Brian suggested they say, “the RIPE NCC will apply this CoC in consultation with the relevant Programme Committees or communities.”

Leo asked the RIPE NCC to take an action to review these two paragraphs and make sure it was happy with them. They could update the text if needed.

Action: RIPE NCC to review text under "Where this CoC Applies" (final two paragraphs).

People and Organisations Bound by the Code

Leo said he’d mostly taken this from the Python CoC, with some changes to make it more relevant to RIPE. He’d included RIPE NCC Board Members, but this was only within the context of a RIPE Meeting or RIPE community mailing list – it did not include things like RIPE NCC board meetings or other RIPE NCC-specific events.

Athina said she had understood Leo’s thinking here, which was why she had added a line noting (for all people/organisations) the CoC only applied while participating within the RIPE community.

Antony asked if it they needed to have both the spaces the CoC applied (e.g. RIPE Meetings and mailing lists) and the people subject to it (event attendees and mailing list participants).

Brian said he thought there was value in having both.

CoC and National Law

Antony asked if they should change the CoC Team/RIPE NCC Team “will” relay illegal acts to the relevant authorities to “may”.

Brian said there might be cases where it was best for the CoC Team to refer people to the venue staff, as a crime had been committed on their premises and it was the venue’s problem. He thought they could just see what the community thought here.

The group agreed.

Antony asked if they wanted to state that the PDP was out of scope.

Brian asked how this would be out of scope. He could imagine complaints being made as a result of people’s behaviour during PDP discussions.

Antony said he thought discussions would be in scope, but not the actual consensus determination within the PDP. He was thinking in terms of people attempting to rules-lawyer the CoC to challenge PDP decisions. He suggested a line to the effect of: “The CoC cannot be used to appeal PDP decisions.” 

Leo noted they already had a PDP appeals process. He asked if they should make this more generic and say that the CoC couldn’t be applied where there was already a separate process in place.

Brian said he didn’t want to go that route, because there might well be other processes that fell within the scope of the CoC. Off the top of his head, there could be a CoC violation that came out of a WG Chair selection process. He understood where Antony was coming from, but he was inclined to leave this out for now and see what the community thought. His concern was that it might be used to cover things that were abusive or otherwise. It was unlikely, but he didn’t want to make anyone immune.

Leo said they should take an action to give this some more thought. They also needed to think through the next section (“Behaviour”). He understood what Brian was saying; they didn’t want to make people immune from the requirement to behave ethically. On the other hand, they didn’t want to usurp a separate/more appropriate process.

Action: TF members to think about whether there should be a statement that the CoC cannot be used to appeal consensus decisions within the PDP, and also to review the Behaviour section ahead of next call.

Brian said there had to be grounds for a CoC complaint. If someone made a CoC report because their proposal hadn’t reached consensus, the obvious first step would be to establish what their complaint was based on.

Antony said someone might claim their voice was ignored on the basis of their race, gender, etc.

Brian said this was something the chairs should be able to defend, with help from the RIPE NCC’s Policy Officer.

Athina said the first step of the CoC Team would be to ask the person making the complaint to show them how.

Antony asked if this meant the CoC team would be assessing the merits of a consensus determination.

Athina said the person making the complaint would have to provide proof. And the validity of a consensus determination was separate from whether a CoC violation had occurred. The CoC report would be separate from any appeal of the PDP decision.

Brian said he didn’t want to make it so that WG chairs had the ability to do something bad for whatever reason. Equally, the consensus review process was long and required a lot of evidence. So, if someone claimed they had been ignored, marginalised, harassed, or otherwise – that was something that should be investigated. But he would like to think the CoC Team would look at what the WG chairs had presented, do an investigation, and speak to the people involved. And if it turned out that someone had been marginalised out of the process – then that opened a very serious can of worms for the PDP in general, and maybe it would be something they would need to address as a community.

Leo said this came back to the emotional/intellectual capability and good sense of the CoC Team. He said they were out of time, but he encouraged TF members to consider this point and the next section on behaviours ahead of their next call.

5. Actions

Action: RIPE NCC to review text under Where this CoC Applies (final two paragraphs).

Action: TF members to think about whether there should be a statement that the CoC cannot be used to appeal consensus decisions within the PDP, and also to review the Behaviour section ahead of next call.