Hi Daniel, Thanks for taking the time to read the minutes and the draft documents. Just to clarify: theses two documents will be published as RIPE documents shortly including all the necessary meta data. They will then disappear from the folder marked Draft and Discussion Files. I take your point though that even temporary draft documents should be complete with list of authors etc. Kind regards, Mirjam On Sat, Apr 10, 2021 at 16:52, Daniel Karrenberg <dfk@ripe.net> wrote:

On 9 Apr 2021, at 9:37, Mirjam Kuehne wrote:

...

Dear colleagues,

The RIPE Working Group Chairs met in March to discuss recommendations for possible changes to the RIPE Policy Development Process. …

Mirjam,

Thank you for sharing this meeting summary.

I have looked at https://www.ripe.net/publications/draft-and-discussion-files/review-of-the-r... . This is another example of a bad habit we have gotten into. In Rob’s time the RIPE community has only discussed documents that said clearly

- Who had written the text, - on Whose request, - for What purpose, and - When it had been written, released or published.

Referring to documents without this basic information and discussing them is a bad habit. It is easily perceived as not transparent. The ‘WWWW’ information is also essential for understanding and discussing any text.

My advice to the community in general and the Chair in particular is to insist that all documents we discuss in the context of RIPE have this information.

Daniel

Therefore I suggest to make more fundamental changes that do address these shortcomings. Here are three generic suggestions:

1) There should be a higher threshold to make an appeal because appeals are costly to the community.

2) Appeals should be handled by a small number of people who commit to handling it properly within a defined time line because someone has to take responsibility.

3) Appeals should be fully and transparently documented from the first submission until the conclusion, because this is the RIPE standard.

how may appeals has ripe had? how many appeals were upheld? how much sturm, drang, and omplaloskepsis are we willing suffer to tune it? imiho, your point one is the toughie. you want to require N signatures?

I have some implementation ideas already, similar but not identical to the RIPE NCC arbitration procedure. However before I get to those I would like to have some feedback on the general idea.

i fear we have to go through this. if so, i respect and value your start. randy --- randy@psg.com `gpg --locate-external-keys --auto-key-locate wkd randy@psg.com` signatures are back, thanks to dmarc header butchery

Daniel, My own feeling is that the appeals process worked basically well enough the first and only time it has been used, and that we would not be able to get any significant gain by a redesign at this point. Since we've only had 1 appeal since the process was actually documented 6+ years ago, maybe we should wait to see if the appeals process is actually broken before scrapping it? More thoughts inline and at the end... On 11/04/2021 10.31, Daniel Karrenberg wrote:

Randy, colleagues,

we are already past the station where we wonder whether to review the appeals process. Our chairs collective is already actively thinking about significant tweaks. This is what prompted my reaction.

I wouldn't call the proposed changes significant: 1. Clarifying who should recuse themselves. (This was already implicit, but to quote the Zen of Python: "explicit is better than implicit".) 2. Setting deadlines. 3. Clarifying the role of informal discussion before policy proposals. In fact, I don't see any much work at all there.

To make my point clearer let’s look at this from the perspective of cost to the community: The chairs are proposing costly tweaks to the existing procedure, such as writing and agreeing on a playbook and giving courses to WG chairs that may never use the PDP. I ask whether we should fundamentally review the procedure instead. That has a cost too. I expect this cost to be less or equal to the cost of the proposed tweaks. I also expect that we can come up with a good procedure that costs significantly less to *run* each time than a tweaked procedure. My message gives the general idea on how I propose to achieve that. This is the question we have to answer first.

The engineering comes after that. And, as always, the engineering will include trade-offs: the less costly the execution of the procedure is, the lower the threshold to invoke it can be and vice-versa.

Again: Should we go beyond tweaking and fundamentally review the PDP appeals procedure?

We now have N=1, since we've had exactly one appeal. I was the one who facilitated the process and wrote the draft of the response after a special meeting of the working group chairs collective (WGCC) to discuss the appeal. We had a relatively small number of chairs who actively participated in the process. I suspect that any handling of an appeal would look pretty much the same, although possibly with different people. I don't think we would save work by picking different people to handle the appeals process; we would just shift it around. As for including people who did not sign up for this task, the role of the WGCC in appeals was set in the PDP in 2014 (ripe-614), so this is hardly new (although I see that when we updated the working group chair job description in 2017 we missed that bit; technically redundant but really it should be there). In the end we basically have the same unpleasant options we usually have for such things: either re-use a body that was not designed for this purpose or create a new one. Both options kind of suck. In principle the appeals procedure could be used as a denial-of-service attack on the RIPE community by bad faith actors. But I think that the RIPE community is highly resistant to such problems and I trust that our RIPE Chair will be able to handle any such situation in a common sense manner. Cheers, -- Shane

On 12 Apr 2021, at 22:14, Peter Koch wrote:

… <very good food for thought> … This could be continued,

And it should in the context of the PDP review!

but I'll stop here to focus on Daniel's question.

That question remains: “Is it worth the effort to take a step back and describe how we deal with conflicts and their resolution within the RIPE community or is tweaking the PDP appeals procedure enough for now?” Any answers? Suggestions? Daniel