[Accountability-tf] Notes from 12th Call

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Antony Gollan agollan at ripe.net
Wed Dec 6 14:10:22 CET 2017

Dear task force members,

Here's the minutes from Monday's call. Let me know any changes or
clarifications.

Cheers

Antony

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*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.

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*2. Review of open action items
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Antony went through the action items.

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*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.

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*3. Review open questions to the task force.
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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*

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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)*

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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.***