[Accountability-tf] RIPE Accountability Task Force Next Steps & RIPE74 Meeting Notes

Dear TF Members,

It was great meeting with everyone in Budapest. I wanted to welcome again the new additions to our task force, Gregory and Francesca, for those members who were not at the meeting. I would also like to thank Filiz for all her contributions to the task force, she will be missed!

Special thanks go out to Antony who was kind enough to be our scribe and has assembled the meeting notes below. We covered a lot in a very short amount of time. If you think we missed anything or care to continue the conversation please comment on the mailing list.

As for next steps for the task force;


1)      June Call. It is our intent to keep our same schedule as previous calls, if you have any conflicts please let me know. We will be sending details out soon.

2)      Face-to-Face meeting. We will send out a doodle, we are exploring dates in Jul/Aug/Sep. Please answer the Doodle ASAP. We want to get this planned as early as possible and are competing against conferences, events, holiday, and day jobs. The current proposal is a meeting in Amsterdam. We will also be looking for feedback on the length of the meeting.

3)      Homework. It is important we continue to provide feedback, discussion, and prioritization on the mapping document. We had a great discussion in Budapest but will benefit greatly from all task force members’ participation. Please send your feedback to the list as soon as possible.

The next RIPE meeting in Dubai seems far away right now, we only have the mailing list, a handful of monthly calls and the face-to-face to complete our work. Every member’s participation is vital to continuing the task force work as we collaborate towards our next milestones.

I thank you all for your work in advance, and look forward to speaking with you all on our next call.

Thanks,
William

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RIPE Accountability Task Force Face-to-Face Meeting – RIPE 74


InterContinental Hotel, Budapest
9 May 2017

Attendees:
Athina Fragkouli, Antony Gollan, Malcolm Hutty, Alexander Isavnin, Peter Koch, Francesca Merletti, Gregory Mounier, Paul Rendek, Carsten Schiefner (via Webex), Marco Schmidt, William Sylvester, Filiz Yilmaz

1) Completion of Tasks by Task Force Members
2) Feedback – Timeline/Work Plan
3) Review of Mapping Document
1) Completion of Tasks by Task Force Members
Filiz said that she was the only one who had completed the homework. She said task force members needed to be responding to requests to complete assigned work. Participation in a task force involved a bit more engagement than a working group. She asked that in future, members respond more promptly to these requests.
2) Feedback – Timeline/Work plan
William said regarding a timeline, they would aim to have an accountability update by the next RIPE Meeting. He asked if they were okay with the concept of putting a timeline in the scope.

Malcolm suggested they should wait to see what the work looked like rather than attaching an arbitrary deadline.

Filiz said she would try and put together a work plan after the meeting and would share it with the group. She would add a strawman proposal next to each item and would aim to get this done in the next two weeks.

***Action: Chairs to put together work plan with strawman proposals.*

Peter said some of these concerns about a timeline would be addressed when they had more of an idea of what they intended to work on. If they could share more detail about what they intended to do on the list, people might be a bit more understanding.

Filiz said she would therefore consider the scope in its current iteration as completed by the end of RIPE 74. The work plan and timeline would be done in the next few weeks as they completed their work, and this would be posted on the webpage. She said this information could eventually be turned into a charter, but they weren't ready to have this yet.


3) Review of Mapping Document


Malcolm said that ripe-642 noted that the RIPE Chair was the "author and owner" of the PDP. He said he didn’t think this was true. This authority lay with the Plenary. He thought they should state that the RIPE Plenary was the source of authority – it was the fundamental source of authority for everything they were mapping.


Paul asked why this would be the plenary and not the RIPE community.


Malcolm thought that when it came to taking action, it was the plenary that made the decision.


Paul said that the plenary couldn't take action without going back to the mailing list and getting consensus. If the plenary was understood as having this authority, he asked how this would affect people who couldn’t attend the meeting.


Malcolm said he saw Paul’s point, but he was talking more about the comment of RIPE Chair as author and owner.

Peter said there was no documentation that said the PDP must be used to affect changes to the PDP. The PDP had come into existence by the WG Chairs (or some sub-grouping of them) - he asked Filiz if she could clarify.


Filiz said maybe the task force could recommend that this sentence was taken out when they published their findings, but they were getting ahead of themselves. She noted that the PDP had always been seen as being managed and overseen by the RIPE Chair (Rob). When the RIPE NCC staff had initially come up with the features of the PDP (such as the various phases) - Rob had put his stamp on it. It then went to the plenary and they were given the opportunity to approve it rather than discuss it at length. So historically this had been owned by the RIPE Chair. As an aside, she noted that if they were of varying opinions as individual task force members – when they reported back to the RIPE community, they could always list that some TF members were of the opinion that X or Y should be done. She asked where they could fit this "authority" issue into the document – they could likely do this under 9.1 which listed the PDP as an overall process.

Malcolm said it could be argued that the RIPE Chair was putting something to the community and declaring the consensus. So the Chair didn't have the power to go against the community – he didn't own the process. He said this came back to the question of whether it was the plenary and who the plenary was – this wasn't an easy one to answer.


Athina noted that in the mapping document they had listed the plenary as a body that had some powers – it could approve WGs, etc. Athina said she wanted to highlight that when they were talking about specific “roles” in the document – they were not “powers” per se – as the roles were a reflection of the underlying discussions and consensuses that had lead to their creation.

Peter said another open question was what happened when the plenary said no.

Filiz said they needed to be clear when they said plenary. It referred to the RIPE Meeting structure – as opposed to WGs that existed outside of the meeting itself and had more structure around them.
Alexander said that as someone with a technical and mathematical background – this document wasn't functioning because it wasn't telling them where there were gaps. He felt they needed to have stronger definitions around what they meant by “Chairs” and “Community” and other terms.

Filiz disagreed, as the mandate of the task force wasn't to create definitions – though it was perhaps to say that "this particular definition is unclear". They might recommend that the community had to define some of these things. The task force was just a group of community members who had agreed to highlight deficiencies, not to fill them.


Malcolm said he thought the community might appreciate them making recommendations or identifying specific ways of fixing issues. He didn't think this was outside of their scope. If they didn’t supply recommendations, the community would just have to charter a new TF to address the issues they raised. That's what the group was here for.


Paul said in a sense they did have a mathematical task – to score these issues in the document. He said he would like to go through Filiz's scoring.


William asked if they needed to put together a glossary of terms as they worked.


Paul noted there was a RIPE NCC glossary on the website.


William said he was talking more in terms of the document.


Peter said the document had a challenge in that it was trying to take a 2D approach to a multidimensional landscape. This was a working document for the task force, and not an output for the unprepared reader – so as long as they understood this, they were okay. In part of their final recommendations, they could have some definitions in there that explained what they took various terms to mean.

Alexander said it had previously been pointed out that the document that defined task forces was marked as obsolete. He noted that there were other documents that were also marked as obsolete that might not be so obsolete in practice. He suggested as part of their homework, they do a survey of obsoleted RIPE Documents and check if they were still current.


Malcolm said that in some of these cases, it may be a matter of opinion for people. Just because not all of a document was not true, didn't mean that none of it was true – and just because a document was marked as obsolete didn’t mean that none of its content was relevant.


William suggested that if they ran across any documents that were obsoleted with current content or vice versa, they make an note of it.


Peter agreed that it would be helpful to note this, but they shouldn't go fishing for obsolete documents – it would be too much work for the TF.


Peter said it was a concern that there was no regular reviews of RIPE documentation – maybe this was one of the gaps that they could identify later.


Filiz suggested they run through the homework she had completed and see if everyone agreed with this approach.


Peter said he found the scoring problematic. When they were talking about the RIPE Chair selecting the location of RIPE Meetings – the output was being documented in the sense of the meeting location – but not in the sense of the Chair making that decision. This might be unclear for newcomers.


Filiz noted that when it came to Chairing of RIPE Meetings, the plenary wasn't minuted. It was only "documented" in the sense of the video archives/stenography transcript.


Antony noted that the RIPE NCC’s Communications Department had recognised this a few years ago and had been making an effort to record plenary decisions in the Daily Meeting Reports.


The group discussed that this was a lot more productive in a face-to-face setting. They thought they might need to have some kind of a retreat to perform a block of this work in a face-to-face setting.


Paul said he would look at his budget and the RIPE NCC would be able to support this.


***Action: RIPE NCC to look at arranging another (longer) face-to-face meeting for the task force.


Malcolm said in advance of any future face-to-face meeting, they could take a careful look at what they could do first to make the most of their time.


Filiz asked everyone to provide feedback on the document after the meeting.


Regarding next steps. William said they needed to own the solution and not the problem. That is, as opposed to raising only a problem on the mailing list, they also needed to propose a solution.


Malcolm asked how they could handle discussing any sensitive issues they might come across on the open mailing list.


William said they would put out a call for agenda items ahead of the next call and someone could include that there. They could then discuss this on the call and decide how to handle it on the mailing list. Alternatively people could email the Chairs directly.


William said they needed to think about face-to-face meetings, or longer or more frequent calls to get through the work. Otherwise they would be here in seven years. He said they were open to suggestions.


Alexander suggested they the move the mapping document to Google documents, as this would be more efficient than passing around a Word document between them.


The group said they would leave this to the secretariat.


Antony noted that the nature of the document meant that they wouldn’t expect to have too many individual edits from task force members.


End of meeting.


Action Items
20170509-1: TF Chairs to put together work plan after the meeting.

20170509-2: RIPE NCC to look at arranging another (longer) face-to-face meeting for the task force.

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.


Closed Action Items


20170502-1: TF Chairs to send an email to ripe-list asking for final comments on the draft scope, aiming to close this at the end of RIPE 74.

20170502-2: TF Chairs to decide how to handle community attendance/feedback during the face-to-face meeting at RIPE 74. Also to think about what sort of feedback they will be seeking from the plenary presentation.

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