[Accountability-tf] Notes from 20th call
Antony Gollan agollan at ripe.net
Tue Jul 17 17:04:23 CEST 2018
Dear task force members, Here are the notes from Monday's call. Cheers Antony +++ Accountability TF call minutes - 20th call Attendees: Athina Fragkouli, Antony Gollan, Malcolm Hutty, Alexander Isavnin, William Sylvester. Agenda: 1. Recap of community feedback from RIPE 76 2. What changes are needed to the draft? 3. Next steps 1. Recap of community feedback from RIPE 76 Antony ran quickly through the feedback from the BoF at RIPE 76: - Values: the community seemed to prefer that they stick to the more established values of open, transparent, bottom-up, etc. Daniel had stated that they had deliberately avoided "motherhood and apple pie" statements from the beginning. Their goal had been to allow operators, who were often in competition with one another, to cooperate. And for that you needed to be open/transparent, etc. He noted that Salam had supported having something along the lines of "who am I, why am I here?" but not pushing it too far. - Consensus: there was the comment that the community used consensus not because they were hippies, but because it was the best way to ensure cooperation in an environment where everyone could vote with their feet. There were some comments about not confusing consensus (as a method of negotiation) with the decision-making of the community, and some comments that perhaps these could be described separately. Ruediger had also noted having a well-described process was important for external accountability. - Capture: Nurani argued that they shouldn't take themselves too seriously - if somene caputred a WG Chair position, the community would survive. Because no one had too much power, it wasn't a concern. It was noted that one risk of capture was from process geeks who wanted to document everything. Filiz had noted that there was not really such a great separation of powers - WG Chairs could also be RIPE NCC Board members at the same time. - Retaining community trust over time: Shane had argued that they could only retain trust by being trustworthy and as long as they were open to newcomers, they would be sharing their values with them. It was noted that there could be a divergence between the community and RIPE NCC membership. And Randy and Daniel had noted that documenting these types of things for newcomers would be valuable and a good task for the task force - but that maybe this should be more like a history or an informal explanation. William said they would need to integrate BoF feedback in the document. This would probably mean an internal revision that they would share with the task force for a review before they published it to the community. Malcolm asked what the problem had been with the substantive values. William said this was partly because by documenting them they would exclude people who didn't share these values. And these values would naturally drift over time, so there was a risk that the document would quickly lose meaning or become out of date. Antony said that there had been been pretty consistent feedback from the community that they wanted to avoid writing down the more abstract "substantive values" and in fact had deliberately chosen not to right from the beginning, for example in the RIPE Terms of Reference (RIPE-001). William said there was comments that it was better to leave those values at a higher level and let the process (open, transparent, bottom-up) produce them naturally. Alexander said they were working on this document because the situation was changing dramatically since the community had created those first documents. What they were doing was in response to all those changes. Maybe if they were getting these concerns, they should address them - by pointing out that things had changed over 25 years and that now the world had come to them. Malcolm said he was more sympathetic to Alexander's point of view. 2. What changes are needed to the draft? William said regarding the draft, they'd needed to take another solid review. And they'd need to add essential feedback they had gotten from the meeting. And then they could use the same process that they'd used ahead of their earlier Go/No-go meeting. He knew Malcolm had some comments that he wanted to be integrated. Then they could take this new revision and send it out for feedback. Did they need another Go/No-go meeting to decide if they were ready to send to the community? William said the next step would be to take another editorial review, adding feedback and sending this to the group. The group agreed with this. Malcolm asked how widespread this opposition to substantive values was. Antony said this had been pretty sustained throughout the whole process, including the email they had sent ahead of the previous meeting. William said this feedback had been from the old guard who thought it was better to keep this ambiguous, because they all had an idea of what this meant and didn't want to create problems. Because the values that were established were the social mores of the community. People might not want to sign on to this because it would not get revised in the future. Antony added that there had been a couple of people who had stepped up in support of documenting these values. Athina suggested they not focus too much on values and address other parts of the document first. She hadn't really seen any substantial support on this. And she was concerned this would generate negative comments on the report. Malcolm said clearly something had to change in the document, if they were getting push-back on it. On the other hand, he found it difficult to believe that people objected to a "stable and reliable Internet", or "RIPE has a defined scope", etc. If they were getting this much feedback, maybe they could take the parts out of that section and work it into other areas of the document as more of a background approach. Alexander said he had two suggestions: 1) if they didn't believe that they would have complete support for their report, they could allow themselves to have a minority report. They might have consensus on one part, but might have a different opinion on some of the topics. That would not completely ruin the idea, as there was no minority report on anything about RIPE. 2) If they couldn't get support, they could start working on a negative report - they had tried to define their accountability and failed, and here was why. William said he didn't think they wouldn't have support for the overall report, they just didn't want to have a negative response to some of its parts when they presented it to the community. William said he liked the idea of integrating some of this content (substantive values) into the background of other sections and they would see what they would do here. 3. Next steps William said if their goal was to have this ready for the meeting, hopefully they should aim to get something ready for the group in early August. Malcolm said last time they spoke they were comtemplating publishing this. The basic sense was that the document was about right, but didn't have quite enough explanation - but now they were thinking that maybe what they had down in the document wasn't quite right either. Their experience from the last meeting showed how important it was to have a clear Go/No-go decision and not get trapped into artifical deadlines. William agreed and said they'd also learned a lot through the BoF process. Malcolm said they needed to do the same thing again - look at the meeting dates and work back from there to see out when they needed to publish and when they needed a Go/No-go decision. William said they had their aimed to have their next meeting early August. And he could work with the secretariat to propose a timeline to the group soon. Malcolm noted that when he opened the version with Carsten's comments, it crashed his Word. The version that Antony had sent opened fine. William said they would plan to keep their next call in two weeks to track progress and see where they were.