[Accountability-tf] Notes from 15th call

Dear task force members,

Here are the minutes from our call on Monday.

Cheers

Antony


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Accountability TF call minutes - 15th call

Attendees:
Antony Gollan, Peter Koch, Carsten Schiefner, William Sylvester

Agenda:

1. Review of open action items
2. Work plan/timeline for upcoming work
3. Presentation for RIPE 76 (Call for Presentations)
4. "Working Call"


1. Review of open action items

20171204: RIPE NCC and TF Chair to publish an updated call schedule with 
additional "working calls" for each month.

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

Antony said they would address these two action items in the next part 
of the agenda and they could be closed.

20180205-1: Task force members to provide input on draft outline
document.

20180205-2: Finalise draft report.

Antony said these two points were ongoing and could stay open.

20180205-3: Review task force website content, add links to
presentations.

Antony said he had added the two task force updates from RIPE 74 and 
RIPE 75 to the page and this could be closed.

20180205-5: RIPE NCC to post the relevant parts from the Address
Policy WG's discussion one the role of the chair.

Antony said he would send this after the call.

20180205-6: Carsten to prepare paragraph for chair section of
consensus document and send to the list.

This had been done.


2. Work plan/timeline for upcoming work

Antony ran through the proposed timeline:

9 March RIPE NCC to send updated draft document to TF
11 March RIPE 76 CfP
19 March Working Call
2 April Regular Call
16 April Working Call / Go/No Go Decision
39 April Working Call
1 May Publish to RIPE List
14 May RIPE 76

Antony said he and Athina would be blocking out some time this week to 
incorporate the task force's input so far into the draft document. They 
would then send this back to the group and note areas where they felt 
more input was needed.

William said they would need about two weeks to share material with the 
community ahead of the RIPE Meeting - so they would need to do this 
around 1 May.

Peter asked why they were submitting presentation slides to the RIPE PC, 
as this was a RIPE matter and they didn't need to have this approved by 
them.

Antony said from his understanding this was more of a courtesy and 
allowed the PC to schedule this into the meeting agenda.

William said he assumed that on the call on 30 April, they would be 
finalising what to send to RIPE List. Hopefully by around 16 April they 
would have a document that would be ready and they would wordsmithing 
and making final changes closer to that 30 April date. That was what 
they should be striving for.


3. Presentation for RIPE 76 (Call for Presentations)

William said they'd done a couple of updates - this would would have to 
be a more substantial presentation where they dug into the nuts and 
bolts of what they had done over the past year and a half, identify 
their findings, and ultimately open up the floor for discussion. At that 
time, assuming they got to this point, they would they probably be 
announcing the adjournment of the task force. He asked if there were 
additional actions needed afterwards - he guessed they might actually be 
looking to adjourn in October at RIPE 77.

Peter said they might not be enough voices to come to a conclusion here. 
They might want to send this question to the mailing list.

Carsten agreed and said his proposal would be that after they had sent 
out the final report, they keep the task force structure in action to 
collect any feedback and possibly do a revised final version of the report.

William said with their current plan, they intended to publish a final 
draft ahead of the meeting, and then gather feedback before publising a 
final report in October. If there weren't any major changes, they 
probably wouldn't need a full slot in Amsterdam to go over the report 
again - but he would expect that in Amsterdam in October, it would be 
more in line to say that "we presented the draft, we implemented your 
feedback, and published an updated document back in July or August and 
we consider our work done." That was, if they didn't have any major 
feedback or new structures that needed to be reviewed.

Peter agreed with William and thought that leaving the structure of the 
task force remaining might not be welcome in the community, given some 
of the comments during the task force's inauguration. He wasn't even 
sure that they needed to meet at RIPE 77. But he thought they could note 
this in the minutes of this call so the other task force members could 
see this expectation.

***Action item: TF members to note the expectation that the task force 
will adjourn after publication of the final report. Share any comments 
on the mailing list about this.


4. "Working Call"

The group started with a discussion on capture.

William said capture usually meant that a certain interest group was 
dominating things. But he had voiced concerns regarding decision making 
a couple of times. It was hard to say that there was any capture going 
on, because there weren't any particularly dominant groups.

William said they had processes for how leadership was identified, and 
the community needed to support the chair in an ongoing way. They hadn't 
had a RIPE Chair removed, but a WG Chair had been removed in the past.

Carsten asked if they wanted to have a kind of emergency procedure in place.

William said they didn't need to have the answers, but they did need to 
identify gaps. When Rob handed over to Hans Petter, it was the king 
handing over the crown. It was identified then that they needed a 
process for handing this over in the future. This was the hypothetical 
issue of what to do if someone was hit by a bus. He was aware that Hans 
Petter was working on this, but nothing final had been published, so 
they needed to recommend that this take place. In an emergency or 
extraordinary situation, while they would be working on consensus, 
someone could game the situation and engender support for a certain 
candidate and capture it that way. Someone might argue for a candidate 
from a certain region - if people argued that they needed someone from 
Europe - would that be a valid objection? There might also be people who 
prioritised their loyalty to their state over their day-job - this might 
be people working in some kind of intelligence or military organisations 
that had been tasked to get into a certain role to influence matters.

Peter suggested they should broaden the idea of what capture was. Of 
course, one could try and capture an organisation by implanting 
"sleepers". However, the openness of RIPE and its procedures meant you 
had the opportunity to get your agenda through without having to take 
over key roles in a conspiracy. In the Anti-abuse WG, people in security 
roles were very active, for example. He had lost track of the current 
state of the discussion, but so far the recent proposal seemed very 
successful. How much that was capture depended on how much it was in 
line with what the wider community thought. A risk was that you could go 
rather far in a specific WG unnoticed by the wider community. This 
wouldn't work in the Address Policy WG, as there were too many people 
watching, but there were other WGs where this could be a risk.

William said in the Anti-abuse WG, in the past they had someone from an 
anti-spam organisation who had tried to drive through their own personal 
agenda. It wasn't that they didn't each have their own perspectives and 
interests - but to the extent that this didn't contradict the best 
interests of the wider community, the community understood that this was 
okay. But when the values of the individual/employer contradicted those 
of the community, it was in those moments that the community had checks 
and balances that came into play.

Peter said his point was that thinking too big and imagining people 
being installed as sock-puppets to prevent capture - that imagined a 
specific kind of capture. But he thought you could get your agenda 
through even if you didn't control the RIPE Chair. Getting your agenda 
through wasn't wrong if the community supported it, but there were 
probably ways of getting your agenda through that might need to be 
further studied, but you might need someone with a degree in political 
science to investigate.

Carsten said they could include this as a note, that it was something 
that the community might want to explore further, but it wasn't 
something that the task force thought was in its duty to look at.

William said in terms of action items, they might want to note this as a 
concern - that it was something that should be reviewed further. And how 
it gets reviewed was probably not up to them.

***Action item: Note recommendation that community explore alternate 
forms of capture.

William said they didn't see this as a kind of clear and present danger. 
They believed that the community had structures to protect the WGs, but 
that didn't mean people couldn't push through their agendas that were 
counter to the interests of the community, and this might want to be 
looked at more closely. He thought this problem was probably inherent in 
all organisations of this kind. He saw examples of this in the IETF for 
example. A prominent person proposed something, built support, and 
pushed it through. Now, if you looked twenty years after this happened, 
it didn't result in anything negative. In an organisation like RIPE, was 
that a bigger deal? /22 policies - would that say that was a good idea 
or a terrible idea?

Carsten asked if it would be good to find a list of examples, to see 
what they were talking about. What currently came to mind was in Berlin 
where there were social democrats where one guy took over a local 
chapter by installing his cronies. It might be a good exercise to put 
together a list of examples where this kind of thing had been attempted.

William said he didn't think they wanted to accuse people of trying to 
capture their community, and some might disagree with their view that 
this was an attempt to capture. He was thinking about whether they could 
say this was capture or just politics. Capture was a politically strong 
term. He thought they could ask if people knew of any outside groups or 
narrow interests that tried to force through decisions that were against 
the wishes of the wider communities. You had organisational capture and 
then there was the idea of coming as a participant to the process.

Action Items:

20180305-1: TF members to note the expectation that the task force will 
adjourn after publication of the final report around RIPE 77. Share any 
comments on the mailing list about this.

20180305-2: Note recommendation that community explore alternate forms 
of capture.

20180205-1: Task force members to provide input on draft outline
document.

20180205-2: Finalise draft report.


Closed Action Items:

20171204: RIPE NCC and TF Chair to publish an updated call schedule with 
additional "working calls" for each month.

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

20180205-3: Review task force website content, add links to
presentations.

20180205-5: RIPE NCC to post the relevant parts from the Address
Policy WG's discussion one the role of the chair.

20180205-6: Carsten to prepare paragraph for chair section of
consensus document and send to the list.