[coc-tf] Draft Minutes - Code of Conduct TF: Second Call

Dear TF members,

Here are the minutes from our second call. Let me know any 
changes/corrections.

Cheers

Ant

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*Draft Minutes - Code of Conduct TF: **Second**Call
**19**October 2020, 1**7**:00-1**8**:00 (UTC+2)*

*Present:
*Denesh Bhabuta, Antony Gollan, Brian Nisbet, Leo Vegoda, Salam Yamout

*1.**Minutes/Agenda*

The draft minutes from the last call were accepted.

The group agreed to record calls from now on.

There were no changes to the agenda.

*2.**Regular meeting schedule*

Leo asked if they should aim for a regular meeting every two weeks.

Brian said by now it was clear they wouldn’t have anything substantial 
ready in time for RIPE 81. He supported meeting every two weeks, 
provided this worked with their updated time frame.

Leo said the reason it was important to have regular meetings was that 
they had three work items: the updated CoC itself, a document about 
selection of the CoC Team, and a document outlining procedures. This 
could take a few months, and having some predictability was definitely 
an advantage.

*Action:*Antony to share a poll with the group to agree on a regular 
bi-weekly meeting.

*3.**Questions *

The group ran through the questions document that Leo had put together:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fbJaJVaOPlCjr40kVMvWkV2AhRPFRrCeJJNrgAIWk6I/edit 
<https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fbJaJVaOPlCjr40kVMvWkV2AhRPFRrCeJJNrgAIWk6I/edit> 


*Introduction*

Antony asked if some of the parts in the introduction about how the CoC 
applied to could be moved to the “Scope” section later in the document.

Brian said he liked having this in the introduction - he wanted them to 
make it clear that: “Yes, this definitely applies to you.”

Denesh said the W3C’s CoC had a glossary at the end. One thing that 
struck him from looking at the RIPE community’s draft was that they 
talked about “participants” but didn’t define what that was. They also 
didn’t consider the people running the event.

*In Scope*

Leo said he’d asked about people who might be engaged to run the 
meeting. This made sense to him, as it was the CoC for “RIPE” rather 
than “RIPE Meetings”. So, RIPE NCC staff should be covered, as the 
purpose of the RIPE NCC was to help RIPE do its job.

Brian said he agreed with this, but he was also concerned that trying to 
force the RIPE NCC as a legal entity/employer of staff to do something 
might lead to adoption problems.

Antony said he’d checked this with their HR department when putting 
together the impact analysis on the draft v3.0. They hadn’t raised any 
concerns – and said they would link the RIPE NCC’s internal staff CoC to 
the RIPE community’s.

*Protected People*

Leo explained that the list started with people who were almost 
certainly covered (e.g. RIPE Meeting attendees) and that this became 
less clear as you went down the list. The idea was to identify where the 
boundary was. For example, if a person attended a RIPE DNS session and a 
DNS OARC session, he thought they shouldn’t be bound by the RIPE CoC in 
the latter venue, as they didn’t bring any “RIPEness” with them.

Antony asked if someone could show a pattern of abuse by a someone in 
another venue – would the CoC Team not take this into account?

Brian said this was one of the biggest issues with CoCs that he’d come 
across. The general feeling was that evidence could be presented 
(“Person X did something terrible at Meeting Y”) and this was certainly 
relevant information. But they couldn’t say their CoC applied to people 
at a different meeting, so the answer was both yes and no. He thought 
this was out of scope – they couldn’t turn around and say to that their 
CoC applied to other events because some of the attendees had been to a 
RIPE Meeting in the past. What they could do was try to encourage 
communication. Another aspect was that this approach led to issues 
around defamation and things of that sort.

Denesh agreed.

Leo said one of the examples was someone attending a different event in 
the same venue. Were they protected by the RIPE CoC because the 
offending person was a registered RIPE Meeting attendee?

Denesh asked if this came down to whether the other person complained 
(as the offender would be wearing a RIPE Meeting badge). If not, it 
would be very difficult to prove.

Brian said he wouldn’t necessarily see this as something that fell under 
their CoC. If someone reported that an attendee had done something, then 
it came back to the hotel and it was a grey area. All of the CoCs he’d 
seen only talked about people at the event – they didn’t extend 
enforcement to these things. If someone punched someone outside a RIPE 
event, they might expect some repercussions from that, even if they 
didn’t come from the CoC team.

Denesh said this was similar to the way schools could receive complaints 
when people were in uniform and got into trouble outside of school – 
students might be suspended or punished on that basis. He wondered if 
this might be similar to someone outside the event wearing a RIPE 
Meeting badge.

Leo said now they were talking more in terms of protecting the 
reputation of RIPE as an organisation, which was a different dimension.

Antony asked if it could be problematic to go down that route – they 
might have someone criticising RIPE on a mailing list for not supporting 
a policy proposal, for example.

Brain agreed and said this should be out of scope. This was where people 
talked about “rules lawyering” a CoC. They might also hit a situation 
where someone did something to someone and the RIPE NCC had to take 
their badge away because the hotel had told them they were no longer 
welcome in the venue. This was separate from the CoC; they shouldn’t try 
to protect the world.

*Communication Protection to Non-Participants*

Leo asked how they communicated that people were protected so they knew 
they could make a complaint and who they should make it to.

Antony said the RIPE NCC could probably handle this in terms of venue staff.

Denesh said at UKNOF, if sponsors wanted to run their own events with 
their name attached, they had to agree to abide by their code of 
conduct. This seemed like more of a contractual issue on the RIPE NCC’s 
side.

Brian said he wouldn’t expect to see physical signs up, as this would be 
more for community members in terms of something they agreed to when 
signing up.

*Agreement on the Code of Conduct*

Leo asked about “tourists” – people who didn’t register for the meeting 
but were nevertheless on the periphery of the event to network with 
people. He personally thought this was too difficult, but he had 
included it so they could find the boundary in terms of the scope.

Denesh asked how the RIPE NCC was policing people in the venue without 
badges.

Antony said he was pretty sure they’d used venue security to check 
badges since their last meeting in Amsterdam. In the past they had 
relied on staff to spot people. People definitely needed a badge to be 
in the meeting space.

Brian said this seemed very straightforward – if someone was at the 
meeting without a badge, they could be asked to leave on that basis.

Antony asked if Leo was thinking in terms of people on the boundaries of 
the meeting space.

Brian said they allowed that as a courtesy and so it was straightforward 
to ask these people to leave. Where this might become more interesting 
was if someone had bought a +1 ticket for the RIPE Dinner. He suggested 
they could include something which said that all people attending the 
dinner agreed to adhere to the CoC, and the person who bought the ticket 
was responsible for their +1 in this respect.

Salam agreed with Brian and said they didn’t need to worry too much 
about tourists. The purpose of the CoC was to bind the RIPE community 
together and they needed to keep that in mind. This was the border in 
her opinion – she was not overly concerned with exceptions or edge cases.

*Understanding*

Leo referenced the feedback that people who were on the spectrum might 
have difficulties understanding the CoC. He noted that in the CoC it 
said they didn’t need to tell people what it meant to be a decent 
person. He asked if they did in fact need to tell people what was decent 
behaviour, or whether they should double down and say that they didn’t 
need to do this.

Denesh said he liked the W3C CoC as it explained expected behaviour and 
what they didn’t like, but he thought it might be worth giving some 
examples.

Salam said she thought they could assume that people were good and 
explain their values, rather than catering for the exception.

Brian said he really liked the expected behaviour part in the W3C 
document but noted that it was very long. He suggested maybe this was 
something to look at a future update to the CoC.

Salam said she didn’t see how they could describe what decent behaviour 
was, except by stating what their values were in the CoC.

Denesh said things like that could always be updated. He thought 
clarification was a good thing, but suggested this could go into an 
appendix. At the end of the day, some people did want guidance, but this 
shouldn’t be prescriptive.

Salam asked if they should have FAQs. One of these could be: “What is 
decent behaviour?”

Leo said he liked the idea of having this information separate, because 
it meant they could make a readable document and people who wanted the 
extra detail could find it.

*Reporting an Incident*

Leo asked what mechanisms should be available to submit a report.

Brian said he preferred in-person and email, and possibly web form. 
Instant messaging was complicated – you would need to have an official 
account and someone to staff it. He’d seen it happen where people ran to 
Twitter to report an incident; as a team they had to ask people to use 
an official format for reasons to do with reporting, logging, 
confidentiality, etc.

*Action: *Athina to provide input on where the legal boundaries are 
regarding reporting incidents and what is not acceptable/what is preferred.

*Mediation*

Leo noted the v3.0 document talked about investigations and decisions 
rather than what the RIPE community was meant to be about – bringing 
people together to reach consensus. Someone might say something rude and 
this could result in a report to the CoC Team. Hopefully, this would 
lead to a discussion and an apology – and hopefully an agreement for the 
future. He suspected the authors of the last version had this in mind, 
but it wasn’t documented. He asked if the group wanted to formally 
include this.

Brian said the one piece they needed to avoid was a situation where a 
potential abuser had more access to the person they abused. While it was 
good to have mediation as an option, it was important that it couldn’t 
be used to slow things down or force the victim to face their abuser.

Salam said that by the time she made a report, it would be because she 
wanted the other person gone. She wouldn’t want to have to deal with 
them after making a report and wouldn’t want to be reminded of how she 
felt about that person. Not all reports would result in sanctions, but 
she wouldn’t want it to put her across from her aggressor.

Leo said that what he was hearing was that they didn’t need to make this 
compulsory, but it might be good to have it as an option and note that 
it would need to be handled with some delicacy.

Brian agreed with Salam’s point. The ideal situation was that if someone 
did something bad, it was pointed out to them, they apologised, and 
everyone moved on. Some level of mediation was good, but it was 
important that no one was forced into a situation they didn’t want.

*Jurisdiction*

[Skipped until Athina could be on the call].

*Investigation – professional qualifications*

Leo asked if the CoC team would be qualified to perform investigations. 
And when they completed their investigation – who made the decision – 
should it be the same group or should there be some separation? He asked 
if the group would prefer a RIPE NCC staffer with a legal or HR 
background to drive this.

Salam asked if RIPE had some kind of Ombudsman.

Antony said they had the Trusted Contacts – one RIPE NCC staff member 
and one community member. It had been the same two people for some time 
now, and they’d both done external training on how to handle reports. 
This training was more in terms of how to receive a report and support 
someone in distress rather than how to conduct an investigation.

Leo said he was thinking if they wanted the investigation to be run by 
someone from the community or if they wanted this to be done by the RIPE 
NCC’s HR or Legal department. This was because they would be approaching 
this as professionals who went through all of the relevant development 
and training. This would be more of a challenge if they used volunteers, 
who would not be able to maintain the same degree of training/skills 
over time. The way he read v3.0, it sounded like the Trusted Contacts or 
the CoC Team who would be leading the investigation and making a 
decision at the end.

Brian said this was what they had intended, because this was the model 
that was employed in other communities. Because RIPE had a secretariat 
and money, perhaps it was an option to have someone with a professional 
background in this role.

*4.**Review Actions*

**

Leo ran through the actions and proposed a few additional ones based on 
the group’s discussion.

**

- RIPE NCC to share a poll with the group to agree on a regular 
bi-weekly meeting.

**

- Athina to provide input on where the legal boundaries are regarding 
reporting incidents and what is not acceptable/what is preferred.

- Add some model behaviours to a web page or an appendix.

- Include wording in the updated document that mediation is an option 
but not mandatory.

- TF members to review the draft document and add comments.

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