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

Dear TF members,


Very sorry for the delay with the recent batch of minutes. Here's the 
first set from January. Two more still to come!


Cheers


Ant



***

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*

*Draft Minutes - COC TF: **Eighth**Call
**22**January 2021, 16:30-17:30 (UTC+1) *

*Attendees:*Denesh Bhabuta, Athina Fragkouli, Antony Gollan, Brian 
Nisbet, Leo Vegoda, Salam Yamout

*Summary: *The TF discussed whether to include wording in the CoC that 
it cannot be used to appeal PDP decisions. While it agreed the two 
processes were separate, it decided this was not required. The TF also 
decided not to include “defamation” in the CoC, as this would depend on 
the specifics of the case and might used against others in bad faith. A 
line was added to clarify that only “unacceptable behaviours” could 
constitute a CoC violation. It was noted that while the CoC would be 
applied to other RIPE NCC events (that did not have a PC), there might 
be issues with the CoC Team not being present at the meeting to handle 
reports or not being familiar with the local culture.

*1. Minutes*

**

Leo said they had two sets of minutes from previous meetings.

Both were approved without comment.

*2. Agenda*

**

There were no changes to the agenda.

**

*3. Actions*

**

-*RIPE NCC to review text under Where this CoC Applies (final two 
paragraphs)*

Antony said he and Athina had looked at this before the call, but they 
weren’t quite there yet. He said they would have this done before the 
next call.

Leo asked him to notify the group via the mailing list once this was done.

-*TF members to think about whether there should be a statement that the 
CoC cannot be used to appeal consensus decisions within the PDP, and 
also to review the Behaviour section ahead of next call.*

**

To recap, Leo said there could be a case where a consensus call was made 
in a WG and someone then complained that this outcome was the result of 
something that contravened the CoC. So there was a question about 
whether this should go through a WG process or the CoC process. He asked 
if there were any thoughts on this.

Salam said the CoC was about people’s conduct – while a consensus call 
was about whether they agreed on A or B. She couldn’t see how these 
could conflict.

Denesh agreed with Salam – they were completely separate processes. He 
thought it came down to the WG Chair. If the chair thought the report 
was a matter for the CoC, they could direct it there.

Brian said he thought they had already agreed these were separate and he 
personally didn’t think there should be any relation between the two. 
The question was whether they wanted to have a statement in the CoC that 
this was the case. He didn’t think they should have such a statement, as 
it and might seem strange. If this became an issue later, they could 
worry about it then. If someone felt they were being bullied as part of 
a PDP discussion, that was a CoC matter – and the PDP continued 
separately from this. It was possible to imagine cases where someone 
claimed they weren’t able to pursue their proposal due to a reaction 
from the community – but the solution was to resolve this via the CoC 
before going back to the PDP.

Leo said he thought there was the potential for someone to claim that a 
WG Chair was biased against them for a CoC-related reason. At that 
point, because the WG Chair was the person being targeted by the 
complaint, he thought the only way this could be resolved would be to 
have the decision about which process to follow go to another group – 
probably the WG Chair Collective. However, he didn’t think they needed 
to put this into the CoC itself. If they did want to include this, it 
could go into the process document rather than the CoC.

Brian said the key point was that if someone didn’t think the WG Chair’s 
decision was correct, they had the right to appeal to the WG Chairs 
Collective. There could even be a CoC complaint and a PDP appeal on the 
same issue simultaneously, but they should be separate.

Leo said they could say that the first half of that action was done – 
they’d thought about it and didn’t want to address it in the CoC 
document itself. The next part was to review the behaviour section. As 
most of the TF had reviewed this, they could mark this as done.

Salam asked if they should have something in the CoC on “defamation” – 
she had noticed this recently in a mailing list thread.

Denesh said he thought things like slander, libel and defamation were 
already covered in the section on jurisdiction: once a legal line was 
crossed, it became a legal matter rather than something for the CoC to 
address. He asked Athina if that was correct.

Salam said if someone defamed her via email, she probably wouldn’t sue 
them.

Athina said she understood what Salam meant. The RIPE NCC had seen two 
cases of such an accusation recently. On the mailing lists, someone had 
posted facts and information in an analysis regarding how someone was 
involved in a fraudulent case. This person asked the RIPE NCC to remove 
the content because it was defamatory. It was very difficult to define 
whether this was defamation or if it was writing down known facts. At 
the same time, they had also decided to moderate someone because they 
were doing the same to others, because this was a violation of the CoC. 
She thought perhaps they should add this to the CoC and leave it to the 
CoC Team to make this evaluation depending on the case.

Salam said Athina had a good point. The RIPE NCC had removed content 
because it believed it was a violation of the CoC. Provided it continued 
to do this, then they wouldn’t need anything in the CoC. But if the CoC 
Team would be making this decision, then they would need to have 
something in there.

Athina said there were differing outcomes depending on the specifics of 
the case. If someone posted illegal content, then the RIPE NCC had an 
obligation to remove it, as otherwise they were liable. It might also be 
that an outcome of an evaluation by the CoC Team was that they had to 
exclude someone from a mailing list – but this would be a separate thing.

Brian said he was strongly against adding this to the unacceptable 
behaviours. He thought it became too easy for someone to say that they 
were being defamed. When it came to whether they should ask a group of 
people to decide whether something was defamatory or otherwise – he 
wasn’t a fan of that. He’d often had things said about him on the 
mailing lists that would fall into one category of unacceptable 
behaviour or the another. His concerns were that A) they were asking a 
team to make a legal judgement and B) People could use this against 
others in a malicious way. If claims were untrue, then other legal steps 
might need to be taken, but he thought this should be separate from the 
CoC.

Athina said other unacceptable behaviours that were in the CoC could 
also be subject to a legal evaluation. An example was making threats, 
which was also illegal.

Brian said some threats were quite literal – “I’m going to kill you.”

Athina noted that she often said she was going to kill people as a joke.

Leo said he thought they could all agree that email was quite a bad 
medium for conveying tone and people could always misinterpret things. 
He thought they could mark this action as done and move on to reviewing 
behaviours.

**

*4. Publication *

**

*Behaviours*

**

Leo said he wasn’t sure if they wanted Unacceptable Behaviours to be an 
exhaustive list.People could always find creative ways to be cruel and 
so he didn’t think they could be comprehensive – it had to be examples. 
He had taken the opening paragraph from the Python CoC, and hadn’t made 
any changes beyond updating “Python community” to “RIPE community.” He 
asked if there should be any further changes to this.

The group discussed whether they should use “RIPE participants” vs 
“members of the RIPE community.” There was support for the former, and 
they agreed that this should be used consistently throughout the document.

The group also discussed whether they should use wording along the lines 
of “RIPE community members are…” vs “RIPE community members should be…”

Looking at “Expected Behaviours”, Athina noted that it was much easier 
to enforce a list of “do not’s” as opposed to a bunch of “do’s”. She had 
taken the liberty of adding a line stating that the “do’s” were an 
aspirational list – making it clear that failing to display these 
behaviours was not necessarily a CoC violation.

Brian said that failing to “Accept feedback gracefully” might include 
telling someone to “F-off”.

Athina said it could also describe someone who acted in a less offensive 
way but nevertheless did not accept feedback gracefully. Looking at the 
list they had, she wondered if someone could make a complaint because 
someone was not “open”, for example.

The group agreed to include some wording along the lines of what Athina 
had proposed to address this.

Leo asked if there were any comments on the list of “Unacceptable 
behaviours”. He noted that he had grouped these in alphabetical order to 
avoid the perception that some were more important than others.

Salam asked what happened if a person clearly discriminated against 
someone, but their actions were not something that was included on the 
list.

The group agreed that they could have some wording to the effect of 
“this is not an exhaustive list.”

Brian said this was one of the biggest sticking points in CoC debates 
and created space for rules lawyering, but no one had yet found a way 
around this.

Athina noted the phrase “This includes but is not limited to:” and said 
the latter part was redundant. However, she could see the value in 
having this. If they did decide to keep this, then they should make it 
consistent throughout the document (as “but is not limited to:” was not 
in the scope, for example).

Brian also found this redundant. However, he recognised that he was a 
native English speaker. He agreed that they should be consistent 
whichever way they went.

The group agreed to include both throughout the document.

Leo said this meant they were at the end of Document 1, though there was 
still the review of a couple of paragraphs that the RIPE NCC had to do.

*5. AOB*

**

Antony said he and Athina had been looking at the text about how this 
would apply to groups such as ENOG or MENOG. The current text said this 
would be up to the relevant PCs to apply, and the RIPE NCC would apply 
it to its own meetings. This was fine. However, when they started 
thinking about things like RIPE NCC Regional Meetings, for which there 
was no PC, they started to wonder what would happen if a complaint was 
made via the CoC – especially if the meeting was quite far away from 
where the CoC Team was based. Did the complaint go to the RIPE CoC Team, 
or should the RIPE NCC have its own CoC Team for these complaints?

Leo said this document was about what the CoC was and where it applied. 
He suggested they think about the implementation later.

Athina agreed with Leo’s comment. However, one issue was that the draft 
document touched on the implementation a little bit. In the rationale, 
the third goal talked about a transparent framework for report handling. 
So this was not entirely separate. When they talked about the RIPE 
Meetings, they had the RIPE CoC Team. When they talked about ENOG, SEE 
or MENOG meetings, they would work this out with the relevant PC, which 
might create its own CoC Team. But if it was a RIPE NCC Regional 
Meeting, did they send reports via the RIPE CoC Team, or was this too 
far away and the team wouldn’t feel comfortable making a determination 
in these cases?

Brian said he didn’t think it would be unfair to the future CoC Team to 
ask it to fill this role in cases where the RIPE NCC organised an event 
for the RIPE community and there wasn’t a relevant body (PC, RIPE NCC 
Executive Board) to form a CoC Team. Perhaps this might come with the 
understanding that the process was a little slower than usual.

Salam asked if this meant the same rules wouldn’t apply in all regions.

Athina said this was about how reports were handled rather than the 
rules. When it came to RIPE Meetings, they would have the RIPE CoC Team. 
When it came to MENOG or ENOG Meetings, they might like to have their 
own team – or perhaps would feel comfortable using the RIPE CoC Team for 
that.

Salam said she thought each community should have a few local members 
who underwent the same training as the RIPE CoC Team.

Antony said the example he was thinking of was something like “RIPE NCC 
Regional Meeting: Kazakhstan” – which would be a RIPE NCC run event that 
didn’t have any interaction with a local PC.

Athina said it was something they might need input on from the community 
– whether it was appropriate or they felt comfortable having the CoC 
Team performing such evaluations. And also, whether these local 
communities felt comfortable having their reports evaluated by a group 
that was not present at the meeting, and potentially was not familiar 
with their culture.

Leo said this could be something they discussed with the community. The 
TF might say they were very happy with the other sections, but this part 
needed more input. This might be preferable to investing a lot of effort 
on this aspect – only for it to later change based on feedback.

Brian said he would prefer they had someone at these events who could 
handle reports over excluding these communities from the CoC.

Leo said they were out of time and proposed an action on the RIPE NCC.

*Action: RIPE NCC to clean up the draft CoC and circulate it on the list 
(perhaps via a separate Google doc).*

**

Leo also noted that the RIPE Chair Team was asking whether the chat at a 
RIPE Meeting should be preserved, or whether it should be ephemeral and 
disappear. This might have implications for the CoC Team’s work.

Athina suggested they consider whether they should remove the bullet 
point on report handling from the rationale of the CoC, as this was not 
addressed in the document.

Leo said that by getting the CoC document finished, they had passed 
their first milestone. He thanked the TF members for their work so far.

*Actions*

**

*Action: RIPE NCC to review text about where the CoC aplied at the 
fringes of the formal RIPE community and moving into associated communities*

*Action: RIPE NCC to clean up the draft CoC and circulate it on the list 
(perhaps via a separate Google doc).*

End of meeting.

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