[diversity] RIPE Code of Conduct 2.0

Amanda, Shasha, Ruben, colleagues,

thank you for reading and responding to my proposals. I took some time
to reflect on your thoughts and here are some more thoughts of my own.
Please do not interpret my contributions here as opposition to what you
are trying to achieve or even as a denial of the necessity to improve.

I agree that RIPE should be as diverse as possible and a safe place for
everyone. We should strive for this in our open and transparent way and
avoid taking dangerous shortcuts that will haunt us in the future. This
is why I spend energy in this discussion and why I repeat my offer to
help with better language.

---

I proposed:

"- The draft should encourage anyone in the community to actively
intervene when they observe unacceptable behavior."

I heard:

	- In practice this does not work.
	- People lack the courage.
	- Yes in an ideal world ...

Further thoughts:

My own observations are not much different. This is not getting better
either. The bystander effect is real and it takes courage to intervene
in such situations.

Yet I remain convinced that the RIPE CoC should have as much active
en*courage*ment as possible. We loose nothing by saying what kind of
behavior we, as a community, would want to see. It would be bad not to
say this at all because this would encourage people to look away because
"someone else is responsible".

So I am still convinced we should include language to encourage the
community to intervene and not rely on someone else. Something like "We
no it takes courage not to look the other way, but please act anyway.
Here is how. Here is what you do to get help if you need it. Not looking
away is what makes RIPE a safe place."


----

I proposed:

"- It is a real bad idea to create a special enforcement committee.

- It would be better to continue the current system of trusted contacts
and empower them more."

I heard:

	- The trusted contacts are powerless
	- The current structures are ineffective
	- It should be possible to sanction first violations.
	- How do we deal with violations by 'people in power'?


Further thoughts/clarifications:

I strongly suspect that the current scope of the trusted contacts is
lacking; so we have no disagreement there at all. However we have not
seen any sort of 'transparency report' from the trusted contacts that
would allow for a good analysis. We need to hear from the trusted
contacts and base our discussion on what they have to report and what
they might suggest.

I remain extremely concerned about empowering a vaguely described
'enforcement committee' with no other responsibility than sanctioning
community members. Doing things like this, especially with the best of
intentions, never ends well in my experience. History has a lot of
pertinent examples too.

Sanctioning needs careful consideration and due process. Decisions about
sanctions should be made by people clearly legitimatized by the
community. These people should have other community responsibilities
beyond sanctioning in order to prevent a very undesirable focus and
possible bias. We are talking about sanctions *in the name of the
community*. The current language is much too vague.

The emphasis needs to be on preventing and correcting unacceptable
behavior and not on sanctioning it. Therefore I *do* believe that a
community member who apologizes appropriately and does not repeat the
unacceptable behavior should not be formally sanctioned *by the
community*. The *community* then has no reason to sanction in this case.
Other actions like criminal, employment and social ones are separate.

Yes we need to make it easy for victims to report and get help. However
we also need to prevent abuse of community processes. I totally agree
that this is a difficult balance. I do not expect to find the perfect
solution for this dilemma. The current language however gives the
impression that anyone can accuse anyone with impunity, remain anonymous
and have a good chance that something will at least stick to the
accused. We need to do better than that.

I realise that it is especially difficult to deal with unacceptable
behavior if it involves a real or perceived power gradient. All we can
do here is to make sure that the persons concerned are kept out of any
decision process about their personal behavior. This can be done.

So here is my revised proposal:

- We should ask the current trusted contacts for a transparency report
about their work so far. We should ask explicitly for their opinions
about impediments to being effective. We should also ask them for
suggestions for improvement.

- Based on that and on the language we obtained from other communities
we should develop a CoC specifically tailored to RIPE and a response
process (not just a guide) that first aims at quickly resolving
violations, then collection of evidence and then an agreed number of
sanctions. Formal sanctions and the process to apply them need to be
clearly specified.

- We should *not* create a special group of people with the sole purpose
of sanctioning community members for CoC violations.

;-) ;-) ;-)
I remain white, male, 60+, slightly obese and diverse in many ways.
;-) ;-) ;-)

Daniel