[ripe-list] PDP Appeals Process

Daniel,

My own feeling is that the appeals process worked basically well enough 
the first and only time it has been used, and that we would not be able 
to get any significant gain by a redesign at this point.

Since we've only had 1 appeal since the process was actually documented 
6+ years ago, maybe we should wait to see if the appeals process is 
actually broken before scrapping it?

More thoughts inline and at the end...

On 11/04/2021 10.31, Daniel Karrenberg wrote:
> Randy, colleagues,
> 
> we are already past the station where we wonder whether to review the 
> appeals process. Our chairs collective is already actively thinking 
> about significant tweaks. This is what prompted my reaction.

I wouldn't call the proposed changes significant:

1. Clarifying who should recuse themselves. (This was already implicit, 
but to quote the Zen of Python: "explicit is better than implicit".)

2. Setting deadlines.

3. Clarifying the role of informal discussion before policy proposals.

In fact, I don't see any much work at all there.

> To make my point clearer let’s look at this from the perspective of cost 
> to the community: The chairs are proposing costly tweaks to the existing 
> procedure, such as writing and agreeing on a playbook and giving courses 
> to WG chairs that may never use the PDP. I ask whether we should 
> fundamentally review the procedure instead. That has a cost too. I 
> expect this cost to be less or equal to the cost of the proposed tweaks. 
> I also expect that we can come up with a good procedure that costs 
> significantly less to *run* each time than a tweaked procedure. My 
> message gives the general idea on how I propose to achieve that. This is 
> the question we have to answer first.
> 
> The engineering comes after that. And, as always, the engineering will 
> include trade-offs: the less costly the execution of the procedure is, 
> the lower the threshold to invoke it can be and vice-versa.
> 
> Again: Should we go beyond tweaking and fundamentally review the PDP 
> appeals procedure?

We now have N=1, since we've had exactly one appeal.

I was the one who facilitated the process and wrote the draft of the 
response after a special meeting of the working group chairs collective 
(WGCC) to discuss the appeal. We had a relatively small number of chairs 
who actively participated in the process. I suspect that any handling of 
an appeal would look pretty much the same, although possibly with 
different people. I don't think we would save work by picking different 
people to handle the appeals process; we would just shift it around.

As for including people who did not sign up for this task, the role of 
the WGCC in appeals was set in the PDP in 2014 (ripe-614), so this is 
hardly new (although I see that when we updated the working group chair 
job description in 2017 we missed that bit; technically redundant but 
really it should be there).

In the end we basically have the same unpleasant options we usually have 
for such things: either re-use a body that was not designed for this 
purpose or create a new one. Both options kind of suck.

In principle the appeals procedure could be used as a denial-of-service 
attack on the RIPE community by bad faith actors. But I think that the 
RIPE community is highly resistant to such problems and I trust that our 
RIPE Chair will be able to handle any such situation in a common sense 
manner.

Cheers,

--
Shane
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