[Accountability-tf] Notes from 13th call

Dear task force members,

Last email from me today - here are the notes from Monday's call.

Cheers

Antony


****
*

*Accountability TF call minutes - 13th call *

*Attendees: *
Athina Fragkouli, Antony Gollan, Malcolm Hutty, Alexander Isavnin, 
Carsten Schiefner, Marco Schmidt, William Sylvester

*Agenda:*

*1. Welcome back, finalise agenda**
**2. Review of open action items **
**3. Plan moving forward to RIPE 76 / Work plan for upcoming calls**
**4. Malcolm's document on consensus **
**5. Gathering TF feedback for the RIPE NCC to fit into document**
**6. AOB*

*1. Welcome back, finalise agenda*

There were no changes to the agenda.

*2. Review of open action items *

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

William said they were planning to have more calls that would be focused 
on working through the document. They would take whoever was available 
and they would be a bit more casual. He suggested they could also create 
a slack group or use some other kind of collaboration tool for work 
between calls.

He asked what people thought would work best for their schedule. He 
asked if the 2pm slot worked for everyone and if they were happy using 
WebEx.

Everyone agreed that 2pm was fine, and WebEx was working well.

Alexander supported the idea of using some kind of collaboration tool.

*20170907-1: Malcolm to finalise the mind-map as a supporting document 
for the task force. *

It was clarified that this was really about tidying up the mind-map with 
any final comments or tweaks before it went into the supporting 
documents. William said they could close this item for now.

*20170703-2: RIPE NCC to look for past statements/presentations that 
might be relevant to the TF's work. *

Antony said they had looked at some presentations and gone through a 
number of mailing lists, but it was difficult without some direction in 
terms of what they were looking for.

William asked if they had spoken with any staff members who had 
experience with the RIPE community's past. He said they could close this 
one.

Antony said they were happy to if there was some direction on what they 
should be asking about.

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

*20170306-1: RIPE NCC to further develop accountability mapping document 
with task force input. *

*20170306-2: Task force members to review and comment on accountability 
mapping document. *

Antony said there wasn't much to say about these other items. They were 
mostly placeholders that they had kept open for some time.

William said they could close the two relating to the accountability 
document, as that was mostly done. He asked if there were any new items 
they needed to add to the list.

****Action: Task force members to provide input on draft outline document. *

****Action: Finalise draft report. *

****Action: Review task force website content, add links to presentations. *

*3. Plan moving forward to RIPE 76 / Work plan for upcoming calls *

William asked if they needed to make any more updates to the task 
force's web page. He asked if they should add the mapping document.

Athina said she wasn't sure they wanted to share documents that hadn't 
been discussed in the community and that were just supporting documents. 
She supported putting up the slides they had presented to the community. 
Putting the mapping document up without context might confuse people.

William said it looked like they needed to add links to presentations on 
the website, but agreed with Athina's point about their other working 
documents.

Carsten asked if there was anything they were afraid of sharing with the 
community.

William said information without context might just confuse people. It 
might be better to present this in one go to the community once they had 
done the work. He asked if Carsten thought people reading the document 
would understand it.

Carsten said he was just wondering if a maximum of transparency would be 
the way to go.

Athina said publishing the document might distract from their goal of 
publishing a draft report. The mapping document was in their mailing 
list archives and was in their presentation slides. It would make more 
sense for this to be attached to the final report. As long as it was a 
work in progress, it was enough that it was where it was currently.
Carsten said he was happy to rest his case for the time being.

William said the goal was to get input to finalise the document and 
publish the draft in time for the community to see it at RIPE 76, and 
then publish the final ahead of RIPE 77. The goal was to present this to 
the community, gather any feedback, and finalise the document and any 
other deliverables. They had a lot of work ahead of them, so they'd need 
to move ahead with bi-monthly calls to get through this. On these calls 
they could work on their actual deliverables.

Malcolm said they needed to have a decision point ahead of RIPE 76 where 
they could decide whether they had enough to put something forward to 
the community. If the answer was no, perhaps they might be willing to 
share what they had, with the understanding that they were not 
presenting it to the community in an official sense. They would need a 
date for this decision.

William said they probably didn't want to do it any earlier than 18 
April and no later than 1 May. April would be aggressive, and the 
challenge in May was that they would be right up against the meeting.

Malcolm said his concern was that it should be a deliberate decision to 
present something to the community, and not something they stumbled into.

Alexander agreed they had a lot of things to do ahead of RIPE 76. They 
needed more active assignments to be given to task force members - like 
paragraphs to complete in the final document. They could also test their 
draft document on community members in a focus group.

William said those were both great points worth discussing further. As 
an arbitrary suggestion, he proposed 15 April as the date when they 
could decide whether they were near their goal and needed a couple of 
weeks, or whether they needed to change their strategy from publishing a 
draft to giving an update on their progress. He took Malcolm's point 
that they should publish something they supported, and not just publish 
something because they felt they needed to publish something.

Carsten cautioned against using a focus-group of community members - he 
didn't think this would go over well with the wider community.

William said the idea was just to test out their ideas by running them 
in front of a few people (possibly with RIPE NCC staff) to see how it 
would go over. They might want to discuss who would be in this group. It 
might be as little as running some stuff past a couple of people to see 
if they had any feedback to make it better.

*4. Malcolm's document on consensus *

Malcolm said this could be a key accountability tool itself once it was 
finalised, so he had taken a first shot at it. He was looking for 
everyone's reactions. It was quite complete in terms of the parts that 
were written (as a first draft), but he had noted in brackets that they 
needed some discussion on the critical role of the chair, which hadn't 
been written. He had also noted that there should be a brief description 
on the differences between RIPE and the IETF's understanding of consensus.

Alexander asked that any concerns or things that needed further 
discussion be clearly indicated in the text. As a non-native English 
speaker, there was the possibility that some of this might not be 
immediately obvious.

Malcolm said he had tried to write this clearly. But he agreed they were 
a community with differing levels of English and he could take another 
look at it with this in mind.

William said Alexander's feedback was important - this was something 
that should be a concern for the task force when they published their 
final deliverables, so anyone in their community could understand it. He 
thought Malcolm had written it quite clearly, but they could look at 
this when they were at the wordsmithing stage.

Malcolm noted that there had been a recent discussion on the role of the 
chair recently in the Address Policy WG that they could pull from.

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

William said most people thought of the chair as the tie-breaker. He 
asked if that was consistent with the group's view.

Malcolm said there was some subtlety here. He didn't think the chair was 
a tie-breaker in terms of being the deciding voice that chose from one 
of two conflicting views. It was more in terms of helping the community 
to work to reach an agreement. One of the things the chair did was to 
define the terms of an objection. It either meant there was no 
consensus, or that someone was objecting in a way that was insufficient 
to hold up the process. As a community they relied quite heavily on the 
chair to make this determination. Malcolm said there were various 
reasons why a statement of "no" might not be a barrier to rough 
consensus being found. They wanted to see if they had an exhaustive list 
in the document, or whether they were only some examples.

Athina said she would be interested in understanding more about when the 
objection came from many voices. On what basis would the chair evaluate 
that this was not a valid objection? For example, how could a chair say 
that a massive objection was not the community's opinion and rather an 
effort to capture the process. That might be something they wanted to 
touch upon.

Carsten said as much as he agreed with Malcolm and Athina that they 
needed to discuss this point, he had a feeling that this wasn't the main 
role of a chair. The main role was to keep the WG running - managing the 
proposals, and other tasks.

William said this discussion was specifically related to the chair's 
role in terms of rough consensus. Chairs had many responsibilities and 
one of those was to moderate consensus.

Malcolm said that to capture Carsten's point, perhaps he should modify 
the heading to say it was the critical role of the chair in making a 
consensus decision. This wasn't about creating a job description for the 
chair - the chair had many roles - this was only in terms of consensus.

Carsten suggested they should add a paragraph to this effect.

William proposed that Carsten draft something and send it to the list.

****Action: Carsten to prepare paragraph for chair section of consensus 
document and send to the list. *

*5. Gathering TF feedback for the RIPE NCC to fit into document *

William said the format of the working calls would be to get the section 
headings they would be discussing out to task members ahead of the 
meeting so they could speak to these and the RIPE NCC could feed this 
back into the document.

*6. Any Other Business (AOB) *

There were no AOBs.

William encouraged everyone to read the recent emails on the ML and 
share any comments.


*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. **
****
**20180205-1: Task force members to provide input on draft outline 
document. **
****
**20180205-2: Finalise draft report. **
****
**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. **
***

*Closed Action Items *

*20170907-1: Malcolm to finalise the mind-map as a supporting document 
**for the task force. *

*20170703-2: RIPE NCC to look for past statements/presentations that 
might be relevant to the TF's work.*

*20170306-1: RIPE NCC to further develop accountability mapping document 
with task force input.*

*20170306-2: Task force members to review and comment on accountability 
mapping document.*

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