[Accountability-tf] Notes from 20th call

Dear task force members,

Here are the notes from Monday's call.

Cheers

Antony


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Accountability TF call minutes - 20th call

Attendees:
Athina Fragkouli, Antony Gollan, Malcolm Hutty, Alexander Isavnin, 
William Sylvester.


Agenda:

1. Recap of community feedback from RIPE 76
2. What changes are needed to the draft?
3. Next steps


1. Recap of community feedback from RIPE 76

Antony ran quickly through the feedback from the BoF at RIPE 76:

- Values: the community seemed to prefer that they stick to the more 
established values of open, transparent, bottom-up, etc. Daniel had 
stated that they had deliberately avoided "motherhood and apple pie" 
statements from the beginning. Their goal had been to allow operators, 
who were often in competition with one another, to cooperate. And for 
that you needed to be open/transparent, etc. He noted that Salam had 
supported having something along the lines of "who am I, why am I here?" 
but not pushing it too far.

- Consensus: there was the comment that the community used consensus not 
because they were hippies, but because it was the best way to ensure 
cooperation in an environment where everyone could vote with their feet. 
There were some comments about not confusing consensus (as a method of 
negotiation) with the decision-making of the community, and some 
comments that perhaps these could be described separately. Ruediger had 
also noted having a well-described process was important for external 
accountability.

- Capture: Nurani argued that they shouldn't take themselves too 
seriously - if somene caputred a WG Chair position, the community would 
survive. Because no one had too much power, it wasn't a concern. It was 
noted that one risk of capture was from process geeks who wanted to 
document everything. Filiz had noted that there was not really such a 
great separation of powers - WG Chairs could also be RIPE NCC Board 
members at the same time.

- Retaining community trust over time: Shane had argued that they could 
only retain trust by being trustworthy and as long as they were open to 
newcomers, they would be sharing their values with them. It was noted 
that there could be a divergence between the community and RIPE NCC 
membership. And Randy and Daniel had noted that documenting these types 
of things for newcomers would be valuable and a good task for the task 
force - but that maybe this should be more like a history or an informal 
explanation.

William said they would need to integrate BoF feedback in the document. 
This would probably mean an internal revision that they would share with 
the task force for a review before they published it to the community.

Malcolm asked what the problem had been with the substantive values.

William said this was partly because by documenting them they would 
exclude people who didn't share these values. And these values would 
naturally drift over time, so there was a risk that the document would 
quickly lose meaning or become out of date.

Antony said that there had been been pretty consistent feedback from the 
community that they wanted to avoid writing down the more abstract 
"substantive values" and in fact had deliberately chosen not to right 
from the beginning, for example in the RIPE Terms of Reference (RIPE-001).

William said there was comments that it was better to leave those values 
at a higher level and let the process (open, transparent, bottom-up) 
produce them naturally.

Alexander said they were working on this document because the situation 
was changing dramatically since the community had created those first 
documents. What they were doing was in response to all those changes. 
Maybe if they were getting these concerns, they should address them - by 
pointing out that things had changed over 25 years and that now the 
world had come to them.

Malcolm said he was more sympathetic to Alexander's point of view.

2. What changes are needed to the draft?

William said regarding the draft, they'd needed to take another solid 
review. And they'd need to add essential feedback they had gotten from 
the meeting. And then they could use the same process that they'd used 
ahead of their earlier Go/No-go meeting. He knew Malcolm had some 
comments that he wanted to be integrated. Then they could take this new 
revision and send it out for feedback. Did they need another Go/No-go 
meeting to decide if they were ready to send to the community?

William said the next step would be to take another editorial review, 
adding feedback and sending this to the group.

The group agreed with this.

Malcolm asked how widespread this opposition to substantive values was.

Antony said this had been pretty sustained throughout the whole process, 
including the email they had sent ahead of the previous meeting.

William said this feedback had been from the old guard who thought it 
was better to keep this ambiguous, because they all had an idea of what 
this meant and didn't want to create problems. Because the values that 
were established were the social mores of the community. People might 
not want to sign on to this because it would not get revised in the future.

Antony added that there had been a couple of people who had stepped up 
in support of documenting these values.

Athina suggested they not focus too much on values and address other 
parts of the document first. She hadn't really seen any substantial 
support on this. And she was concerned this would generate negative 
comments on the report.

Malcolm said clearly something had to change in the document, if they 
were getting push-back on it. On the other hand, he found it difficult 
to believe that people objected to a "stable and reliable Internet", or 
"RIPE has a defined scope", etc. If they were getting this much 
feedback, maybe they could take the parts out of that section and work 
it into other areas of the document as more of a background approach.

Alexander said he had two suggestions: 1) if they didn't believe that 
they would have complete support for their report, they could allow 
themselves to have a minority report. They might have consensus on one 
part, but might have a different opinion on some of the topics. That 
would not completely ruin the idea, as there was no minority report on 
anything about RIPE. 2) If they couldn't get support, they could start 
working on a negative report - they had tried to define their 
accountability and failed, and here was why.

William said he didn't think they wouldn't have support for the overall 
report, they just didn't want to have a negative response to some of its 
parts when they presented it to the community.

William said he liked the idea of integrating some of this content 
(substantive values) into the background of other sections and they 
would see what they would do here.

3. Next steps

William said if their goal was to have this ready for the meeting, 
hopefully they should aim to get something ready for the group in early 
August.

Malcolm said last time they spoke they were comtemplating publishing 
this. The basic sense was that the document was about right, but didn't 
have quite enough explanation - but now they were thinking that maybe 
what they had down in the document wasn't quite right either. Their 
experience from the last meeting showed how important it was to have a 
clear Go/No-go decision and not get trapped into artifical deadlines.

William agreed and said they'd also learned a lot through the BoF process.

Malcolm said they needed to do the same thing again - look at the 
meeting dates and work back from there to see out when they needed to 
publish and when they needed a Go/No-go decision.

William said they had their aimed to have their next meeting early 
August. And he could work with the secretariat to propose a timeline to 
the group soon.

Malcolm noted that when he opened the version with Carsten's comments, 
it crashed his Word. The version that Antony had sent opened fine.

William said they would plan to keep their next call in two weeks to 
track progress and see where they were.