[Accountability-tf] Notes from 16th call (working call)

Dear task force members,

Here are the notes from yesterday's call.

Cheers

Antony


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Accountability TF call minutes - 16th call (working call)

Attendees:
Antony Gollan, Alexander Isavnin, Wim Rullens, William Sylvester

1.5.    How are the subjects held accountable?
-Appears to be held to agreed processes
-Applying a standard or value or norm
1.6.    To Whom are the subjects held accountable?
1.6.1.    Who is the RIPE community?
1.6.2.    Broader Internet Community

Alexander said the RIPE community as it was formed was accountable to 
the idea of global Internet connectivity. With this in mind, they could 
discuss who the RIPE community was: a community of people interested in 
working on and supporting global Internet connectivity. Maybe those 
people who were using [rather than working on] connectivity could be 
understood to be the "broader Internet community".

William said he thought they did have the broader Internet community as 
a stakeholder. Internet users were affected by the things that RIPE did. 
They also had governments and states. And they had ICANN. The other RIRs 
were also all stakeholders in what they were doing. He asked if they had 
commitments to these parties.

Antony noted that in their face to face meeting, someone had said that 
RIPE should only be accountable to itself.

Alexander said this was a good point. At the meeting they had also 
discussed that if they went down the road of being accountable to things 
like human rights or "the greater good", they would be opening the door 
to involvement from other parties such as governments and this could 
backfire. They might want to include some kind of statements on what 
they thought about these aspects.

William said he agreed with the point that RIPE was accountable to RIPE. 
Others might benefit from RIPE's activities - and people from other 
communities were free to participate, but that didn't mean that RIPE was 
accountable to these communities.

Alexander said they had talked about how RIPE was open to everyone, but 
people forgot the idea that RIPE was about IP connectivity. So people 
might have the feeling that their business was affected by IP 
connectivity (e.g. intellectual property advocates) but they didn't have 
a role to play in improving IP connectivity and so were not part of the 
community.

2.2.    Values
2.2.1.    Process
- Transparent
- Accessible
- Open Participation
- Bottom-up self-regulatory structure
- Consensus-Based decision making

William said this was a good segue to the point on RIPE being open to 
participation. They did encourage others to engage, and anyone could 
participate within the community. Everything was open, there were clear 
communications and they had bottom-up mechanisms for decision making.

Alexander asked if they had something in the mapping document about this.

Antony said they had a section called 
"Open/Transparent/Inclusive/Bottom-up" near the end of the document. The 
things that were included under that heading, such as archived mailing 
lists, were intended to serve as evidence or "documentation" that the 
community had these features.

Antony asked if they should include some wording on "why" the community 
had chosen to make these values (open, transparent, bottom-up) such a 
central part of its processes.

Alexander said he thought these were default European values at the 
location and time where the community was formed. He had first come to 
the community with very different values and it had taken him some time 
to get used to how the community worked. If these values had not been 
there since the beginning of the community, it could have formed grown 
into else and likely would not have been as successful.

William said the community had lasted a long time and overcome adversity 
because of its values - this was an important point to make. If they 
didn't have these values, they might not have been supported by the 
greater Internet. The values were part of their DNA and who they were as 
a community.

Alexander said the Internet couldn't have become the Internet if it 
didn't have these values. In the ITU, those values might be stated 
somewhere, but they did not live up to them: governments and 
corporations had oversized influence there. That's why the Internet 
model overcame their model. Keeping these values, which had led to the 
growth of the Internet, allowed them to make a statement about the RIPE 
community being accountable to itself. They shouldn't shift their 
accountability outside of the community - because being accountable to 
themselves led to the success of the broader community.

William said by setting and adhering to these values, the community held 
itself to a higher standard and kept itself accountable through the way 
that it conducted discusions, made decisions, etc.

2.2.2.    Substantive
- Everyone can use the Internet
- Inter-connected Networks (core network value)
- Stable and Reliable Internet
- RIPE has a defined scope

William said that as a community they provided support/enabled the 
interconnection of networks and supported operational needs.

Antony asked if they wanted to talk about the distinction between 
Process vs Substantive values and some of the implications around this.

Alexander said that Malcolm had been the one to really make this 
distinction and it might be worth letting him comment here.

William suggested they leave it there, and hopefully some of the other 
task force members would be able to share their thoughts on the mailing 
list.