[coc-tf] Draft Minutes - Code of Conduct TF: Sixth Call

Dear TF members,

Apologies for the delay - here are the minutes from our last call. 
Corrections welcome.

Happy new year :)

Cheers

Ant*
*

*
*

*Draft Minutes - Code of Conduct TF: Sixth Call *

17 December 2020, 16:30-17:30 (UTC+1)

*Present: *

Denesh Bhabuta, Athina Fragkouli, Antony Gollan, Brian Nisbet, Leo 
Vegoda, Salam Yamout.
Summary: The TF reviewed its draft RIPE Code of Conduct document and 
made changes. At the end of the call, it decided that it was not quite 
ready to publish, and would postpone this until the new year.

*1. Minutes *

Leo proposed one change to the summary in the previous minutes (fifth 
call), which read: “The group discussed feedback from the RIPE Chair 
Team on the role of a future CoC Team within RIPE NCC Executive Board 
Elections. This is not an absolute requirement and it might be that 
another group performs this role.”

Leo said that the text from the actual minutes stated that this would be 
a separate implementation, which was much clearer. He asked that the 
summary be updated to include this phrasing. The group agreed.

*2. Agenda*

There were no changes to the agenda.

*3. Review of actions *

*- RIPE NCC to request more detail from the Trusted Contacts on workload.*
Antony said he had not gotten to this yet. The group agreed to carry 
this over to the next call.

*- Athina to provide some examples of corner cases.*
Athina said she had reviewed the Google document and found that most 
cases were covered. She had added four more:

1. The RIPE NCC General Meeting
2. Encounters during the RIPE Meeting week outside of official social 
events (e.g. in a bar)
3. Social media interactions about RIPE or RIPE NCC issues that are not 
necessarily on a RIPE NCC-platform
4. Other non-RIPE events organised by the RIPE NCC (such as RIPE NCC Days).

Leo said it would be good for TF members to give Athina’s questions some 
thought. He thought they might hold a planning call in early 2021 to 
look at how they would approach the next documents, and they could 
discuss these questions then.
*
**- TF members to review CoC Document and propose changes. **
**- Leo to draft an update for the community.*
Leo said he would cover these actions later in the agenda.

*4. Publication – Decide on publication of Document 1 *

Leo suggested they review the document and look at what changes or 
comments they wanted to implement. They could then decide if they were 
ready to publish.

*Significant Changes from v3.0*

The TF agreed to remove this section from the actual Code of Conduct 
document and instead publish it as separate/accompanying information 
along with the updated draft.

*Terminology*

Athina said she thought the sentence noting that neutral terms had been 
chosen deliberately was not needed – this was clear from the terms 
themselves.

Leo said this was more of a working comment, as some of the terms used 
in the previous draft had been less neutral.

Denesh said it might be worth making this point somewhere in the 
document – so it was clear that people would not be pre-judged.

Salam asked why they were defining WG Chairs in this section. She also 
wasn’t sure about terms like Investigator – as this would be determined 
by their work on the later documents.

Leo noted that none of those terms appeared in document one. The only 
terminology in Document 1 was that Code of Conduct was abbreviated to 
CoC. So, they could get rid of the whole section, and just include “Code 
of Conduct abbreviated to CoC”, perhaps in the introduction [it was 
later noted that “CoC Team” also appeared in the first document].

*Rationale*

In his comment on the document, Denesh had asked if they needed to 
define “unpleasant behaviours”. Leo had responded that this could be 
renamed to “unacceptable behaviours”, which was the title of the section 
below.

The group agreed with this approach.

Denesh noted that the next sentence referenced “if people have an 
unpleasant experience” and asked whether this needed to be rewritten.

Antony said it might be preferable that this not change. It avoided 
repetition and the context was slightly different.

Athina said unpleasant was quite broad.

Antony said it was subjective, which was fine in this context.

Denesh said they might want to think a little more about this sentence.

Salam referenced the line: “Some participants may have had poor 
experiences in other communities.” She asked whether they should care.

Brian said they wanted to make it clear that RIPE aimed to be better 
than those communities.

Denesh said they should care, as they wanted people to be part of the 
community. And in that sense, it didn’t matter what they had experienced 
elsewhere. As a community, they cared about people and invited them to 
participate. He thought this was important to keep.

Salam asked if they should merge the second and fourth bullet-points, 
which both seemed to be dealing with the same thing (building 
trust/having a transparent framework).

Leo said if they used “trust”, they needed to define it carefully. If 
they didn’t, they would need to explain what they were trying to achieve 
here.

Brian said there were three main points here: making people feel safe; 
ensuring everyone was aware; and having an open/transparent process. 
They could remove the point on trust with this in mind, as that the goal 
there was to have an open and transparent framework for report handling.

Leo reordered the list and merged the vocabulary of “building 
trust/having a transparent framework” items. He also removed mention of 
the CoC Team, as this would be covered by the later documents.

Leo noted that the text said reports would be followed-up, even if they 
concerned someone in power. He asked why they said “even if” instead of 
“including.”

Brian said he preferred this to remain, as it made it explicit that 
everyone was covered by the CoC.

The group agreed with Brian.

*Scope*

Salam said she didn’t think they should say criminal activities were not 
in scope, as it was almost a tautology (hot water is hot, etc.).

Brian said he disagreed, he thought it was worth making this plain for 
readers.

Salam said she agreed, but Brian’s point was that the CoC did not 
supersede national laws; the current text did not reflect this. She 
suggested they update the wording along the lines of “This CoC is not a 
substitute for/in lieu of applicable sovereign laws.”

Brian the (unfortunate) other side of that was if they were in a country 
with laws they didn’t support, they would nevertheless have to be 
mindful of them.

Denesh said this was why he’d brought up cultural behaviours and 
what/wasn’t acceptable. It was about defining what the RIPE community 
thought was acceptable behaviour. If someone was beaten at a RIPE 
Meeting in a country where this was legal, the CoC would take 
precedence; he asked Athina to correct him if he was wrong.

Athina said if, in another country, it was perfectly legal to beat 
someone, the CoC Team might not be able to call the police on them. 
However, as this person would have agreed to abide by the CoC, they 
would be able to ask them to leave due to violating the CoC.

Brian said it might be legal for him to get up on stage and yell abuse 
at people, but he wouldn’t expect to be allowed to back to the RIPE 
Meeting afterwards. That’s why it was better to say that the CoC could 
not supersede national law (rather than saying criminal activities were 
out of scope), because that could muddy things. They wanted to avoid 
people claiming something was a criminal matter and they first needed a 
ruling by a judge.

Athina said in an earlier discussion on this, Antony had said that while 
this was obvious for lawyers, it might be helpful for others to spell 
this out. They had also thought this could be moved to the end of the 
scope section.

Brian said it might be enough just to say that the CoC did not supersede 
the law of any country where a RIPE Meeting took place.

Salam suggested Athina come up with some text for this.

*Action: Athina to come up with text for Criminal Activities not in scope*

Antony asked if this part on criminal activities should stay in the same 
place in the scope; it seemed like more of a footnote.

The TF agreed to move this to the end of the scope.

*Activities Covered*

Athina said they talked about “activities covered” but then talked about 
spaces and venues, so they should change the title of this section (she 
proposed: “Spaces Covered”.

Antony suggested: “Where this CoC Applies”.

She also suggested they come up with a more definitive list of venues 
and spaces. If they used the word “includes”, that meant it was not an 
exclusive list. She thought it would provide more clarity if they 
thought of all the spaces where it applied.

Leo said having this a little vague might avoid having to update the CoC 
whenever new activities emerged.

Athina agreed. In that case, to avoid people over-applying the CoC, she 
suggested they create another list of spaces where it did not apply, 
such as events not organised by the RIPE NCC where RIPE community 
members met, etc.

Salam asked if people at RIPE Meetings fell under the CoC rules 
automatically, or if they had to opt-in. She asked the same about 
mailing lists.

Athina said agreeing to the terms was part of registering for the RIPE 
Meeting. Mailing lists were a little less straightforward, as there were 
already a lot of subscribers. They could require active agreement for 
new subscribers, but it might be difficult to manage for those already 
on the list. However, the punishment was also not that heavy – if you 
misbehaved, people might be blocked or put under moderation. She 
therefore didn’t see a huge need to have everyone on the lists to agree 
to the CoC. Where she saw the biggest risk was with event participants, 
because they might seek damages for travel and accommodation costs, and 
so on. In these cases, you did want them to have agreed in advance to be 
bound by the CoC.

Salam asked if they needed a full list of applicable venues in the 
actual CoC. She asked if they could instead keep this in the meeting 
terms that people actually had to agree to and be covered legally that way.

Athina said there might be other cases where this wouldn’t be possible – 
such as on social media. But the CoC team would nevertheless investigate 
any reports about behaviour in these spaces.

Salam asked if they needed to cover every aspect of this. If someone got 
into an argument on social media after the meeting one evening – was 
this really an issue for the CoC Team?

Brian said they could spend ages on this if they wanted to. It might be 
possible that a report was made along the lines of Salam’s example. The 
extent that this fell within the bounds of the CoC would likely depend 
on the context. They had non-exhaustive lists of types of behaviour to 
offer guidance. The CoC had to be about the “spirit of the law” rather 
than “the letter”, because otherwise people could rules-lawyer it to death.

Salam asked if they should use wording stating that the CoC applied 
whenever people came together under the “banner” of the RIPE community 
or something similar. But she added that it wasn’t a “RIPE activity” if 
Salam got onto Brian’s Facebook page and started insulting him.

Athina suggested it might be better to specify where the CoC was not 
applicable. Because they didn’t want to create an expectation that the 
CoC was something people could use whenever they interacted with another 
member of the RIPE community.
*
**5. Communication *

Leo said they were out of time on the call. As there were still a lot of 
questions, it was clear they were not ready to publish Document 1 (the 
RIPE CoC) in December. That being the case, he had put together a draft 
announcement and asked that TF members review this and provide feedback. 
He said they could handle this on the mailing list.

Brian said they should get their email out to the community early the 
following week, as people would soon be leaving on their Christmas holidays.

*6. Actions*
*
**Action: RIPE NCC to request more detail from the Trusted Contacts on 
workload.**
**
**Action: Athina to come up with text for Criminal Activities not in 
scope.**
**
**Action: TF members to make comments on the draft announcement text by 
Monday, 21 December. **
**
**Action: TF members to continue discussion of Document 1. **
**
**Action: Leo to propose an updated meeting schedule. *

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: </ripe/mail/archives/coc-tf/attachments/20210108/8e6fa8ef/attachment-0001.html>