[ripe-list] repeated and continued PDP violation - WG chairs delaying or denying proposal publication - new policy proposal "Ensure Neutrality of PDP Appeals Procedure"

Hi Nick,

El 7/2/21 22:49, "Nick Hilliard" <nick at foobar.org> escribió:

    JORDI PALET MARTINEZ via ripe-list wrote on 07/02/2021 13:05:
    > Briefly, in several situation I've written policy proposals, and the
    > chairs of the WG, tried to convince me to not publish it, or actually
    > decided not to publish it, or delayed it.

    Jordi,

    without prejudice to any of the proposals that you've submitted to 
    various working groups over the years, one of the jobs of a working 
    group chair is to make a call on whether or not a proposal is suitable 
    for their working group.

[Jordi] I mention that in my email. I agree that the chairs may decide that it may be "out of the scope of the WG", but nothing else.

    There are a lot of reasons for this, but the one of the generally 
    accepted responsibilities of any chair is to ensure functional 
    communication within a group and ensuring that the communication within 
    the group is relevant and on-topic.  So, a chair is within their rights 
    to decline to take on a proposal if they feel it's unlikely to achieve 
    consensus, or if it's been discussed extensively already without 
    consensus, or if it contains - in their opinion - proposals which would 
    be highly unlikely to gain consensus, or if they feel that the proposal 
    was inappropriate or out of scope for their particular working group, 
    and so on.

[Jordi] I disagree here. By the fact that we are using consensus, it may happen that a single person in the community (example of an extreme case) supports a proposal, but *all the objections* to the proposal are invalid. For example, in case of very technical and *demonstrated* issues and *demonstrated* solutions. So, if the chairs disagree on accepting it, then it is impossible that consensus "really works". Besides that, if we really want to have that, then we can't use anymore "consensus" AND, we should have it clearly defined in the PDP. The PDP right now doesn't ALLOW rejecting a proposal. In fact, unless I'm missing it, as per today, the only RIR that has this chairs pre-decision of acceptance in the PDP is ARIN and it is really a bit different, because it works via the AC, etc.

    In other words, regardless of whether or not it's stated explicitly in 
    the PDP, the WG chair has leeway to accept or reject a proposal, as they 
    see fit.

[Jordi] How come something not in the PDP is valid? Then tomorrow chairs can decide that something else "not in the PDP" is what they want to do! Irrational.

    If a RIPE WG chair rejects a proposal, the PDP allows the proposer to 
    forward the proposal to the RIPE Chair.  This would trigger an 
    examination of the WG chair's decision.  External review always causes 
    us to examine our actions more seriously, so it seems unlikely that a WG 
    chair would reject a proposal lightly, as they can be held to account 
    for their decision.

[Jordi] There is no such thing in the PDP. I would agree that this is a possible way forward, if the PDP has both aspects made explicit, but none of them are.

    Incidentally, the duty to manage discussion isn't something specific to 
    RIPE WG chairs - it's a general accepted principle about the rights and 
    responsibilities of all chairs, regardless of what they're chairing. 
    There's nothing unusual about the RIPE WG chair duties in this respect.

[Jordi] Again, where is that in the PDP? We can't accept a PDP that we can interpret in different ways when we (or the chairs) wish.

    Nick



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