Re: draft-ecahc-moderation (was: [Last-Call] Moderation in general)

[Warren Kumari <warren@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, Jun 22, 2024 at 6:45 AM, S Moonesamy <sm+ietf@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hi Brian, All,
At 02:02 PM 12-06-2024, Brian E Carpenter wrote:

I hope the moderators will excuse me Bcc'ing this message to the Last Call list in an attempt to switch discussion to the main IETF list.

I think we do indeed need to review moderation as a whole and pick a venue to discuss
draft-ecahc-moderation.

The objective of draft-ecahc-moderation is to create a moderator team for all IETF contribution channels. The motivation is to deal with
"disruptive behavior" (Section 3) given that the IESG-led process
(authors' description) of PR-actions is viewed as ineffective.

If the problem is the following: "The IETF community has not been able to agree on a common definition of disruptive behavior.", the fix proposed by the authors would be to have the IETF community agree to the IETF Chair appointing some people to agree on some definition and be responsible for the implementation. Such an approach caused a problem previously, if I am not mistaken. The reaction to that was to prevent the IETF Chair from intervening in the day-to-day operation.

Many years ago, Russ informed this mailing list that he took a decision on a message which was posted to the list. The list's participants were silent about that. In my opinion, it was because people understood that it was what an IETF Chair may have do in such circumstances.

I've written and deleted this email multiple times now — in theory this should have made me very good at it, but I suspect the opposite is true.

I think that the approach in draft-ecahc-moderation is more complicated than it needs to be (and / or perhaps we need an additional process).

Being a moderator is a tough and thankless job — no matter what you do, some set of people will say that you overreacted, some will say you were too mild, some will say that you were not fast enough, some will say that you jumped the gun, some will claim censorship, etc. 

In addition, it is hard to design a foolproof process which cannot be gamed — listing all of the bad things that participants should not do will always be incomplete (and will just be a long list of ick or people will see just how close to the line they can get). 

I think that we should just give the the IAB Chair, the LLC Chair, and the IESG Chair (acting together) the capability, and, more importantly, the responsibility, to perform emergency moderation (and, if necessary, banning), and make the "dealing with egregious behavior" their problem.  This would be in addition to the current moderators, and would only be used in egregious cases.

W

P.S: Yes, I am on the IESG (so, nominally leadership) and so I am likely biased. No, if I were any of there people I really really really would not want this power/responsibility. Yes, I suspect I'm going to get some grumpyface from these folk. Yes, if these 3 people became corrupt, they could do damage by censoring people — but, I posit that if this happens, we are so broken that we should all just give up and go home. Yes, I *am* sending this from the gate at IAD airport, and will be onna plane for the next many hours - I'm much braver when I'm out of flaming distance :-). Yup, this might be my worse idea ever… but perhaps not…

[0]: In prestige, if not in actual money :-)

Regards,
S. Moonesamy