On Tue, Oct 22, 2013 at 02:37:59AM +0000, Fred Baker (fred) wrote:
>
> I wondered at the last sentence. What is the definition of an
> "appropriate" response to harassment? Does this mean that law
> enforcement might be contacted? Does it mean that an abusive poster
> might be excluded from posting to a list? If it is in the context of
> a meeting, does it mean that the aggressive party might be asked to
> leave, either the specific meeting or the meeting venue? I suspect
> that this may imply some variant on legal process (as noted in Ted's
> use of the term "litigate"), which worries me immensely. What
> guidance can be given to the ombudsman and to an appellant of an
> ombudsman's decisions to ensure the appropriateness of a
> counter-measure?
These are indeed the critical questions. It's easy to have a
statement about what might be considered "harassment". If however
someone tries to use this as a debating tactic during a particularly
robust technical discussion, what happens next? Does it get raised to
the wg chair? If the wg chair says, that's just a robust technical
discussion, does it get escalated to ombudsman? If the ombudsman
says, "nope, sorry", does it get escalated to the AD and IESG, and do
they then have to write up carefully crafted appeal documents which
will no doubt suck up huge amounts of their time?
Should there be any cost to someone who tries to escalate disputes via
the anti-harassment process, when it is determined afterwards that it
is not harassment? If we do, then it might deter valid plaintiffs
from coming forward. If we don't, how do we deter people who might
try to abuse this process from using it to that end? Historically, we
certainly had people who have been rather enthusiastic about using
whatever appeal processes we've made available.
One hint --- we should definitely try to pursuade folks not to try to
get a decision based on the specific facts of a particulate dispute
via the court of public opinion:
"Adria Richards, PyCon, and How We All Lost"
http://amandablumwords.wordpress.com/2013/03/21/
- Ted