I support your comments and suggestions. However, I have few comments/suggestions below,
On Saturday, February 22, 2014, Dave Crocker wrote:
On Saturday, February 22, 2014, Dave Crocker wrote:
Kudos to Adrian and Pete for working on this and producing a thoughtful proposal.
I'm separating my comments, and will limit this initial posting to a few basic issues. I'll post pickier quibbles later...
Summary:
Although reasonable by many measures, the proposal needs more complete specification of the standing Ombud function. It also needs a different appeals body.
Background:
I believe the primary goal, in the IETF's having and processing harassment complaints, is to ensure that the IETF is legitimately inviting to the widest possible range of participants, and hence to encourage their active participation.
Groups with more diversity produce better work. Groups that suffer harassment of participants inherently reduce real diversity.
Groups should have the IETF vision repeated in meeting as the note well, because many WGs may forget that.
In spite of the IETF's long history of open participation, the fact is that daily IETF life often includes explicit and implicit tolerance of various forms of harassment.
The new anti-harassment policy sets quite a good foundation for changing this.
However as challenging as it is to produce a policy statement, it is far easier than figuring out how to produce a practical implementation of the policy...
The Details:
This topic is quite foreign to the experience, skill set and even perspective of most IETF participants, touching delicate and painful legal and personnel management issues. Anyone put in a position of handling a harassment report needs training, coupled with expert advice. Raw intelligence and good intentions are not enough.
(On the other hand, the principal actors in a harassment complaint are not employees of the IETF. So there might be some additional degrees of freedom in the way that IETF-related complaints are handled, compared with what a regular company has to do.)
0. Defining Harassment
I think the IESG Statement provides extended text defining and describing harassment that is quite reasonable, in tone and scope. The text should be incorporated into an IETF-approved document, which is what I'm hoping Adrian and Pete's draft becomes.
1. Ombud Formation
I believe the most critical bit of core work for handling a report of harassment is to already have a well-defined and stable Ombud function, with good community understanding of the function and approval for it. The proposal defers the substance of this issue to the IETF Chair. While the Chair is probably the right function for overseeing formation of the Ombud, the framework for the office should not be left to the vagaries of whoever happens to be Chair and whatever they happen to think right at one moment or another.
So the Ombud function needs to be formally defined and according to community approval, not merely community review. Hence the requirements and details for the function need separate and stable specification, with community support around it. Then the IETF Chair can reasonably be asked to implement it.
It is tempting to suggest assigning the Ombud function to a senior human resources professional.
However they will not have the experience with the IETF culture and are, instead, likely to apply a classic corporate model for responding to harassment complaints, which sometimes includes worrying more about protecting the company than about ensuring appropriate handling of actual abuse.
So it is better to rest the responsibility for Ombud work on the shoulders of experienced IETF volunteers.
2. Appeal
It's reasonable to consider the IESG or IAB as an appeals review board, since they already have some IETF appeals responsibilities. However harassment reports call on completely different expertise and completely different dynamics. They also require far greater confidentiality and sensitivity than is reasonable to demand from the IESG or IAB.
So, here's a modified proposal...
1. Setup
a. Formulate a standing Complaints Committee -- called the Ombud -- of 3 IETF volunteers. This is small enough to make efficient and coherent workings workings more likely, along with maintain a reasonable degree of confidentiality.
b. Give them the relevant professional manager's training in handling harassment complaints.
c. Recruit a professional HR harassment adviser and a harassment-savvy attorney, to act as advisers.
We may not need to recruit (May get costly) we can outsourcing contract as pay per file, which I don't believe in IETF we will get more than 2 reported harassing per year, but if I am wrong even after the draft approved then you point is the right advice to IETF managers to look at the financial costs trade offs.
2. Processing:
a. On receiving a report, the committee works with the Reporter, Target and Respondent to formulate a sanitized summary of the complaint and 'defense'. This will be used if there is an appeal. It also will serve to get the involved parties to focus on the essential details. The wordsmithing goal of the sanitization is to produce a version that can be shown outside of this initial group. Possibly only an appeals committee but possibly even public.
b. The Ombud works with the principals to assess the claimed offense and formulate responses they deem appropriate.
c. The Ombud modifies the sanitized writeup to include a sanitized summary of the decision.
d. If any of the principals wishes, they can appeal the Ombud's decision. Appeal is to the ISOC Board of Trustees.
3. Appeals:
For a topic like this, I think one level of appeal is sufficient and that the sensitive personnel and legal aspects of this topic warrant restricting who is involved, including choosing a venue that already has legal strictures in place. Hence the ISOC Board, rather than the IESG.
Your very right, ISOC rather than IESG, because IESG were selected mostly for technical engineering work/problem not social problem.
4. Addendum:
I'll offer one more item I think basic to discussion of this topic. For now I'm not suggesting specific wording changes, but do want to circulate the key point, because I think it has a profound effect upon one's thinking about harassment.
We typically think of harassment as being a problem only for the Respondent and the Target. However there is a third, critical participant: The rest of us.
Yes I agree and already pointed in my comments posted previously that there are two targets not one.
I'll offer a precept that we need to keep in mind:
Harassment behavior does not merely create a hostile work
environment for the target(s).
It creates it for everyone.
To the extent that participants watch others get treated badly and do not then see the misbehavior get corrected, there is chilling effect across the IETF.
I seen that happen once public misbehaving in one WG and I told my AD related about that, but he said it was solved privately but still I was a target and while I was remotely participating I felt that I am targeted also, so decided not to become face to face participant in 2012 (now my first come will be in few days).
Again, thanks to you both for working on this.
Thanks to you and all participants that are working together to solve IETF problems. If we all work together and respect each other all times in working and not working, then we will have best documents produced and published.
AB