Re: Comments on draft-farrresnickel-harassment-01

[Spencer Dawkins <spencerdawkins.ietf@xxxxxxxxx>]

This all seems reasonable to me (FWIW).

I have one comment on the Mary/Adrian exchange, and one question from out of the blue ...

On 03/17/2014 03:33 PM, Mary Barnes wrote:

On Mon, Mar 17, 2014 at 3:02 PM, Adrian Farrel <adrian@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Mary,

 

Thanks for taking the time and giving your input.

I take a couple of things away from your review...

[MB] I agree with all the points below and have one additional comment.  Thanks!  [/MB] 

 

1. We should state our expectation of Ombudsperson recusal. Not that the Ombudsperson would be anything other than wholly professional, but making the statement will help people to have the right expectations when they report incidents.

 

1a. Point 1 obviously speaks to the need for more than one Ombudsperson.

 

2. We should include a note about corporate anti-harassment policies. I think this is going to need a little thought, but it should be light (along the same lines as the legal note) and should probably simply acknowledge that people involved in the IETF may be subject to other anti-harassment policies such as from their employers, and that the IETF policy neither replaces nor stands in for such policies.

 

3. We need to come to some consensus about selection procedures. What I got from Dave's email (so what I think you are agreeing with) was:

- Should be IETF volunteers

- Should be more than one (he suggested 3)

[MB]  I think 3 is a good number.  It allows for recusal in certain cases and since these could be very challenging situations, this will provide a means of validating opinions, etc. prior to taking actions. [/MB]

- Should be trained

- Should have access to professional consultancy (HR and legal)

It seems obvious enough (after several conversations) that almost no harassment professionals will understand what passes for normal around the IETF, and almost no IETF participants will have an in-depth understanding of how to deal with harassment allegations, so there has to be some combination of harassment professional and IETF participant to provide the background ombudspersons will need.

I was leaning towards having professionals with IETF participant support as ombudpersons, and the only reason I was leaning that direction was that it's easy for me to imagine an IETF participant who is willing to serve the community in this way, also being willing to serve the community as WG chair or AD at some later point in time, and it seemed awkward to be on the wrong side of a complaint of harassment (in either direction), and then having your ombudperson pop up in your document approval chain, further down the road.

Adrian said "Not that the Ombudsperson would be anything other than wholly professional, but making the statement will help people to have the right expectations when they report incidents" when talking about recusal. I wonder if there is any statement about ombudpersons resolving a complaint and then moving on that would be helpful.

Since this is almost where Pete and I were with the issue, and since most of the comments we have received seem to have been along the same lines, I think we can probably converge on some words.

My out of the blue comment:

While re-reading -01, I remembered from a recent refresher on https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3683.txt that a PR-action for one IETF mailing list can spread to any other IETF mailing list - at least, that's my understanding of this text:

   A PR-action identifies one or more individuals, citing messages
   posted by those individuals to an IETF mailing list, that appear to
   be abusive of the consensus-driven process.  If approved by the IESG,
   then:

   o  those identified on the PR-action have their posting rights to
      that IETF mailing list removed; and,

   o  maintainers of any IETF mailing list may, at their discretion,
      also remove posting rights to that IETF mailing list.

Given that Section 5 ("Remedies") includes not permitting the Respondent to participate in a mailing list discussion, as I read this text:
 
   Finally, on the other end of
   the spectrum, the Ombudsperson could decide that the Respondent is no
   longer permitted to participate in a particular IETF activity,
->  whether it is a mailing list discussion, virtual meeting, or a face-             
   to-face activity, up to and including requiring that the Respondent
   can no longer attend a face-to-face IETF meeting and its associated
   activities, either for the remainder of the present meeting or (in
   the extreme) future meetings.

might this include other mailing lists as well? If that's obvious to everyone else, my apologies for asking ... but I thought it was worth asking now, before the question comes up in practice.

Thanks,

Spencer