Re: [hrpc] draft-irtf-hrpc-association-02

[Niels ten Oever <[e-mail]>]

Thanks for all the great reviews and comments. It is great to see a lot of new energy on this draft.

As mentioned, Gisela and I feel like we are not the best persons to integrate the proposed changes, so we would like to take a step back a lead authors and hope that others will step forward to take the lead to take this RG document further.

If there are no others who want to work as co-authors, perhaps the reviewers (and RG participants and others) could propose alternate text either in attached markdown document, or as pull requests on github ( https://github.com/IRTF-HRPC/drafts/blob/master/draft-association.md )?

Thanks in advance,

Niels and Gisela

On 3/28/19 3:26 PM, Joseph Lorenzo Hall wrote:
> I'm just going to share my own comments now, without having de-duped across Avri. Happy to clarify and let me know if I'm being brain-dead anywhere:
> 
>   *
>     https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-irtf-hrpc-association-02
>   *
>       o
>         Abstract:
>       o
>           +
>             "causal”? That’s a pretty surprising claim to be making here… maybe I’m missing something?
>           +
>             It feels like the first sentence should be last, or that a final sentence should be added specific to association, or the entire abstract redrafted to focus more clearly on the specific right -- association -- the document addresses. 
>       o
>         Intro:
>       o
>           +
>             Could be edited to be a bit more concrete, and make the very good points it does make more clearly.
>           +
>             Define "epistemic community"
>           +
>             Typo: "As the Internet grows, decisions made about its architecture are become more important"
>           +
>             I would probably change “established” here to “described”: "[RFC8280] established the relationship between human rights and Internet protocols." 
>       o
>         Section 2:
>       o
>           +
>             might be good to have colons (“:”) after each term to distinguish the term from the definition?
>           +
>             can’t distributed systems have their behavior coordinated by other things than message passing? (e.g., a global clock).
>           +
>             The Infrastructure definition could benefit from being more concrete… I would think modifying a more standard definition first — e.g., "the basic physical and organizational structures and facilities (e.g. buildings, roads, power supplies) needed for the operation of a society or enterprise.”) — and then extending it would be better.
>           +
>             Internet seems to be a cluster of definitions… is the reader supposed to pick one, consider them all, or? 
>       o
>         4. Methodology:
>       o
>           +
>             Again, I would say “describe” instead of “establish” in "an initial effort to establish the relationship between human rights and the Internet architecture"
>           +
>             again with the “causal”: “it ultimately established either causal or deterministic relationships between aforementioned concepts through a series of case studies."
>           +
>             this is uncited… I’m not sure this document can claim anything further about 8280-like work without referencing something to show how individuals using 8280 have confirmed research in 8280: "further validated through confirmatory research in the form of Human Rights Protocol Reviews"
>           +
>             This definitely needs elaboration within the document! I know what these words mean methodologically-speaking, but I’ve never seen them composed like this and that may just be me being not familiar with this strain of research (despite being a qualitative methods geek): “we therefore aim to test the causal relationship through a case-selection method, where we have adopted a purposive sampling approach, aimed at the typicality and paradigmatic nature of the cases [SeawrightGerring] to help us achieve an attempt at an an ethnography of infrastructure [Star]." 
>       o
>         Section 5, Lit review:
>       o
>           +
>             I’d like to believe this but it’s not immediately obvious that the reference here supports the assertion made in this sentence: "The IETF itself, defined as a 'open global community' of network designers, operators, vendors, and researchers is also protected by freedom of assembly and association [RFC3233]." 
>       o
>         Section 6, cases and examples:
>       o
>           +
>             I really really like the clarity of the analysis in 6.1.1 in the third paragraph where each of the elements of free association are examined in that case… I see that other sections try to do this but aren’t nearly as clear and lucid as this first case. It would be great to try and tighten up the other cases analyses here.
>           +
>             wondering if the list at the end of each subsubsection might better be comma-delimited rather than dash-delimited.
>           +
>             6.1.2: hmmm, WebRTC is basically a two-party protocol, while PERC is the multi-party conference mixing version… so maybe “multi-party” should be modified here: "Multi-party video conferencing protocols like WebRTC [RFC6176][RFC7118]..."
>           +
>             6.2, certainly people share “proprietary” information via peer-to-peer tools and services… I think the point here is that peers don’t themselves encumber downstream recipients with additional terms that would make it hard to share further (but that the object being shared may have other proprietary interests such as copyright…). Not sure if we need to do anything here it was just a subtlety that might be confusing to some readers.
>           +
>             6.2.2: this should be modified to reflect the new GIT WG and drafts? "There have been two efforts to standardize the workflow vis a vis these third party services, but these haven't come to fruition: [Wugh] [GithubIETF]." 
>       o
>         Section 7: Discussion: Establishing the relation
>       o
>           +
>             can we find a different way to say “juridically”?
>           +
>             s/These preliminary finding suggest/These preliminary findings suggest/
>           +
>             I really like this section, although I think it is a bit overclaiming in that it seems to imply an exhaustive case set that would allow us to say things more definitively. E.g., I think this is a bit stronger than the draft can support in its current form: "The case studies show that the Internet infrastructure, the combination of architecture and protocols, facilitates freedom of association and assembly, by allowing groups of people to converse, collaborate, exchange, and build and maintain identities in both structural and occasional manners.” I guess we could try and think of more cases or just qualify this text a bit more that "these cases heavily support the assertion that…"
>           +
>               #
>                 The conclusion words this better, IMO (i.e., “some protocols”): “we established the relation between some protocols and the right tofreedom of assembly and association." 
>       o
>         Section 8:
>       o
>           +
>             I think this section is good, but I think it could benefit from a summary of what the cases showed to lend support that despite the *capacity* of the Internet to support association, it’s complicated and can be very fractured and increasingly proprietary. 
> 
> 
> On Thu, Mar 28, 2019 at 7:03 AM Avri <[e-mail] <mailto:[e-mail]>> wrote:
> 
>     Hi,
> 
>     Again apologies for the last minute comments.
> 
>     Abstract: saying that something establishes  ‘the causal link’ is a very strong claim.  Are we sure we want to make that strong a claim?  Can we really prove a causal link and can we prove that it is ‘the’ causal link. I personally do not see this draft as establishing any causal links, though it does point toward where they might be found.
> 
>     Introduction: “by investigating the exact impact of Internet protocols on specific human rights,” again a very strong claim.  Can we ever really know the exact impact in some possible causal chain?  An even if we want to position a possible impact, we need more definitive illustrations and argumentation.
> 
>     There is an ambiguity between  allowing a right to prosper meaning a right is enabled, and what looks like a claim to a ‘right to prosper’. This is just a language nit, and I have avoided commenting on those for the most part, but this jumped out at me.
> 
>     4. Methodology
> 
>     “been further validated through confirmatory research in the form of Human Rights Protocol Reviews.” I think this is the primary reason for the HRPC to do reviews, but I do not beleive we have established a methodology for doing those yet.  At this point some people are doing reviews and delivering them to responses that vary from happy acceptance to irritation to shock and awe. As far as I can tell we have not yet developed a systematic methodology for measuring the impact of the considerations in test reviews. Nor are we yet studying the reviews to see how they apply the considerations.  We have not yet established a rigorous method for testing our ethnographically established hypothesis. 
> 
>     “Even though the present work does not seek to create new guidelines, the conclusions could inform the development of new guidelines such as is done in draft-irtf-hrpc-guidelines.” I think we need a tighter binding between the discussion in this draft and anywhere in the guidelines where a consideration is said to be relevant to freedom of Expression/Assembly.
> 
>     Perhaps this is a personal academic prejudice, but while I think ethnography is extremely useful in hypothesis formation, I do not see how it can also serve to test and verify relevance and usefulness. Seems circular process to me. I think we need to find other methods for testing and measuring.
> 
>     6.  Cases and examples 
> 
>     Seems like a loose collection of internet features that may or may not have a positive or negative affect on expression & assembly.  I do not see the persuasive argument that shows the possibility of a causal chain.  Perhaps I am just not seeing it and others do, I accept.  Even in the two discussion sections, 7 & 8, the draft seems to jump from assertion to assertion without the rigor of argument that makes the conclusions inescapable.  I do not see the arguments that show why consideration in general or why specific considerations would be significant in enabling or disabling the freedom of association and assembly, though the guidelines does make those sorts of claims.
> 
>     Re considerations:  While I understand that the authors do not want to introduce new considerations related to assembly and association - there may not be any new considerations or changes to existing considerations, I still think the draft needs to show a mapping between internet protocols and features and existing considerations.
> 
>     Note: I have not called them out, but the draft needs a spelling and grammatical scrubbing..
> 
>     Thanks for continued efforts on this draft.
> 
>     Avri
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> 
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-- 
Niels ten Oever
Researcher and PhD Candidate
DATACTIVE Research Group
University of Amsterdam

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