Re: [hrpc] HRPC recharter

[Andrew Sullivan <[e-mail]>]

Dear colleagues,

Noting my usual disclaimer about my employer (the Internet Society) and not speaking for them, I want to note something Vittorio has put his finger on:

On Thu, Apr 13, 2023 at 07:45:50AM +0200, Vittorio Bertola wrote:

>I am also troubled by a fundamental uncertainty that, I think, underlies the entire charter: is this meant to be a research group, or is this meant to be a policy advisory group?

I think this is exactly the difficulty that I have had with this proposed charter and, really, some of the output of the RG since its formation.

When the RG was formed, I was a supporter of formation with the proviso that the RG be chartered pretty narrowly to look at the interactions of protocol design and human rights, with some sort of specification of which rights we were talking about.  That seemed to me to be a pretty big but since well-scoped research space.

While I believed at the time that the charter created such a careful distinction, I cannot say I think the RG has really paid attention to that line since its formation.  Some of the output of the group has seemed to me to be very nearly prescriptive in what it says, and I occasionally get the impression that people want to use "it's an RFC" as part of the well-worn rhetorical path of claiming some kind of important status for the documents that the group produces.  The decision to depend on RG rough consensus often seemed to me to be part of the same rhetorical move.

More challenging, in my view, is that the proposed charter seems to be at least a little coy about what _research_ is happening.  Sentences like, "This research group is a discursive resource for the community to support the development process in recognizing these potential public policy impacts as well assist to address those impacts adequately," do not suggest research, but rather suggest a partial means of developing policy.  Similarly, only one of the four objectives listed in the Objective section really seems to entail research (this was a problem with the previous charter too).

I might have more comments on the charter were I convinced that this fundamental issue could be solved.

Best regards,

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
[e-mail]