Re: [hrpc] HRPC recharter

[Andrew Sullivan <[e-mail]>]

Dear colleagues,

Still employed, still just my opinion.

On Thu, Jan 05, 2023 at 11:01:07AM -0500, Mallory Knodel wrote:

>Understood that this is your view. On the other hand, the feedback we 
>are consistently getting in our actual meetings and through our most 
>recent IAB review is that in fact HRPC is contributing and doing well 
>and we don't need to be overwrought in our attempts to do more work.

My reading of the minutes of the IAB meeting from 2022-11-08 is doubtless more poorly informed than yours would be, since I wasn't in the meeting. Nevertheless, when I read them what I do not see is a lot of encouragement of scope changing.  What I read, on the contrary, is some hesitation about the wisdom of expanding the scope in this way. The person on the IAB who was arguing for that explicit scope expansion is also a chair of this RG (i.e. you.  BTW, the minutes aren't linked at https://www.iab.org/wiki/index.php/RG_Reviews but are in the main IAB minutes pages).

>This is why I want to make very incisive changes to the charter that 
>very slightly expand the work into policy

But this is the concern I was trying to raise in my prior note to the list: I don't think the text you have proposed is incisive change or very slight expansion.  Instead, if I read it correctly, it appears to turn the RG into a (not to say "yet one more") venue where people come together to talk "policy" without much in the way of bounds on what is in or out of scope or even what kind of policy is involved.  I don't wish to be provocative, but I am sceptical that the IRTF needs to reproduce the Internet Governance Forum.  

>are those that disagree that we even need to specify this change given 
>that policy already is under the purview of talking about human 
>rights.

It seems to me that restricting the policy discussions to ones that have direct human rights implications might help in making the scope of the charter somewhat more manageable, even if it would still be an enormous ocean to boil.

>In other words: I don't believe it is widely accepted that HRPC has a 
>misguided view of its own purpose. Others may, but that has 
>unequivocally improved since it was first chartered.

I must say that I very strongly disagree with that "unequivocally improved" claim.  I thought the original charter discussion was pretty good because of the way it whittled the space down to a set of questions that one could imagine answering through research.  I was indeed frustrated over time by the way the RG resisted sticking to those questions, but at least there was something to hang on to.  I don't think officially giving up on such scope limitations is an unequivocal improvement.  (Maybe I'm just old-fashioned.  I also believe that, say, musical forms often provide a better structure for creativity than a total lack of such structure.)

I suppose I will receive a suggestion that I make a PR at the github, but if I am honest I don't really understand why the charter text needs to change except perhaps to remove bullet 2 under "Objective".

Best regards,

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
[e-mail]