Re: Sam's text and way forward on the last call of draft-farrresnickel-harassment-05.txt

[Eliot Lear <[e-mail]>]

Hi Jari,

I've been following this discussion for some time, and while I agree
that it is important to protect people from harassment, it is also
important for the community to be able to hold decision makers
accountable for their decisions.  This draft puts too much power in the
hands of people who are not appointed by the community.  While I truly
do understand the need to scale the function of the AD, this is a case
where I believe the community expects them to take responsibility for
excluding someone from some or all of our processes.  I am happy for the
ombudsman team to have responsibility for providing you guidance, but
the decision to exclude someone or not should be exclusively in the
hands of someone who cannot be recalled.

To that end...

On 3/19/15 11:03 AM, Jari Arkko wrote:
> I wanted to recap where we are with respect to the topic
> of incidents handled by the ombudsteam affecting roles
> that people have in the IETF.
>
> First off, I think we have broad agreement that we need
> to deal with this better than version -06 of the document
> does, and that misbehaving leadership needs to be
> removed. The debate has been about the specific
> mechanics of doing that, and clearly -06 was not up
> to the task, as well as leaving a bad impression.
> I’m sorry. We are now in the process of seeing how to
> correct that.
>
> I would like to get to the specific proposals. Sam
> suggested one way of dealing with this, copied below.
>
> I personally like this text. There are some variations of
> the general approach, I think Pete argued for a similar
> treatment of WG chairs and nomcom-appointed
> positions. I could live with that as well.
>
> However, there is clearly another class of approaches
> to solving this. We could specify the mechanics of
> ombudsteam initiating or running the recall process,
> or providing the ombudsteam the authority to terminate
> appointments. I think this type of an approach is also
> possible, but would tie into our nomcom and recall
> processes in a quite close manner. The details would
> have to be specified, and of course, the resulting system
> should still be workable, safe, etc. from overall IETF
> perspective. Does anyone have a proposal in this
> space, or believe we should take this path?
>
> Or are there other approaches not listed in this
> e-mail?

Yes.  The change here would be that the lead ombudsman may recommend
corrective action, but that person must do so to an area director who is
in an appropriate position of authority to rectify the matter, up to and
including excluding someone from an activity.

In the case where an area director, IAB member, or IAOC member stands
accused or has a conflict of interest, they must remove themselves from
the proceedings.

In this way, accountability to the community for the function is
directly maintained.  To be clear, this balances confidentiality against
accountability,  Both are important.

Eliot