Re: Harassment, abuse, accountability. and IETF mailing lists

[Pete Resnick <[e-mail]>]

On 3 Jun 2022, at 6:30, Lars Eggert wrote:

> On 2022-6-3, at 13:38, Carsten Bormann <[e-mail]> wrote:
>> On 2022-06-03, at 09:19, Lars Eggert <[e-mail]> wrote:
>>>
>>> They can always contact any AD, the IESG as a whole, or the IETF 
>>> Chair.
>>
>> (One problem with such a broad recommendation is that a newcomer will 
>> have no way to know who in the IETF organization colludes with whom.  
>> We may think it is a job requirement for an AD to be able to act like 
>> an ombudsman, but how does the newcomer know that.)
>
> which is why there is an ombudsteam?

(Speaking without hats)

Let's be clear about the division of labor here: RFC 7776 anticipates 
that common disruptive behavior on a WG mailing list is handled by the 
chair of the WG, and then escalated to the AD, IESG, etc. as needed. The 
ombudsteam process is normally reserved for the kinds of harassment that 
can't be dealt with that way. While the ombudsteam has been completely 
open to advising people (both participants and chairs) on cases of 
straightforward misbehavior (and in fact recently was asked to speak at 
a WG meeting in order to deal with such behavior), I would personally 
not be too keen on the default position for every concern to be brought 
to the ombudsteam; that's a recipe for the ombudsteam to become the 
good-behavior-enforcement-body in the IETF, which IMO would be a very 
bad thing (let alone against what RFC 7776 says). The default should 
always be to bring it to the person(s) leading the discussion, which in 
the case of WGs is the chair(s).

For non-WG mailing lists, there is an IESG statement: 
https://www.ietf.org/about/groups/iesg/statements/disruptive-posting/. 
It's pretty clear that for non-WG lists, the administrator deals with 
disruptive posters. But I just happen to know about that IESG statement 
because Iwas on the IAB when an appeal caused that statement to be 
written. A newcomer probably would not know that non-WG list 
administrators are expected to deal with disruptions. More importantly, 
as John and others have said, finding the identify the list 
administrator is not trivial. Somewhere, in an easy to find spot, anyone 
should be able to discover the procedures for dealing with disruptive 
behavior and the names of the humans who handle it.

pr
-- 
Pete Resnick https://www.episteme.net/
All connections to the world are tenuous at best