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

[John C Klensin <[e-mail]>]

--On Thursday, June 2, 2022 22:27 -0700 Benjamin Kaduk
<[e-mail]> wrote:

> Hi John,
> 
> Trimming judiciously, as I am not prepared to comment on all
> the points you raise.

Thanks.

> On Thu, Jun 02, 2022 at 11:26:32PM -0400, John C Klensin wrote:
>> 
>> (1) If someone is feeling abused or harassed in conjunction
>> with an IETF mailing list, they should have readily-available
>> information about who to discuss that with.  That person, or
>> choice of people, should have clear responsibility for
>> responding to such queries and should be identified by name
>> and contact information.   Non-transparent role addresses with
>> neither hints about who might receive them nor a clear
>> indication that they should be used for such purposes are not
>> good enough.  For the (hopefully rare) cases in which action
>> is required, those contact people should have either the
>> authority needed to enforce our behavior rules or quick
>> access to someone with the authority and should be
>> accountable to someone if they do not respond in a timely and
>> useful way.
 
> This is not exactly an answer to your question as written, but
> I believe that it is always okay to approach an arbitrary AD
> with concerns of this nature, and the AD should be able to
> help locate the appropriate authority figure.  An arbitrary AD
> can be selected so as to be uninvolved from any particular
> controversy, known to be particularly conscientious, etc.

I believe that is probably true.  I also believe that the odds
of a random newcomer or semi-newcomer being able to figure that
out are slim to none (and, again, the main "Get started" page
does not hint at it).   If the IESG agrees (and I hope they
would), while it would not be an ideal solution from my
standpoint, a note at the top of the "non-WG mailing lists" page
that said that, if people have problems with any of those
mailings lists or traffic on them and cannot figure out who else
to contact, they should pick an AD and contact them for help or
routing to the right person. That would presumably be followed
by a link to the IESG current members page, which does (at least
so far) provide email addresses as well as names.  A similar
note could go at the top of the "Active IETF working groups"
page indicating that the listed responsible AD should be
contacted.  

IMO, putting a similar note at the bottom of every WG-specific
or list-specific page would be even better (and space there
should be cheap), but that would be closer to a matter of taste.

>> Now, let's look at those very important pages from which,
>> among other things, one ought to be able to find out who is
>> on said hook and, btw, what the list is about.
>> 
>> * For a typical WG one, the Chairs and AD are listed, but
>> without contact information (just a pointer/link to a
>> datatracker profile page that does not have that information).
>> I believe that is a change although I don't have any idea how
>> long ago it was made.   If the observer knows enough to click
>> on
> 
> I'm really confused.
> Are you talking about the WG lists as listed at
> https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/?  I see links to profile
> pages, yes, which includes a table of role/group/email
> entries, with the email addresses right there -- I am not sure
> why you say "does not have that information" (perhaps you are
> looking at a different page than I am?).

I don't think I'm looking at a different page.   Let's take the
first entry on the page as an example and assume it is typical.
It reads:

	 asap  Murray Kucherawy  Automatic SIP trunking And
	Peering 	Jean Mahoney, Gonzalo Salgueiro

As you pointed out, there is an envelope icon next to Murray's
name that contains a mailto: link.  Good stuff there.    But...

> Interestingly, the list of WGs does include direct mailto:
> links (the envelope icon after the name) to the responsible
> AD, but does not have those for the chairs.  Perhaps that's
> the change you're thinking of?

Exactly.  But also...

If I want to find the WG chairs, who are presumably responsible
for the WG and its mailing list on a day by day basis, I am
potentially out of luck unless I can track them down in some
other way (you probably can, I probably can, that newcomer...
probably not).

Given a serious of assumptions about how knowledgeable I need to
be about the IETF, lets go to the link associated with "asap".
It gets me to the Documents tab and I need to know (or figure
out) to click on the "About" one.  Probably that is not a
problem -- I'm willing to see things optimized for reasonably
intelligent and competent newcomers even if some who are not in
that category fall by the wayside.  Others might disagree.   On
that "About" page, I again see the names of the chairs and links
to their profile pages, but still no email addresses.    Only if
I think to go to the "Email expansions" tab do I find actual
email addresses (see below).  I don't know whether we can expect
those not familiar with how things work to think to go to that
tab or not but I am disinclined to believe it should be
necessary.  Instead, I'd hope what I think you are asking about:
to see email addresses associated with the chairs on both
https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/ and, for this example, on
https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/asap/about/ .  Maybe only one or
the other is needed, by why give users the runaround when that
should be really easy?

If the "Email expansions" tab is expected to be the answer,
let's look there.   Is it reasonable to assume that a newcomer
would be able to figure out that a line that has
"[e-mail]" provides the email addresses for the
chairs to the right?   I don't know, but caution and robustness
might argue against that assumption.  More important, when we
get to the right, it is fairly obvious that, if we have
co-chairs named Gonzalo Salgueiro and Jean Mahoney, which of
those addresses belongs to which one.  But, suppose that,
instead of email addresses containing variations on their names,
they borrowed a note from Murray and the addresses there were 
   [e-mail], [e-mail]
Want to bet on which chair goes with which address?  Especially
if, for some reason, contacting one and not the other was
important?

Again, as you deduced, the problems go away if chair addresses
(not just profile links) are shown on the WG listing page and
the WG's own "About" page.

Does that clarify the concern a bit?

The problem with non-WG lists, where there are no names at all,
is much more serious and that is why I started there.

thanks,
    john