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

[tom petch <[e-mail]>]

On 04/06/2022 15:01, John C Klensin wrote:
>
>
> --On Saturday, June 4, 2022 13:06 +0100 tom petch
> <[e-mail]> wrote:
>
>> On 04/06/2022 01:38, John C Klensin wrote:
>>>
>>> --On Saturday, June 4, 2022 11:08 +1200 Brian E Carpenter
>>> <[e-mail]> wrote:
>>>
>>>> On 04-Jun-22 04:27, tom petch wrote:
>>>> ...
>>>>>
>>>>> A new non-WG list was announced yesterday including the text
>>>>> 'For additional information, contact the list
>>>>> administrators' with no indication who they might be or
>>>>> anywhere where they might be identified.
>>>>>
>>>>> Yes, administrators are elusive.
>>>>
>>>> The Welcome message after you subscribe is no more helpful
>>>> (and even lies: "Normally, Mailman will remind you of your
>>>> ietf.org mailing list passwords once every month").
>>>> ...
>
>>> And, as I pointed out yesterday when I commented on the
>>> announcement (the reason I added the ART ADs to this
>>> distribution) [1], there is actually less,  information at
>>> https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/cfbl : it not only does
>>> not identify the secret administrators, but does not even
>>> provide information as to which ADs to bug if one does not
>>> want to pick a random one of those as Lars suggested earlier.
>>> As a bonus, the explanation of what the list is about is
>>> incomprehensible, at least to non-specialists.
>>>
>>> And this isn't even about abuse or harassment, just about
>>> trying to find out what a list is about or asking someone for
>>> information on that subject.
>
>> Wandering off into the weeds, that listinfo page does have a
>> msilto: url for the list owner which could be seen as the list
>> administrator and it also has a URL for the archive in which
>> the first entry tells me that the list bolongs to ART.
>
> Tom,
>
> That gets us back to nearly where I started the thread.  If one
> is as thoroughly familiar with the IETF as you are and willing
> to make some deductions, it would certainly be possible to look
> carefully at the list owner URL and infer that "owner" =
> "administrator".  However, I have seen many cases in which that
> relationship does not hold and you probably have too.
> Moreover, if the question is about abuse, harassment, or
> something else sensitive, rather than a mere inquiry about the
> list one should be able to identify the name (and email address)
> of the owner/ administrator/ complaint-handler and that page
> does not make that information available.  Similiarly you can
> look at that URL and deduce ART Area.  I can too.  But a
> newcomer who might not even know about our Area structure, much
> less what that string means and/or who has see lots of
> meaningless abbreviations and other string in the middle of
> URLs... well, probably not so likely.
>
>> By which time the harassed person has probably taken to
>> Facebook (or LinkedIn) to rant at the unfriendliness of the
>> organisation:-(
>
> If we are lucky.    Less likely scenarios are more scary.  But,
> in any event, we lose a newcomer and potential contributor who
> might have a perspective we need.

I agree with your points.  One slight addition, the reference to ART is 
explicit in the first post to the e-mail archive but as you say, it 
takes familiarity with the IETF to get that far and as you say, a 
newcomer will likely not know what ART is.

I would wonder though about our target audience in this.  Is it the 
newcomer who gets put off because this is not like the Internet they are 
used to e.g. Facebook?  Or is it the person who has been around for a 
while but has begun to find the tone of a WG hostile, perhaps to their 
ideas, and intolerant?  I saw an apology for the use of '...considered 
harmful' recently and was suprised that that phrase was .. well 
considered harmful but at least the recipient felt able to speak up so 
hopefully that was resolved.

Tom Petch

>      john
>
> .
>