Re: What is a "management position? [Last Call: <draft-farrresnickel-harassment-05.txt> (IETF Anti-Harassment Procedures) to Best Current Practice]

[Pete Resnick <[e-mail]>]

On 3/16/15 5:52 PM, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
> On 17/03/2015 10:57, Dave Crocker wrote:
> ...
>    
>> Public vs. private is entirely orthogonal to 'formally powerful' vs.
>> 'has leverage but no formal authority'.
>>
>> By way of example:
>>
>>     A document writer has made statements to a participant that violate
>> the boundaries acceptable to the Ombud team.  The statements were made
>> in private, but have been sufficiently verified. The Ombud feels that
>> the document writer needs to be removed from any position of leverage in
>> the IETF, other than "regular participant".
>>
>>     Currently, it's the Chair(s) who have the authority to remove that
>> person, not the Ombud.  But confidentiality constrains the Ombud
>> possibly from making the request and certainly from explaining why.
>>
>> d/
>>
>> ps.  Extra credit:  Note that the confidentiality thing prevents any
>> sort of persistent application of a decision.  There's no way to bar
>> someone from being a document writer going forward, even if we figure
>> out how to handle the immediate situation.
> Right. And the only solution that I can see is what would happen
> inside a company in such a situation: extend the envelope of the
> confidential discussion to include the person(s) with that
> authority.
>    

I think we have now circled back to the reason the original text ended 
up in the document in the first place:

We really want the Ombudsteam to be as confidential as possible. That's 
certainly important for the Respondent, for whom public accusations can 
be destructive and could bring legal liability for both them *and* the 
IETF, but I think the most important reason for confidentiality is for 
the sake of the Subject: Being the recipient of sexual, racial/ethnic, 
or other sorts of harassment (in contrast to most other sorts of bad 
behavior) can be embarrassing and shaming for the recipient, and can 
make one the object of all sorts of horrible negative comments. Of 
course, it would be perfectly lovely if we lived in a world where 
comments along the lines of "she was asking for it" or "he's just being 
overly sensitive to any comment about race" or "she seemed to be happily 
participating in it" were not the first things out of people's mouths, 
but we don't live in that world. And it would be nice if people did not 
look upon the targets of harassment as victims to be pitied, but they do.

Because of that, the best thing to do is to limit as much as possible 
the number of people who get exposed to the information about the 
incident. In the current text, even in the most extreme cases of 
remedies (e.g., removal from a meeting), the only people -- beyond the 
Ombudsteam -- that need to be made aware of the imposition of a remedy 
are people who are under contract to the IAOC/ISOC (i.e., the 
secretariat), which means that some level of confidentiality can be 
contractually imposed. As soon as we give the ability to the Ombudsteam 
to remove someone from an appointed position (NomCom-appointed or 
otherwise), members of the open volunteer community are going to have to 
be made aware of the existence of the remedy, whether it's the entire 
IESG ("This person can no longer be a chair for any WG"), the IAB ("This 
person can no longer be confirmed as an AD") or others. Maybe we want to 
go through the exercise of trying to figure out what sorts of 
confidentiality "envelopes" we want to have and examine how this 
document interacts with 2026, 2418, and 7437, but it's not going to be a 
pleasant exercise.

The thing I like about the original text, and reason that I'm OK with in 
Sam's text, is that it limits how many people need to know the result; 
the Ombudsteam removes the person from the situation that is causing the 
problem (from a mailing list or a meeting in the extreme case), but can 
only tell the Respondent that it would be a good idea to resign at that 
point. If things go the right way, the person resigns and the outcome is 
identical to having the Ombudsteam remove them (with potentially less 
people having to be told). If things go badly and they refuse to resign 
and instead make a stink, the outcome doesn't seem all that much worse 
than the stink such a person will make after the Ombudsteam summarily 
dismisses them from their position. And again, it avoids the Ombudsteam 
having to figure out who in the community needs to be told, and what 
particular details they need to know.

pr

-- 
Pete Resnick<http://www.qualcomm.com/~presnick/>
Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. - [phone]