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

[tom petch <[e-mail]>]

On 03/06/2022 15:24, Pete Resnick wrote:
> 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.


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.

Tom Petch



>
> pr