Re: Proposed IETF Anti-Harassment Policy

[Ted Lemon <[e-mail]>]

On Oct 22, 2013, at 5:30 AM, Theodore Ts'o <[e-mail]> wrote:
> These are indeed the critical questions.  It's easy to have a
> statement about what might be considered "harassment".  If however
> someone tries to use this as a debating tactic during a particularly
> robust technical discussion, what happens next?  Does it get raised to
> the wg chair?  If the wg chair says, that's just a robust technical
> discussion, does it get escalated to ombudsman?  If the ombudsman
> says, "nope, sorry", does it get escalated to the AD and IESG, and do
> they then have to write up carefully crafted appeal documents which
> will no doubt suck up huge amounts of their time?

The path is harassment->ombudsbeing, not harassment->wg chair.  I would expect the ombudsperson to push back at this point unless something inappropriate was said.   If someone says "that's a stupid idea, because FOO" and "because FOO" is valid, then it would be appropriate for the ombudsperson to say to the offending party, "you know, you didn't need to say that was a stupid idea—all you needed to say was 'because FOO.'".   OTOH, if the offending party said "I'm going to cut off a deer's head and leave it in your refrigerator if you don't stop denying that FOO," then that would elicit a different response.

> Should there be any cost to someone who tries to escalate disputes via
> the anti-harassment process, when it is determined afterwards that it
> is not harassment?  If we do, then it might deter valid plaintiffs
> from coming forward.  If we don't, how do we deter people who might
> try to abuse this process from using it to that end?  Historically, we
> certainly had people who have been rather enthusiastic about using
> whatever appeal processes we've made available.

I think if someone develops a history of engaging in this kind of tactic, it might become grounds for banning from mailing list discussion, and there might be appeals, and that would suck.   But that's really the status quo now, so it's not like this changes anything.   It's unlikely that it would be appropriate to respond to a single accusation of harassment that the ombudsperson does not agree is harassment with any kind of censure.

> One hint --- we should definitely try to pursuade folks not to try to
> get a decision based on the specific facts of a particulate dispute
> via the court of public opinion:
> 
>       "Adria Richards, PyCon, and How We All Lost"
>       http://amandablumwords.wordpress.com/2013/03/21/

What happened at PyCon is a really strong argument for having an escalation path other than twitter.   We can't stop participants from doing stuff like this, but hopefully the lesson has been learned that this is a bad tactic for dealing with behavior in meetings that one finds inappropriate.   So there should be an incentive to try the ombudsperson tactic first, and then escalate to twitter only if that fails.