[Mod-discuss] Re: Is there a problem? [was Keith Moore's response to WGLC (was Re: WG Last call...)]

[Brian E Carpenter <[e-mail]>]

Simon,

> I feel that this effort is driven out of a desire to "we really should
> have a mechanism to ban this person" to ease the every day life of
> people who feel that some person is annoying.

As others have pointed out, that was the reason for RFC 3683 and
RFC 3934 many years ago. The motivation for the current draft is
to *fix* the problems caused by those RFCs, particularly (IMHO) the
toxic effects of RFC 3683, especially the public shaming, which in
some cases concerned valuable technical contributors who have
arguably stepped out of line. Another motivation is to fix one
unintended side effect of those RFCs, i.e. the reluctance of some
WG chairs to take any action at all against disruptive behaviours.

Regards/Ngā mihi
    Brian Carpenter

On 12-Sep-25 20:11, Simon Josefsson wrote:
> Brian E Carpenter <[e-mail]> writes:
> 
>>> Can we enumerate five examples of past situations where we would
>>> have wanted the moderator team to have stepped in and made a decision?
>>
>> I could easily give you more than five, just by looking in my filters
>> for incomimg email. But I don't think that finger-pointing at past
>> events is a productive idea.
> 
> That will probably deteroriate into personal commentary quickly, but
> that comes with this territory, doesn't it?
> 
> If we cannot establish a couple of events that the community stands
> behind as something that should have be banned, did we really have a
> serious problem worth fixing during those events?
> 
> I feel that this effort is driven out of a desire to "we really should
> have a mechanism to ban this person" to ease the every day life of
> people who feel that some person is annoying.
> 
> Maybe the solution to that problem isn't to ban people, but to improve
> other matters so that people become better at accepting that others have
> a different way of thinking, discussing and interacting.  Or try to find
> people who have that acceptance.
> 
>> Sometimes (and this is a matter of judgment and personal opinion) WG
>> chairs simply don't intervene when they should, and let distracting
>> and repetitious threads go on far too long. But there's no consistency
>> across WGs about this, and we have no clear tradition of de-escalation
>> before things get so bad that either a person is permanently banned
>> (RFC3683) or the WG is essentially nullified.
> 
> That sounds like engineering a technical solution to a social problem.
> 
> I don't think it is a good idea to enforce consistent social behaviour.
> 
> It will lead to enforcing someone's own norms, which over time tends to
> get biased towards the norms of people who are good at enforcing their
> own norms.
> 
>> There's also a risk of the opposite problem, where a discussion is
>> shut down when it shouldn't be - again a matter of judgment, but IMHO
>> very rare in the IETF.
> 
> The (threat to) shut down discussions is not uncommon in my experience,
> it tends to pop up when there are serious technical disagreement on how
> to solve things.  Sometimes in the veil of "okay so let's have a cool
> off period".  I think the PGP and SSH working groups could have been
> different places to contribute to.
> 
>> So I believe we need some way to (a) evolve a common and public
>> understanding for what is disruptive and (b) some way of applying that
>> understanding across the IETF.
>>
>> The draft proposes a model in which the new team facilitates (a) and
>> is used as a resource to enable (b).
>>
>> If the draft doesn't make that clear, then the draft needs more work...
> 
> I think I'm disagreeing with the way the draft wants achieve those
> goals.  Those may be good goals, but why can't we work on this in a WG
> like on any other matter?  Why is a new team needed?
> 
> /Simon