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Re: Proposed IETF Anti-Harassment Policy

2013-10-22 09:16:00
On Oct 22, 2013, at 5:30 AM, Theodore Ts'o <tytso(_at_)mit(_dot_)edu> 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.