On 22/02/2014 17:03, John Levine wrote:
The process looks fine, if a bit overspecified. I have some concern
about the choice of ombudsman*, given the extremely poor experience I
had with ICANN's ombudsman a few years back, although the lack of pay
will certainly discourage careerism.
My larger concern is that you need at least some general descriptions
of what would constitute harassment to keep it from being too
arbitrary.
Yes, I'm afraid that deferring that to an IESG statement isn't
satisfactory; I would assume that at some point the IESG would
update its statement to point to this document, rather than
the other way round. Having the definition split between two
places is the surely the worst solution.
It seems to me that the essence of harassment is unwanted
attention directed to an individual or small group of individuals.
One difficulty is that what is "unwanted" is very sensitive
to cultural and linguistic subtleties. Also, if (for example) I
were to repeatedly point out substantive errors in somebody's
IETF work, or even syntax errors in their English, where is the
line between legitimate discussion and review and objectionable
harassment?
I don't think that saying the behaviour is "unwanted" by the
target is sufficient. It needs to be clearly directed at the person
and not at the work, and it needs to be "hostile or intimidating"
as well as unwelcome (as in the IESG statement). But even so,
there's always going to be judgment involved. As long as we have
checks and balances as proposed, I don't see a better approach than
an ombudsman (or something very similar).
http://www.ombudsmanassociation.org/about-the-role-of-an-ombudsman.php
Brian
If
the target told the harasser to stop and he continued, that makes the
claim more credible, although there are surely situations where the
situation is threatening enough that it's reasonable not to respond at
the time.
A few general guidelines like that would make the policy a lot more
concrete, and avoid "how could I know X would take that as
harassment?" issues.
R's,
John
* - ombudsperson is unacceptably species-ist, while ombudsman is a
Swedish legal term from the 1950s