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Re: Comments on draft-farrresnickel-harassment-01

2014-03-17 19:32:23
On 3/17/14 7:17 PM, Dave Crocker wrote:
The pressures towards keeping things private are quite strong and understandable.

The conflicting requirement is to ensure a public sense that harassment and bullying will not be tolerated.

To the extent that public mis-behaviors are not seen to be countered aggressively, the public perception therefore is one of tolerance.

This is issue is especially important when changing from a culture that actively tolerated or encouraged the problematic behavior.

So... how will the IETF community come to understand that the behaviors will not be tolerated (any longer)?

Speaking personally:

This is the big difference between general public mis-behavior (whether bullying or other disruptive behavior) and harassment. For bullying and other sorts of misbehavior, having the community leaders handle these things publicly using the procedures we already have is perfectly appropriate. That shows that the behavior will not be tolerated.

For harassment, this is completely inappropriate. The draft insists on confidentiality throughout the process for the protection of all parties. Insisting on a public visibility into harassment might be damaging to the subject of the harassment if the subject wants to keep things confidential (for all sorts of, I hope, obvious reasons). It damaging to the respondent in that a public airing of these sorts of incidents might cause the person to lose their job or otherwise, and fear of these those sorts of consequences might discourage subjects from reporting incidents of harassment, or might make respondents less willing to participate in the process and resolve the situation.

I am personally very committed to keeping these subjects very separate. I strongly oppose any attempt to conflate our procedures for dealing with general disruptive behavior (including bullying) with our procedures for dealing with harassment.

pr

--
Pete Resnick<http://www.qualcomm.com/~presnick/>
Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. - +1 (858)651-4478