On 3/18/14 11:54 AM, Michael StJohns wrote:
The IETF is a non-membership standards body.
Exactly right. That's why the IEEE has a lot easier time having a
policy: With members, you can ask them to formally sign up to certain
standards and they can be formally removed from membership or otherwise
sanctioned (even monetarily if they wanted) if they don't behave within
those standards. And investigating such behavior can be done (by
professional staff of the organization) in a private fashion. We can
have standards for participating in a mailing list or showing up for
meetings, but sanctioning poor behavior is somewhat trickier. (Not
impossible; just trickier.) And as you said, our openness rules make it
hard for our normal leadership (who are all part of the volunteer
participants) to address these issues other than in public.
We are perfectly within our rights to deal with public disruptions of the
standards process, and we have procedures in place to do just that with respect
to all IETF controlled mailing lists. We are also perfectly within our rights
to exclude people who do not conform to accepted behavior norms - again - in
public - at IETF meetings as a matter of safety, decorum or protecting
standards production. It's less clear that we can exclude someone from
attending a meeting solely based on bad behavior on a mailing list. [I've been
told for example that one mailing list participant I consider somewhat
disruptive was quite respectful in person].
The key word here is "public".
Yep. And we have processes right now that deals with public disruptions
of the standards process. Chairs can deny people the floor in a
face-to-face meeting and leadership can remove posting privileges to our
mailing lists when people are disruptive of the standards process. But
because of our openness rules, we have never had rules that allowed
anyone to be excluded from quietly sitting in a room if they were not
*directly* disruptive. And "directly" is part of the problem:
Where I think the document goes off the rails is that it provides an IETF cause
of action for private interactions with a related confidential investigation
and resolution process...
The problem with harassment is that I can harass someone in the hallway
of an IETF meeting and create an environment for the target of that
harassment that is disruptive for that individual, but perhaps not
disruptive in a way that a chair could reasonably be asked to enforce.
And making the issue public can *increase* the level of disruption for
the individual target in question.
For example: If someone is extremely sexually aggressive toward me in
the hallway before a meeting, they may have quite effectively disrupted
my ability to participate in the meeting. But there was no direct
disruption of the meeting. Even if I went to the chair, the most the
chair can really do is not grant the floor to my harasser, but it's
going to be pretty difficult (and not currently part of our procedures)
to ask that person to leave the room. Furthermore, even if it were
possible to kick the harasser out, a public airing of the incident could
*increase* the disruption to my participation: Bringing up topics of a
sexual nature publicly can be terribly embarrassing, and these topics
are often met with dismissiveness (e.g., "Oh, he only made a pass at
you; take it as a compliment and ignore it"). And as I said in an
earlier message, harassers who might otherwise be willing to cooperate
in the resolution of an incident if things were kept private might
instead issue denials and claims of "simple misunderstandings" if the
incident needs to be publicized, again because discussions of sexual
topics can be embarrassing, and because publicity about them can
escalate to legal and employment problems. If I, as a target, am forced
to bring these things out in public, I may choose to simply not
participate rather than have to have the discussion publicly. That may
also cause others similarly situated to me to choose not to participate
if the environment is seen as problematic.
Similar stories could be told regarding racist or other discriminatory
sorts of interactions, including the same sorts of discomfort about
discussing these things publicly. I would be thrilled to live in a world
where harassment could always be made public without embarrassment or
shame for those who get harassed. But I don't think we're there yet.
Sure, some sorts of harassment are overt and public and can be handled
by our current public procedures regarding disruption. Many sorts of
harassment are not.
So I think the ability to have an (exceptional) process for dealing with
incidents privately is necessary. I hope that we can come to consensus
that having some set of folks in place for these (hopefully exceedingly
exceptional) circumstances, who (in the most exceptional of these
circumstances) have the power to quietly tell someone that they can't
even stay at the meeting, is an exception to our openness that we can
live with.
IANAL, but, I would expect that any attempt to impose IETF sanctions due to
private interactions based on a confidential investigation could leave the IETF
vulnerable to being sued. AIRC, the IETF has an insurance policy that
indemnifies various IETF related folk against being sued for actions related to
the standards activities - it would be interesting to get a read of the
underwriter as to whether the policy would cover non-public harassment related
actions without a substantial IETF node.
My understanding is that this has been discussed with the insurance
folks at ISOC and that we are on reasonably safe ground so far.
pr
--
Pete Resnick<http://www.qualcomm.com/~presnick/>
Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. - +1 (858)651-4478