On March 18, 2015 1:52:24 PM EDT, Pete Resnick
<presnick(_at_)qti(_dot_)qualcomm(_dot_)com> wrote:
On 3/16/15 5:52 PM, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
On 17/03/2015 10:57, Dave Crocker wrote:
...
Public vs. private is entirely orthogonal to 'formally powerful' vs.
'has leverage but no formal authority'.
By way of example:
A document writer has made statements to a participant that
violate
the boundaries acceptable to the Ombud team. The statements were
made
in private, but have been sufficiently verified. The Ombud feels
that
the document writer needs to be removed from any position of
leverage in
the IETF, other than "regular participant".
Currently, it's the Chair(s) who have the authority to remove
that
person, not the Ombud. But confidentiality constrains the Ombud
possibly from making the request and certainly from explaining why.
d/
ps. Extra credit: Note that the confidentiality thing prevents any
sort of persistent application of a decision. There's no way to bar
someone from being a document writer going forward, even if we
figure
out how to handle the immediate situation.
Right. And the only solution that I can see is what would happen
inside a company in such a situation: extend the envelope of the
confidential discussion to include the person(s) with that
authority.
I think we have now circled back to the reason the original text ended
up in the document in the first place:
We really want the Ombudsteam to be as confidential as possible. That's
certainly important for the Respondent, for whom public accusations can
be destructive and could bring legal liability for both them *and* the
IETF, but I think the most important reason for confidentiality is for
the sake of the Subject: Being the recipient of sexual, racial/ethnic,
or other sorts of harassment (in contrast to most other sorts of bad
behavior) can be embarrassing and shaming for the recipient, and can
make one the object of all sorts of horrible negative comments. Of
course, it would be perfectly lovely if we lived in a world where
comments along the lines of "she was asking for it" or "he's just being
overly sensitive to any comment about race" or "she seemed to be
happily
participating in it" were not the first things out of people's mouths,
but we don't live in that world. And it would be nice if people did not
look upon the targets of harassment as victims to be pitied, but they
do.
Because of that, the best thing to do is to limit as much as possible
the number of people who get exposed to the information about the
incident. In the current text, even in the most extreme cases of
remedies (e.g., removal from a meeting), the only people -- beyond the
Ombudsteam -- that need to be made aware of the imposition of a remedy
are people who are under contract to the IAOC/ISOC (i.e., the
secretariat), which means that some level of confidentiality can be
contractually imposed. As soon as we give the ability to the Ombudsteam
to remove someone from an appointed position (NomCom-appointed or
otherwise), members of the open volunteer community are going to have
to
be made aware of the existence of the remedy, whether it's the entire
IESG ("This person can no longer be a chair for any WG"), the IAB
("This
person can no longer be confirmed as an AD") or others. Maybe we want
to
go through the exercise of trying to figure out what sorts of
confidentiality "envelopes" we want to have and examine how this
document interacts with 2026, 2418, and 7437, but it's not going to be
a
pleasant exercise.
The thing I like about the original text, and reason that I'm OK with
in
Sam's text, is that it limits how many people need to know the result;
the Ombudsteam removes the person from the situation that is causing
the
problem (from a mailing list or a meeting in the extreme case), but can
only tell the Respondent that it would be a good idea to resign at that
point. If things go the right way, the person resigns and the outcome
is
identical to having the Ombudsteam remove them (with potentially less
people having to be told). If things go badly and they refuse to resign
and instead make a stink, the outcome doesn't seem all that much worse
than the stink such a person will make after the Ombudsteam summarily
dismisses them from their position. And again, it avoids the Ombudsteam
having to figure out who in the community needs to be told, and what
particular details they need to know.
pr
Since the accused can't be kept quiet, is it realistic to have a document that
purports to provide confidentiality? Unless the identity of the accuser and the
alleged victim are unknown to the accused (which would create its own set of
problems), the process can't really be called confidential.
Scott K