William, On 2018-10-03 13:36, William Sylvester wrote:
We are now ready to share our draft report with the RIPE community and we invite you to share any input on this mailing list by 16 November.
Thanks to both you and the rest of the Accountability Task Force for this work. Overall I found the report to be clear and comprehensive. The description of RIPE seems correct to me, and the recommendations by-and-large useful. I've gone through the report and have a bit of feedback. Here you go! Recommendation: The task force acknowledges the long-standing relationship between the RIPE community and the RIPE NCC. While there is a lot of goodwill involved, and an overlap between RIPE NCC members and RIPE community participants ensures alignment, there are no formalised commitments from the RIPE NCC to the community. While this has never been a problem to date, the task force nevertheless wishes to raise this as something for community to consider. My comment: Since RIPE is not a legal entity, any formalized commitments would have to be done as promises by the RIPE NCC. I believe there is precedent for this, for example promises to allow other companies to use patented technology and not be sued (not a contract, still possibly legally binding). Still, ultimately any such commitment by the RIPE NCC would have to be unilateral; not an agreement. Enforcement of any such commitment seems problematic as well, and would have to be considered. Text: This is why the community consciously developed a separation of powers between individual working groups, the Working Group Chair Collective, RIPE Chair, RIPE Programme Committee, and other roles and structures. My comment: Was this conscious? The role of the WGCC seems to have evolved over the years, but I don't remember it ever being considered as a sort of separation of powers. The PC is even newer, and my recollection is that its current form was created after Joao Damas had been single-handedly arranging the plenary (or rather the EOF session) for years and wanted to give up the task. I think that it was heavily influenced by the way PCs work in NANOG or other bodies, rather than for any reason of separating powers within RIPE. Citation needed. 😉 Text: "Also, the RIPE Chair is able to waive the meeting fee for attendees that have a legitimate need." My comment: Technically I believe that the RIPE Chair asks the Managing Director of the RIPE NCC to waive the meeting fee. Recommendation: The community might want to consider whether the RIPE Chair should be required to disclose details about expenses associated with performing RIPE Chair duties, and who covers these. My comment: This is tricky. The RIPE Chair position is unpaid, and not full-time. Certain RIPE Chair duties may be performed when the Chair is traveling for other reasons. Personally I think this sort of transparency is highly desirable, but I am not sure about how practical it is. Perhaps a conversation with Hans Petter ask his opinion makes sense. Also note that any such transparency would probably be strictly voluntary from the RIPE Chair, as there is no obvious enforcement mechanism and it's not clear how any audit of expenses or other payments would work. Text: One of the RIPE Chair functions is documented as: "1.7 Decides on content of Friday Plenary at RIPE Meetings" My comment: To be clear, the RIPE Chair is responsible for the Closing Plenary. The RIPE NCC - in co-ordination with other RIRs - is responsible for the first part, and the RIPE PC is responsible for the second part, until handing it over to the RIPE Chair. This is a minor detail, and can be changed since the RIPE Chair also has control of the overall plan for the meeting. Text: One of the RIPE Chair functions is documented as: "1.9 Makes final decision on waiver of RIPE Meeting fees" My comment: As mentioned above, I believe that the RIPE Chair asks the Managing Director of the RIPE NCC to waive the meeting fee. Text: In the introduction to the Working Group Chair section we have: "Finally, the task force notes that there is no formal process to educate new chairs on their role within the community. This does not need to be anything onerous – but perhaps the RIPE NCC could share a set of relevant documents, responsibilities and timelines with newly-selected chairs." My comment: It is not clear that the RIPE NCC actually has too much knowledge of how the Working Groups actually work, or what the Working Group Chairs do. However, all working groups (except IoT) have multiple co-chairs, and I believe generally strive to maintain some level of consistency. We could formalize the idea of new chair training and perhaps the RIPE NCC can help organize that. Section: 6.0 Programme Committee My comment: Note that the PC also meets during the RIPE meetings, and also publishes its minutes. Finally, there may be a couple of missing pieces in the document: * I think that a missing piece of RIPE the picture in RIPE is any description of what RIPE Documents are and how they work. My understanding is that anyone can publish a RIPE Document, but I do not see any description of how that is handled anywhere, nor (as the report mentions) when a document becomes obsolete. Since these documents happen to be where RIPE Policies live, I think this is probably important. * BCOP is called a task force, but really I think it is a separate thing. It is totally fine, but it is sort of like a working group and sort of like a task force but not really either. It might be confusing and/or seem suspicious if someone is looking at RIPE from an accountability point of view. From the point of view of RIPE it's just what seems practical and useful, which is a strength of the way RIPE does stuff IMHO. Anyway, that's it for now. Thanks again for the excellent piece of work. Cheers, -- Shane