Subject: Comments on draft-farrresnickel-harassment-01

From: Mary Barnes <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 17 Mar 2014 12:59:28 -0500

I've finally had a chance to take my first look at this document.

One thing that I find notably missing is any mention of corporate
anti-harassment policies that may also apply to these situations.  It's
noted in section 1 that this document doesn't interfere with the legal
handling of these issues.  However, there's no mention of how these
guidelines might relate or be superseded by corporate policies, which in
the US, at least could very well apply to these situations. Most corporate
policies apply outside the workplace, on business trips, etc.   Thus, I
think there needs to be some mention of how this relates to, interacts with
or is superseded by corporate policies.  I also think that the corporate
guidelines could introduce some difficulties with regards to an
ombudsperson who might have the same corporate affiliation as the
Respondent.   My understanding of the policies in many US companies would
require that if the ombudsperson were at a higher level in the company than
the respondent, that the ombudsperson would have a responsibility to report
the incident to corporate HR.

Personally, I think the corporate policies provide a much large stick than
do IETF policies, which is perhaps why some folks behavior is far worse in
IETF than it ever would in a corporate environment.   I also realize this
is a very US centric view but given that a large number of IETF
participants work for companies that have a US presence, I think it's
relevant.

Not being a lawyer and having my only experience with corporate
anti-harassment procedures being "avoid at all costs" (i.e., get a new
manager rather than have to go to HR and complain about a boss), I don't
think I have the right answers as to how this needs to be addressed, but I
don't think it can be avoided.

I also agree with Dave Crocker's comments on the -00 with regards to how
the Ombudsperson is selected, etc.:
http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg86223.html

Regards,
Mary.

---

From: "Adrian Farrel" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 17 Mar 2014 20:02:47 -0000

Mary,
 
Thanks for taking the time and giving your input.
I take a couple of things away from your review...
 
1. We should state our expectation of Ombudsperson recusal. Not that the
Ombudsperson would be anything other than wholly professional, but making the
statement will help people to have the right expectations when they report
incidents. 
 
1a. Point 1 obviously speaks to the need for more than one Ombudsperson.
 
2. We should include a note about corporate anti-harassment policies. I think
this is going to need a little thought, but it should be light (along the same
lines as the legal note) and should probably simply acknowledge that people
involved in the IETF may be subject to other anti-harassment policies such as
from their employers, and that the IETF policy neither replaces nor stands in
for such policies.
 
3. We need to come to some consensus about selection procedures. What I got from
Dave's email (so what I think you are agreeing with) was:
- Should be IETF volunteers
- Should be more than one (he suggested 3)
- Should be trained
- Should have access to professional consultancy (HR and legal)
Since this is almost where Pete and I were with the issue, and since most of the
comments we have received seem to have been along the same lines, I think we can
probably converge on some words.
 
Cheers,
Adrian

From: Mary Barnes [mailto:[email-masked]] 
Sent: 17 March 2014 17:59
To: <[email-masked]>; [email-masked]
Cc: <[email-masked]>
Subject: Comments on draft-farrresnickel-harassment-01

One thing that I find notably missing is any mention of corporate
anti-harassment policies that may also apply to these situations.  It's noted in
section 1 that this document doesn't interfere with the legal handling of these
issues.  However, there's no mention of how these guidelines might relate or be
superseded by corporate policies, which in the US, at least could very well
apply to these situations. Most corporate policies apply outside the workplace,
on business trips, etc.   Thus, I think there needs to be some mention of how
this relates to, interacts with or is superseded by corporate policies.  I also
think that the corporate guidelines could introduce some difficulties with
regards to an ombudsperson who might have the same corporate affiliation as the
Respondent.   My understanding of the policies in many US companies would
require that if the ombudsperson were at a higher level in the company than the
respondent, that the ombudsperson would have a responsibility to report the
incident to corporate HR.    
 
Personally, I think the corporate policies provide a much large stick than do
IETF policies, which is perhaps why some folks behavior is far worse in IETF
than it ever would in a corporate environment.   I also realize this is a very
US centric view but given that a large number of IETF participants work for
companies that have a US presence, I think it's relevant.
 
Not being a lawyer and having my only experience with corporate anti-harassment
procedures being "avoid at all costs" (i.e., get a new manager rather than have
to go to HR and complain about a boss), I don't think I have the right answers
as to how this needs to be addressed, but I don't think it can be avoided.
 
I also agree with Dave Crocker's comments on the -00 with regards to how the
Ombudsperson is selected, etc.: 
http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg86223.html
 
Regards,
Mary.

---

From: Mary Barnes <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 17 Mar 2014 15:33:46 -0500

> I take a couple of things away from your review...
[MB] I agree with all the points below and have one additional comment.
 Thanks!  [/MB]

> Ombudsperson would be anything other than wholly professional, but making
> the statement will help people to have the right expectations when they
> report incidents.
>
>
>
> 2. We should include a note about corporate anti-harassment policies. I
> think this is going to need a little thought, but it should be light (along
> the same lines as the legal note) and should probably simply acknowledge
> that people involved in the IETF may be subject to other anti-harassment
> policies such as from their employers, and that the IETF policy neither
> replaces nor stands in for such policies.
>
>
>
> 3. We need to come to some consensus about selection procedures. What I
> got from Dave's email (so what I think you are agreeing with) was:
>
[MB]  I think 3 is a good number.  It allows for recusal in certain cases
and since these could be very challenging situations, this will provide a
means of validating opinions, etc. prior to taking actions. [/MB]

> Since this is almost where Pete and I were with the issue, and since most
> of the comments we have received seem to have been along the same lines, I
> think we can probably converge on some words.
>
>
>
> Cheers,
>
> Adrian
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> *From:* Mary Barnes [mailto:[email-masked]]
> *Sent:* 17 March 2014 17:59
> *To:* <[email-masked]>; [email-masked]
> *Cc:* <[email-masked]>
> *Subject:* Comments on draft-farrresnickel-harassment-01
>
>
>

---

From: Spencer Dawkins <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 17 Mar 2014 17:13:02 -0500

This all seems reasonable to me (FWIW).

I have one comment on the Mary/Adrian exchange, and one question from 
out of the blue ...

On 03/17/2014 03:33 PM, Mary Barnes wrote:
>
>
>
> On Mon, Mar 17, 2014 at 3:02 PM, Adrian Farrel <[email-masked] 
> <mailto:[email-masked]>> wrote:
>
>     Mary,
>
> [MB] I agree with all the points below and have one additional 
> comment.  Thanks!  [/MB]
>
>     1. We should state our expectation of Ombudsperson recusal. Not
>     that the Ombudsperson would be anything other than wholly
>     professional, but making the statement will help people to have
>     the right expectations when they report incidents.
>
>     2. We should include a note about corporate anti-harassment
>     policies. I think this is going to need a little thought, but it
>     should be light (along the same lines as the legal note) and
>     should probably simply acknowledge that people involved in the
>     IETF may be subject to other anti-harassment policies such as from
>     their employers, and that the IETF policy neither replaces nor
>     stands in for such policies.
>
>     3. We need to come to some consensus about selection procedures.
>     What I got from Dave's email (so what I think you are agreeing
>     with) was:
>
> [MB]  I think 3 is a good number.  It allows for recusal in certain 
> cases and since these could be very challenging situations, this will 
> provide a means of validating opinions, etc. prior to taking actions. 
> [/MB]
>
>     - Should be trained
>

It seems obvious enough (after several conversations) that almost no 
harassment professionals will understand what passes for normal around 
the IETF, and almost no IETF participants will have an in-depth 
understanding of how to deal with harassment allegations, so there has 
to be some combination of harassment professional and IETF participant 
to provide the background ombudspersons will need.

I was leaning towards having professionals with IETF participant support 
as ombudpersons, and the only reason I was leaning that direction was 
that it's easy for me to imagine an IETF participant who is willing to 
serve the community in this way, also being willing to serve the 
community as WG chair or AD at some later point in time, and it seemed 
awkward to be on the wrong side of a complaint of harassment (in either 
direction), and then having your ombudperson pop up in your document 
approval chain, further down the road.

Adrian said "Not that the Ombudsperson would be anything other than 
wholly professional, but making the statement will help people to have 
the right expectations when they report incidents" when talking about 
recusal. I wonder if there is any statement about ombudpersons resolving 
a complaint and then moving on that would be helpful.

>     Since this is almost where Pete and I were with the issue, and
>     since most of the comments we have received seem to have been
>     along the same lines, I think we can probably converge on some words.
>

My out of the blue comment:

While re-reading -01, I remembered from a recent refresher on 
https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3683.txt that a PR-action for one IETF 
mailing list can spread to any other IETF mailing list - at least, 
that's my understanding of this text:

    A PR-action identifies one or more individuals, citing messages
    posted by those individuals to an IETF mailing list, that appear to
    be abusive of the consensus-driven process.  If approved by the IESG,
    then:

    o  those identified on the PR-action have their posting rights to
       that IETF mailing list removed; and,

    o  maintainers of any IETF mailing list may, at their discretion,
       also remove posting rights to that IETF mailing list.

Given that Section 5 ("Remedies") includes not permitting the Respondent 
to participate in a mailing list discussion, as I read this text:

    Finally, on the other end of
    the spectrum, the Ombudsperson could decide that the Respondent is no
    longer permitted to participate in a particular IETF activity,
->  whether it is a mailing list discussion, virtual meeting, or a face-
    to-face activity, up to and including requiring that the Respondent
    can no longer attend a face-to-face IETF meeting and its associated
    activities, either for the remainder of the present meeting or (in
    the extreme) future meetings.

might this include other mailing lists as well? If that's obvious to 
everyone else, my apologies for asking ... but I thought it was worth 
asking now, before the question comes up in practice.

Thanks,

Spencer

---

From: Stephen Farrell <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 17 Mar 2014 23:44:15 +0000

Hi Adrian,

> - Should be more than one (he suggested 3)

An option might be to have IETF volunteers who are backed up
by professional advice that is on tap as needed, in the same
way we deal with legal issues where e.g. IESG folk stumble along
until we need Jorge, and then we call on him for help.

I don't understand whether that set of options has been explored
nor why it was seemingly rejected, if explored. (Its a set of
options since there are various different ways in which the set
of responsibilities might be split between the volunteers and
the professionals.)

I for one am quite uncomfortable with the idea that the
ombudspersonage is an IETF participant (or a few such) with some
probably minimal training. I think that approach just brings too
much baggage to be workable.

So did you consider that approach and if so why did you choose
to reject it in this rev of the draft?

S.

---

From: Scott Brim <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 17 Mar 2014 20:06:56 -0400

An ombudsperson tries not to bring a situation to "justice" or any other
public exposure (to start with), and from what I've seen most cases can be
worked out without. Are you getting advice from professionals on how to
structure this?

---

From: Dave Crocker <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 17 Mar 2014 17:17:01 -0700

On 3/17/2014 5:06 PM, Scott Brim wrote:
> public exposure (to start with), and from what I've seen most cases can
> be worked out without. Are you getting advice from professionals on how
> to structure this?

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)?

d/

-- 
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net

---

From: Pete Resnick <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 17 Mar 2014 19:20:02 -0500

> of responsibilities might be split between the volunteers and

The set of options has not been rejected, at least in the current draft. 
The current draft leaves the structure open-ended, expecting the IETF 
Chair to consult with assorted folks (including IETF leadership, the 
community, ISOC folks) and figuring out the right approach. Given the 
unusual set of circumstances (for example, the fact that this is 
traditionally a corporate Human Resources function but that the 
relationship is not employee-employer), leaving this flexible seemed to 
make sense. I'd personally prefer that we as a community don't try to 
figure out all the details, but rather trust the IETF Chair to consult 
with the right people and figure out something that works.

pr

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

---

From: Scott Brim <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 17 Mar 2014 20:30:54 -0400

Dave, you continue to lump together willful harassment and bullying with
behavior that has unintended effects. You even use the words willful and
intent in your draft. A "misbehavior" (your word) is not necessarily
malicious. If it was we would have a lot of evil two-year-olds in the world.

You can take cases of true bullying to a public court of justice, but there
will be a long period of training in the IETF where most issues that arise
are due either to simple ignorance or lack of communication skills. Think
about this crowd, and what percent of them act with malicious intent. This
is also what Stewart tried to say to you the other day, that you apparently
didn't understand.  What I said about ombudsperson is straight from
ombudsperson training.

---

From: Pete Resnick <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 17 Mar 2014 19:32:04 -0500

On 3/17/14 7:17 PM, Dave Crocker wrote:
> The conflicting requirement is to ensure a public sense that 
> harassment and bullying will not be tolerated.
>
> 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

---

From: joel jaeggli <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 17 Mar 2014 20:05:56 -0700

> don't think it can be avoided.

I would very much prefer that one of them be and outsider, or least a
no-longer practicing participant in the IETF activity. The current
person serving temporarily in the role effectively meets those criterion
modula coworkers who are participants, and an enterprise with a
proprietary interest in the successful functioning of the IETF.

---

From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 18 Mar 2014 20:33:17 +1300

On 18/03/2014 13:32, Pete Resnick wrote:
...
> bullying or other disruptive behavior) and harassment. 

I'm wondering whether somebody would care to post highly anonymised
descriptions of one or two of the most serious examples of personal
harassment that have been reported privately. I think they are
sufficiently serious that people would immediately see what Pete
means and why we should get this settled quickly.

   Brian

---

From: "Adrian Farrel" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 18 Mar 2014 08:57:10 -0000

Opinion noted, Joel, but you supplied no arguments to convince me nor for me to
resolve to convince you.

All I can say back to you is that we would need to find those people, educate
them about the functioning of the IETF, and work out how to fund the work. None
of those is impossible, but they are factors.

Adrian

> -----Original Message-----
> From: joel jaeggli [mailto:[email-masked]]
> Sent: 18 March 2014 03:06
> To: Mary Barnes; <[email-masked]>; [email-masked]
> Cc: <[email-masked]>
> Subject: Re: Comments on draft-farrresnickel-harassment-01
>

---

From: Avri Doria <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 18 Mar 2014 12:52:16 -0400

hi,

I have been thinking about this for a bit and was not sure I would comment.

A while back, a few of my friends were under attack by an ombudsman* in 
another group.  This Ombudsman had become too much of an insider in the 
organization and had lost the objectivity that is key for this role. 
Irritation with some people had become personal.

There is an entire literature on the the Ombudsman role. And 
professional training.

I did some research and found that this whole notion of being separate 
seems critical to the function of the role.  Sometimes even reporting to 
just the Board that hired can be problematic unless the terms of 
reference are strict enough to say that the Board, or whatever authority 
is being spoken of, has no authority over the Ombudsman.  So I am not 
sure how it will work for an IETF member to become a Ombdudsperson 
without ceasing to be a regualr particpant to some extent.

Another aspect, other than being other to the organization is time in 
the job.  While the options seem mixed on this one, it seems that there 
is a limited time that an Ombudsman can remain in the job and remain 
objective.  So if we go ahead with this we should should careful 
attention to term limits.

If IETF needs one, and I think this is a good idea in an organization 
this wide, is it a role where a professional should be added to the 
staff of those supporting the organization?

Alternatively, a while back, at some point when I was last active in the 
IETF, there were all sorts of problems that various individuals had with 
others.  At that time there was a notion going around (never so 
formalized as this draft) of having a group of old timers (both without 
beards and with - grey beard[les]s?) that could serve as volunteer 
advocates for individuals being mistreated or having other such issues. 
  The advantage of the advocate is that it does not require strict 
neutrality, leaving that to the nomcom selected stuckees when issue 
actually needs to be escalated.

avri

* forgive me for using the tradional term, all the reading I did on the 
role uses this term.