[council] Regarding dealing with inappropriate behaviour

[Mawaki Chango]

Bruce,

Though I appreciate your experience and valuable input below, I don't
even understand how we've got to debating about excluding people for
inappropriate behavior. Has some such thing happened in one of the
WG, or are we pre-suspecting that some people may not be civil? Any
reason for that?

I an only regret that council members spend their valuable time on
this whole topic of WG membership, failing to clearly address some
legitimate questions at inception.

Bruce, allow me to remind us of a couple of points:

1) The distinction you made between WG and TF, while setting up the
IDN WG: the WGs are not policy-making or even policy-recommendation
group (e.g., they may conduct straw polls, but that is not a vote on
a decision.) They are meant to clarify issues and identify those the
WG members think the Council should examine further for, possibly,
policy recommendations (through PDP or simple/single resolutions,)
etc. As a consequence, I'd like to clarify that the choices made by a
WG should not preclude by any means the possibility for the Council
to further discuss or examine an issue left out of the WG report or
proposals, especially at the motivated request of any council member.

2) In "designing aloud" (so to speak) the WG general rules (I must
say I don't like this piecemeal approach we seem to adopt,) apart
from the size problem, I don't necessarily see why the membership
shouldn't be open to any interesting parties (especially in the light
of the WG function recalled above.) I was told that was the case in
the old DNSO days, and maybe even early GNSO ones, and I'm not under
the impression that we've been dramatically more efficient since then
(I consider respectability, visibility or level of profile a
different point.) I don't think the observer category resolve any
problem. We could rather consider the following principles:
- ensure to each constituency a minimum number of seats (e.g., 3)
- open the membership to any interested party or individual (maybe
subject to a statement of purpose and interests, etc.)
- define a maximum size for a WG.

That size needs not to be one fixed number but a range of numbers. Or
if we want to make the procedure clear cut, we could also ask the
constituencies to submit whether they wish to retain their minimum
number of seats and fill them in at a later stage, or they wish to
give them up. But those are implementations details that can be
refined or crafted one way or the other.

Best,

Mawaki 


--- Bruce Tonkin <Bruce.Tonkin at melbourneit.com.au> wrote:

> Hello Chuck,
> 
> > In that regard, we
> > may want to consider some means of dealing with non-constructive
> > behavior both for observers and members.  
> 
> I tend to agree that a chair should attempt to deal with
> inappropriate
> behaviour, bearing in mind the wishes of the whole group.
> Ie the decision is not made autocratically, but based on documented
> guidelines for acceptable behaviour as well as seeking the views of
> other members of the group.
> 
> I think the Council then is simply able to deal with issues on an
> appeal
> basis - which could be handled in a similar way to that of the
> Board
> appeal mechanisms - e.g a subgroup of the Council can investigate
> and
> report to the whole Council.
> 
> However - I would hope that these situations are rare events.  The
> best
> approach is to stop inappropriate behaviour as soon as it happens,
> rather than let it gradually grow amongst multiple participants (ie
> such
> behaviour tends to escalate).  If a problem is let run too long,
> then
> you will always be blamed for singling out one person, when other
> people
> have also been behaving inappropriately.
> 
> The rough rule of thumb is that was is not acceptable in a small
> face-to-face environment in terms of language and courtesy is not
> acceptable in a telephone conference or mailing list when people
> are
> further apart.
> 
> I have noticed that when a group of people have been "fighting"
> amongst
> themselves on a mailing list and then meet face-to-face, the bad
> feelings are often carried over.  In contrast where a group has
> initially met face-to-face a few times and the group members have
> built
> some respect for each others opinions and good intentions, then
> mailing
> lists discussions are generally much more civil.   For example, the
> Council meets face-to-face as a group regularly, as do most of the
> more
> active members of the registrar constituency.  Subsequently mailing
> list
> and teleconference discussions tend to be fairly civil despite the
> fact
> that the participants may be strong competitors in business, or
> have
> strongly opposing views on a matter.
> 
> 
> Regards,
> Bruce Tonkin
> 
> 
> 
> 
>