]> NetApp

Stenbergintie 12 B Kauniainen 02700 FI lars@eggert.org https://eggert.org/

Cisco

alcoop@cisco.com

Ericsson

Kauniainen 02700 FI jari.arkko@ericsson.com

Vigil Security

housley@vigilsec.com

The University of Auckland

School of Computer Science PB 92019 Auckland 1142 NZ brian.e.carpenter@gmail.com

This document describes the creation of a moderator team for all of the IETF's various contribution channels. Without removing existing responsibilities for working group management, this team enables a uniform approach to moderation of disruptive participation across all mailing lists and other methods of IETF collaboration. About This Document The latest revision of this draft can be found at . Status information for this document may be found at . Discussion of this document takes place on the gendispatch Working Group mailing list (), which is archived at . Subscribe at . Source for this draft and an issue tracker can be found at .

Introduction This document proposes the creation of a moderator team for all of the IETF's various contribution channels. This moderator team is modeled after, and subsumes, the moderator team for the IETF discussion list .

Conventions and Definitions The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "NOT RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in BCP 14 when, and only when, they appear in all capitals, as shown here.

Motivation The IETF community has defined general guidelines of conduct for personal interaction in the IETF , and the IESG has defined an anti-harassment policy for the IETF for which the IETF community has defined anti-harassment procedures , empowering an ombudsteam to take necessary action. Dealing with disruptive behavior, however, is not part of the role of the ombudsteam. task the chairs of each IETF working group with moderating their group's in-person meetings and mailing lists, and an IESG statement describes additional guidance to working group chairs. For IETF mailing lists not associated with a working group, another IESG statement clarifies that the list administrators are tasked with moderation. And the IETF list for general discussions has, mostly for historic reasons, a team of moderators that are not list administrators and operate by a different set of processes . In addition, defines a process for revoking an individual's posting rights to IETF mailing lists following a community last-call of a "PR-action" proposed by the IESG, often in response to complaints from the community. This fractured approach to moderation of disruptive participation through chairs, list administrators, and moderator teams, combined with the IESG-led process of PR-actions, has proven to be less than ideal:

• The IETF community has not been able to agree on a common definition of disruptive behavior. Therefore, chairs and list administrators apply individually different criteria when making decisions, and participants have different expectations for when PR-actions are warranted.
• The moderation process that chairs and list administrators need to follow is slow and cumbersome, which makes it ill-suited to situations that escalate quickly. It also assumes that the originator of disruptive behavior is a misguided participant that can be reasoned with and who will change their ways.
• Chairs and list administrators may only enact moderation actions for their single list, which is ill-suited when a pattern of disruptive behavior spans multiple lists. Also, chairs and list administrators may not be fully aware of disruptive behavior that spans multiple lists, due to not being subscribed to some of the affected.
• PR-actions, which can address disruptive behavior across several lists, are cumbersome and slow, and the community has not been able to agree on a common definition of disruptive behavior. This has led to a situation where PR-actions are rarely used, and when they are used, they are perceived as very heavy-handed.
• For a given mailing list, participants may not feel comfortable reporting disruptive behavior to a chair or list administrator, for various reasons. For mailing lists not associated with working groups, list administrators are not even publicly identified - they can only be contacted through an anonymous alias address. This exacerbates the problem, because participants may not be comfortable reporting disruptive behavior to an anonymous party.
• The IETF offers participation not only through in-person meetings and mailing lists, which are the two channels of participation for which moderation processes are currently defined. IETF business also happens in chat channels, remote meeting participation systems, virtual meetings, wikis, GitHub repositories, and more. How disruptive behavior is moderated in these channels is currently undefined.

IETF Moderator Team This document proposes a different, uniform approach to moderating the IETF's various participation channels: a moderator team for the IETF. The creation of this team intends to address the issues identified in .

Scope This IETF moderator team consists of a small number of individuals (no less than three) that SHALL moderate all the IETF's various current and future participation channels. At present, these include mailing lists, chat channels, and discussions in other systems that the IETF or WGs have chosen to employ, such as GitHub repositories, Wikis, or issue trackers. The management and moderation of in-person, remote, and interim meetings remains a task of the relevant group's management, such as WG chairs. However, it is expected that moderators are available for consultation and assistance should issues arise, and they may confer with the group management over potential patterns of behavior. The moderator team SHALL operate according to a consistent and uniform set of criteria, processes, and actions. The moderator team SHALL independently define and execute their role. They SHALL maintain a public set of moderation criteria, processes, actions, and other material that allows the community to understand and comment on the role of the team. The moderator team SHOULD consider adopting moderation criteria, processes, and actions that other technical communities have found suitable. The moderator team's criteria and processes SHALL be developed with community input, but they are not expected to be documented in the RFC series. The moderator team MAY initiate moderation actions by itself; individual participants SHOULD also alert the team to disruptive behavior they observe. Participants should be able to contact the moderator team in ways that are, ideally, integrated into the various participation channels the IETF offers. It is not expected that the moderator team will be monitoring every IETF channel, but rather that participants will proactively flag concerns about disruptive behavior to the moderator team. However, the moderator team SHOULD actively monitor a small set of key participation channels, including, for example, the IETF discussion and last-call mailing lists or the IETF plenary chat channel. The moderator team should decide which channels are in this set based on their own judgement and community suggestions.

Membership The IETF Chair appoints members of the moderator team. Apart from appointing moderators, the IETF Chair SHALL refrain from the day-to-day operation and management of the moderator team. The moderator team MAY decide to consult with IETF Chair when needed. Because the IESG and IAB are in the appeals chain for moderator team decisions (see ), the IETF Chair SHOULD NOT appoint a moderator who is serving on the IESG or IAB. Individuals serving on other bodies to which the NomCom appoints members, such as the IETF Trust or the LLC Board, as well as LLC staff and contractors SHALL also be excluded from serving on the moderator team. If a moderator is assuming any such role, they SHALL step down from the moderator team soon after.

Appeals Because the moderator team serves at the discretion of the IETF Chair, any moderation decision can be appealed to the IETF Chair, per . Disagreements with a decision by the IETF Chair can be brought to their attention. If this does not lead to a resolution, the decision can be appealed as described in , as with any other Area Director decision. In this case, the appeals chain starts with an appeal to the entire IESG.

Team Diversity Due to the global nature of the IETF, the membership of this team SHOULD reflect a diversity of time zones and other participant characteristics that lets it operate effectively around the clock and throughout the year. Team diversity is also important to ensure any participant observing problematic behavior can identify a moderator they feel comfortable contacting.

Relation to Ombudsteam The moderator team SHALL complement the efforts of the IETF ombudsteam , whose focus on anti-harassment and operation SHALL remain unchanged. The moderator team and ombudsteam are expected to work together in cases that may involve both disruptive behavior and harassment; they may determine the most effective way to do so in each case. The ombudsteam has strict rules of confidentiality. If a moderation case overlaps with an ombudsteam case, confidential information MUST NOT be shared between the teams.

Changes to Existing RFCs Creation of the IETF moderator team requires some changes to existing RFCs and also requires the IESG to update a number of their statements. This section describes these changes.

Security Considerations The usual security considerations do not apply to this document. Potential abuse of the moderation process for the suppression of undesired opinions is counteracted by the availability of an appeals process, per .

IANA Considerations This document has no IANA actions.

References Normative References In many standards track documents several words are used to signify the requirements in the specification. These words are often capitalized. This document defines these words as they should be interpreted in IETF documents. This document specifies an Internet Best Current Practices for the Internet Community, and requests discussion and suggestions for improvements. RFC 2119 specifies common key words that may be used in protocol specifications. This document aims to reduce the ambiguity by clarifying that only UPPERCASE usage of the key words have the defined special meanings. IETF Participants must not engage in harassment while at IETF meetings, virtual meetings, or social events or while participating in mailing lists. This document lays out procedures for managing and enforcing this policy. This document updates RFC 2418 by defining new working group guidelines and procedures. This document updates RFC 7437 by allowing the Ombudsteam to form a recall petition without further signatories. This memo documents the process used by the Internet community for the standardization of protocols and procedures. It defines the stages in the standardization process, the requirements for moving a document between stages and the types of documents used during this process. This document specifies an Internet Best Current Practices for the Internet Community, and requests discussion and suggestions for improvements. Informative References IESG IESG IESG The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) discussion mailing list furthers the development and specification of Internet technology through the general discussion of technical, procedural, operational, and other topics for which no dedicated mailing lists exist. As this is the most general IETF mailing list, considerable latitude in terms of topics is allowed, but there are posts and topics that are unsuitable for this mailing list. This document defines the charter for the IETF discussion list and explains its scope. This document obsoletes RFC 3005 and updates RFC 3683. This document provides a set of guidelines for personal interaction in the Internet Engineering Task Force. The guidelines recognize the diversity of IETF participants, emphasize the value of mutual respect, and stress the broad applicability of our work. This document is an updated version of the guidelines for conduct originally published in RFC 3184. This document is an update to RFC 2418 that gives WG chairs explicit responsibility for managing WG mailing lists. In particular, it gives WG chairs the authority to temporarily suspend the mailing list posting privileges of disruptive individuals. This document specifies an Internet Best Current Practices for the Internet Community, and requests discussion and suggestions for improvements. All self-governing bodies have ways of managing the scope of participant interaction. The IETF uses a consensus-driven process for developing computer-communications standards in an open fashion. An important part of this consensus-driven process is the pervasive use of mailing lists for discussion. Notably, in a small number of cases, a participant has engaged in a "denial-of-service" attack to disrupt the consensus-driven process. Regrettably, as these bad faith attacks become more common, the IETF needs to establish a practice that reduces or eliminates these attacks. This memo recommends such a practice for use by the IETF. This document specifies an Internet Best Current Practices for the Internet Community, and requests discussion and suggestions for improvements. All RFCs are required to have a Security Considerations section. Historically, such sections have been relatively weak. This document provides guidelines to RFC authors on how to write a good Security Considerations section. This document specifies an Internet Best Current Practices for the Internet Community, and requests discussion and suggestions for improvements.

Acknowledgments These individuals suggested improvements to this document:

• Jay Daley