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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@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