Bruce, Thanks for this highly welcome comment! Tony Harris

Hello Chuck,

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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

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