[Community-Discuss] Call for Comments on the AFRINIC Mailing Lists Terms of Use

[JORDI PALET MARTINEZ]

Hi Ashil, all,

 

I’ve several issues here:

 
The AUP (Acceptable Usage Policy) of the RPD mailing list can only be developed as a policy, following the PDP. This is a community task and not any committee or board or anything like that.
I’m not convinced, in legal terms, if you can enforce “AFRINIC” privacy policy to subscribers outside of Mauritius. I don’t see either, the benefit of that, as I just re-read the privacy policy and only affects the AFRINIC obligations, not the “users”.
While I will love the idea of everybody using their real name and email when contributing to mailing list, I think that breaks many aspects related to the way we work in the RIR communities and asking for that will be against bottom-up and openness concepts. We have discussed this many times. The community is composed by individuals, not organizations. However, the participants often work for organizations related to the Internet sectors. That means that if we make mandatory every poster to use their real name:
Maybe his/her “everybody life name” is not available for registration in free mail servers, so you discriminate them.
Maybe his/her personal opinions are contradictory with the ones from the organization is employing him. So, either he/she is exposed to being fired if express his personal view in the list, or we are not anymore open and acting against freedom of expression, as we are not allowing him to express freely in the lists.
A is easily solvable with a different wording in point 3 of the Mailings lists terms of use (for example, the signature must include the same name being used in everyday life), but B is not.

An alternative, which also requires a clearer wording for point 3, is that AFRINIC will verify every subscriber, without publicly disclosing that date, and for that, the subscription process will request the real name (never disclosed), and some kind of ID. Those subscribers that for employee reasons need to be registered twice (with different emails), will need to identify themselves and their employer, and if the mailing list is used for elections (as it happened last time), they will only be able to vote once. Further to that, when they change work, they will need to notify it, to avoid anyone taking his email without proper identification (a new employee, etc., which will be point 5 on your terms of use). Can you see how complex is all this?
The above point also requires modification of point 3 in the terms of use.
You’re missing explicit mention of publication of conference information, Call for Papers, etc. In all the RIRs, in general it is outside of the scope of the RIR mailing lists, at least most of them.
Similarly, you’re missing electoral information. It is ok to publish information for/against any election’s candidates? Or only in some mailing lists and which ones?
 

Clearly this requires a more extensive work and being more specific about which mailing lists, because as said, not all them are the same.

 

Regarding my input number 3 above. If we are talking about the policy mailing list, I know by facts, that some of the opinions and objections to my own policy proposals, have been made by puppets (which will be against point 9 of the mailing list terms of use) and others have been made by trolls, so in other words, looking for manipulation of the PDP and business interest, instead of individuals, which is against the PDP as is solely community based.

 

Despite that, I still think that enforcing the participants to use “publicly” their own name will be against the full concept of the PDP and Internet open community.

 

And once more, if AFRINIC can find a way that allow to identify people, but then they can use either their real name or an alias (so to avoid problems with the employer, I’m fine, but I don’t see how that can be done.

 

 

 

 

Regards,

Jordi

@jordipalet

 

 

 

El 2/2/21 12:34, "AFRINIC Communication" <comms at afrinic.net> escribió:

 

Dear colleagues,

AFRINIC acts as the secretariat and facilitator to support community discussions and the policy development process. To deliver on this mandate, AFRINIC provides a number of inclusive, transparent and open platforms that include public meetings and mailing lists.

Following complaints received from several community members on the virulence of exchanges on AFRINIC mailing lists and the growing number of one-off posts from incognito aliases that the community dubbed as “Internet trolls”, we published a blog in September 2020 on the Code of Conduct. https://afrinic.net/20200903-code-of-conduct

Unfortunately, that did not act as a deterrent and consequently, the subscription of one subscriber to our Community mailing list was revoked following previous warning issued to the latter.

(https://lists.afrinic.net/pipermail/community-discuss/2020-October/003736.html)

We are also awaiting the feedback from the Governance Committee pertaining to two requests made by the AFRINIC CEO in August 2020:

- Violation of Code of Conduct on Community mailing list [https://afrinic.net/govcom/request#GC2020.04]

-  Code of Conduct Review [https://afrinic.net/govcom/request#GC2020.05].

In the meantime, however, AFRINIC has been working on a plan of actions that will allow for verification and authentication of users of its mailing lists in our effort to safeguard the community from being subject to inappropriate behaviours. As a first step, we have developed a new set of AFRINIC Mailing Lists Terms of Use that will govern one’s subscription to AFRINIC mailing lists.

https://afrinic.net/20210202-afrinic-mailinglists-terms-of-use

In this respect, we hereby invite you to provide us with your valuable feedback on the aforesaid AFRINIC Mailing Lists Terms of Use in the comments section of the page (https://afrinic.net/20210202-afrinic-mailinglists-terms-of-use).

We look forward to receiving your feedback by 28 February 2021.

AFRINIC shall consider your input and thereafter, take such actions as it may deem appropriate.

Ashil Oogarah
On behalf of the AFRINIC Communications and PR Team

_______________________________________________ Community-Discuss mailing list Community-Discuss at afrinic.net https://lists.afrinic.net/mailman/listinfo/community-discuss 



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