Re: Appeal procedure for DAM actions
Hello,
Anthony Towns:
> On Mon, Jan 07, 2019 at 11:27:35PM +0100, Joerg Jaspert wrote:
>> 1. Appealing DAM decisions
>> --------------------------
>> Any person who had their Debian membership suspended or revoked by DAM may
>> appeal the decision.
>
> Based on the process you describe, I'd suggest phrasing this as "may
> ask for the decision to be reviewed by the New Members Committee".
> An "appeal" (at least in legal terms) usually goes to the more powerful
> body, but in this case, DAM is the more powerful body.
>
> Having the boss's decision reviewed by people who report directly to
> the boss is kind of a dodgy structure; and people on the new member
> committee will probably want to maintain good relations with DAM, at
> least if they want to continue doing new member work.
I cannot see a problem here. The vote of NMC will be secret, so there is
no way that DAM could know about who voted what.
>> 2. DAM statement
>> ----------------
>> Within 72 hours DAM will provide a statement to the NMC and the appealer
>> with their reasoning for the account status change.
>
> I think by this point DAM should have already provided the reasoning
> for the expulsion to -private (or -project if the person being expelled
> agreed), so this should be redundant.
No, you might have read below that the idea is to leave it to the
concerned person to disclose why they've been suspended or expelled.
Also see mail sent by Jonathan Wiltshire yesterday to d-d-a.
>> DAM may also send additional material to the NMC only, encrypted to the
>> individual members, if they deem it necessary for the case, and if
>> presenting this to a wider public might cause issues of confidentiality for
>> involved third-parties.
>
>> [1] The NM-Committee is defined as:
>> - All members of DAM and FrontDesk.
>> - All application manager that are marked as active and
>> processed at least one NM in the last 6 months.
>> There is a mail alias <nm-committee@nm.debian.org> which reaches all
>> members, it is regularly regenerated by FrontDesk.
>
> All AMs that have processed an NM in the last 6 months is a fairly
> broad group, and not one that's particularly selected for dealing with
> particularly sensitive information. It doesn't seem like a great idea to
> send sensitive info to them that you wouldn't feel comfortable sending
> to any random developer to me, so again sending the detailed reasoning
> to -private still seems like the right approach, removing personally
> identifying details in the rare cases where that's necessary.
So sending this info to a number of AMs is less privacy sensitive than
sending it to ~1000 people on -private? I don't think this is useful and
I don't understand why you are proposing such a thing. We've repeatedly
seen information from -private forwarded and shared with the outside world.
There are archives accessible to each DD, even new DDs can read the
archives from years ago...
ie. -private is not private and this information has *nothing* to do on
a mailing list.
Imagine a case of harassment and the harassed person does not want their
identity to be disclosed? Even if you send some information about a
venue or a time when this happened, it might be possible to reverse
engineer the identity of the person. It's not up to "us" to decide about
disclosing such information to a huge list of people.
>> The NMC members are expected to avoid disclosing
>> this material to anyone else, including the appealer.[3]
>
> Doing things that way avoids this risk/caveat.
>
> I don't really think providing sensitive material to the new member ctte
> in this way is helpful anyway: if they can't pass it on to the person
> who got expelled they can't ask "is this true? what's your side of the
> story?" either, which is pretty essential if you want to have a remotely
> fair process.
The procedure does not say they cannot ask if something is true.
But as seen in the two current cases, both suspended/expelled developers
absolutely wanted to know who complained about them. Hence this sentence
makes sense: please do not share the raw material with anyone, including
the appealer.
>> 3. Appealer statement
>> ---------------------
>> Within a further 72 hours, the appealer has the opportunity to respond to
>> the DAM statement with their own statement.
>
> DAM should be providing the full reasoning to the person being expelled
> when they're expelled; if that person's going to ask for review, they
> already have all they need to provide their side of the story as part
> of the request for review, avoiding the need for this 72h period.
DAM _does_ send the expelled/suspended person an email containing their
reasoning afaik. Leaving time is a good thing: the expelled/suspended
person may use it to write up something to clarify what they don't agree
with. Let's give them this time?
> Both the above changes would cut the appeal time down by a week, from:
>
> - expulsion happens
> - <30 days, review is requested
> - 3 days for DAM to do an update
> - 3 days for expelled person to provide a statement
> - 7 days for discussion
> - 3 days for vote
>
> to something more like:
>
> - expulsion happens, affected member and -private given detailed
> reasoning
> - <30 days, review is requested and statement from expelled person is
> provided to newmaint-ctte
> - 7 days for discussion
> - 3 days for vote
>
> This setup avoids giving the expelled developer the opportunity to
> pick Christmas or Easter or the start/end of the freeze or some other
> inconvenient time to start the process, and immediately triggering a 3
> day deadline for DAM members.
I think it is good to define these things very precisely instead of
vaguely so I do agree with the initial proposal over your idea.
>> 4. NM Committee review
>> ----------------------
>> The NMC has 7 days to review the received material and discuss the matter in
>> private. They are expected not to solicit further input, as this is not an
>> inquiry but a peer review of the DAM decision.
>
> One of the things appeals courts in real life can do is send the case back
> to a lower court with a requirement to fix up mistakes in fact finding,
> which gives them an easy opportunity to avoid having to do any fact
> finding themselves. Since the balance of power is the other way around
> here; I'd expect that if the new member committee isn't just going to be
> a rubber stamp for DAM, then they'd need to be able to solicit further
> input in cases where DAM's summary of events doesn't match the expelled
> developer's take on what happened.
Maybe the sentence needs to be made clearer: what kind of further input
are we talking about and why it shall not be solicited.
> (Another difference between the proposed process and court appeals is
> that appeals courts can provide detailed opinions as to why the original
> decision was wrong which helps avoid making the same mistakes in future;
> this process doesn't really have that feature).
There could be a _non-mandatory_ reasoning written by the NMC to DAM if
a decision is overturned.
>> 5. NM-Committee vote
>> --------------------
>> After 7 days discussion, or earlier if unanimously agreed by the NMC,
>> NM-Frontdesk will ask the secretary to conduct a secret, 3-day-long vote,
>> with the following options:
>> 1. Uphold the decision of the DAMs
>> 2. Overturn the decision of the DAMs
>> Committee members otherwise involved in a case must abstain.
>> DAM members are not allowed to partake in the vote.
>
> I think "involved" should probably be more explicit. If the expulsion
> came from a recommendation from the anti-harassment team, which in turn
> resulted from a complaint, does that mean members of the AH team and the
> complainant must abstain? How about if someone said "hey, tone it down"
> on a mailing list, and this was used as part of the evidence that it was
> an ongoing problem, but they weren't otherwise involved in the expulsion?
>
> A rule that could work might be:
>
> - DAM will only directly expel people for DMUP violations and similar
> serious, urgent and unambiguous breaches of trust
I suggest you read the procedure sent by Jonathan Wiltshire yesterday on
d-d-a that makes it clear how such decisions are taken.
> - Other expulsions will be initiated by other developers following the
> process described in 2005 (or some updated replacement)
The above mentioned procedure does also make clear how to initiate a
discussion within DAM, so this should solve your concern.
> - If a review is required, neither DAM or the developers who
> initiated/seconded the expulsion process are allowed to participate
> in the review process (nor is the expelled developer, obviously)
Sounds reasonable.
> If discussions are to be held on a private list that the expelled member
> doesn't have access to, DAM etc probably should also be excluded from
> that list while the discussion takes place.
I don't think that -private should discuss this. See my comment below.
>> A simple majority decides the vote; in the event of a tie, the decision is
>> not overturned.
>> Abstained or absent votes are not counted. If more than half of the NMC
>> (excluding DAM) abstain or do not vote, the decision is not overturned.
>
> A quorum of 50% is pretty high; using the same formula for Q from the
> constitution would probably make more sense. Not counting explicit
> abstentions as part of quorum also is pretty unusual.
Make a better proposal.
> I'd suggest explicitly making this a secret ballot, like DPL elections.
Wasn't this written in the email already?
>> 6. Action
>> ---------
>> If the decision is overturned, the suspension or revocation of the account
>> will be turned into a warning.
>
> If DAM wrongfully expels someone, I think the stress of going through
> the wrongful expulsion and the review process is probably more than
> punishment enough for whatever they actually did, and it's better to
> write the whole saga off, instead of making a note on their personnel
> file, or whatever "turning it into a warning" means.
It means that once you've been expelled/suspended, and the NMC decides
they want to overturn this decision, you may consider yourself warned:
some of your behavior triggered this DAM decision in the first place.
> As I've said on -private, I don't really think putting the burden
> on the expelled developer is the right way to do things: if you get
> expelled you're going to be pretty annoyed/frustrated/angry/etc, and as
> a result you'll be a very bad advocate for yourself. It's better IMO to
If it gets to this point, IMO, there is some work to do by the
suspended/expelled: there was a reason this happened, DAM does not
pronounce a suspension/expulsion for absolutely nothing.
> inform the project as a whole (ie, send a detailed explanation of what
> caused the expulsion to -private), and let people who aren't already
> annoyed/frustrated consider whether it makes sense or not.
I don't agree with you. There is no process whatsoever in your proposal.
What happens if the discussion spawns two camps, or more, just like what
we're currently seeing? How do you expect people to make a decision of
sense in that case?
Changing the
> trigger for nm-ctte review to be K (ie, 5) DD's rather than the expelled
> person would probably work, I think -- that's the same number who could
> do a GR anyway, after all.
I don't understand this proposal.
Cheers
Ulrike
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