Minutes IETF110: hrpc
minutes-110-hrpc-00

      Notes HRPC IETF 110

*Action points are denoted in bold, as such.*

# Welcome and introduction

I’ll just make a note that those on the list will have noticed there's been a
great deal of activity this week. I would admit as a co-chair I've not been
able to keep up with those discussions as I would have liked, given their
volume. Hopefully we can bring in those conversations today although they've
not been addressed by the authors (but we can also then of course commit to
continuing those discussions on the list and we'll get to that when we are
ready in the agenda).

# Talk: JoAnne Yates and Craig Murphy

        "Standardization in the Public Interest since 1880"

## Discussion

Corinne: I'm a PhD student at the Oxford Internet Institute and I wanted to
start off with thank you both for this wonderful presentation; it was really
interesting to see the IETF in what I guess is the larger arc of
standardization. I had some specific questions about the assumptions that you
make both about early and current standardization efforts in terms of it acting
in the public interest and I do so partially for my own PhD research on the
IETF but I want to start with the older standardization bodies that you
mentioned because you very much show how they are focused on world peace. But
it seems that this is really essentially world peace within a larger consensus
that the reigning system of empire and the reigning system of colonialism was
one to be kept in place and it also seems different images that you included
that all of the people involved in these early efforts seem to be white men and
that to me raises a question of the extent to which we can even argue that
these individuals in these organizations represented all of the public interest
or very particular geopolitical interests.

Joanna Yates: On the one hand yes it was within their time public interest as
it was seen in their time by their class. I think that's all true but one of
the things that's been true about most of the literature on standardization in
the last 20 years has focused on how self-centered and non-public interested
standard setting bodies are and what we wanted to highlight in this book is
that there really is a strong undercurrent of very positive values now. The
values are in their time period and we can come up with examples where they
didn't live by them and we can come up with great examples where they did. But
the other thing that I want to add is the period that we talked much less about
in this talk which is from 1945 onward; this was a period of time when because
of some of the leadership of the ISO or at the time ISO is actually leading at
least in a time period the decolonization of global governance; it was years
ahead of the system bizarrely, and ISO worked from the very beginning to try to
bring in engineers of course from the colonies around the world before they
became independent which is a little bit bizarre in regards to the gender
openness of to the degree there is a gender openness of this system shall we
say it is uh a lot later than um the international openness. And one of the
things that I find interesting and peculiar I teach at a liberal arts college
for women is that in the social the kind of, post-1990s social area much of the
leadership of the social standard setting outside the ISO system and some of it
within the ISO system is done by women and it's certainly done by people from
the developing world, and it's something i'm not sure is correct. I have a
hypothesis that part of the reason the ISO standards are sometimes considered
more legitimate in many parts of the world is because ISO is still more white
and Western than perhaps some of the other areas.

Niels: Thank you very much for this presentation and for writing the book. So
you write about the moral commitment of the social movements and you talk about
the social around internet and web technology and around their environmentalism
and corporate zones about responsibility and I'm very interested to see whether
these are different moral commitments and for different groups. So do they
optimize for themselves and their customers or for a larger understanding, so
this connects to the earlier question. I'm also very interested to understand
if you see differences between consortia and former standards bodies, and their
interrelation?

(Response): Yeah I mean it's certainly the case that that company consortia are
much more concerned about standardization than it is really focused on the
benefit to the companies that are actually in the consortium, and there are no
rules or whatever that are designed to make sure that is balanced in any way.
The older standard setting organizations at least have these principles that
are associated with balance in the public good. They're not always followed by
any stretch of the imagination. The details from organization to organization
from standard commit, from actual technical committee, to technical committee,
are things that deserve a great deal more research.

Mallory: You gave some examples of standards that are defined that companies
can adopt to show that they're kind of acting in some sort of public interest.
Do you have examples of incorporating more topic frameworks, like social
justice, into more technical standards?

Craig: So that's a really good question and so there were cases where
indirectly that happens. So containers are the most sort of the iconic standard
set after WWII. In the decades following world WWII container standards opened
up the global market and in the process of arriving at the standard, one
company owned the intellectual property for the corners that you know when you
stack containers on a ship corners hold them together, and one company owned
that. They had also lost out actually that the standard that was established
did not fit there; the length and breadth did not fit there and they already
had built up an installed base, so they were losing players but they still in
the end gave up their IP. They gave up that patent to the ISO and let them and
the engineers members of the technical committee use it and modify it for the
new standard so that is sort of indirectly an example. I think that the big
example in the early period of standardization (that is until the 1980s) was
simply the notion that every technical committee must include people engineers
and experts whose purpose is to serve the larger social interest. I mean that
that's the original balancing rule that goes back to these organizations that
were created around 1900, that there's somebody sitting there not as an
indirect representation but as representation by engineers to reflect what is
considered to be this at the time. The general interest in this idea was
powerful enough that in the early part of the century many very lefty kinds of
people, like the founders of the Fabian Society, etc, actually looked at these
standard setting organizations as places that were doing something that was
more democratic and more in the public interest than what many governments were
doing. I don't know however that there's an example as explicit as what you
guys know.

# Talk: Sebastian Benthall

        "Towards a Data Science of Institutional Power: Progress with BigBang"

## Discussion

Mallory: So I was really excited to hear about the tool and how it works but I
love that we also got a huge dose of strategic thinking about why this is
really important for the community, so i really appreciate that.

Mirja: Yeah thank you for being here. You're kind of preaching the choir here
because I think the IETF is a community that loves data and wants to understand
what's going on and we have all these interfaces but we don't make good use of
the data and we try a little better but we depend on volunteers actually making
sense of the data. So you're more than welcome here. I'm part of leadership and
we talk very often about what kind of data we need and how to understand what's
happening and one of the big questions we have there is usually how to get new
people involved in the IETF, how long do they stay in the IETF, what's the
motivation to stay or leave the IETF, so are we a healthy organization that is
kind of future proof in the sense that we get new people in and make them work
in the IETF. To have them make progress in the IETF so maybe that's a question,
that if you take that on I'm sure there are a lot of open ears and would be
interested in that. I'll make a note of that and I'll probably file some
issues, to make a note of those as feature request.

*Action: File issues for BigBang future development around tracking participant
retention over time.*

# Update: Guidelines draft and short presentations from reviewers

        draft-irtf-hrpc-guidelines, Gurshabad Grover

## Discussion

This document sort of went into last call in December but we received a lot of
reviews and comments so just to recap this is a document sort of proposing
guidelines that network protocol designers and developers can keep in mind to
broadly be in line with human rights. The document is practice based and
practice oriented so we want all the language to be aimed at people designing
protocols. It is practice based in the sense that a lot of the feedback has
come from the people who put these guidelines into use and review drafts or
author drafts. This is an update to RFC 8280 which had a version of these
guidelines.

So there were a lot of reviews and while making this presentation I thought I'd
summarize some changes but there was no easy way to. They're sort of all over
the place but I did send in detailed sort of responses to the reviews by
others, so please do check those out on on the mailing list if you haven't.

Now here's the thing, we do need more additional work on this. Bill said, “so
some of these guidelines and explanations read as criticism of existing
practices rather than guidance.” And there's also very detailed review by
professor Sandra Brahman, which asks a lot of critical questions about the
theoretical framework we've chosen and how we chose to represent certain
documents. So this is coming in the next version and one of the open questions,
at least for me, was on a section on attribution and legal remedy. And
currently in the last update this was changed very close to what had been
suggested on the list and and there's been a couple of emails on that after the
the new update was pushed.

Currently I'm of the opinion of adopting the text that was proposed on email
which just for context the attribution and legal remedy problem was that if the
right to legal remedy is something that protocol developers need to consider
and in case the answer is yes, then it probably becomes a prescription for
including elements of protocols where you can trace content to their
originators or all the containers perhaps linked to identifiers associated with
the creator. And this of course runs very contrary to privacy and freedom
expression.

In that sense other guidelines on that which are already in the document so my
proposition is to change it to what was proposed but if there is still
disagreement I will let it go and would love to hear your opinions on that and
perhaps Niels and the chairs and others can also come in. So while this was in
last call I mean we're still very open to feedback and in case you want to send
that to the list or step to the mic after I stop speaking. There are lots of
drafts that are having a human rights consideration section and and if you're
one of those we'd love feedback especially from you. After the last sort of
detailed review which was from professor Sandra Brahman, I think at least I
propose that, and maybe the chairs can decide whether we need another last call
or whether we're all set.  So perhaps on that note the approach you're taking
to responding to the comments.

Very much understand the approach you're taking of sort of trying to keep it
within the particular mode of this is addressed to the developers and such that
are using the the guidelines. And I very much appreciate also the number of
people that sent in comments, though it did take a while to get people started
sending them in and I was very remiss in not stopping the last call after two
weeks in which case there would have been no comments. Hopefully next time we
have a last call more people will jump in quickly. I'm of the opinion that you
know you're really close and in fact I was thinking that I would be suggesting
another last call at this meeting, but with a few things discussed here and
especially with you now addressing some of of Sandra's issues, I think your
next release would be the one that I would look to do another last call for. I
would like to do one that is short and force myself to actually obey the
two-week type of notion and not let it drag on for a month or more hoping that
people will comment.

Avri: What I'll really be asking of those of you that commented whether it has
been dealt with, but the thing I'd like to ask people to think about is some of
the issues that have come up seem almost like fodder for a great new companion
document that sort of discusses many of the issues behind some of these and
goes into great detail of the understanding that people have gotten over the
last couple years of using the guidelines, but that's something more for our
later conversation than this one. So if that's okay with people, and especially
if it's okay with the editors, that's kind of the approach i'd like to take
moving forward and I don't know if other people have other comments but I just
wanted to get that and I really do appreciate the fact that you did not yell at
me for for leaving the the last call open as long as I did and again thank the
people that commented.

GG: During the last two or three meetings there were no comments or feedback
coming in so glad to have received that volume in the past few days. I think
the idea of going to last call after we address comments.

Niels: This is great thanks so much. I very much appreciated your slide about
how difficult it is to do the synthesis of these comments. I've sort of been
doing one of those in the background because it'll be a necessary part of the
write-up that gets submitted to the IRSG. Discussing: this is the document,
these are the discussions, this is where it came out, you know, etc. I totally
sympathize with you of the difficulty of putting them in in a chart in a nice
sneak boxes but it's one of the things that i've been looking at as well.

Mallory: Any other comments? There is one more comment. Farzaneh do you want to
jump in the queue and send audio or I could just read your question aloud which
is that, what are we going to do to resolve the issues, will there be a last
call after we address the comments? It would be great if we could make use of
our session time to try to build a consensus around that text because that part
is particularly contentious and as we all know this is a research group
document so we all have change control so if we all make suggestions, we can
only make a document better.

Yeah completely, if the question directly relates to the sort of attribution
legal remedy part then my proposal is to just adopt the text that was proposed
and if you have two minutes then if there are any objections to that then we
can certainly discuss them on the list in the meantime I think we're going to
spend the time on it so Eliot do you want to jump in?

Eliot: I was looking for the minimalist change that would that would accomplish
the same thing. You know the fewer changes the better. That was the goal and it
did come up whether the issue is relevant at all. I think it's useful to retain
that text and change it to what you suggested just because we shouldn't avoid
the controversial questions.

She talks about a meeting to resolve the issues. I hadn't planned on a specific
meeting unless there were significant number of them that required one. I
haven't the impression yet that we need that so, have those issues been covered
or do you see it not having been covered?  Really if you could speak up that
would be helpful because really want to understand whether we need more
in-depth discussion on any of these issues before this document is finalized.
Does this document need a theoretical companion document that goes into deep
depth on these issues and and that's why I have my questions.

Farzaneh: Yeah I think my suggestion would be characterized and I don't
remember exactly what I wrote. We can look at that on the list.

Mallory: This draft probably can't go into depth on all these sort of nuanced
debates and we should have those nuanced debates in the context of another
draft. It would be great if this document and a future draft were linked such
that you know the research that we have done on the guidelines has exposed a
gap on a certain nuanced issue that we then follow and take forward a deeper
discussion. I'm pretty sure that's what I said. Gurshabad is just asking a
really direct question to Farzaneh and if you want to continue in the chat
that's fine but if the text proposed is fine we need to, I think everyone
agrees, perhaps except we want clarity on your position on that before it gets
adopted fully, and we can do that here we can do it on the list but I think
that's the only remaining open question about that point. It will be great so
that we don't need to organize an extra meeting and that will save people a lot
of CPU cycles.

Farzaneh: I've extensively objected to that section on Attribution and people
said I was not in the rough so I like Mallory's approach to be taken into
consideration. I'm certainly very supportive of that assuming we have people
that really want to work on that beyond the email messages.

Niels: Eliot made what Mallory suggested, perhaps something on attribution
needs to be there just to reference to what is already in RFC 8280 and even
better to serve as a pointer to future work for our collective understanding of
Attribution.

Farzaneh: So I did not see that comment being implemented and we still have
that text about attribution and legal remedy. I think that Mallory's approach
in this email is very good, and i think we should just make the text neutral.
Say it needs more work and then continue in another draft.

GG: So in my opinion the current text I thought would reflect more your opinion
than it does a neutral position which is the position you expressed in your
email, is something I agree with very explicitly that including attribution
elements will go certainly against privacy and anonymity and freedom
expression, which are the other rights we've expressed so very happy to
incorporate the text Mallory suggested. I also think that merits inclusion as a
general note and is perhaps applicable to certain other questions in the draft
as well and not particularly restricted to the attribution question but I'm
happy to change it to a more neutral text. I was under the impression that this
text was in fact reflecting your opinion more closely. I leave it up to the
chairs, too, as to the last question in the meeting to facilitate the
discussion.

Niels: I put the text in the chat and I think the addition that GG is talking
about is towards the end that explicitly says considering the adverse impact of
attribution on the right to privacy and freedom of expression enabling
attribution on an individual level is probably not consistent with human
rights. So i think that's there and i think that was your opinion so we can add
a sentence that we should do more work on it but i'm not sure that way will
make this document clearer. So I can definitely say we can put it on the work
plan to do more work on it. I'm not sure adding that to this document will make
it clearer but happy to consider any other text that you'd like to have in
there.

Eliot: Okay so I just put the proposed change in the chat and there are two
changes if you take a look. The first is we take out the word "probably." I
think probably is problematic because either something is supported or it's not
supported and we can say "may" as in the idea of this might be a problem that
is worthy of further research or we can say it "is" in which case we can cite
it and we can take out the word "may" and just say it "is" and and that's fine
too. The second part of this is that we didn't want to over generalize in terms
of whether attribution impacts all human rights. It's these particular human
rights that we were talking about. So those were the two changes. I don't think
the latter change is at all controversial.

Farzaneh: I think the former change is easily resolvable as well.

Colin: I mean for the record I'm not waiting for any specific text changes to
this document however whether the chairs judge your consensus. So if I
accidentally gave the impression that I was then then my apologies that's
certainly not the case.

Avri: Are we okay on this? Let's continue this discussion on the list. The list
gets deadly quiet sometimes and then it flurries and then it gets deadly quiet
so really I would like to see this one resolved there as much as we can before
GG and and Niels put out another version, which I hope is the one that we can
take to last call and I will be trying to check with people that made comments
to see where they're at on the resolution of their comments.

*Action: New version of draft-guidelines, Avri will ensure all comments are
resolved before putting it in Last Call (again).*

# Update: Association draft (20 minutes)

        draft-irtf-hrpc-association, Niels ten Oever and Lisa Vermeer

## Discussion

Niels: Is great that we're all here to talk about freedom of association and
it's nice after we've been talking about participation in groups that we now
get to talk about the draft on association and internet infrastructure. I've
been working on this with Gisela Perez, with Stephane Couture and with Mallory
Knodel, which is funny because these are people who associate together with all
different mother tongues, which is interesting.

The objective for this draft is to expand and deepen relations between a
specific right and protocols and this is the explicit objective from the
charter so a non-objective for this doc is to analyze specific protocols to do
human rights impact assessments or to produce new guidelines such as those done
in the previous document. So a short summary of how i've been working on since,
March 2017, so it has its  four year anniversary. It has been a research group
document since September 2018 and authors from academia and civil society and
from different geographies and disciplines have contributed to it. That also
sometimes shifted the structure and the topic of the document, which sometimes
made it a bit like an accordion but it definitely made a good sound at times
and we had many reviews from many IRTF and IETF participants as well as legal
experts. And we actually might hear from some in a bit.

So what happened since -06: We've been reading more literature and getting
extensive reviews, which is great because this is a research group document. I
think we need to keep in mind that we all have change control on this document
and so text suggestions are great but if people say, "go here, read these 10
papers and get something from that" is perhaps not the best way to approach a
group document, and it would also be great if we can keep the threads linking
to each other on the mailing list so we can keep track of the comments and we
cannot let anyone's useful and a very important contributions get lost.

So what we've been doing is addressing the full reviews. We make clearer
distinctions between the rights to association and the right to assembly. We
added recent decision documents and documents from relevant United Nations
bodies. We added more context and new ones where there were unclarities, we
added examples and concrete considerations and improved the conclusions.

Then some proposed changes for our next version because this week people have
been emailing. I think some put some very good suggestions, so we should more
clearly differentiate the right to assembly and right to association in the
beginning, and then also provide definitions for both rights.

*Action: definitions and distinction early in the draft for FAA.*

I'd like to do that directly on top and show that they're different then we can
discuss them in a combination later because then they are extended and add an
emphasis that the document is about human rights as per the HRPC charter and
not their implementation in national laws.

*Action: Present up front the scope as IHRL, not national laws.*

I do think it is very relevant to get that stuff, but not maybe in this
document because then this document might never see the finish line. That will
be my proposal to go forward and any comments and questions are extremely
welcome. I just wanted to make my own comment that I also agree that we need to
point to possible future work.

Mallory: Regarding national laws and applications, this document is really
still in the baby stage and just trying to establish a key relationship so that
future work has the ability to stand on top of this. It's incredibly important
that we do all the things but in a sort of order. Then my second thing was to
invite Lisa Vermeer to talk. She's given a really great review and is engaging
on the list currently as well, so go ahead Lisa, you should be able to unmute
yourself.

Lisa: I'm happy to contribute to this discussion and um was really happy to
look do a full review of the latest draft and contribute to the next draft I'm
very enthusiastic about the conclusions and the improvements and there are
still some improvements possible as Niels just mentioned. I had some thoughts
that I wanted to share with you during this mission, maybe also sharing a
little bit about the background for my contribution. There were two aspects
that we focused on at the International Center for Not-for-profit Law (ICNL). I
think I'm the only non-lawyer in that organization so I have interesting
discussions with my colleagues about freedoms of association and assembly and
what falls within the scope and outside the scope. And what I try to do is to
always keep in mind that very detailed legal texts are often pretty difficult
and sometimes even scary to understand for non-legal people so let's say that I
had a discussion about how the paragraphs about freedom of association and
freedom of assembly were written in this paper. Also related to the comments
made by Professor Brahman, it's possible to really go in-depth into these
freedoms but I'm not sure if it is really worthwhile for the goal of this
paper. These rights apply in cyberspace and how digitally mediated assemblies,
for example, and they should protect it. This is an ongoing discussion and it's
important to have the references to this discussion but to really go to
inter-juris burdens or interpretations in national laws. I'm not sure if that
is really helpful to make a point in this paper. Because I'm not a lawyer I
focus a little bit more on identifying and really updating the normative
language that has been developed over time. Four years has been a great time to
work on this because you actually allowed the Human Rights Committee to come up
with their general comments on freedom of assemblies that was published end of
last year. This is really the latest authoritative text in terms of language
that we should refer to in this paper and that's what I tried to include in the
latest draft. I wanted to highlight some of the general remarks by the Human
Rights Committee: three different phrases and whether you have anything to to
add to that. The paper says 1) activities that happen online or otherwise rely
upon digital services are protected. I think that is in general a very
important notion but still very general. 2) It also says technologies that
offer the opportunity to assemble either wholly or partly online should be
protected. I'm not able to really translate that into protocol design so if
someone can, they can also highlight this. That would be so welcome for me also
to learn. Another important aspect of international human rights law of course
is that the restrictions on international law are formulated so that actually
should be limited when they are not in line with international law and with the
tests [like the three-part test for freedom of expression] that are developed
for restriction. 3) They mentioned restrictions of operation of information
dissemination systems. I think that's super generic and requires further
thinking but I was just wondering how is this related to protocol design. And
they also mentioned actions that block or hinder internet connectivity in
relation to peaceful assemblies. So is that really the opportunity to use your
phone and share videos on online platforms or is it something else or really
participate in a mailing list while you're at the protest or preparing a
protest? I find that interesting to think about: what it means and what it's
what it implicates for protocol design. It also explicitly mentioned
geo-targeted or technology-specific interference with connectivity or access to
content and activities of internet service providers and intermediaries that
restrict assemblies or the privacy of assembly participants. That's it for the
legal language for me and I'm just really happy to be here in this community
now and any further replies to this are super welcome and I look forward to
continue to work with the draft.

Niels: I just wanted to thank Lisa again because the comments were just so good
and both in the document and now again so we can take the definitions from
there without using other sources. We can use authoritative human rights
language from the source where we cite from. That should definitely help make
the next steps for the document so thanks so much for being here, thanks so
much for commenting, and thanks so much for also conferring with your legal
colleagues and making this document better. Thanks so much.

Mallory: So putting my chair hat on for a second because I authored part of
this draft for a short amount of time. I'm just wanting to make sure everything
has been resolved. Sandra Brahman has written to the list a few times about
this draft. She isn't on the call but I wanted to think about how to get to the
point where we've resolved that. When I think a lot of those questions, with my
author hat on, a lot of those suggestions feel very out of scope. Taking  my
hat off again, how to then actually resolve that, I just feel like it has sort
of proven to be a bit of a endless back-and-forth where there's some
cross-talking every year on what we should do.

Avri: I don't think it's been going on long enough for it to be an endless
discussion and so I'm hoping to see a little bit more discussion go on on the
list. I'm starting to think that somewhere or other I've got a shepherd's hat
for taking this through its last call since you're an author but you know we're
not quite there yet. I think there's room for some further discussion. You know
I think some of the new input that's coming in is really great and so I think
this one is starting to get close but I do think there's just more discussion
and as I said I think there's still the division between what is the
theoretical background and how much of that needs to be in this sort of first
big work on the association theme.

Mallory: Well for one, maybe we can just discuss like one of the most recent
ones that Niels also talked about in the slides. Stephan and others did a very
comprehensive literature review already that spanned six to 12 months so if
there's that much source material that we're missing I actually think we need
to get to the heart of the comment and start another document because it cannot
be. I feel that we've missed so very much and are still within the same scope
of the same document. I think the reason why it appears that we've missed so
much is that there's a vision for this document that is different from what the
authors have envisioned and that's totally fine. That happens all the time.
It's actually a gift because in some ways we've got the beginnings of another
piece of research for HRPC to work on. But again because this is like trying to
establish a sort of baseline relationship that does not exist elsewhere, it's a
real contribution to the space. I think we should keep it to achieving that
very one clear goal that's in our charter: trying to make that as solid as it
can be to indicate other peripheral work and then follow that work from the
beginning properly.

Avri: Yeah I think that's probably true. I very much take Niels' comment of
don't tell me to go read these 10 books but you know give me some specific
text; give me some specific pointers for where something that as you say fits
within the context. I think it's fine, but I think that trying to cut that line
because it is a research group document of where exactly is the constraining
line on this document and the beginning line on another is still at least for
me a little fuzzy. So I'd really like to try and I'd really like to hear from
some other people and I'm so glad to see Eliot's name show up. One thing before
we go there: We haven't AOB topic on the list that we're not going to get to on
the agenda and I'm going to suggest, and especially since Sandra's not here, an
interim meeting so let's not worry about that.

Eliot: I think part of the issue to address the point that Mallory just made
and that there are different visions: the IRTF was established to to allow for
that. It's perfectly fine to have different conflicting visions. I think I have
to come back to what a few of us have have been scratching our heads about:
there's no need for these documents if there's conflicting visions, for them to
be consensus documents. It's a perfectly reasonable thing to go forward with or
without going for that strong consensus. You're not under the IETF constraints
and you shouldn't tie your hands in that way is my view you know if people want
to disagree it's okay as long as the work is of a certain level of scholarly
standard if it meets the scholarship standard good. If it's missing the
scholarship standard that's more of an issue but if people have different
points of view and they're expressing it through good scholarly work just let a
thousand blossoms bloom as they say. I'd see no reason to hold this document up
beyond that point just so long as we're clear that it's not going to be a
consensus document and I think that's something that will help you guys advance.

I think there's a differentiation between two things: 1) what is the purpose of
the document is and how far do we go in it and 2) the other is differences of
opinion on particular points that are included in the document. I think
everyone pretty much accepts your view that the document itself doesn't need to
be a consensus opinion but we do need to reach a certain amount of consensus
about the scope of the document so it doesn't end up an encyclopedia and ends
up a document directed towards a specific point.

Colin: I do think Eliot made some good points there. Some documents are
consensus documents and it's important that their consensus documents and other
documents can cannot be consensus documents and can express a minority view.
Providing it's clear what the document is and provided it's a well reasoned
argument well argued, and the document is getting such quite extensive feedback
like it did and the the authors then turn around and say, "well that's all
great but it's out of scope" then that perhaps suggests that it's not clear
what the scope of the document is and maybe the the scope of the document
should expand to include that feedback or maybe the scope should be clarified.
I would think it needs some extensive perhaps moderately extensive changes to
the document to make the scope clearer or it should be addressing those
comments.

*Action: Better clarify scope of the document in the beginning.*

Mallory: I'm in the queue as an author so I think that it would be useful. I
totally agree with you Colin. I think I said before to say it's out of scope
isn't enough. We should try to figure out a way to point to other research, or
we can incorporate a sentence or a paragraph of that in the current draft. We
can definitely strengthen the scope but then in terms of leading to other
drafts we would need someone if not Sandra herself to step in and try to
summarize what would the research question of that other document be. I cannot
as co-author or co-chair of the group find the time to help make that document
happen so it's a call and a request to the group to distill what's been shared
into a very clear research question that leads into another document in such a
way that we can point to that future work in the draft that we have now. If we
can direct Sandra to do it that'd be great but I suspect that we also need
other folks who maybe yet haven't helped author drafts in HPRC or if I saw
comments to Sandra's emails where they found them very enlightening and that's
taught them a lot, and especially if it's going to focus on national laws like
to get folks actually based in nations where we're going to be taking cues from
them that would be really helpful to be co-authors and to try to actually make
this happen. I think that's where we should go with this to try to resolve the
current association draft.

*Action: Get Sandra or another reviewer to suggest language for a concluding
paragraph that points to additional research questions related to national
laws.*

Lisa: Thank you i'll keep it short. Yeah in terms of the scope and the goal of
the paper I think it can be strengthened by really showing that every kind of
form of association and assembly has this very important online aspect to it
much more than for example two or three or four years ago. So it can be the
relevance of the paper is to strengthen the examples and tie them to what is
actually protected under international human rights law and what is not and to
also really present a disclaimer that this is not a finalized discussion. Where
there's really more awareness and more guidelines for and conclusions for
people working on the internet architecture that are maintaining this super
important digital infrastructure that we know to continue assembling and
convening in digital time so thank you thank you.

*Action: Strengthen the examples to tie to the past four, highly relevant,
years in freedom of assembly.*

Niels: I think the Juliana made a great point in the chat that this is part of
an interdisciplinary conversation, which is always challenging. It's part of a
very long discussion of which some people that came in at the end have not been
part and we really spend a long time on building consensus in the group on what
this scope of this document should be, then we completely reorganized it and
worked on it for a long and hard time with Stephane with students, included
binding cases with the research structure and then we had consensus on it and
now Sandra came in and would like to change it, which i think is great but that
makes the discussion and the process also a bit problematic. So I fully agree
that we should try to make the scope of this document clear, put the definition
at the beginning and what it does and what it doesn't do and then I really hope
that we can have another document that further discussions on implementations
and then combining guidelines and other stuff. But I think we should also try
to keep our outputs going because it also keeps it enticing for people to work
on stuff.

Mallory: One of the ways that we decided to work on this draft was to be
genuinely curious and to conduct research to answer questions that we didn't
know the answers to yet and that is what has led to this draft. I think the
reason why we aren't including national laws and things that Sandra raised is
because from the beginning we didn't look there when we said we're going to
first conduct a literature review, and then we came up with sub-questions, and
then we answered those sub-questions with examples and analysis. So we from the
beginning limited ourselves to human rights and international human rights law
so that's why it's not there and I can totally understand why there are some
very curious questions and itches that need to be scratched that touch on this
issue. I'm so glad that this draft has inspired those questions, but they just
simply are not what we set out to do and I think just reminding us of that and
then facilitate that research that has been inspired by this draft. I'm really
invested in doing that as a chair, so I think the end is near.