MODPOD - Moderation Procedures
IETF 121, Dublin, IE

Thanks to Richard Barnes for raw notes; Lisa Dusseault summarized.

1. Chairs intro

* Introduced what the WG has for input documents
* Discussion of goals, especially to address how PR actions are a heavy-weight process
* Should moderation procedures be lighter-weight, more discreet?
* Roman Daniliw's editorial comment: This is extremely critical for IETF.  

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2.  Document update (Eliot Lear)

The Charter already clarifies some consensus on approaches, e.g.allowing more consistent moderation across venues.

The authors of two of the drafts (-ecahc-moderation and -bcp83-replacement) are talking about merging best parts of each. There are differences between those two drafts, but both drafts say that the mod team has wide latitude.  Both the draft by Lear and the draft by Sayre provide graduated response and graduated transparency to reduce the "all or none".  Proposed plan: 

3. Discussion

There was definite support for much of the direction of the two drafts, and for combining them. Some additional points:
* A process concern about combining both docs is that if the goal is to replace BCP83, which is focused on banning from mailing lists, this is a narrower scope than the WG's overall scope, and perhaps there should be separate docs for replacing BCP83 vs other work.  Others thought that one document could still achieve replacing BCP83 as well as the larger scope.

* Question about  how the Ombudsteam fits into this?  Roman noted that updating RFC 7776 (Ombuds procedures) is out of scope

* Point made that specifying overly-precise procedures is usually wrong.  Ideally, make a short document defining areas of responsibility., then the persons responsible should publish their working methods.  Overly-precise rules lead to nitpicking as well, and discretion is important.

* General agreement about some useful tools of moderation: it helps to have several actions or options to choose ; warnings are often useful to moderate behavior even without any firm action; quicker moderation is better.

* Several contributors were concerned about moderation being used  to control participants by chairs/mod-teams with a bias or agenda.

* Roman also noted that updating RFC 7154 is out of scope

* Some discussion of the desired future scope of a moderation team included tradeoffs in different directions - trusting WG chair discretion vs lightening the load of chairs, the ability of a moderation team to scale to many lists, etc. Note stats from existing moderation team: (https://github.com/ietf/Moderators/blob/main/stats.md)

* Some discussion of whether moderation could be an LLC function, but clearly many folks saw value in moderation as a community function.  A possible combination model would be to set policies or make difficult decisions via community representatives, but delegate more routine work to the LLC

* Discussion of whether this could be run quickly as a process experiment?  Since there's widespread desire to replace BCP83 an experiment wouldn't replace that; also a document would still be required to run an experiment.  In any case, doc work comes first. 

4. Consensus call

* Jon: Does anyone object to us using these 3 docs as a starting point?
  * 35 Yes, 1 No, 4 No opinion

Call for consensus: Consolidate using ecahc as a baseline
* 22 yes, 1 no, 14 no opinion

Conclusion: either of these seems like an approach the authors can take with support from participants.